Well as I looked at my twitter page I began to consider that Twitter just might be a great test of leadership. After all you search for those who you know already, find others who have common interests, communicate into the void meaningful points (hopefully) and see what happens. Somewhere along the way people decide to follow you. So as of writing this I have 87 people following my tweets. Yes a pretty small number on the scale of things but a decent number all the same.

The comparison stops here unfortunately because leadership is a contact sport and cannot be faked in a virtual space.

So then I consider the twitter sport of following and some interesting questions and thoughts come forth

* Whats up with the reciprocity?! I will follow you if you follow me. Seems a little juvenile

* How the heck does a guy like Glenn Beck get to 160,000 followers?

* How is it that people actively gain followers?

* When a friend gets too irritating I have taken to telling him that if he were on twitter I would unfollow him ;-)

Lead well
–
Ron

Great news! After a grueling 8 months of leading an organization by day, evenings in B school obtaining an MBA and spare time split between family friends and volunteer leadership roles, I am happy to announce that I finished school and am taking the summer off. Well I am still going to lead my organization, still hanging with family and friends and still building, with your help, the Developing Leaders community.

In the next day or so you will start receiving a new series of emails that are a series of experiential leadership challenges. Not to steal the thunder of one of my favorite leadership books “The Leadership Challenge” no this is a journey of risk and fun we can take together. I tell you what, I will do all the challenges myself as well. Lead from the front… Is there any other way????

If you are wondering how you can participate, join the Developing Leaders Mailing list today! Check out the link in the bottom right side of the website

Anyway Ron dug into the task and came up with a great post you will want to read.  It addresses the angst of leading in an uncertain time. A time when we are enticed to find comfortable solutions to difficult challenges. Enjoy the post

Lead well 

I have discovered something peculiar about people searching on the search engines. Those that find this site seem to ask questions like the title of this post. I discovered this because the most hit posts on the site are questions about leadership. So we will do a small experiment as see if we get more people coming to the site with you guessed it questions.

We are really excited to see the sites growth in popularity and the recent activity of people from around the world asking questions about leadership and seeking guidance. That is the purpose of the site so it is exciting when people start to really get into it. Who would ever think that people from the United States, eastern and western Europe, and numerous countries in Asia would ask important questions for their growth.It is humbling to serve such a diverse community and we thank you.Keep the questions coming everyone.

Leadership is meant to be shared and mentored.

Lead well

Ron  

Learn What it is and What it is Not

Developing a mindset to maximize retention starts with an understanding of what retention means. It is not a keep everyone mentality. Rather we keep the high performers, coach average performers into high performers and challenge the rest to pick up their game or clear out their desk.

Help them Soar

We talked about performance management and the need to systemically ensure that your team are meeting or exceeding the expectations of the role. Of course this requires that the work be done to understand exactly what those expectations actually are. There are some simple diagnostic tools that can be used to help identify the likely cause of a performance gap and how to address it.

Hire the Best

We talked about effective hiring which is the cornerstone of a retention policy. You must bring in the best people you can, treat them well, hold them accountable and watch them soar. Often we need to find ways to bring people when we find them rather than waiting for a vacancy to present itself.

Know Your Team

Finally, the most important point of this discussion is this, relationship. An effective leader has a trust based professional relationship with every team member. We talked about the tools to achieve this and why it is of critical importance.

We may not retain 100% of our best people. There will be those misguided souls who have not yet learned that the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. They may leave for money, for a promotion you would not give them, or possibly just to be closer to home. It will happen. What matters here is that you have the tools to know with some advance warning when they do decide to leave. More importantly though those who leave for money, fame, promotions etc especially if you treated them well and followed the advice above are better off leaving. Frankly you and your team are also better off. You will have the opportunity to bring in a rock star and take your team to new heights.

Lets take a step back in time. You may not be able to go back and rehire your entire team but you certainly have control over who is brought in to the team in the future. This makes an effective hiring process a critical aspect of your teams success and ultimately the success of your retention strategy.

How do you hire well. There are a few straight forward points on this that I would like to share.

• Hire in advance of a need if possible
• Define your needs clearly
• Decide upon the key hiring criteria in advance including how the decision making process will be handled
• Decide upon whether quantitative testing will be used
• Decide upon what sort of interview style will be used
• Hire only the best

In Advance

Often we come across excellent people well in advance of a specific need. You are at an industry conference and someone blows you away with their professionalism and knowledge. A resume comes across your desk for a technical expert who looks like a rockstar. A friend lets you know about a plant shutdown in your area, they are known for quality skilled people. Resolve whenever possible to hire early or at least secure information for talent in advance of the need. You never know when a opening will unexpectedly form.

Take people who look like a great fit to your organization through your process. If they are as good as they seem find a way to hire them. Don’t be naive though there are many considerations that go into a hiring decision. checks and balances that keep knuckle-headed managers from building their own fiefdom. Be conservative where needed be courageous when necessary.

Define Needs

Take the time when the hiring decision is upon you to define the attributes you need for the position in question. Knowing these in advance will not only stream line the process but can be an important paper trail for the process. These attributes can be defined through an analysis of positiion descriptions, the organizational needs analysis and organizational culture elements.

Hiring Process

Will the decision to hire be made by one person, by committee by test score, by interview result? What will you do in the event of seemingly equally talented candidates? Know this in advance to avoid unnecessary conflict and indecision.

Quant or Qual?

Will you include the use of quantitative testing as part of your process? Often such tests can be used as a screen for aptitude and intelligence and have the advantage of removing perceived biases. Be certain the testing is relevant to the role hired for.

Interviews

This is the heart of a good process. The use of behavioral style interviewing is in my opinion the only effective way to ensure a positive hire. Yes it is lpossible that you will reject a potentially capable candidate but in my opinion this style when executed correctly has a very high success rate and a low rate of false positive hires. As they say past performance is a good predictor of future performance. Perhaps not the best predictor but I have found little else as effective.

Rock Stars 

Remember that when you interview you are not trying to fill a hole, you are actually trying NOT to hire. You are trying to rule candidates out. Seem contrary to what I have said already? It is not, if you have a bias toward ruling people out instead of ruling them in you will raise the performance level you will hire to and avoid the pressure to just fill the position. Hire only the best candidates, the rock stars. Settle for mediocrity and guess what you will not have a retention problem no you will have a performance problem and then you may find yourself looking at retention from the UN-employment side of the street.

lead well

Ron

Relationships Matter

There is another important aspect of retention, it relates to relationship. Let me ask you, have you ever really been surprised when someone resigns? I have and every time it happened there was a definite common denominator. There was a definite lack of relationship. I could not see it coming because I had not invested in the individuals enough to know they were looking elsewhere.

An effective leader or manager invests the time to know their team. You have heard me say many times that leadership is a relationship. That statement is very much on point with our current discussion.

Leverage Your Resources…. Manager tools!

Where do you start in building a professional relationship? I recommend a simple set of tools here developed by Mike and Mark over at http://www.manager-tools.com/. They describe in their podcasts a tool called one on ones. O3′s as I call them are weekly meetings with each and every direct report that provides the uninterrupted opportunity to build trust based professional relationships. I could talk for hours about the elegant simplicity of their model but they (Mike and Mark) are way it better. Check them out and subscribe to their podcast, it is my number one ranked cast.

Proactive Management, Oxymoron? I think not

Once you have a regular venue for relationship building you will find that you can not only gain early signals of dissatisfaction, but you can actually avert it by providing developmental opportunities to your team that will engage them and help them to make a more meaningful contribution. Please let me jump on my soap box here. Do not send them for “training” I said development. Figure out how they learn and where they need to develop. They could be best developed through a project role, through a temporary assignment to a different department, through a volunteer assignment. Be creative here do not just send them to a 200 buck one day crap session. To truly learn a new skill you have to practice it, get good at it. This does not happen by listening to a talking head for a day.

This is the core of a retention strategy, knowing your team and their desires, hopes, and dreams. Help them connect with these in the workplace and why would they want to leave. Sure a few may go any way but then who said you were aiming at 100% retention anyway. In fact there may be times where you encourage a team member to leave for a better positioned opportunity for them.

lead well

Ron

The past two days I had an almost indescribeable opportunity. But then this is a blog right so I will attempt to describe it anyway.

I attended a Manager Tools conference. What the heck is a manager tools conference you ask.

Manager Tools is a website, podcast and management consulting company. The founders Mike Auzenne and Mark Horstman have embraced the web 2.0 model and through it built the top business podcast on the web and on iTunes. Each with 25+ years of senior management experience and executive coaching Mike and Mark provide effective practical advice on how to manage. You just cannot get this type advice anywhere. Imagine listening to a 30 minute podcast on your commute, walking into your office and applying the content of the podcast in your first interaction with a direct report that morning to positive effect. That is manager tools. I am one of over 40,000 people who listen, learn and apply their wisdom. This is not rocket science it is practical comon sense tested advice that works.

That is manager tools but a conference? Yes Tuesday and Wednesday I attended Mike and Mark’s first effective communications conference. This was a perfect blend of wise candid advice delivered with unmistakable energy and enthusiasm along with practical exercises to apply the concepts. when we started tuesday am I listened like a sponge taking in everything I could. Please understand these guys are virtual mentors and frankly men I admire greatly. (If developing leaders has only a fraction of the success they have achieved I would be thrilled.) Well by wednesday afternoon the concepts they were discussing had become close to second nature.I was blown away by the power of what they had taught me. What was even cooler was that I was not alone. The other 60 managers in attendance also “got it”

The core of the conference was applying the DISC preferences model to tailor communications to the needs of the listener and in doing so increase your commuication effectiveness. What leader wouldn’t want to improve in this area…

I don’t do this often but I highly encourage anyone who wants to learn how to improve their management effectivenss to check out Mark and mike’s site at www.manager-tools.com

lead and communicate well

Ron

I thought you were talking about retention you might ask. We are! The process of retention requires a fundamental understanding of who to retain, who to let go, who to develop further who to transfer to a different position. We cannot simply skip to the end and say how can I retain my people. Honestly that would be incredibly foolish.

So with knowledge at hand of the skills and competencies needed to allow your organization to meet its goals and objectives we can now begin to assess the ability of our workforce to meet these goals.

Many years ago a guy named Fredrick Taylor revolutionalized the world of manufacturing with the concept or division of labor. The idea that people specialize on a specific small group of tasks rather than the entire manufacturing process (the craftsman era) thereby increasing productivity. Well this concept is alive and well in the form of position descriptions, job descriptions etc. Again these can be as simple as a statement of objective for a person’s role along with major objectives or a detailed summary of every aspect of the job. Regardless this document is the starting point of the performance management system as it provides a template on what is expected. A standard to measure against.

Define what is expected

So if you do not have them, write them. If you do not have time to write them call me I will get you set up with someone who can help you do so. Once drafted I highly recommend collaborating with the employee performing the function. They will have insight as to whether the document accurately reflects their role as they understand it. Involve the employee you will be surprised to learn how their understanding differs from yours. This is crucial for buy in moving forward with employees. Once you have well documented and agreed upon position descriptions you can now regularly assess performance based on objective facts rather than opinion, subjective thoughts and what happened lately. Performance management in the form of regular reviews is a key aspect of a solid retention policy.

People Crave Feedback!

An arguably more critical aspect of performance management is regular performance feedback. When I say regular I mean monthly, weekly, even daily as appropriate. There is some common sense required here. Too much feedback can seem overbearing even micromanaging. Too little well that’s what we are trying to address here in the first place! The key concept to remember is that employees, heck people, crave feedback. They want to know they are doing a good job. They want to know how they can improve. Anyone who argues to the contrary is likely suffering from the trauma of a feedback void in their life to a point where they have overcompensated with a defensive shield.

Managing the performance gap

Several years ago I came across a wonderful tool that helped me to better understand how to assess employee performance against standard. It is a tool developed by a guy named Gilbert and called the six windows. It is an elegantly simple way of walking through how to assess and then help an underperforming employee improve. If you want to learn more about it contact me through the site here at developing leaders or email me at ronn.hurst@gmail.com

With an understanding of organizational goals, required competencies, and employee performance against expectation we can now focus in on the all important strategy of retention. As we move forward in this discussion we will cover a number of approaches to this concept. In the mean time if you have questions, want to share an opinion or want to be heard post a comment. Want to learn more about this topic stay tuned or contact us here at develop a leader dot com.

Lead well

Ron