Training – Page 16 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Leading Your Team through the Balance of Success and Failure

March 9, 2016/2 Comments/in Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Finding the right balance between how you handle success and failure makes a tremendous difference in how motivated (or unmotivated) your team members are. There are some simple techniques for celebrating success and dealing with failure. Apply them and you’ll find your team is happier and more effective.

When you lead a high performing team, you’ll face plenty of situations where you’re dealing with success and failure. Success and failure are part of running a team day to day. You need to recognize and promote “wins” because it’s going to build momentum for the team and make them feel like they’re accomplishing great things. When they fail, you need to accept that failure as a learning opportunity and help the team grow.

Celebrating Success

In terms of celebrating success, there are a lot of great ways to acknowledge success. You can give people bonuses, provide them visibility opportunities, or ensure there’s public recognition of their efforts. You can give people increased responsibilities and even promotions. All of those are very effective ways to celebrate the success of your team members.

But remember, just because you think something is valuable doesn’t mean the team member will. You need to understand what personally motivates them, and then reward them accordingly. Because if you’re not thoughtful about it, something you think is a reward is going to be horrible from that person’s perspective.

For example, imagine you have someone on your team who is very introverted. They do a great job and you want to reward them. You decide that you’re going to celebrate their success by putting that person on stage in front of a large audience. You then tell them “Here’s your great opportunity to shine and share your initiative with 50 people in the room!” That introvert might really hate that situation and they’ll feel very uncomfortable. Even though you thought you were rewarding them in celebrating their success, you’ve turned it into a bad experience.

Driving Accountability Through Incentives and Consequences

March 2, 2016/0 Comments/in Career, Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Accountability starts with clear communication around what you expect people to deliver. Once they know what they’re on the hook for, it’s all about using incentives and consequences to drive and reinforce behavior.

Accountability starts with clearly defining what you expect people to deliver. Are there numbers they’re supposed to hit? Deliverables they’re expected to complete? Processes they’re supposed to manage? Dedicate time to spelling these expectations out explicitly. Failure to do so isn’t fair to anyone involved. You can’t hold people accountable for performance if you haven’t told them what you expect of them.

Once you’ve defined what people are accountable for, you need to drive their behaviors. Incentives are a very powerful way for doing so. Leaders can create incentives for people who over-deliver on their accountabilities. Things like bonuses or promotions can be powerful motivators to drive the behaviors you’re seeking.

You can also use punishment or disincentives when people fail to live up to those accountabilities. Meting out consequences, while not enjoyable, is an effective method for changing behavior if you’re not able to get the results you expect by using positive reinforcement.

Allow me to offer an example. When I was part of an operating division of a large corporation, we knew very clearly what we were accountable for. We had revenue targets and customer count targets. One year we missed our numbers, and we didn’t get a bonus. It was extremely frustrating. We knew exactly why. We knew what the metric expectation was in terms of customer counts, and we fell short. But it was really difficult watching our colleagues in other divisions get big bonuses that year, because they met expectations.

The next year, again, we knew what we were accountable for. The numbers were clearly spelled out, and we exceeded our numbers and got a huge bonus that year. The incentives worked, it drove the right set of behaviors. Additionally, in that situation, individuals could still get merit increases based on their own performance of their specific accountabilities. So even in the year where the division didn’t get a bonus, we did have people who had done a great job, and they did receive extra incentives.

There are different ways to create incentives as well, it doesn’t always have to be money. Sometimes you can give people visibility. Put them in front of senior management, and let them present. That might mean a lot to them especially if they’re looking to get promoted and they need to be seen by a broader population of senior executives.

Another type of incentive is to send them to a training course. Help them build a new skill that will advance their career and marketability. Let them work on a project they’re very excited about. Sometimes just a simple thank you note can go a long way in creating the right incentives.

As you look at your team, and look at driving accountability, and the right set of behaviors, review what your people are accountable for. Lay out those metrics in a very clear and concise way, and then help them understand: if you meet that metric or exceed it, here’s the reward, and if you miss it, here’s the consequence. The better you’re able to clearly communicate those accountabilities, and the corresponding incentives or consequences, the more likely you are to drive the behaviors that you want them to demonstrate.

Want to learn more about this topic? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to better lead a high-performing team. The entire course is available at lynda.com. Enjoy!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Photo: The Bait by nist6dh

How much professional reading do you do each month?

January 21, 2016/1 Comment/in Books, Leadership, Poll, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How much professional reading do you do each month?

– A ton — more than 5 books per month: 3.82%
– A lot — 2-3 books per month: 13.25%
– Some — 1 book per month: 24.5%
– Little — a book every few months: 42.57%
– None — I don’t have time for it or interest in it: 15.86%

Reading is Fundamental. It’s a bit surprising and somewhat distressing that leaders are reading so little with almost 60% of you stating you do “little” to “none” in terms of professional reading. Time sounds like a convenient excuse but I’ll challenge that assertion. If you add up the time you spend watching TV, cat videos, and being on social media, I’m sure you can carve out a portion of it for reading.

If you want to continuously grow as a leader, you have to invest in expanding your knowledge base, perspectives, and skills. Reading a book is a great way to do so (and for some great suggestions on where to get started, check out these titles). Letting your knowledge base stagnate directly correlates with the stagnation of your skills. Go hit your local library or bookstore.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

3 Steps to Preparing Your Organization to be Future Strong

December 21, 2015/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Learn how to best prepare yourself and your firm for the best possible future. Becoming future strong is not just an organizational strategy — it may ask personal changes of you.

Today’s post is by Bill Jensen, author of Future Strong, (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

My team and I just spent the past few years asking over 7,000 leaders across the globe, “What are the toughest choices you must make to create the best possible future for your firm?”

We wanted to uncover how to make the future of work work. After disruptive technologies blow up most everything we do today… After the Internet of Things creates a world driven by analytics… After Millennials hit a tipping point for being the majority of people at work — (depending on your industry, that happened this year and will through 2019)… And after all the other massive changes coming our way…

What will make the future work? What’s the one biggest thing leaders should be thinking about and doing to successfully lead our teams and our companies into the future?

The Future is Personal

If you were expecting some easy market-driven answer, an updated version of the The Graduate’s “Plastics” — sorry to disappoint.

What we uncovered is that what matters most is not the next big thing that’s coming at you from out there, but how you decide to embrace it, learn from it, and change your attitudes and habits. How you choose to disrupt yourself.

The future is personal in that it reveals itself to you only after you have made a deeply personal choice about how you will embrace it.

During our interviews, 86% said that the biggest challenge facing senior execs is how to free people to succeed. The issue isn’t more people-focus or better benefits. Most leaders get that and are working on this front. The issue is that our current 20^th century hierarchies are hanging on beyond their expiration point. We need to move toward more distributed models of structuring people, capital and work. More in the direction of social models like Airbnb and Uber.

Making that shift is going to require leaders to make leaps and bets on the future before best practices are fully established and before all risks have been mitigated.

How to Inspire Your Team to Embrace a Sense of Urgency

November 16, 2015/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Your team needs to move with a sense of urgency. This doesn’t mean moving fast – it means moving with purpose. A group of firefighters can provide great insight into what moving with a sense of urgency means.

Today’s post is by Tom Pandola, author of Light a Fire Under Your Business (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

One of the big issues in business today is how to motivate a young workforce. Anyone in a leadership position knows how difficult it can be to instill a certain level of engagement within their employees and associates. This can be a difficult task, but if you are in a leadership position and accountable for accomplishing important work through the efforts of others, you need to start leading as though it matters.

Much of what I have learned to be true about the subject of leadership was learned during my 25 years of firefighting in Los Angeles. The topic of motivating a sense of urgency within a workforce reminds me of one of the first greater alarm fires that I responded to as a rookie fresh out of the fire academy.

Try to picture a large commercial building in flames, with smoke billowing high into the sky. Imagine all of the actions taking place by the multitude of firefighters carrying ladders and hose lines in every direction, fire engines pumping large amounts of water, and the continuous roar caused by the fire consuming everything inside the building, including the structure itself. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, and I was certainly taking on every task given to me with what I would consider an enormous sense of urgency!

Running toward the burning building tasked with delivering a piece of important equipment that was needed inside, I was confronted with an obstacle: a large pile of fire hose which resembled spaghetti on a dinner plate. I was moving fast with no time to slow down! So, I attempted to leap over the pile. As I caught my foot on a loop of hose, tripped, and fell face down onto the concrete sidewalk – my helmet along with that important equipment I was carrying all went flying. Everything that I was trying to deliver was now skidding across the ground with such a noisy clatter that it caught the attention of everyone within a hundred feet of me.

Stunned, I looked up and realized I had landed sprawled out at the foot of the deputy fire chief, who was in command of operations. Read more

6 Reasons Your Offsites are Terrible

October 21, 2015/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Project Management, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Your offsites and training programs aren’t effective because of a few typical planning mistakes. With a few tweaks and openness to changing your approach, you can run a great offsite.

Offsites are a great way to share focused content, build relationships, spend time away from the office discussing key issues, and re-energize your team. More often than not they turn into rushed, mind-numbing wastes of time filled with forced fun. Why do they devolve to this so often?

Planning. Plain and simple. Poor planning.

I’ve seen and run my fair share of offsites. Sometimes I’ve been a participant. Others I’ve been in charge. Still others I’ve been the content being delivered. After over a decade of doing this, I’ve identified a few common issues that make for terrible offsites. I’d like to share those issues and more importantly offer some thoughts on how to rectify them.

Issue 1: You Put Ten Pounds of Crap in a Five Pound Sack

“Hey we’ve got 8 hours of offsite time. Let’s have eight one-hour sessions.” Fail. People see offsites as a rare opportunity to get everyone together and as a great way to share a ton of content with that group. Unfortunately we try to share too much information during the offsite.

Let’s talk planning math. If you have an 8 hour offsite, you can have 5.5 hours of content. No more. Why? 1 hour for lunch, 30 minutes for breaks (one morning and one afternoon), 30 minutes of “meeting friction” in the morning as people arrive late and 30 minutes of “meeting friction” in the afternoon as folks leave early because they have a flight to catch. 5.5 hours. Period. And if your offsite is more than 50 people, take off another 30 minutes because the breaks will take that much longer because you only have two restrooms. Stop jamming too much content into the allotted time. You won’t get to it all and if you do, it’ll be rushed and won’t stick.

Issue 2: You Rely on Time Warps

The Importance of Hiring for Outcomes

October 19, 2015/0 Comments/in Books, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

By identifying your organization’s critical outcomes, you can find star performers who can consistently produce the desired results for your organization.

Today’s post is by Greg Long and Butler Newman, coauthors of The New Game Changers: Driving Performance by Focusing on What Matters (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

On June 17, Mike Figliuolo wrote about the three secrets to hiring stars for your high-performing team. In that post he advocated hiring based on skills rather than experience. We agree. To put it in other words, to build high-performing teams, you need to select people with the skills to produce at a high level. That’s the working definition of stars: people who can consistently produce the desired results that further an organization’s goals.

To dig just a little deeper into this topic, allow us to highlight one of the practical challenges you are likely to face: how to identify the specific skills you need in those stars. We’ve found that identifying the right skills and knowledge needed for someone to succeed is not nearly as easy as one would think.

To meet that challenge, we must first understand the concept of outcomes. Not business outcomes, but job outcomes. We define job outcomes as those things that an individual performer produces that the organization values. The idea of things is important because things are left behind as the result of the work someone does. For example, building on the financial position Mike discussed, a job outcome may be a valuation of a company being considered for acquisition. Or it may be a comparative analysis of different office equipment leases. Both require specific financial skills but different skills from each other. Knowing what you want people to produce makes it easier to decide what skills they require to produce it.

In our experience, most jobs consist of five to seven major outcomes. For example, a project manager job could look like this:

9 Reasons You Should Write All the Time

September 30, 2015/2 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Writing is a powerful habit that can improve your performance in several ways. It also makes you smarter, more relaxed, and more disciplined. Here are 9 reasons you should build a writing habit of your own.

I write. A lot. Emails. Blog posts. Books. More books. Articles. Tweets. I’m surprised I don’t have full-on carpal tunnel syndrome. Writing is draining, laborious, frustrating, and tiring.

You should write too.

What?!?! Mike, you just said a whole bunch of negative things about writing. Why are you telling me to write too?

There are 9 great reasons you should write regardless of your role or occupation.

1. Writing improves your vocabulary. When I write, I tend to be precise with my words. When I don’t know what a word means but it sounded cool when I heard it, I look it up. When I use new words in written form, it solidifies their meaning and use in my vocabulary. I’m then more comfortable using those words in conversation. That enables me to express my ideas more clearly and intelligently than I could with a limited vocabulary.

2. Writing clarifies your ideas. When you write about a concept, the vague becomes clear. Writing forces you to take the generalities and amorphous or ambiguous thoughts in your head and put structure to them. It solidifies ideas. It generates new insights and understanding of your thoughts thereby making them more concrete concepts that can be acted upon.

3. Writing alleviates stress. When I write, I set aside all the stressors that are typically swirling in my mind. Believe me, there are plenty of them. My writing pushes those thoughts aside – albeit temporarily – while I focus on the topic at hand. That timeout from my stressors gives my nervous system a break from being overloaded.

4. Writing creates business opportunities. I get calls and emails all the time from people who say “I read your book/post/article and loved it. Would you be interested in teaching/coaching me on that topic? Because I have a pile of money I want to throw at you.” Um, yeah. Content marketing 101. I’ve had opportunities to travel to Greece, China, Florida, Utah, California, and other great places because of my writing.

How Principle-Based Behaviors Drive Culture and Accountability

September 9, 2015/2 Comments/in Career, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Culture is the sum of your daily actions. How can you direct the actions of large organizations without micromanaging everyone? Simple. Use principle-based leadership tied to accountability to drive the behavior changes you’re looking for.

Once you understand your accountabilities as a leader, and you’ve clearly defined them for the members of your team, you need to start thinking about the broader organization and how you can create a culture of accountability. Culture is nothing more than the sum of our daily actions. To change culture, you’re going to want to put in place a set of principles for how you want people to behave. Those principles are going to drive daily behaviors.

Make no mistake about it – changing your culture will take time. Culture will not change overnight. But reinforcing small behaviors every single day, over time, are going to create that strong culture of accountability.

Your values need to be articulated and clarified in a manner that everyone in the organization understands them. You also need to give your people the latitude to behave in a manner where they’re not afraid of taking a risk and trying to live up to those values.

For example, I ran a large customer service organization at one point and we said we wanted to commit to the customer to give them great service. We knew we had financial obligations to the broader organization. What we did was we said we’re going to tell our associates who are on the phone with our customers to ask themselves one question: “Is this right for the customer?” Whatever they were thinking about doing during the interaction with the customer, they had to ask themselves “is this right for the customer?”. If the answer was yes, they should do it. If the answer was no, they needed to find some other solution.

We got some great behaviors because of that values-based approach. Read more

7 Tips for Dealing With Irate Customers

June 29, 2015/0 Comments/in Communications, Customer Service, Guest Blogger, Sales, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Dealing with angry customers can be one of the greatest challenges you face. Here are 7 tips for dealing with those difficult situations gracefully and effectively.

Today’s post is by Mark Goulston, author of Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

One of the things that all irate customers have in common is that they have an attitude that says “I rate better service than this and now that I have you on the phone, you’re going to pay for it!” And one of the other things about them that gets to you is you feel unjustly accused of having done this to them and that can make it difficult to remain calm.

That is why the first three tips are about ways to remain or regain your calm and the final four about what to do next.

1. 3 Strikes and You’re Calm – 1. Think of the first thing you want to say or do in response to an irate customer (which is about defending or protecting yourself). Don’t do it, take a breath and exhale. 2. Then think of the second thing you want to say or do (which is about retaliating). Don’t do that, take a breath and exhale. 3. And finally think of the third thing you want to do (which is about finding a solution) and do that.

2. Assume innocence – Unless you are dealing with a truly evil person, assume that nothing is going right in the person’s life and they have chosen this interaction with you to displace all their frustration as a way of not taking it personally when it is meant for your company or product and not you.

3 Secrets to Hiring Stars for Your High Performing Team

June 17, 2015/2 Comments/in Career, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

If you recruit and hire well, the odds of your team performing well go up dramatically. There are three key considerations for making sure you’re hiring well. If you follow these principles, you should end up with a highly-talented team much faster than you would building it from scratch.

One of the most exciting aspects of building a high performing team is recruiting people to be members of that team. There’s nothing better than finding that really talented person who wants to come work with you.

As you think about doing this recruiting and finding the right people, first you need to understand how to create role descriptions based on the team skill needs. Next, you need to think about hiring from non-traditional sources, based on skill sets rather than experience. Last, when you’re hiring somebody, don’t just think about the role you’re hiring them into, but think one role ahead so those people have headroom to grow when they join your team.

Experience-Based Versus Skill-Based Job Descriptions

Experience-based role descriptions might sound like “The individual must have five years of experience on a small business credit union underwriting team working at a small, mid-Atlantic community bank with multiple branches.” That’s a really specific description and there are very few people who probably meet those requirements. By writing a description that way, you’ve shrunk the recruiting base that you can find somebody in, and, by the way, those experiences might not be relevant to the skills the team needs.

Instead, write skill-based job descriptions. Read more

How do you feel about your current level of responsibilities?

April 2, 2015/0 Comments/in Career, Poll, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How do you feel about your current level of responsibilities?

– I don’t have enough — they need to give me more: 32.27%
– I’m comfortable with my current responsibilities: 40.6%
– I have too much on my plate, and they need to lighten my load: 27.13%

Overworked or Underworked. It seems to be an even split between those of you who feel overworked versus those who feel underworked. The critical piece of either side of that equation is communicating with your manager. If you want additional responsibilities, make a clear case for what you’d like to take on and why it makes sense for you to own it. But beware – when you take on those additional projects, you might find yourself in the overworked camp. If you’re overworked, first prioritize your own projects and eliminate time sinks and low value projects. If that doesn’t lighten your load enough, speak with your manager about additional resources or reprioritizing what’s on your plate.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!