by Gavin Prout, Special Benefits Insurance Services
This article outlines the importance of researching the areas you or your employees may plan to travel to. Whether it be political unrest or diseases in that area, this article provides statistics of beliefs vs truths and what is affected in your travel insurance policy with these uncertainties.
https://www.sbis.ca/travel-insurance-in-times-of-global-uncertainty.html
by Gavin Prout, Special Benefits Insurance Services
This topic is a very popular one based on all the issues people have been having after they claim during travelling. These 5 points will help you or your employees understand what most don’t and the things to do or look for when purchasing a travel insurance plan. Even if you have group benefits with travel insurance it is important to understand the limitations of these plans.
https://www.sbis.ca/5-ways-avoid-problem-travel-insurance-claim.html
By Jim Clemmer
A long list of studies shows that 50 – 70% of leadership, culture, and organization change and development efforts fail. For example, a Harvard Business Review article by Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria on “Cracking the Code of Change” concludes, “the brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail.”
These efforts typically include:
I have reviewed research and our experiences in helping dozens of organizations with their change initiatives. Success or failure ultimately rests with the organization’s senior leadership team. Here are the common problems that trap many leadership teams and become the root causes of their failed change and development efforts:
How many of these traps are snaring your senior leadership team? What are you doing to avoid falling into these sinkholes?
Taking the team offsite for a few days can have a major impact on avoiding these problems. An offsite retreat can also lay the foundation to become one of the 30 – 50% of organizations with a very high and lasting impact from their change and development work.
About Jim Clemmer
For over three decades Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats, and seven best-selling books translated into many languages, articles, blog, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s Canadian Strategic Partner. Zenger Folkman is an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations.
“…At one point, I had an extraordinarily difficult boss, who could literally drive you into tears. And it was easy to convince yourself to allow the fear that naturally arose to, if not paralyze you, certainly greatly restrict what you did, and the risks you were willing to take. And I think coming to grips with that was not an easy one…I decided life was too short to hide in the corner and worry about this guy. And I also decided that I was right, and he wasn’t.” — John Kotter, leadership author and Harvard Business School professor
Strong leaders don’t allow themselves to be victims of a bad boss. Choosing to do that is like choosing to hang wallpaper with one arm tied behind our back. Many managers lose the “boss lottery” and, through no fault of their own, end up reporting to an ineffective executive. We may not be able to choose our boss, but we can choose how to respond to him or her. Good leaders refuse to be a victim of their boss’s weaknesses. They don’t let a dumb boss make them act dumb. They know that the worst thing they can do is to sabotage their careers just to spite the boss.
Unless the boss is so bad that a bigger career decision (i.e. looking for a new job) is called for, a strong leader tries to make the best of a difficult situation. What can I learn from this boss? Sometimes a bad example – of what not to do and how not to behave – is very instructive! Keep in mind, too, that your boss may not be as entirely bad as you might think. Ask yourself: What are the boss’s strengths that I could learn from? Am I allowing my own style or preferences to cloud my opinion and damage our relationship? For example, is he or she cold and analytical while I am more emotional and focused on people – or vice versa? (Typically the people we have the most problems with are those at the opposite end of our own behavioral style.)
Ask yourself, too, whether there are ways you can play to your boss’s strengths and preferences. Are there other people reporting to your boss who have a good relationship with him or her? If so, and assuming that these people aren’t simply sucking up to the boss, can I emulate some of what they are doing to build a better relationship with the boss? Do I know what work issues are keeping my boss awake at night? Can I link the changes I am trying to lead to those “hot button” issues? Could I more effectively partner with my boss to use his or her higher organizational position to leverage the larger change or leadership agenda I am trying to drive forward? Do I understand the bigger political picture of which my boss is a part? Am I “stage managing” my boss to help him or her look good and bring the additional weight of his or her office to our situations?
Many bad bosses do a poor job of planning, setting priorities, and following through. Sometimes that’s because he or she is being pulled in many directions by forces beyond his or her control. Do I know what those are? Other times bosses are just disorganized and undisciplined. But before I throw a Pity Party and complain about that, I need to take a look in the mirror. How’s my leadership example? Strong leaders take the initiative to regularly plan, set priorities, and follow through with his or her boss. Does my boss share the same sense of urgency I have about the changes that need to be made in our organization? Have I done enough to increase his or her understanding of the need for change?
Research indicates that effective middle leaders make valuable contributions to change in successful organizations. INSEAD professor Quy Nguyen Huy found that strong middle leaders have good entrepreneurial ideas. They are often better than executives at leveraging informal networks. The best ones stayed attuned to and meet the emotional needs of people throughout the organization during major change. Effective middle leaders also manage the ongoing tension between continuity and change.
There is a difference between middle managers and middle leaders. Both are needed. However, most organizations need stronger leadership to counter-balance years of focus on management systems, processes, and technology. The best middle leaders provide strong leadership up, down, and across the organization. They use influence, persuasion, “tempered radicalism” (change-leaders use their anger or energy to alternatively heat and cool their approaches as they become tougher and stronger), networking, and other skills to lead at the speed of change.
Reprinted with the permission of Jim Clemmer. For over three decades Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats, and seven best-selling books translated into many languages, articles, blog, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s Canadian Strategic Partner, an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations. http://www.clemmergroup.com
Article By: Jack Altman. Co-founder / CEO @latticehq
People are companies’ most important assets. We’ve all known this for a long time, but 1) we pay it lip service more often than we try to do something about it, and 2) it’s true more now than ever.
The rise of technology and the information age has resulted in more companies that compete based primarily on their people. This isn’t only true for technology companies like Facebook and Google; as software continues to eat the world and the pace of business increases, nearly all companies will live and die by their continual ability to innovate.
Despite the fact that most organizations know that their long term advantage resides in their people, most companies don’t think critically about how to increase employee retention.
In this post, I’ll argue that the core reason people don’t think about employee retention seriously enough is because they don’t know how to measure the impact. I’ll then share some frameworks for how you might associate dollar values with regrettable turnover, and once I’ve (hopefully) convinced you that this matters, give you some actionable ideas for improving the state of affairs.
The problem with not measuring employee turnover
Employee turnover is expensive.
People instinctively sense this; we’ve all felt the pain of a superstar leaving, the cultural challenge associated with the departure of a beloved employee, or even just the painful gap that is left behind by an employee who was doing an important job well.
But most people have no framework for quantifying this cost, or they never even bother to try.
The problem with this is that people tend to optimize what they can measure. Doctors believed that cigarettes were bad for human health as early as the 18th century, and scientific studies about the link between smoking and lung cancer started surfacing in the medial literature as early as the 1920s. Even though people generally knew cigarettes were bad for you, it wasn’t enough, and smoking in America surged dramatically during the first half of the 20th century.
So what was the solution? In 1964, the first Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. This landmark report laid the foundation for the next 50 years of public education about the negative effects of smoking, and the results have been dramatic:
Source: Data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The U.S. government started running extremely effective public service campaigns over the following decades about the number of years cigarettes shaved off your life, the specific diseases you would contract and how likely you’d be to get them, and the effects on loved ones who are exposed to your second hand smoke.
In order to help people to do something difficult but valuable, such as quitting an addictive habit, a critical first step is to help them understand the cost of not doing that thing.
Understanding the quantitative impact of employee churn
Employee turnover, like cigarettes in the 1920s, is generally understood to be bad, but there is little awareness of its quantifiable impact.
A visual way to gain a mental framework for the cost is to simply draw a graph of an employee’s value to the company over time.
Maia Josebachvili, VP of of People at Greenhouse, produced a case study where she argued that retaining a sales person for three years instead of two, along with better onboarding and management practices, yields a difference of $1.3 million in net value to the company over a three year period.
Slightly more conservatively, Josh Bersin of Deloitte believes the cost of losing an employee can range from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5–2.0x the employee’s annual salary. These costs include hiring, onboarding, training, ramp time to peak productivity, the loss of engagement from others due to high turnover, higher business error rates, and general culture impacts.
Employees, Bersin explains, are appreciating assets that produce more and more value to the organization over time, which helps explain why losing them is so costly.
Source: Employee Retention Now a Big Issue: Why the Tide has Turned
Others sources peg the cost of regrettable employee turnover at a higher level. A paper from the Center for American Progress, citing 11 research papers published over a 15-year period, determined that the average economic cost to a company of turning over a highly skilled job is 213% of the cost of one year’s compensation for that role.
No matter how you slice it, the cost is high. But how high is it for you?
How to calculate your own cost of turnover
To help you quantify this, we’ve put together a simple formula: your company’s cost of employee turnover is equal to the number of regrettable departures times the average cost of those departures.
The number of regrettable departures will simply equal your number of employees times your annual turnover percentage.
While we can’t capture every single expense, or even some of the big intangible costs like impact on employee morale, we can get a good sense by analyzing four major buckets:
So we can now describe your overall annual cost of turnover to be:
As an example, if you are a 150 person company with 11% annual turnover, and you spend $25k on per person on hiring, $10k on each of turnover and development, and lose $50k of productivity opportunity cost on average when refilling a role, then your annual cost of turnover would be about $1.57 million.
Reducing this by just 20%, for example, would immediately yield over $300k in value. And that says nothing of the emotional headache and cultural drain felt from losing great people.
You can use this spreadsheet to plug in your own numbers to get a sense of what the costs look like for you.
How you can address employee churn
Alright, so we know it’s expensive. But what can be done?
First and foremost, acknowledge that there are some problems that you can solve by throwing money at them, but employee satisfaction isn’t one of them. Multiple studies show that while under-compensation can definitely contribute to employee churn, over-compensation won’t make up for a bad workplace. Your well paid but unhappy employees will simply leave you and make their money somewhere else.
Instead, focus on growth, impact, and care
So view market-rate compensation simply as table stakes, and spend your energy focused on the next level of Maslow’s hierarchy of employee happiness: opportunities for growth, the ability to have impact towards a purpose, and a caring environment that makes them feel valued.
Growth is fundamental to human happiness; the hedonic treadmill was built into all of us, and humans constantly seek growth and change.
The craving for growth is especially visible for the younger generation that is coming to dominate the workforce. Younger workers are more easily able to prioritize things like personal growth and career opportunity over income and job security.
Giving your employees authentic opportunities for growth is something you have to build into the fabric of your company. Here’s a few questions to ask yourself to check whether you’re on the right track or not:
If you don’t build a culture that deliberately provides good answers to these questions, it’ll be a matter of time before your employees start looking for a workplace that does.
Impact applies at two levels; the impact your company is having on the world, and the impact an individual is having on your company.
People want to know that what their company is working on matters. Articulating a clear and purposeful company mission is important not just because it help people prioritize their work, but because it helps them keep going through hard times and know they’re part of something that matters.
To give a tangible sense of impact, they need to know that what they’re working on is contributing to a mission that matters. If someone builds and launches a new product they will certainly feel some satisfaction, but if they can say, “I built a new product which is going help our company accomplish a much broader mission” that will mean much more to them.
Finally, and just as critically, is creating a workplace that cares.
Feeling cared for and recognized addresses another basic human requirement; the need for human relationships and for others to acknowledge to us that we matter to them.
You need to build a culture where people respect and appreciate each other.
A culture of care and appreciation doesn’t mean throwing around constant, meaningless praise. Instead it’s an authentic care for others’ best interest, which can’t be faked and has to be built over time.
An environment where people feel like their coworkers have their best interests in mind comes with all kinds of benefits. Critical feedback will be more easily accepted. Frank conversations about what’s required for employees to make it to the next level will happen more naturally. Managers will want to see their teams succeed and work hard to empower them.
And, of course, employees will feel happier on a day to day basis knowing they are surrounded by people who don’t just want something out of them, but want something for them.
Final thoughts
In a world where people are an organization’s most essential assets, companies need to be more strategic about how they think about employee retention to remain competitive.
Employees are just humans who happen to be at work. You’ve hopefully learned some ways to make other humans happy in your personal life, so take that knowledge and apply it to your workplace.
Once the basic need of sufficient income and job security has been met, move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and create a culture that enables growth, impact, and care. It’ll save you a ton of money, help you stay competitive in your industry, and make the place you spend most of your waking hours much more enjoyable.
Enjoy reading? Click the little heart below to help spread the word!
Jack is a co-founder at Lattice, a performance management service that helps companies retain and motivate their employees
Thanks to Alex Kracov, Eric Stromberg, Connor McSheffrey, Jarred Sumner, and Ming Lu.
This December Newsletter includes lots of free tools for municipalities:
It’s the age-old question, what makes a good leader? I think we have all experienced both good leadership and poor leadership. I have asked and been asked this question many times over the years in conversation, in workshops, in coaching and here’s what I’ve discovered. It doesn’t matter whether you are a leader in an organization, whether you are leading a team or a leader in a community, it all comes down to a few key attributes; being a good communicator, being approachable, supportive, versatile and being accountable.
So let’s start with communication. When it’s all said and done, being effective at keeping your team in the loop, facilitating two-way conversations, being a good listener, asking questions and taking a genuine interest in your team members are absolutely key to strong leadership. Even when a leader needs to have a crucial conversation, lending an ear to listen, being open, showing you care and demonstrating interest, will not only promote more two-way dialogue, you will gain their trust and confidence.
Being approachable is always at the top of the list when I ask others what makes a good leader. Many commented that a manager who is approachable offers unlimited support, they not only offer positive and constructive feedback, but they ask for feedback and are actually open to receiving it. This is a great segway into being supportive and versatile.
Being supportive goes hand-in-hand with being versatile. Versatility is about managing one’s emotions and helping others manage their emotions. When stakes are high and there’s a lot on the line, it can be very easy to fly off the handle and potentially “throw someone under the bus”. Everyone has bad days, so as long as it doesn’t become a habit, being supportive in these instances goes a long way. What is also key, is for a leader to recognize patterns or situations where a team member may lack skills or an ability to cope, in a given situation. It doesn’t mean they are not good performers, it simply means they appear or feel that they cannot perform under the circumstances presented. These are great coachable moments and a place where both strong support and versatility play a vital role as a leader.
A supportive leader will stand behind their people and even co-handle putting out fires if need be. Once the fire is out or at least under control, the leader will take the opportunity to debrief the situation with their team or team member. They may ask questions like, what did you notice? What went well? What didn’t go well? How come? What would you do differently? The goal being to help gain a better understanding about where things went wrong and even where they went right, celebrate the good and coach the team/team member on how to better manage this type of situation in the future. The key is to help others see the gaps and look for ways to fill them. The role of leader is not to highlight the gaps.
Funny enough, accountability is probably the most critical piece to being an effective leader. It’s always interesting to hear others describe what accountability means to them or who should be accountable and what that looks like. Often people mistake leadership to be hands-off and simply a role of overseeing-of-others or as we have heard it called in the corporate world, the top-down approach to management. What being a strong leader is really about, is being able to acknowledge, own and stand behind your decisions, mistakes or a misstep. It’s getting behind a cause, keeping your word or backing someone up where appropriate. Being a bit exposed and vulnerable has its ups and downs, but in leadership, it can mean the difference between gaining and eroding trust.
To bring this all together, the really cool thing about this is that anyone can work on themselves and increase their emotional intelligence. Whether you are a Leader or not, as you may have gathered, enhancing these skills can help us in business and in life.
Here are 5 simple steps to being or becoming a stronger leader in any capacity:
Being aware of others around us and noticing our own behaviour is the first step in understanding what to work on. It is really up to each of us to make that happen.
P.S.: if you’re interested, other words for Leader are Front-runner, Trailblazer, and Spearhead, all of which represent a way of being. Think about it, when we apply for a position, although we must present substantial evidence on paper, that we can in fact do the job from a functional standpoint, it’s usually during the interview process that our behaviours, how we respond in the moment, how we manage ourselves that typically stands out and either gets us the job or not.
In reality then, it’s only after demonstrating key behaviours and proving ourselves, that we in fact earn a title. All the more reason to improve our communication and increase our emotional intelligence, wouldn’t you agree? After all, providing guidance and being a good example will be key to grow our next generation of leaders.
Written by:
Heather Wilson, ATC
Owner at Spark Your Vitality
Lizard surgery, Homeland Security and Vaseline trucks. What do they all have in common?
According to a study from CareerBuilder, they are among a list of outrageous reasons workers claim they have been late for work.
Below are some of the bizarre reasons for being late to work:
With Christmas only a month away, it is getting colder and much harder to get out of bed in the morning. For some people, this can make getting to work on time a difficult task. You would be surprised of what could get in the way of your morning routine. Many of these excuses are extreme and may have more to do with one’s creative imagination than anything else. However, you can bet employers are going to hearing more late-to-work excuses especially coming up to Christmas.
In order to prevent tardiness in your organisation, why not take advantage of Softworks Flexible Working and deploy a Time and Attendance system.
Flexible working is a very positive choice that needs to be embraced by more organisations. It doesn’t only provide employees with job satisfaction, better health, increased work-life balance, and less stress, it also benefits employers. With higher productivity levels, less turn over, and reduced absenteeism, employers will be able to retain qualified employees and also save money. With flexible working, excuses for being late to work will be less necessary as employees will have the flexibility to work around appointments, family events and of course, all of the excuses listed above!
Softworks Time Management Software will allow your organisation to build a clear picture of employee time-keeping through comprehensive reports on attendance, absenteeism, overtime, flexi-time, rostering and holiday leave. Softworks Time and Attendance is one of the most powerful tools available for recording and analysing hours worked. Used to manage employee attendance and produce real-time reports for analysis by management as well as to collate personnel information. It allows you to build a clear picture of employee time through detailed data and reports on attendance, absenteeism, overtime, flexi-balances, rostering and holiday leave. Scalable and completely configurable, it applies and automates processing your organisation’s unique pay rules and policies accurately and consistently and is fully compliant with legislation.
The survey also found more traditional excuses for being late to work are still very common:
By implementing Softworks Flexible Working and Time & Attendance Software, employees and employers will be able to overcome the traditional excuses of being late to work (along with a few of the outrageous ones too!).
You can also turn your administrative nightmare of managing employee time & attendance into a dream come true with Softworks new self-service app. Softworks app enables employees to record their own time, attendance, holidays, absences and check work schedules via their smart phones/tablets. Softworks app is a joy to use and loved by employees and managers alike, but you don’t have to just take our word for it, find out more via this link.
You can keep up to date with Softworks by following us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
By Jim Clemmer
If you buy a little goldfish and keep it in a small bowl it will remain no bigger than a few inches long. Move that same fish to a large aquarium and it will double or triple in size. Put the goldfish in a large pond and it can grow up to a foot long! The biggest factor that determines the size of the fish is the size of its environment. And so it is with people.
Many managers see people as they are and treat them according to what they see. A less effective manager would take a small goldfish and keep it in the little bowl because it would be inefficient and wasteful to put it in a larger environment.
Outstanding coaches, however, see people as they could be and work to grow that potential. Our research shows that extraordinary coaches share these attributes:
How many of these attributes describe your coaching or the coaches in your organization?
Click here Keys to Extraordinary Coaching for a two minute video clip of me presenting and explaining these points.
Have you ever experienced a leader who’s very strong at coaching and mentoring but doesn’t get results? People feel great working with him or her, but the job doesn’t get done. What’s the likelihood this leader would be rated in the top ten percent of leaders?
How about a leader who is very good at getting results — he or she really delivers — but not much of a coach? How likely is he or she to be rated in the top 10 percent of leaders?
Research based on over 250,000 360 assessments of roughly 25,000 leaders shows that either of the above combinations produces leaders in the 90th percentile less than 10% of the time. How often do you think a leader who is strong at both energizing people to achieve results and coaching and mentoring others is rated in the top 10% of leaders? Hint; it’s much higher than most people realize.
Click on The Impact of Coaching Effectiveness for a three minute video clip where I present the research behind this powerful combination and how dramatically these two competencies turbo-boost a leader to the very top. You can then see the dramatic impact of coaching skills on turnover, engagement, discretionary effort, and leader satisfaction.
No other leadership behavior is more correlated with increasing employee engagement than a leader’s coaching effectiveness. Outstanding coaching skills rocket leaders to top-tier effectiveness.
Many crazy-busy, frenetic managers believe it’s a trade-off: “Either I deliver results (often by micromanaging and pushing hard) or I coach and develop people. Which do you want me to do?”
Highly effective leaders get results through people. They understand that peak performance comes from empowering, energizing, focusing, and developing people to their highest potential to own and deliver outstanding outcomes.
Reprinted with the permission of Jim Clemmer. For over three decades Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats, and seven best-selling books translated into many languages, articles, blog, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s Canadian Strategic Partner, an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations. http://www.clemmergroup.com
The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Centralized, hierarchial organizations work about as well as the old Soviet Union. Despite all the evidence, I am still appalled by the number of variations on the centralization themes I still keep smacking into. What makes things even worse is how senior managers in these dysfunctional organizations proclaim empowerment, participation, teams, leadership, trust, and the like. Then they take partial measures while expecting total success. They liberate parts of their organizations while limiting other parts. They push hard with one foot on the accelerator while also pushing hard with their other one on the brake. Their words say “you’re empowered”. Their actions say “you’re empowered as long as you get approval first”. These dysfunctional organizations end up trying to go in two opposing directions at once. I once halted an executive retreat and everybody went home after the group of seven division presidents and corporate staff vice presidents couldn’t agree on whether their values were centralization or decentralization. Trying to do both at once was ripping the organization apart. The CEO never could decide which direction he wanted to commit to. He was eventually fired as frustrations and infighting rose while organization performance fell.
Most centralists don’t set out to deceive anybody. In their heads they know that high degrees of involvement, participation, and autonomy are key elements in high organization performance. But in their hearts, they still crave orderliness, predictability, and control. That’s why they cling to such anachronisms as strategic planning. It’s part of their futile search for a master plan that can regulate and bring a sense of order to our haphazard, unpredictable, and rapidly changing world. Our equally outdated accounting systems give centralists plenty of reinforcement. For example, hard financial measures can clearly show that consolidating and centralizing support services and functions saves money and increases efficiency — at least on paper. What don’t show up are the alienation, helplessness, and lack of connections to customers or organizational purpose that mind-numbing bureaucracy brings. The energy-sapping and passion-destroying effects of efficiencies may save hundreds of thousands of dollars. But traditional accounting systems can’t show the hundreds of millions of dollars lost because of lackluster innovation, mediocre customer service, uninspired internal partners, and unformed external partnerships.
I am an extreme (some might argue dangerous) decentralist. Since I began my management career, I’ve given people high degrees of autonomy. I’ve run even small organizations to the point of such inefficient decentralization that people are running their own show. It works. Here are some of the reasons:
High-performing organizations that are thriving in today’s chaotic world are adapting and pioneering a wide variety of highly decentralized structures. They are giving up control of people so that people can control their own and the organization’s destiny. This is creating an explosion of organization structures and models with such names as network, shamrock, pulsating, jazz combos, adhocracy, horizontal, hollow spider’s web, flat, meritocracy, modular, cellular, cluster, inverted, starburst, federal, pancake, and virtual … to name a few.
The Shape of High Performance
The search for an ideal or perfect structure is about as futile as trying to find the ideal canned improvement process to drop on the organization (or yourself). It depends on the organization’s vision and values, goals and priorities, skill and experience levels, culture, team effectiveness and so on. Each is unique to any organization. We are also in the midst of a major transition from organization and management practices that began around the turn of the twentieth century. My cloudy crystal ball won’t allow me to see which organization structure or model will dominate the twenty-first century. Because we’re no longer in an age of mass production and standardization, I sure there won’t be just one type. Rather, we’ll see our top organizations grow and shed a variety of structures and models to suit the their changing circumstances.
However, the shape and characteristics of a high performing organization structure is coming clearly into view:
Structure Shapes Behavior
If you’re not happy with the behavior of people on your team or in your organization, take a closer look at the system and structure they’re working in. If they behave like bureaucrats, they’re working in a bureaucracy. If they’re not customer focused, they’re using systems and working in structure that wasn’t designed to serve customers. If they’re not innovative, they’re working in a controlled and inflexible organization. If they resist change, they’re not working in a learning organization that values growth and development. If they’re not good team players, they’re working in an organization designed for individual performance. Good performers in a poorly designed structure will take on the shape of the structure.
Many organizations induce learned helplessness. People in them become victims of “the system”. This often comes from a sense of having little or no control over their work processes, policies and procedures, technology, support systems, and the like. “You can’t fight the system” they’ll say with a shrug as they give the clock another stare hoping to intimidate it into jumping ahead to quitting time. These feelings are amplified by a performance management system that arbitrarily punishes people for behaving like the system, structure, or process they’ve been forced into. “Empowering” helpless people without changing the processes, structure, or systems they work in is worse than useless. It increases helplessness and cynicism.
Structure is a very powerful shaper of behavior. It’s like the strange pumpkin I once saw at a county fair. It had been grown in a four-cornered Mason jar. The jar had since been broken and removed. The remaining pumpkin was shaped exactly like a small Mason jar. Beside it was a pumpkin from the same batch of seeds that was allowed to grow without constraints. It was about five times bigger. Organization structures and systems have the same effect on the people in them. They either limit or liberate their performance potential.
Reprinted with the permission of Jim Clemmer. For over three decades Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats, and seven best-selling books translated into many languages, articles, blog, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s Canadian Strategic Partner, an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations.
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