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Leadership Errors

kenderso — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:32:12 +0000

The Golden Rule of Leadership

kenderso — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:14:33 +0000

In this short coaching session we share the one thing as a leader that will cause you more pain and failure than any other action you can take.

Empowerment

kenderso — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:18:12 +0000

Building a strong team that is dedicated to doing the right thing is key to your success as a team leader. Watch this 4 minute coaching video where we share some thoughts about creating an empowered team.

Meeting Success Tips

kenderso — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:31:39 +0000

Dealing With Perceptions

kenderso — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:20:21 +0000

Customer Loyalty Though Leadership

kenderso — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:35:01 +0000

I was going through a book about building customer loyalty today. Given the current economic conditions, customer loyalty should be one of the most important areas of focus for any business today. I wanted to share some thoughts about the role leaders play in this process.

When building a customer loyalty program, we look at things like Responsiveness, Relationships, Communication, Proactivity, etc. Most of the programs out there are focused on how the front-line people impact customer loyalty, but there are a few key things we can do as leaders to impact these efforts in a big way.

I would start with the importance of Communication. As with any major initiative, leaders need to implement a regular communication plan that keeps 3-5 of the most critical objectives in front of the team members. Things like empowerment guidelines, being responsive, and demonstrating a positive attitude when interacting with the customer. We reinforce these important behaviors by our own actions, when we deal with the customer directly. What we DO speaks louder than what we Say!!

Next, leaders should focus on building a high level of Enthusiasm. Studies show that when leaders demonstrate a high level of enthusiasm, positive things happen with those around them. Team members will in turn show a higher level of enthusiasm towards the customer. This alone has a huge impact on how the customer views the organization. Enthusiasm from the leader will also increase the amount of empathy the front-line people demonstrate when dealing with customers. Team members that can listen and effectively reflect the feelings of the customer builds long term loyalty as well.

My final suggestion for leaders would be to create programs to Reinforce Desired Behavior. Looking back at our 3-5 areas we want to communicate (reinforce) daily, start to build ways to reward and acknowledge team members for demonstrating the behavior you desire. Typically you will see that 75% or more of the team members will ‘conform’ to these behaviors once they can be identified through actual behavior of those around them.

The list of things leader can do to build customer loyalty could consist of 20 or more areas. We want to create simple plans that we can focus on each and every day, doing them effectively. Often times we may start with so many areas and objectives, we are not effective in any one area. Keep it simple!!

Rewarding Poor Behavior?

kenderso — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:18:32 +0000

When we think about motivation, things like gift cards and trips come to mind. We reward team members for positive behavior by giving them things that they value. I would challenge this idea by asking leaders who they spend most of their time with, and how they delegate much of the daily work.

Let’s say you are a front-line leader for a team of 10 people. Like most teams, you have 3 team members that are superstars, far exceeding performance goals. You have 5 team members that are average in every way, they never cause any issues and ‘meet’ expectations every month. And finally, you have 2 people on your team that are in the middle of every ‘issue’ you deal with. They come in late 2-3 times each month. Their performance often falls below the ‘acceptable’ level, and team members complain often about the behavior of these 2 problem team members.

One of the ways leaders reward team members is by spending time coaching and mentoring them. When we look at how we spend our day, specifically with those on our team, we find that most of our day is dedicated to improving performance of the bottom 2 team members. We create a success plan to improve performance and document our actions. We document attendance issues ans address each situation according to the policies. All these things end up taking any available coaching time we have, and leaves the better performers to assume they are needed and valued.

When we fail to coach the middle performers, we often see one or more fall into the bottom level of performance or even leave the organization. And those top performers, they rarely stay there without seeing rewards and recognition for this performance. With little time to spare, it’s just a matter of time before you are looking for a new superstar to replace the one that left. So we reward the poor performers by spending the majority of our time coaching them.

We also penalize top performers in another way. When we delegate tasks, we consider who can perform the task the best, with as little direction as possible. We don’t want to add additional work onto poor performers since they are struggling already. So we load even more work on those that are performing well.

When we consider how this all impacts our best performers, we can see that what we are actually doing is rewarding poor performance by delegating less work and spending more time coaching them. And we punish our best performers by adding more work and spending little to no time with them coaching to improve even more.

So take a look at how you spend your time, and how you reward those around you. There is much more to motivation than just handing out gift cards and trips.

5 Laws For Effective Motivation

kenderso — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:59:06 +0000

When we approach motivation as a leader, we should have several different ideas in mind in order to be successful longterm. Often times new leaders will use a single approach, and you will find you are getting a “hit and miss” results. Your top performers continue to be at the top, and the bottom stays at the bottom. Let’s take a look at 5 Laws For Successful Motivation that will even the playing field for all.

The Law of Face-the vast majority of leaders use money or other tangible items as their primary method to motivate their team. But our number one law for effective motivation is that “Nothing will be more effective or mean more to your team members than to get in front of them and say thank you”!! Period. Far too many leaders feel that as long as they “pay for performance” and provide rewards for good behavior, that’s all they need to do. Get in front of your people when they deserve positive reinforcement and say thank you.

The Law of One-simply put, every person on your team values different things. Leaders need to get personal with their people, getting to know just who they are and what they value. One size does not fit all when it comes to motivation. We should be using several different approaches to our motivation to maximize performance for all team members.

The Law of Repeat-at the core of motivation is the fact that we want to reward the behavior and performance that produces the results we desire and that is aligned with organization goals and objectives. Many leaders “assume” that every team member clearly understands what is expected of them. In reality, many leaders only interact with team members when they do something wrong. This “leave alone Zap” approach only defines the behavior we do not want. Our motivation needs to clearly show our people the performance and behavior we DO WANT.

The Law of Time-if you want to receive the biggest bang for your buck, place your reward as close to the behavior as you can. The longer you wait, the less people will relate the reward with the behavior you are looking for. The sooner you can reward, the more “followers” you will see begin to behave in a similar fashion.

The Law of Clarity-and finally, we need to make sure that our rewards and recognition clearly define why we are providing this reward. All team members must understand what they can do to join in on this recognition. If you have multiple job functions on your team, make sure the recognition adds clarity across each job function.

As the leader of a team, if you can apply each and every one of these laws to your approach to motivation, you will find new “top performers” over time because it takes everyone into consideration and clearly defines the performance you desire and reward.

People vs Process-People Focused Leadership

kenderso — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:36:52 +0000

Learn how to become more focused on your people rather than the tasks we have to complete each day.

Click Here To View Video

The 80/20 Rule of Leadership

kenderso — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:04:23 +0000

In this coaching session we take a look at how we can maximize our performance by focusing on the people and tasks that produce the majority of our results. Who are you spending the majority of your time with each day? Top performers or the poor performers?

Leadership Mentor.com

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