The Only Leadership Book You'll Ever Need

How to Build Organizations Where Employees Love to Come to Work

Peter Barron Stark, Jane Flaherty

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781601631183
• eBook ISBN: 9781601637475
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Every organization faces challenges and hardships. The Only Leadership Book You’ll Ever Need teaches leaders how to overcome their most difficult obstacle: employee engagement. By pinpointing specific areas leaders can focus on and change,
this book shows how one leader can effectively change the entire workplace environment-- for the better.

Topics addressed include:

• The 10 Keys to Workplace Excellence.
• The 11 Stupid Things Managers Do to Mess Up Workplace Excellence.
• 76 Strategies to Effectively Lead and Engage Employees.

Timely and accessible, The Only Leadership Book You’ll Ever Need is an essential book for every executive and manager.

Part 1

The CASE
for
WORKPLACE
EXCELLENCE

Chapter 1

Become the Employer of Choice

The bottom line rules business. If you want to generate more profit, you need employees who are engaged with their jobs. Why? Motivated to improve your product and your service, they want to come to work. Even better, their positive attitude is contagious. These workers achieve results, which earns money for your company. Furthermore, they want to stay with you because they feel fulfilled in their work. You are their employer of choice.

Employees with an above-average attitude toward their work will generate higher customer satisfaction, higher productivity, and higher profits for their organizations.

In addition, companies with higher morale (more than 70 percent) outperformed those in the same industries by 11.3 percent.¹ It’s clear that maintaining a vital, engaged workforce has a significant impact on the bottom line.

Workforce Woes

As we write this, the economy is in a downturn and many employees with concerns about layoffs might be doing their best in order to save their jobs.

However, when the economy improves, employment choices in many industries will be plentiful, but engaged employees are less likely to look for other employment opportunities and walk away with all the training and experience you’ve provided.

That is important to remember because the cost of replacing an employee is staggering. Most human resources professionals estimate a cost of between 70 percent and 200 percent of an employee’s annual salary to replace lost talent. Dealing with low morale is a time-consuming headache. Why do it when you don’t have to?

An employer of choice measures employee engagement and satisfaction, and takes action to address key areas of concern. When employees know you listen, care, and will respond to their feedback, they will choose you.

Here is something else to keep in mind: There will be a worker shortage in the future. Though the statistics vary, all current research projects a shrinking workforce. How will you compete if you can’t hire and retain high-quality workers? Perhaps an even bigger price is paid by the brain drain that occurs when employees leave and take their knowledge and training with them. Employee attrition costs you personally in the effort to hire and train, and it costs your team members as they first compensate for a missing position, then spend time training the new recruit.

Based on research conducted in 2009 by Right Management, the talent and management expert within Manpower, 60 percent of your employees intend to leave when the job market in their geographic location regains strength, and an additional one-in-four are networking and updating their resumes. Douglas J. Matthews, President and CEO at Right Management states, “Employees are clearly expressing their pent up frustration with how they have been treated through the downturn. While employers may have taken the necessary steps of streamlining operations to remain viable, it appears that many employees may have felt neglected in the process. The result is a disengaged and disgruntled workforce.”²

Then there are the demographics. In 2006, Baby Boomers (approximately 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964) began to turn 60. In the year 2008, workers ages 55 and older accounted for 18.1 percent of our workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2018 they will make up approximately 23.9 percent of the workforce. Then they’ll retire.³

Baby Boomers leaving the workplace is significant not only because of the skill sets they take with them, but because of the decline in the birth rate of successive generations. There are fewer Generation X-ers, Generation Y-ers, and Millenials to take their places.

Watch Employees Leave

When we asked employees why they begin searching for a new job, the following responses were given most frequently:

The supervisor or manager does not value the employee’s contribution or appear to care about the employee.

The supervisor does not provide good, ongoing communication to the employee.

The supervisor does not provide the employee with performance feedback.

The supervisor is late on the performance appraisal.

The supervisor treats the employee disrespectfully.

The supervisor fails to provide the employee with clear direction.

The employee feels there is little potential for career development.

The employee is ready for a more challenging position or a new experience.

The employee seeks better compensation and benefits.

Many of these reasons are within the manager’s control, yet when we interview managers and ask why their people departed for another organization, the most frequent response given is a higher salary. Most times, the managers state that they had no hope of keeping the employee from jumping ship because they had no control over matching the employee’s higher salary offer.

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In most instances, people leave because they lack a meaningful working relationship with an immediate supervisor.

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When we interview employees who leave, it’s a different story. Most employees who leave organizations do receive a higher salary, but the amount of the increase is surprising: The average salary increase is approximately 6 percent. Ask yourself this question: If you loved your job and your boss really valued your contributions, would you risk all that to go to work for another organization for just a 6-percent increase in salary?

When employees answer this question, most think about it for a moment and then say, “No.” But what if you did not love your job and you had a bad boss? In this situation, a 6-percent increase in salary would seem like an opportunity you would not want to pass up.

In most instances, people leave because they lack a meaningful working relationship with an immediate supervisor. It’s not the money. The stronger this relationship is, the lesser role money will play when an employee considers leaving the company for a competing offer.

The Employee Who Isn’t There

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only two ways employees leave an organization. Sometimes it is physically, as in moving on to a competitor, which is manageable; at least you know the employee is no longer on your team. You are clear on the next step: hire a great employee to take over the job.

The second way is the one that strikes fear into the heart of every manager: the employee who mentally quits, but stays with the organization. There are five warning signs to help you determine your employees’ level of engagement and give you a “heads up” that an employee has mentally resigned. They are:

Evidence of a “whatever” attitude. The employee is not confrontational, but clear...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise for The Only Leadership Book You’ll Ever Need
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Case for Workplace Excellence
• Part 2: If You’ Re a Manager Who Wants to be a Leader, You Need Followers
• Part 3 Creating Workplace Excellence
• Part 4 The Outcomes of Workplace Excellence
• Appendix
• Chapter Notes
• Index
• About the Authors