In organizations, sales teams are special. They have a sense of drive, an entrepreneurial spirit and a way of thinking that sets them apart from others. Talking to a Sales Manager recently about how he would describe his team, he grinned and said, “it’s like leading a group of ADHD teenagers with the attention spans of gnats”.
There seems to be a parallel between sales teams and families. Leading these employees can be like parenting young children. We need to respect each individual’s needs. They need enough boundaries and structure without cramping their style. To keep the team performing at their best need constant motivation, reassessment and reorganization.
Parents look forward to the seemingly self-indulgent psychological benefits of increasing the longevity of their gene pool, the possible immortality of self through offspring, experiencing the world through fresh and magical eyes of the innocent child. In sales teams, managers aspire to lead their teams as a privilege and a responsibility to make a difference in the topline of the organization, perhaps leaving a legacy, transforming themsleves through developing others.
Managers however have been doing it tough. Having to deliver ever more with dwindling resources through budget and workforce cutbacks, attempting to re-engage workforce with low morale through constant restructuring in our rapidly changing world ….. they don’t seem to be getting too many breaks! In global research by consulting firm BlessingWhite, where more than 7,500 survey responses were studied and interviews were cnducted with HR and line managers - fewer than 1 in three workers are fully engaged. There is a strong correlation between engagement and retention. 85% of engaged employees plan to stay with their company compared with 27% disengaged ones. Engaged employees appear to stay for what they give (they like the work they do), while disengaged employees stay for what they get (favourable job conditions, advancement, growth, or job security). That’s hardly a winning business relationship, is it?
Parents are also not being portrayed in best light by the media. It is cool to be carefree singles like Carrie and her unattached friends from Sex and the City and those friends from Friends and Seinfeld. On the contrary, The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond and the Married with Children paint a darker picture of what it is like to be tied down in a family way.
Sales teams also fight a battle being stereotyped as greedy individuals with little to no team spirit and only motivated by monetary bonuses, who play outside rules ‘normal’ to you and me …. this image has also not been helped by the fall of Wall Street giants.
Society’s unflattering picture of children today is formed by the media’s images, founded in the marketplace and fostered by fear. We may accept our toddler with all the charms and challenges of that age group but other shoppers in the supermarket will only see the tantrum-throwing purple rage of a spoilt tot (the kind we see on SuperNanny regularly) and the ineffectual discipline of a flustered parent caught between the lollie counter and a quick exit.
Childhood today is institutionalized and managerialized around our image of the workplace: Hours are precisely timetabled, outcomes (health, literacy, crime) are benchmarked and measured, costs are privatized and care (nappy services, childcare, tutoring, entertaining) has been outsourced. Sounds familiar for employees being pigeon-holed into systems that may not be useful to enhance performance?
Consequently, BlessingWhite’s www.blessingwhite.com employee engagement research validates the engagement model which focuses on individual employees’:
- Contribution to the company’s success
- Personal satisfaction in the role.
Aligning employees’ values, goals, and aspirations with those of the organization is the
best method for achieving the sustainable employee engagement required for an organization to reach its goals. Full engagement represents an alignment of maximum job satisfaction(“I like my work and do it well”) with maximum job contribution(“I help achieve the goals of my organization”).
Engaged employees are not just committed. They are not just passionate or proud. They have a line-of- sight on their own future and on the organization’s mission and goals. They are enthused and in gear, using their talents and discretionary effort to make a difference in their employer’s quest for sustainable business success.
A few questions come to mind for our managers/parents.
Have we lost the natural instinct to lead/parent?
Are there models of effective leadership/parenting ?
Why do we want to be leaders/parents?
March 3rd, 2010
This article is based on “Driving Long-Term Engagement through a High-Performance Culture,” which is featured in a 3-volume reference on employee engagement called Building High-Performance People and Organizations (Martha Finney, editor; Greenwood Publishing Group; May 2008).Culture may take top honors as the most mysterious and difficult-to-get-your-arms-around lever of employee engagement. It’s amorphous and intangible. Not long ago, biologists were the only ones creating it — in Petri dishes. Organizational development experts studied it, and there were a few maverick businesspeople, like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, who credited culture as the secret to their firm’s success. Most businesspeople dismissed it as soft HR stuff — until leaders like Kelleher started getting attention for the successes they enjoyed, especially in adverse economic times.Corporate culture at its most basic level is the sum of an organization’s behaviors and practices. It is there whether you have deliberately shaped it or not. It reveals itself in big and small decisions as well as daily practices (”how we do things around here”) that tend to perpetuate themselves. Culture often goes unnoticed by employees (like the air you breathe), yet a healthy culture (like clean air) is essential to a healthy organization. It’s potentially the most powerful engagement tool at your disposal. If you get culture right, it provides a foundation for high engagement that can sustain your workforce through good times and bad.Key Ingredients of a High-Performance Culture High-performance cultures are shaped around the following three components:
- A clear, compelling corporate mission. A mission, or purpose as some firms call it, is a statement that answers the question of why the company exists: “What’s your reason for being?” It needs to inspire, inform business decisions, generate customer loyalty, ignite employee passion, and motivate discretionary effort. “Making money” doesn’t qualify as a mission, although profitability is essential to a firm’s survival. And although a mission does not have to reflect a “save the world” tone, it does need to be aspirational and clear enough to engage employees. Its mere existence serves as the organization’s North Star, providing a fixed point to which the workforce can connect.
- Shared organizational values. Core values guide employee behavior and influence business practices as your organization delivers on its promises to customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Core values answer the question: “What are your guiding principles, your authentic, enduring ‘rules of the road’?” Your business strategies shift to meet market demands. Your core values don’t.
- Shared accountability. High-performance cultures require an environment that encourages employee ownership of both the organization’s bottom-line results and its cultural foundation. Culture affects everyone and is everyone’s business. It’s essential, then, that the entire workforce understands the core drivers of your culture and share responsibility for sustaining them.
Pitfalls to Avoid in Shaping Your Culture Copycat CulturesThe mission and organizational values at the core of your culture need to be yours. Benchmarking just doesn’t work. Your culture needs to be unique if it is to be a competitive differentiator — to engage your employees in your marketplace with your business objectives. There’s nothing more de-motivating than trying to be something you’re not. Cultures that engage employees leverage their uniqueness while at the same time raising the bar with aspirational goals.The Celebrity CEO on a TimelineBeware of new leaders bent on promises of rapid culture change. The news is full of CEOs parachuting in to save a firm only to be spat out a year or two later by the very culture he or she is trying to change.Communication BreakdownsNo news here. You can’t conduct a few town hall meetings and call it a day. Just when you thought you’ve said it enough, say it again. Take a tip from the marketing department: Stay “on message.” You may feel like a broken record, but remember that it’s constant radio play that creates hit records — with everyone knowing the words and singing along. Leaders at every level have the opportunity to state and re-state what the organization stands for as well as the organization’s strategy and values.AbstractionsIntegrity. Respect. Customer First. Innovation. Risk Taking. Who could argue with those words? But what do they look like in your organization? How can they be applied each day in every person’s job? That’s where two-way dialogue between employees and managers, not one-way corporate communications, matter. Engagement results when all employees understand why their jobs matter and how they can live the organization’s values.Mis-Steps at the TopDon’t think that the failures of senior leaders to model the values will go undetected. Actions speak louder than words. And though our research indicates that most employees don’t feel safe challenging their leaders’ decisions and behavior, our findings also suggest that they’ll take stock — and move on if there’s hypocrisy at the top.Missing Links in the MiddleCulture is too amorphous and large for senior leaders to effectively maintain it without help from the front lines. Yet most managers are squeezed between the urgency to deliver business results and the need to establish a high-performance culture. If they are held accountable for business results only, or if they see culture as a senior leadership responsibility, the culture will suffer. Give them the tools and support — and accountability — they need to succeed.Misaligned Business PracticesAll the elegant messages and well-intentioned leader behaviors will be for naught if the systems and policies that keep your organization running conflict with your culture’s core drivers.Taking Culture Too FarIt’s rare, but possible, to focus so much on culture that you take your eye off your market. Consider Levi-Strauss — touted for its workplace breakthroughs but so internally focused that the firm forgot how to make a good and profitable pair of jeans. A solid business strategy translated into daily work priorities is a requirement for high engagement so that employees are not only enthusiastic about their work but they also focus their talents to make a difference to the bottom line.An End DateCulture is like a living organism that needs constant feeding and grooming. As your organization grows, recruits need to be assessed for cultural fit, new hires introduced into the culture, and employees reminded with vivid examples of the mission and core values in action. Leaders need to communicate, model, and model even more. If you look away, your culture will continue to grow, but not necessarily in the direction you need to ensure the high performance and high engagement you need to sustain success in your market.
August 5th, 2009
