Talent resolutions for the New Year

Human resources processes, human capital management and workforce productivity all sound so complex and demanding, with so many moving parts to manage. There are employee handbooks and policies to worry about. There are rules and regulations. How is the management to know what to do with the employee base? Although there are certainly some things that are required by the law, here are three guiding principles that will get you far. Make them your New Year’s resolutions, if you are not already following them.

1. Don’t compromise on talent

Decide what kind of talent will get you where you want to be. Understand what drives performance in your business. Be as specific as you can. Don’t add any unnecessary criteria to narrow your talent pool to choose from. Then go after it. When you hire, don’t bring in anyone else except those who meet your standards. When you promote internally, be just as selective.

2. Hold people accountable

If you want a high-performance culture, accountability is a basic cornerstone of it. The building blocks are so simple, yet seem to be so hard to put into practice. Set clear goals. Set clear expectations for behaviors. Create an environment for open feedback and teach everyone to give feedback to each other. Give both positive and constructive feedback. Track results on an on-going basis. Correct performance as soon as it starts veering off track. Celebrate successes.

3. Invest in your people

Investment in people has significantly higher ROI than investment in capital equipment. People learn, grow and develop. Make the investment purposeful and intentional. Invest time in your people by having weekly meetings with managers, communication meetings by the leaders and also by having career dialogues annually. Invest in mentoring, coaching and training. Plan career ladders and growth opportunities. Most importantly, pay attention to your people. Treat them as individuals, all with a valuable contribution to make.

With these three resolutions, you can’t go wrong.

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The buck stops at the top

Top team, are you ever frustrated with your managers and employee base? Perhaps you are not seeing enough initiative and enthusiasm? Sometimes you think you have a house full of whiners, and your managers are coddling them. What happened to all the problem solvers and folks who pulled overnighters just for the excitement of seeing that new product come out? Newsflash; this is all your own creation. You made this with your big and small decisions. You can also fix it.

Executive leadership is responsible for many things: the P&L, formulating strategy and executing it, creating a business model that makes sense and operations to support it. However, what may create the most sustainable competitive advantage is the company culture. Every organization has a culture. In some, it grows organically. In winning organizations, it is meticulously managed. Leadership knows that every decision and action it takes sends a message of what is important and what isn’t. If your managers are not holding your employees accountable, and you are not doing anything about it, the signal is clear: Accountability is not a high priority. The same applies to any aspect of culture: respect for diversity, talent, quality, customer focus, integrity… Inaction speaks just as loud as action.

If you feel you don’t have the right people on the bus, did you pick the right people in the first place? Are you clear about what you want? Do you compromise in your selection process? Do you have a rigorous process? Are you involved at all? Are you developing your current team? If you want an A team, you have to be willing to pay for an A team, and treat them like an A team. As a leader, it’s all about putting a stake in the ground. Lukewarm won’t get you anywhere.

Instead of wondering why your people are not excited, give them a reason to be excited. The best way to engage employees is to share a compelling vision and show them how they can contribute. They need to have a sense of purpose, meaningful work and growth opportunities, which is what your managers should provide. If they don’t know how, train them how. Create a sense of community.

Next time you get frustrated about your workforce, do something about it instead. Manage your culture – get real about your people.

Meaningful relationships at work

One of the Gallup’s Q12 questions is whether you have a best friend at work. At first glance, this seems like a strange question to have risen to the top 12 questions to ask, but Gallup has proven that having a best friend at work correlates with retention, engagement and profit generation.

Meaningful relationships at work build trust. Where you find trust, you will also find accountability. Smart employers will create a work environment that nurtures relationship building. Leadership style is the most critical in creating the right environment. A participative style that engages the team members and values everyone’s input is more likely to create deeper relationships than a top-down directive leadership style.

The overall company culture will clearly impact the work environment. If the culture is very fast paced and task oriented, and relationship building is not valued, the employees will feel discouraged to take any time away from their tasks to get to know their coworkers. This will make the relationships transactional. A sign of a task oriented culture may be that the employees prefer to send a thread of e-mails instead of simply picking up the phone to resolve an issue.

Another organizational mechanism that may complicate trust and relationship building is the forced ranking process. By its nature, it has a risk of promoting an individualistic and competitive culture, unless the process is managed with care, and the managers are highly trained about the performance standards and knowledgeable about potential rating biases.

To build more relationships, the company may just create more opportunities to do so. It can happen in team meetings, happy hours or more elaborate team building events. Eventually, it boils down to a chain of small moments when people get to know and trust each other. They come out of their cubicles, or look around in their production lines.

At the personal level, most of us spend more time at work than at home. It should be time that we enjoy, with people whom we appreciate. Challenge yourself to find out one new unique thing about your coworker. Make a real connection.

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Copyright 2010 Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, all rights reserved.
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