We often get asked "How do we develop our managers?" The key is to develop Leader Managers who improve performance through fulfillment. In this video I explain the five questions employees seek from leaders within their organization.
00:00 Hi I'm Bruce Michalowski, Senior Consultant with Strategic Enhancement Group and one of the questions we get asked often is, "How do we develop our managers?" We have a process at SEG that helps us to develop leaders managers. Why the difference? The difference is, we're looking for not just performance, but performance with fulfillment. We're looking to people to motivate people to give us that discretionary effort, and we have a process that helps establish that. In my experience working, I did this myself, I embraced this process and used it with my teams when I was a manager. Now as a trainer and consultant, I see the value in using this process to help different groups of people and companies I've worked with and throughout mergers, it really helps them to get on the same page and working towards that improved performance with fulfillment.
00:53 The process answers five questions that employees have about their organization and their work, like, where are we going? That's the direction piece of it. How are we going to get there? What are my goals to get there? Then, what's important to people? Why they work? They work for recognition. They work for a reward system including pay, so you know the things that are very concrete and the things that are less concrete, the different parts of reward systems. A couple of other key things about that now, what's in it for me? That recognition piece, but how am I doing? The feedback piece is key. And lastly, where do I go to get help? So to answer those five questions, as part of this process, which helps to align people, and to me, that's been the most important thing I've seen with my clients.
01:41 It gets a group of people and leader managers thinking about not just managing the business, but leading your people and getting a higher performing group together. It works for individuals and work teams because everybody starts at what we call the formative stage. You're learning your job as an individual, a group of people coming together and working is learning how to do that. And this process helps you to get from that formative stage to what we call a normative stage. In a normative stage, you're developing and delivering results. You're earning money, you're making profits, you're meeting your goals. The other thing we want to do is take people up that curve, they want to stagnate, we want to get them to the integrative stage. Integrative means it's a high functioning individual, a high functioning team, and you're getting that discretionary effort.
02:29 These are the kinds of winning teams that are made up of integrative people. I would like to talk next about a specific element that's very key to that process and that's feedback. Now, at Strategic Enhancement Group we have a process that we've put together to help give feedback in a very organized way. It's called coaching. One of the things that people miss as leader managers, is they share expectations, but if you don't give people feedback on how they're doing in a constructive way, you're not going to get the results you want. So this is again, a fairly simple process, it's a principle based process and it makes sense, but it's important to really execute this as a leader manager. First thing, you need to make sure expectations are clear, clarified expectations tie in with goal settings.
03:16 Now to give feedback you have to observe how that person's doing towards those goals. That's a key part of it. You've got to have some interaction with that person you're dealing with. Now once you've observed, and you're making some judgments about how they're doing, one of the next things is rather than dictating what they need to do is ask for their perspective. The best way to coach somebody is have them self discover what they need to do better. Once they agree to that, then you create an action plan off of that. That has to be an agreed upon action plan. It's not something that you, the leader manager dictates to the employee. And then once that action plans in place you help get the resources they need to execute the plan. Once you start a process of coaching and do it on a regular basis it became very easy.
04:04 And again, it drives performance with fulfillment because, this person knows that you're not just there to manage the business, you're there to help them meet their individual personal goals. We all work for a reason. That reason is we put food on the table, a roof over our head, education for our kids, whatever it is, this helps a person to meet their individual goals. And of course, that helps an organization and a team to meet their goals. So a key part of the process of being a leader manager is giving good feedback through this coaching process.
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