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Posts Tagged ‘leadership’

How to Ask For More Responsibility at Work – Be Careful

Most managers and career coaches will tell you that if you want to position yourself for advancement in your organization, you should ask for more –more work, more responsibility, and more exposure. And that’s true –sometimes.

Yes, if you want to develop new skills, learn, grow, and be seen in your company as someone who wants to and is capable of doing more, you should ask for more responsibility.

How to Ask For More Responsibility at Work

Before launching my business, I was a national director at a company headquarters. I led a department with 21 locations and 200 people. I had a big job. One of my peers who had an equally big job leading a different department left the company. He was not replaced. After several months of his role sitting vacant, it was clear that his job was not going to be filled.

I thought the department was important to the company’s success and needed a strong leader, so I offered to run it. I already had a big, time consuming job, and now I had another one that I had volunteered for.

There was lots of opportunity to make improvements in the department I was now leading. The department needed an overhaul – different jobs, different staff, different processes and procedures. And type-A, workaholic girl was just the person for the job.

I spent six months revamping every process, procedure, and job description and trying to get my recommended changes approved. After six months of trying to make change happen, I realized that my boss wasn’t going to support my recommended changes. He blocked everything I wanted to do because changes can cost money. And he didn’t want to spend money on this department. Let me clarify, the company didn’t want to spend money on the department. The company’s most senior leaders didn’t see the department as integral to the company’s financial performance, and thus the department was not important.

I should have realized that our senior leaders didn’t see the department as important BEFORE I asked to run it. A large job, led by a senior person, is not replaced, when there is no hiring freeze in place. When a company is creating new jobs and filling vacant jobs, but chooses not to backfill a senior leader, it’s because the job wasn’t seen as necessary.  I thought it was necessary. My boss and his boss disagreed. And I couldn’t get them to think otherwise.

I am a change agent. If you want to keep your status quo, I am not the person to bring in. We will both be frustrated. My old boss did not want me to make changes to the department I took on. He didn’t think the department was important. And I didn’t see it until after I’d invested six months of my time, passion, and energy.

How to Ask For More Responsibility at Work

Every company has non-strategic and not-so-interesting work. To some extent, all employees ‘wash windows’. But don’t ask to wash windows when you can put your energy into an area that is seen as integral to the success of the business.

Ask questions and be knowledgeable of your organization’s short and long term goals. Look around for juicy work that moves the company closer to those goals. Don’t take work that the people at the top don’t think is important. You’ll be tired and frustrated.


Indecision is Worse Than Making the Wrong Decision – Decide!

Indecision plagues many of us at work.

  • Hire the person or source additional candidates?
  • Let the employee go or keep him?
  • Launch the software implementation or wait?
  • Gather more technical requirements or move forward with the information you have?
  • Ask for different responsibilities or look for a job?
  • Announce upcoming organizational changes to all employees or just to the leadership team?

We meet and discuss, meet some more, discuss some more, and still don’t decide. Endless meetings, discussions, and indecision exhausts and discourages employees and costs money.

Indecision

Do your due diligence:

  • involve the people closest to the work in making the decision;
  • gather enough information to make an informed decision;
  • get key stakeholders’ buy in;
  • then decide and act.

And if it’s the wrong decision you’ll know soon enough and can course correct.

The indecision is often worse than making the wrong decision. My friend and colleague Steve Shapiro author of Goal Free Living would say that the only wrong decision is not making one.

But we know there are decisions that have negative consequences, which is why we’re often hesitant to make decisions. If we make the wrong decision families, careers, and companies are impacted.

So we wait and discuss, dialogue, and debate, over and over and over. Follow the steps above regarding due diligence and decide. Don’t wait too long or stay too long. It’s not good for anyone, especially you.

Indecision


How to Become a Leader – Moving from a Doer to a Leader

There are things in our lives that bug us, but we put up with them.  They’re often little things like a burned out light bulb or a messy drawer in which we dump stuff that doesn’t have a real home. Maybe the bulb has been out or the drawer has been a mess for so long that we no longer even notice it.

Our workplace isn’t any different. There are things in your organization you’re tolerating. Perhaps a process or software is inefficient, but you don’t say anything to the people in your organization who can do something about it. Or maybe you said something a few times, but you didn’t feel anyone listened and you gave up.

Organizations are comprised of doers and leaders.  And organizations need both. If everyone wants to lead, you’ll have trouble. If no one leads, you’ll have even more trouble. Doers keep things going from day-to-day.  Leaders create opportunities, fix problems, and upgrade existing conditions.

I’m often asked to coach managers in organizations. The coachees’ boss tells me, “He’s a great employee.  But if he wants to move up in this organization, he needs to be a leader.”  And more often than not, the employee is confused by what the manager wants. Coachees say things like, “I give my opinion in meetings.  I volunteer for stuff. What else does my boss want?”

I tell my coachees the most straightforward thing I know to transition from a doer to a leader –improve processes and look for opportunities to fix things that are broken.

How to Become a Leader

Want to know how to become a leader in an organization? Ask these questions regularly:

  • What in the organization frustrates people? What could we do differently to ease people’s frustration?
  • Where do we have mediocre results? What’s the breakdown?
  • Where are we wasting money? Where are our costs too high? Where are we losing revenue?
  • What processes take longer than they need to? Or where is there a lack of process?
  • Where do we have inefficiencies and redundancies?
  • What practices work in one department that could work in another?

Leaders in organizations are always looking for ways to make things better. They look for opportunities and (picking their battles) pursue solutions. Pursuing a potential change does not mean asking your boss or department leader once or twice.  It means telling someone in a position of formal authority about a missed opportunity, asking permission to make a change, and then doing the work required to make it happen. Leaders do not tell their boss about a problem and walk away. Leaders suggest and implement a solution.

 


Dealing With Difficult Coworkers: Three People No One Can Work With

If you read your organization’s handbook carefully you will see, in the very fine print, the rule stating that there will be three people in your organization who no one can work with. Everyone knows who these people are. They are the people who employees are afraid of, who tend to make others’ lives hard, and who no one wants to work for.

Employees wonder, doesn’t anyone in management know about these people? Why isn’t anyone DOING anything? Someone is most likely doing something. Dealing with difficult coworkers just take time to work themselves out. And managers can’t talk about others’ performance with you, as you wouldn’t want them talking about your performance with others.

What to do in the face of a crazymaker who doesn’t appear to be going anywhere?

Crazymakers are often bullies and bullies push the people around who let them do so. Despite your fear, give it right back to a bully. Chances are she will back off and find someone else to pick on. Do this professionally. Don’t compromise your own reputation by interacting with a bully in the way she interacts with you.

Work around the person. I’m not giving you a pass to avoid the people you don’t like working with. If you have done everything you can to work well with someone and he won’t work with you, do your minimal best. Be polite and respectful. Keep the person in the loop when necessary. But don’t go out of your way to nurture the relationship. You can’t work with someone who won’t work with you.

Doing everything to work well with someone includes talking to the person about your working relationship, admitting it’s strained, and asking for feedback about what would improve the relationship. Doing everything might involve getting a third party or outside mediator to broker a conversation. It might include weekly meetings to ensure regular communication. If you’ve tried ALL of these things with no outcome, then you can work around the person. But everything is NOT, “I sent three emails and didn’t hear back.”

Dealing With Difficult Coworkers

You can leave your organization to avoid the person who makes you crazy, but s/he will be waiting for you at the next company in a different body.

If you like the work you’re doing and, for the most part, like where you work, don’t let dealing with difficult coworkers drive you from the organization. Ask for help. Let someone who can do something about the situation, assist you or at least give you the go ahead to work around that person, when possible. And if the situation becomes untenable, before you resign, tell someone in a position of formal authority that you’re at the end of your rope and you’re planning to leave. If something is going to change in the short term, he or she will often know and tell you.


You Get What You Give – Engaging and Retaining Employees

A few weeks ago I flew an airline whose employees were universally nasty. Every person I interacted with –from the person who checked me in for the flight, to the gate agent who scanned tickets, to the flight attendant on the plane–was nasty without being provoked.

you get what you give

There are two reasons why employees in various roles and locations are universally nasty to customers. Either employees feel they are treated poorly by the organization’s leaders, and they knowingly or unknowingly take their frustration out on customers, or there are insufficient expectations for good customer service. Given the competitive nature of the airline industry, I’m going to assume customer service standards are in place, and employees are reacting to how they feel they’re treated by the organization.

Your employees will not treat customers better than you treat your employees. You get what you give. Expecting employees to treat customers better than the employees feel treated is akin to buying subpar building materials and expecting superior construction. It isn’t going to happen.

Your organization’s handbook and customer service training programs can outline explicit instructions for how customers should be treated, but if the practices for treating employees are markedly different, don’t expect great customer service.

This begs the question, what does it mean to treat employees well? Don’t all employees need different things to be happy? What about the differences between Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y employees?

In my experience people of all ages need many of the same things to be satisfied in a job. Employees want to learn, grow, and feel challenged. They want to work in an environment in which they feel comfortable–they like the people and feel accepted and respected. They want to make a difference and contribute to something bigger than themselves. And they want the flexibility to control their schedule and personal lives. Depending on an employee’s stage in life and career, some of these things become more important than others.

The difference between Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y: I don’t think each group needs drastically different things to be satisfied at work. In my experience, the key difference between the groups is that Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers will put up with not having everything they want. Gen Y’ers will not. Baby Boomers and Generation X will put up with a boss or job they don’t like for two years, waiting to see if things improve. Millennials are more impatient. If they don’t think they can get what they want from a job or organization, they move on quickly.

The quickest and easiest thing managers can do to engage and retain employees of all ages and stages in their careers is to ask what employees need to be satisfied. And no, employees may not tell you. There is an almost universal and pervasive fear in organizations to speak candidly with one’s manager. But employees definitely won’t tell you what they need to stay with your organization if you don’t ask. And even if employees aren’t candid about their desires, you still get points for asking the questions most managers don’t.

In every leadership, management and coaching class I teach, I ask managers to answer these questions:

• What are your employees’ career deal breakers? What would make your employees leave your organization?
• What kind of work do your employees like to do most? What kind of work do they like to do least?
• So you can provide personalized recognition they’ll appreciate, what are your employees’ favorite
hobbies, foods, and places to eat or shop?
• What are employees’ pet peeves at work?

I’ve asked these questions of thousands of managers, and few can answer the questions. If you can’t, without absolute certainty, answer these questions about your employees, don’t be surprised that you aren’t getting the performance you desire. How can you manage and motivate employees if you don’t know what’s important to them?

The easiest thing to do today to raise employee performance, and in turn improve customer service, is to ask your employees what they need, and when appropriate, give employees those things. If you can’t provide what employees what, tell employees why you can’t honor their requests. Rationale, the answer to the question why not, goes a long way.

You may be wondering, isn’t it worse to ask employees what they want and have to say no, than not to ask at all?” Quite simply, no. Not asking about employees’ needs because we may not be able to tell them yes is akin to the fallacy that if we don’t talk about something it doesn’t really exist.
Employees want what they want, regardless of whether you talk about those desires or not. I’d much rather have an open discussion about not being able to meet an employee’s needs, and know they will job hunt, then be surprised when they quit. If employees’ desires are truly deal breakers, you’ll lose them anyway. If you know what employees want, you can negotiate and attempt to meet some or all of their needs, giving you more control over employee engagement and retention.

Ask what employees need to stay with your organization and be satisfied, and watch performance, morale, and customer service rise.


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