Retention Problems?
One leader behavior reduces turnover intention by
%
Want to know what it is?
Watch the video.
What People are Saying…
How Approachable Leadership Helps Reduce Turnover and Improve Retention…
Management Advice From Steve Jobs
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg] In two and half minutes, Steve Jobs nails one of the most important pieces of management advice out there. Steve Jobs is not the poster child of approachability. I get that. But he was very successful at attracting...
Why Gaining Trust is Hard: 4 Ways to Get it Back
Gaining trust is hard, especially for leaders. One study finds that just being in a leadership position (a power position) makes gaining trust more difficult. Why? Because people in the low-power positions tend to have a natural assumption that those in higher-power...
Toxic Employees: 5 Classic Types and Why They Need More Attention
Superstar hires don't make up for toxic employees. This is the conclusion of a Harvard Business School report. The researchers looked at over 50,000 workers at 11 different firms to evaluate the benefits of highly productive employees versus the cost of toxic ones....
7 TED Talks to Improve Your Leadership
Many of them actually want to be better too. But even for those visionary leaders, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s a lot of advice out there and quite a bit of it actually conflicts with each other.
Time magazine put together a list of 7 TED Talks to become a better leader. Each TED Talk brings its own message. Here they are:
1. Own Your Title – Drew Dudley: “Our society spends a lot of time idolizing people who achieve what very few can, making leadership feel like some far-off, earth-shattering thing that you’ll someday be worthy of. ‘Who am I to lead?’ Who are you not to lead? Your first act as manager should be casting aside any signs of imposter syndrome.”
2. Find Your First Follower – Derek Sivers: “‘The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.’ It only takes one person to support what you’re doing to bring along more follower, so long as you embrace them as equals and let them be partners in your plan.”
3. Don’t Favor the All Stars – Margaret Heffernan: ‘Margaret Heffernan cites evolutionary biology, which shows that extreme Darwinian environments full of only star players and top performers actually create such fierce competition that innovation and collaboration can’t happen….”
Power Distance Killed Nokia (Plus 7 Tips To Discover Your Gaps)
Power distance killed Nokia. Not Apple, Microsoft or Android. A recent study investigates just how it happened.
It is almost impossible to believe, but the iPhone isn’t even 10 years old. If you used a cell phone before 2007 you almost certainly owned a Nokia product at some point. They were THE mobile phone company.
But Nokia is gone now. Many reasons are given for Nokia’s decline. Most observers blame the iPhone or the fact that Nokia just didn’t have the capacity to keep up.
But those stories don’t add up. Nokia’s problem was cultural.
Nokia’s leaders never took Apple seriously until it was way too late. A key reason for this misstep was that mid-level managers did not feel safe confronting their leaders. There was too big a power distance gap between top leaders and other coworkers.
Helping Others Makes Better Leaders (5 Tips to Grow Others)
“Helping others can actually create the sense of meaning we’re seeking. Rather than ruminating on what makes our life worthwhile as we work toward burnout, we can find the answer outside ourselves, in human connection.”
This was the conclusion drawn by Elizabeth Hopper, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Berkeley. Hopper began her research with the understanding that there are two types of well-being: “hedonic well-being (a sense of happiness) and eudaimonic well-being (a sense of meaning and purpose).”
One study sought to look specifically at those differences and found that while “having strong social connections was important for both happiness and meaningfulness…helping others in need and identifying oneself as a ‘giver’ in relationships were related to meaning alone.”
10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation | Celeste Headlee TED Talk
Spoiler alert… here are the 10 ways to have a better conversation:
1. Don’t multitask – be present
2. Don’t pontificate (she suggests writing a blog instead 🙂 ) “Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don’t” (Bill Nye)
3. Ask open ended questions – start with who, what, when, where, why or how
4. Go with the flow – whatever you think of, let it go
5. If you don’t know, say that you don’t know…
Managing Millennials: Only YOU Can Stop Generational Profiling
Stop Generational Profiling
Targeting someone because of their race is called profiling. Targeting someone based on their age is no different. It’s called it Generational Profiling and we are in the middle of an epidemic.
For some reason people who should know better have built a cottage industry around teaching people how to get all these generations to work together. However, most of what I’ve seen about managing Millennials is a hodgepodge of worse than useless advice. It focuses managers on exactly the wrong things. It focuses on the often meaningless differences between people, instead of looking at the massive number of things we have in common.
In her book Retiring the Generation Gap Jennifer Deal discusses a study of 3000 people across generations. Her finding is that the differences between generations are minor compared to the things we all share in common. For example, all three generations want to feel respected at work. They want leaders they trust. They dislike change (yes, even Millennials). They want to learn and receive feedback.
Why Approachable Leadership?
We know there’s a lot of great leadership advice out there already – 5 Dysfunctions, 7 Habits, Crucial Conversations, Situational Leadership, Start with Why. So why doesn’t it stick? Well, it’s a lot like saying I know how to swing a golf club, why aren’t I a scratch golfer?
Let’s face it, most leaders know what they are supposed to do. But when you get into the heat of battle a lot of times you end up falling back into bad habits. The more you do to complicate things the more likely you are to abandon it early. Like the esteemed management thinker Mike Tyson once said:
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Power Creates Distance Leaders Bridge the Gap
Do you shrink the gap?
Why Engagement Efforts Backfire
Some engagement efforts don’t go as planned.
You mean well. You conduct your employee survey or focus group sessions. You collect all the data, review all the spreadsheets. You invest a lot of time, energy (and money) on your engagement efforts. And then they fall flat on their face. Ouch.
You do the right things, check the right boxes. But employee morale remains in the tank. Often the explanation is simple. Even if your heart is in the right place, you might be forgetting to walk the talk. If there is a gap between what you say and do for employees, you’re toast.
We are currently neck deep in one of the best examples of saying-doing gaps you can find – the US presidential primaries. As crazy as this year’s election season has been, are the promises that different from 2012? Are they that different from 2008? Or 2004?
Can bad leadership kill you?
Everybody knows bad leadership can be costly.
It leads to turnover, workplace stress, and decreased cooperation which costs US businesses billions each year. But can bad leadership kill you?
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that United Airlines is calling in all 12,000 of its pilots for extra safety training over the next 3 months. This is due to a series of serious safety incidents. None of the incidents led to an accident, but there were several close calls.
The Infinite ROI of Talent Development
“Training pays.”
Seth Godin says this in his recent article on “the infinite return on investment” of talent development and training. He provides this example:
“Imagine a customer service rep. Fully costed out, it might cost $5 for this person to service a single customer by phone. An untrained rep doesn’t understand the product, or how to engage, or hasn’t been brought up to speed on your systems. As a result, the value delivered in the call is precisely zero (in fact it’s negative, because you’ve disappointed your customer).
On the other hand, the trained rep easily delivers $30 of brand value to the customer, at a cost, as stated, of $5. So, instead of zero value, there’s a profit to the brand of $25. A comparative ROI of infinity.
And of course, the untrained person doesn’t fall into this trap once. Instead, it happens over and over, many times a day.”
Do you suffer from any of the 7 most unapproachable behaviors?
One of my favorite things is giving a room full of people permission to practice treating each other like jerks. I guess that makes me the Jerry Springer of leadership training.
During the Approachable Leadership Workshop that’s exactly what we ask leaders to do (don’t worry, we ask them to practice approachable behavior too). They get to pick the most unapproachable things they can dream up and then do them to their coworkers.
You see some truly amazing behavior during that exercise. And the sad part is most people don’t have to dream up their behavior. They simply pull it from their own real-life experiences of unapproachable leaders.
At this point I’ve seen more than a thousand people channel their best “bad boss” impersonation. Here are the 7 most unapproachable behaviors of them all…
