2019 Directory
25 Are You Leading a Productive Workplace Team? BY MARY KELLY, PHD, CSP, COMMANDER, US NAVY (RET) What three leadership traits do your customers and your employees need from you as their leader? • Consistency. • Reliability. • Trustworthiness. It sounds easy, but small mistakes can lead to big problems. People want to know that their leaders’ behav- iors and decisions are consistent, that they can count on their leaders when they need them, that they can trust their leaders to do what they say they will do and to back them when they need help. Many employees say they get confused and frustrated when a policy change seems arbitrary, or when the boss’s mood dictates the change. If a policy was enforced yesterday, it should be en- forced today. Employees want to knowwhat they need to do to be successful, and those require- ments, if they change, should be made clear. Great workers want to be able to rely on the people they work for, and in turn, that makes themmore reliable. Your people in the workplace and your customers need to know that they can count on you and your decisions. Just like your customers, your employees want the organization to un- der-promise, over-deliver, andmake the process of working with everyone involved easy. Trust is a necessary component in building your teams. Why is trust necessary? Why is trust a factor? As long as employees are working, what does it matter if they truly trust their co-workers and their boss? People like doing business with people they trust, and they appreciate a process designed to help them succeed. People can, and often do, just show up and work. But when building a team, trust matters. People want to trust and be trusted by their leadership. Trust is generally assumed until that trust is broken, and what many leaders don’t remember is how easily trust is broken. Mistrust breeds mistrust, which leads to uncertainty, disruption, blame, and anger. Eventually, enough mistrust can kill an organization. With younger workers, lying by the boss to their people is a mortal sin. It is virtually unrecoverable. Loyalty runs strong with the millennials, and that loyalty is based on personal trust. Break that trust, and the relationship is over. Millennials cite trusting their boss as highly important when looking for a job. This generation is more loyal than many people perceive. For example, if you are “in a relationship” on social media, that means you don’t date other people. They have commit- ment levels that their parents did not. When people do not trust their leaders, they don’t stay at the job very long. If you are in a leadership position, and you have a high rate of turnover among employees, one of their issues may be a lack of trust. So what are you doing wrong? It is a hard question to ask when you are the person in charge, and no one seems to want to work for you. You may be a trustworthy person, but that may not be obvious to your employ- ees, and they are the ones who matter. How can leaders build trust at work? One technique is to gather everyone together every week to review, honestly, what is going well and what is not. By being completely open about the successes and failures, people on the team understand that what they do is objectively assessed. Having others critique issues on projects serves two valuable purposes. First, it keeps everyone humble, and second, it educates and involves the rest of the team. This process extends the ownership of the project to more people and encourages the spread of ideas. Consistently sharing ideas, project updates, successes, and failures teaches people to accept feedback, continuously learn, and take the right action. I worked with one of the top two leaders at a prestigious company. He is admired by his boss, his peers, and his employees. A 360-de- gree survey indicated that everyone in the organization both respected and genuinely liked him. He possesses many of the great skills that great leaders have. He genuinely cares about his people, he listens well, and he is not afraid to make hard decisions. He scored high on our assessments. However, there is one overarching problem that every single person we surveyed men- tioned with this particular leader: He is late. He’s late to meetings, when he has appoint- ments with his team, and when addressing his entire company. The man is always late. His teams cannot get their questions answered in meetings, and his vice presidents do not have clear guidance on important issues. As a re- sult, his people felt disrespected by his broken time promises. We addressed this problem with this leader. He said he wants to give everyone his full time and attention. Every day, in his attempt to listen, he inad- vertently breaks trust with his other people. Every day that his extra listening made him
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