The New Manager's Tool Kit

21 Things You Need to Know to Hit the Ground Running

Don Grimme, Sheryl Grimme

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780814413074
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

In this helpful guidebook, authors Don and Sheryl Grimme provide a fresh, friendly approach to tackling the challenges of management and leveraging your new position to help your organization succeed.

Novice managers have their work cut out for them: all new skills to learn, different personalities to deal with, and greater responsibilities to fulfill. The New Manager's Tool Kit provides you with fast, powerful lessons to help them:

• increase productivity;
• unlock hidden talent;
• work with different types of people;
• communicate effectively;
• diagnose problems;
• coach both good and problematic employees;
• encourage teamwork;
• avoid burnout;
• eliminate conflict;
• and nurture the next generation of managers.

With lessons covering both basic management skills as well as more advanced leadership tactics and bonus tips to help managers overcome the most difficult leadership challenges, The New Manager's Tool Kit provides those charged with managing and leading others the tools and real-world knowledge they need to succeed and open themselves up for further advancement.

PART ONE

Leading People

WHAT DO EMPLOYEES WANT?

What do you think employees most want from their jobs? Good wages? Job security? That’s what most managers have thought for at least the past 60 years.

But it is not what employees continue to say! As shown in Table 1-1, what employees really want are appreciation and involvement.

Note the glaring disconnect between manager opinion and employee fact.

Are we saying—or are employees saying—that competitive wages are unimportant? Of course not. Money usually is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to attract, retain, and motivate good employees. (By the way, money isn’t even always necessary. Notice how energized and enthusiastic unpaid volunteers often are.)

Test this out yourself. Remember a time when you felt energized, fulfilled, and excited about your job or a project, when you couldn’t wait to get out of bed and get to work. If, unfortunately, nothing comes to mind, remember a time when you felt frustrated, bored, or dispirited about your job, when you had to force yourself out of bed to go to work.

What were you doing and what was special—or not special—about it? Was it the pay and fringe benefits? Maybe, for the first few days. Or was it the stimulating work, the stretching of your abilities, being an important part of a grand venture, the rapport with coworkers, the recognition from superiors?

Table 1-1. What Employees Want from Their Jobs

Factors	Managers	Employees
Full Appreciation for Work Done	8	➀
Good Wages	➀	5
Good Working Conditions	4	9
Interesting Work	5	6
Job Security	➁	4
Promotion/Growth Opportunities	➂	7
Personal Loyalty to Workers	6	8
Feeling “In” on Things	10	➁
Sympathetic Help on Personal Problems	9	➂
Tactful Disciplining	7	10

SOURCES: Foreman Facts, Labor Relations Institute of New York (1946); Lawrence Lindahl, Personnel Magazine (1949)

Repeated with similar results: Ken Kovach (1980); Valerie Wilson, Achievers International (1988); Bob Nelson, Blanchard Training & Development (1991); Sheryl & Don Grimme, GHR Training Solutions (1997–Present)

If you find that it’s the former, please write to us. (You’ll be the first; and we have been asking this same question for years—on our websites and in our newsletter, workshops, and presentations.) Otherwise, the only thing we would add to your insight is the assurance that such insight is not unique—to you, your profession, job level, generation, or socioeconomic group.

And notice that while managers rank promotion/growth opportunities among the top three motivators, employees rank this toward the bottom. This is important to some employees (perhaps to you), but overall, not so much.

Lest there be any doubt, these discrepancies between manager opinion and employee fact are good news, for at least two reasons. First, increased wages and job security (which managers think are most important) are precisely what many organizations cannot provide these days; whereas appreciation and involvement, which employees really want, can be provided anytime, at little or no cost. As for those promotion and growth opportunities, often you are not able to provide these to many of your employees. The second reason is that most managers out there don’t really get it. If you do, your department and organization can win the battle for leading people, regardless of budget.

This is all very nice, but you are trying to run an enterprise. How does this affect the bottom line?

Well, in 1998, The Gallup Organization studied the impact of employee attitudes on business outcomes. They found that organizations—where employees have above average attitudes toward their work—have:

• 38 percent higher customer satisfaction scores

• 22 percent higher productivity

• 22 percent better employee retention

• 27 percent higher profits

Satisfying employees is not only a nice thing to do, it also makes good business sense.

Our first tool unlocks employee retention with a deeper exploration of motivation. We examine the current challenge of retention, review some classic motivation theories, introduce our own 3-Factor Theory, present hard data from recent landmark studies that support the theories, reveal the secret and our Top 10 Tips to turn on talent and turn off turnover, and launch you on an application to apply all of this to your staff.

Tool #2 releases employee productivity by exposing a phenomenon that is impairing it—increased job demands. We examine that phenomenon, including highlights from recent studies, share our secret for dealing with it, provide tips to ameliorate the negative impact of job demands, and suggest an initial application for your workplace.

Tool #3 opens an issue of increasing importance to today’s employees: work/life balance. You will learn how important it really is, the critical role you play, the secret, and specific principles to deal with it effectively. As always, an application is included.

TOOL ONE

Turn On Talent…and
Turn Off Turnover

There is a crisis in America today. The one we’re talking about has nothing to do with telemarketing, as annoying as that is, or even the troubling economy. Rather, we’re referring to the diminishing ability of organizations in every sector of our society to attract, retain, and motivate talented employees, that is, to survive.

It is employee retention especially that has emerged as the workplace issue of the decade. In 2006, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), in its Workplace Forecast, predicted that the number one employment trend most likely to have a major impact on the workplace is a greater emphasis on retention strategies.

And in a 2007 study by the global employee retention research firm TalentKeepers, 88 percent of employers reported turnover had stayed the same or increased…and 45 percent forecasted a further increase in turnover (only 3 percent predicted a decrease).

You see, our long-held assumption of an ever-expanding talent pool has been shattered by such factors as the retirement of aging Baby Boomers, lower birthrates, tighter immigration rules, and an increase in the skills demanded for today’s jobs.

The first three factors explain this quantitatively. But it is the last one, the qualitative factor, that is the sticking point. More than a shortage of bodies, this is a crisis of abilities—the talent in “talent pool.”

In addition, employee loyalty is down. According to a 2005 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 79 percent of employees are job searching, either actively or passively. In fact, the most frequently asked question put to SHRM is, “How can we keep talent from jumping to our competitors?”

Fortunately, every crisis contains not only danger but also opportunity. In this tool, you will learn the secret to transforming this dangerous crisis into an opportunity for you and your organization to flourish.

TRANSFORMING DANGER INTO OPPORTUNITY

Employers are groping for ways to attack the problem. The 2005 SHRM survey found that the techniques used are salary adjustments, job promotions, bonuses, more attractive benefits and retirement packages, and stock options—all of which are expensive and (as found in the 2007 TalentKeepers’ study) not very effective. The reason, as you will see, is that they are misdirected.

Rather than leaping to implement techniques, it is important to begin with an understanding of what really energizes and instills loyalty in employees. Otherwise, you won’t know whether any technique is effective and you won’t be very effective in implementing it.

UNDERSTANDING HUMAN MOTIVATION—THEORY

The best known motivation theory is probably Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, shown in Figure 1-1.

Maslow categorized human needs into five sets:

1. The most fundamental is survival. This is our need for food, water, and shelter, and in the modern era includes medical services, electricity, transportation, and phones, all of which are jeopardized by natural disasters. Visualize the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Figure 1-1. Masl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Tool Kit for Today’s Workplace
• Part One: Leading People
• Part Two: Different Strokes
• Part Three: Leader Effectiveness
• Part Four: Optimizing Contributions
• Part Five: Personal and Interpersonal Effectiveness
• Part Six: Eliminating Conflict
• Afterword
• Appendix A: Ten Tips to Protect Against Harassment Charges
• Appendix B: Ten Steps to Manage Workplace Violence
• Appendix C: The Impending Leadership Crisis
• Resource Guide—Books and Websites Organized By Tool
• Index