Just following on from the previous post…..

People want to be part of something that matters, that what they do is meaningful and has some significance and they want to know what contribution they are making too! That also includes you. This is about getting your team to respond rather than to react to problems. There is a difference.

If the MD isn’t good at change and his managers are not good at leading, no wonder employees try and stop it from happening and no wonder they get demoralised.

The first realisation is that people now only want to work on stuff they believe in, understand and find meaningful. In fact that was always the case its just we didn’t have enough passionate leaders to create it. Now we don’t have any choice. These kind of people want to know how it benefits them as well as the business. How it stimulates change, how creative it is and whether it embraces a ‘better way.’ The job of the leader is to engage their people on a journey, on a plan, on a route that they are fully motivated towards. In the future, it will be these things that will bring about a competitive advantage not products!

Leaders are great connectors, they can understand people quickly and they understand motivation. They have the ability to inspire people. They are not process orientated but lead from the front, galvanising support, creating ideas that drive the people in the business towards its goal. They are not interested in authority and can’t abide ego centric people.

Mike Neiss puts it succinctly:

http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?rss=1&note=http://www.tompeters.com/blogs/main/010852.php

The words we use are changing in business or they should be! They describe what we value, what we do, how we think, what we relate to and how we connect. They are important to not only ourselves but our people and our customers. However, they are shifting:

Words of the past; everywhere, promise, safe, timeless, large, distant, normal, complicated, transactional, steady, conformance, communication, faceless, caring, short term, sophisticated, managers, serious, control, big, frustrating, groups.

Words of the future; provocative, curious, surprise, risky, delivery, partner, conversation, intimate, real, authentic, trust, challenging, thinking, leaders, niche, influential, refreshing, weird, fun, intelligent, long term, simple, individuals.

Being loud, being comfortable, being essential  doesn’t necessarily mean you stand out nowadays! 

An employer pays his/her employee money in exchange for time. For that time an employee traditionally gets told what to do when to do it and within what parameters (job descriptions). There is a degree of control. It’s been a one sided affair for many decades/hundreds of years….perhaps I’m being a little unfair? But on the whole an employee is at the beck and call of us employers….why?

An employer may be giving a salary or a wage but the employee is giving up their time. It’s just as tangible, just as important as money and of equal weight, yet the relationship in many, if not most businesses, is lopsided. In the past that’s because employees had little choice. The employers factory was the only one in town and there were only a few people at the top who provided all of the employment in the surrounding area.

As this real life scenario rapidly dissolves it’s changing the ‘power’, things are becoming a lot more balanced. Employees have more choice. Employment is not provided by two or three heavy weights. Business is changing, we are selling intellect and less materials, we are managing our employees imagination not production lines and the business world around is changing very fast, small businesses themselves are changing but not as fast and the leaders of those small businesses, on the whole, are hardly changing at all.

We still see the employee as ‘ours,’ that they belong to us and that we say what goes. I’m not advocating breaking company rules or values but there is a shift. Employees really can choose where they work. They will increasingly make choices, understand where they fit and will leave quickly when they don’t fit.

Increasingly, small business owners will need to learn how to lead these changes and provide a working environment that is less centred on one person making the decisions. They must stop managing people and start leading, understanding that the employee has more choice than ever before. They can stop working and go travelling, they can stop working and do a degree, they can stop working and have a break from work and worse of all, they can stop working for you and go and work for the competition.

The balance has to be restored. As employers we must recognise that our employees can do a hundred things instead of being where they are with you right now. The relationship must not be lopsided and less based on control, order, authority and more on change, emotion, trust, influence and motivation.

Been helping a couple of small businesses with some overwhelming time management issues recently. As usual no time to improve and think about developments for the future because the majority of the staff are engaged in fire fighting. It comes from the ‘top’ and therefore is a problem for the ‘top’ to solve. Time management, I believe, is a cultural issue. It’s no good individuals on their own attempting to manage their time more effectively if other people are not respecting it and adhering to the boundaries or working parameters, great time management requires.

We can work quite inefficiently, we often get distracted by random factors in the working day. We prioritise based on noise but work doesn’t come from thin air, it comes from the commitments we make. We came up with a quite a few exercises to help the process. Here’s one:

1. Make a list of all of the outstanding work you have at the moment. Write down how long the task has been outstanding for and the number of hours it would take to complete the task. When you’ve picked yourself back up off the floor. You now know what your backlog looks like and how big or small it is!

2. Collect a days worth of incoming work. Write it down. You now know what you have to do just to stay on top!

3. Put all of your backlog work into a folder then collect all of your work for one day and deal with it in one batch and do that for three days.

4. Spend the fourth day dealing with your normal incoming work but start the process of clearing one item on that backlog list and do that first thing when you get in the office. Keep doing it until the backlog is gone.

Remember whenever you take on something new, something else has to give.