Vicki Anderson

In today’s work environment of job instability, the only thing truly portable is knowledge. Employees and employers alike have a lot to gain by developing learning organizations. Employers gain by having motivated, involved employees. Employees gain by enjoying their work more while adding to their personal worth.

In order for organizations to be competitive today, most work requires judgment and initiative. Even in routine tasks, employees need to notice errors in quality or processes that would require their adjustment. Employees are in the best position to recommend and make changes
Everyone is motivated by what interests them and is important to them. By developing and challenging your employees to learn, you also get them involved in their work. You are creating an environment where employees can be motivated to take pride in their work and gain more job satisfaction. So many managers make the mistake of focusing on money as the only or main motivating factor for retention of good people. Money is universal—everyone wants to feel they earn what they are worth. We have been conditioned to measure ourselves by money. However, the most effective long-term motivators are factors that go along with money. Many studies have been replicated over the years which show that people who achieve job satisfaction, feel appreciated for what they do, and develop increased skills are far more motivated to contribute to their work environment than those who are paid well, but get no job satisfaction, development, or appreciation for the work they do.
So, what can you do as a leader to develop and challenge your employees? Learning can take many forms such as classroom training, seminars, self-paced courses, coaching and mentoring, working on an improvement team, reading books and articles, temporary job assignments, addition of job responsibility, and training/teaching others. Developing people also means keeping people informed about what’s going on so they can make informed decisions about their work.

Look for opportunities to help people feel they make a contribution to your organization by inviting them to take on more responsibility or have input to decisions when they seem ready. This develops decision- making skills. Remember that according to Marcus Buckingham’s “First Break All the Rules,” employees join companies, but they leave managers. Employees are likely to feel more loyal and productive for managers who take an interest in them by developing them.
While employees do leave their organizations for other employment, it is often because they are not able to achieve their career goals in their current organization within the time period they want. If you have done everything you can within your organization to develop and coach, you still may not be able to prevent that. However, if you do not develop and coach them, they will leave earlier. At least you will have had the benefit of their expertise and involvement for an extended time.
Take time to engage your employees in dialog about where they want to go and what they want to learn. Find out what they like and don’t like about their jobs. Ask for ideas about ways to improve the things they don’t like or the processes that don’t work efficiently. Help them be realistic about what can and can’t be done. Listen and mentor. You’ll find you not only improve your employee retention and engagement, you will increase your own job satisfaction as well.

Being a leader isn’t easy. It takes courage.
- Courage to tell someone that their performance isn’t up to par.
- Courage to help them when it would be easier to let them go and find someone else.
- Courage to take the time to be empathetic about someone’s personal problems.
- Courage to hold people accountable for making needed change when it would be easier to let them go back to what’s comfortable.
- Courage to give credit to those who have done the work when it would be easy to take the credit as the manager of the department.
- Courage to make changes in your own behavior that you would like to see others do.
- Courage to fight for your ideas and the ideas of others when upper management doesn’t want to listen.
- Courage to let each day’s problems stay at work instead of taking them home.
- Courage to have confidence in your vision of what could be and take action to make it happen.
- Courage to delegate to others with support so that they may learn from failures and grow from successes.
- Courage to be honest when it might be easier at the moment to lie. It always comes back to bite you.

Being a leader is a big responsibility. Having courage is not easy, but it will develop character that commands respect.

In leadership development we talk a lot about managing, motivating, and leading your staff, but what about managing your boss? I have always believed that if you want a good working situation it is important to tune in to the needs of your boss.

I have worked with several very difficult and demanding bosses and people would ask me how I could stand working for them. However, I rarely had any issues with them because I figured out what they wanted and needed so I could provide it to them. Just like customers who don’t get the service they expect, bosses can get demanding and difficult when they are often disappointed with the performance they get from their employees.

Make sure you are clear about what your boss expects from your performance. If they do not volunteer the information or are vague in their instructions, ask enough questions to make sure you understand and can deliver what they want.

Make your work as error free as possible and turn it in on time. I had a boss who saw any error in a written document as a license to edit it. He also liked giving others an assignment to write something, but ended up using it as a draft to help organize his thoughts. What I learned was that if I asked enough questions and made the document error free, he rarely changed my work. However, I saw others who would give him a very rough draft thinking it didn’t matter because he would change it anyway. He saw that as an open invitation to rewrite it and often took it in another direction, which really frustrated them.

Something else that is important in managing your boss is keeping him or her informed of your activities and accomplishments. You don’t have to be bragging all the time, but frankly, your boss is too busy doing their own thing to notice everything you do. If you want to get credit for the good work you do, then blow your horn once in a while.

I don’t consider this sucking up to the boss. Instead, you are building credibility with the boss. You find out what they want and deliver it to them. That makes you a highly desirable employee. When you let them know what good work you are doing that they might not see, it gives them a chance to recognize your efforts, further giving you credibility. In today’s competitive workplace, if you want to stand out, you have to manage up.

We all seek leaders who are capable, knowledgeable, fearless, visionary, thoughtful, and a myriad of other qualities that are often so high minded that no one could ever live up to them. And yet, we can miss the fact that who we are looking for is someone like us, or who at least understands who we are and what we need. And, sometimes the right person to lead is actually us.

I often find that the reason people don’t step up to lead is more a matter of fear than lack of ability. They are afraid of the accountability that goes with leading. It is easier to criticize or blame someone else if things don’t turn out right. If there is less fear of reprisal or risk, people tend to get more involved.

This can happen at home, work, or school. If you seem to be holding back making decisions or if you are reluctant to volunteer your talents, ask yourself what you are afraid of. I once attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker asked the question, “If you could do anything in the world and knew you couldn’t fail, what would you be?” I was awakened to take a new direction in my career that I had been thinking about, but didn’t know how to go about it. I took the opportunity to talk to the speaker afterward and she asked me some questions to get me started in the right direction.

If you are withholding your talents from your home, work, or school, ask yourself what you are afraid of that is keeping you from being the best you can be by stepping up to take charge of your life or situation ahead.

If you are a leader and wonder why your employees don’t step up to take advantage of opportunities to get more involved, ask yourself what obstacles you can remove to help them have less fear. By listening more than trying to convince them you may find new paths to success. Your leadership may be more successful by sharing the power.

So, start with the person in the mirror. Who are you? Where do you want to go? What is stopping you? YOU are in charge.

Life is so fast these days that we only take time to look at the surface of things, people, and situations. We read a story on the internet, see a video clip on TV or hear a short report in a meeting and then we make our judgments. We make snap decisions that could have longlasting repercussions on minimal information. I know I’m bombarded with as much information as anyone and I’m just trying to do the best I can with the time I have.

However, I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on the need to look behind the surface–at least once in a while.

When you are hiring an employee, what are you looking for? Are you most interested in the qualities of curiosity and an interest in learning, a customer-first attitude of service, integrity, reliability and a willingness to be held accountable for the promises made? Or are you swayed by their appearance, their weight, their color, their speech, and their ability to draft a good resume? We all change on the outside over time, but it’s what’s on the inside that makes all the difference.

Asking good interview questions to determine what is at the core of a person is not easy. It takes thought and preparation. Just hiring someone off the street because they are breathing will get you as much benefit as you put into it. If you want to have great employees who will work for your benefit as well as their own, you have to find out what they think, how they think, and what they will likely do. Behavioral interviewing using questions such as “Tell me about a time when…” have been around a long time and I think they are even more important now when so many people are looking for work. You have to be able to find the people who will be a good fit for your organization. A person whose values line up with your organization’s so they can truly support them.

If you are a person looking for a job, what do you have to offer? What is on your inside? Do you have the qualities that would show you are a good investment? How can you show that to a prospective employer? Think about what you have done that demonstrate your reliability, integrity, and willingness to grow and learn. Think about your values. Make sure you are looking for a place that has values that mesh with yours. If you want to be truly satisfied with an employer, look beyond the surface.

Who we are inside is what we carry with us our whole lives. It comes out in the actions we take, the decisions we make, and the people we choose to accompany. People will judge us by those outward signs, so we have to make sure that we are showing them the real person so they can make good judgments about us. And we need to do the same for others. Be willing to look beyond the obvious for the real truth.