Managing to Make a Difference

How to Engage, Retain, and Develop Talent for Maximum Performance

Larry Sternberg, Kim Turnage

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119331834
• eBook ISBN: 9781119331780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

A practical, real-world training manual for mid-level management

Managing to Make a Difference presents a leadership guide for those in the middle. The C-suite has a wealth of resources for leadership guidance, but middle managers face a quandary: often given little guidance on how to excel, they are also under enormous pressure to do a variety of things other than "lead." This book provides much-needed tools and techniques for building a high-performing team—without letting your other duties suffer. Organized around a coherent philosophy and based on solid research, the discussion offers a roadmap to engagement, talent development, and excellence in management. From difficult situations and organizational challenges to everyday motivation and inspiration, these techniques help middle managers achieve the goals of their organization while empowering their workers to achieve their own.

Talent development is probably not your full-time job—yet it drives the engagement that results in high performance. This book shows you how to hit the "sweet spot" of middle management, with a host of tools and strategies to help you help your team shine.

• Motivate, inspire, and lead your team with confidence
• Manage through challenges and overcome obstacles
• Develop key talent and maintain high engagement
• Adopt practical management tools based on substantiated research

Most organizations direct the majority of their development resources to the C-suite, but still expect their mid-level managers to attract, engage, retain, and develop talent; but successfully juggling everyday duties while maintaining team performance and leading around roadblocks leaves little room for management planning. Managing to Make a Difference offers the solution in the form of tools, techniques, and practical strategy for a high performing team.

Section V
Shape Your Culture

Chapter 44
Focus on the Right Things

Managing to make a difference involves creating a culture that encourages people to become their best selves. Culture can be a slippery concept. Read any description of “great organizations” and you will find a laundry list of customs, beliefs, rituals, and perks touted as elements of their unique cultures—unlimited vacation, Ping Pong tables and pinball machines in brainstorming rooms, food trucks on Fridays, nap rooms to recharge. The list goes on. It can suck you in to focusing on the wrong things if you let it.

Beware!

Customs, beliefs, rituals, and perks become signs and expressions of cultural values. Understanding them helps to describe the culture. But they do not create and shape culture. Picking up practices from one team or organization and plunking them down into yours is not a great strategy for shaping your culture. Too often, looking from the outside in, even the best managers and leaders can miss that point.

For example, the “quality circle” became a formalized part of the culture of many Japanese companies in the 1960s, and played a key role in enabling those companies to produce very high quality products, including automobiles and consumer electronics. Because of this success, many U.S.-based companies tried to plunk quality circles into their culture, but the strategy did not work. Quality circles did not harmonize with the typical U.S.-based company culture. The cultural context to embrace that approach did not exist.

We want to help you focus on the right things. Based on what you have read so far in this book, it should come as no surprise that we define “the right things” as people.

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Lesson

Culture is shaped by the people an organization selects, develops, and retains.

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If you want to shape your culture in ways that optimize performance and retention, you must start by focusing on the right things—your people—because culture arises organically from your people and your shared values. Culture is more than what you do or what you say. Culture is who you are. Questions like this can help you define key elements of your organization's culture:

1. What unifies both the veterans and the newest recruits?
2. What values drive them?
3. What makes people stay?
4. What attracts new people?
5. What are the common characteristics among our top performers?

By all means, look outside your organization for ideas and inspiration for how to mold and optimize culture. Every chapter in this section provides people-focused ideas and experiments you can try. But recognize that, ultimately, what you choose to incorporate has to fit your people, your shared values, and your history as an organization. Your organization has a culture now. Use the chapters in this section to amplify the best elements of your existing culture and to shape your culture in ways that optimize people's opportunities to become their best selves.

Chapter 45
Exemplify Cultural Values in Employee Orientation

Many organizations make employee orientation a mind-numbing review of the employee handbook. The best managers and organizations avoid that. They focus most of their time instead on helping new employees understand the values and beliefs of the organization, along with the expected behaviors. This approach is engaging. It allows people to decide whether their personal values harmonize with the organization's. It invites them to join emotionally, to get excited about what the organization stands for in the world, and ultimately to make a commitment to enliven those values through their work.

If you have a strong, clearly defined culture, it will not be for everyone. Ritz-Carlton and Zappos, for example, encourage people to opt out immediately if they are not excited about becoming a member. Zappos even offers new employees $2,000 if they wish to opt out.

For this to work, by the way, the description of cultural values cannot be fiction. When employees leave orientation, they experience the culture directly. If the difference between the described culture and the experienced culture is too great, disengagement sets in immediately.

When was the last time you reviewed your orientation and your handbook? Are you proud of the way they express your brand and exemplify your culture?

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Lesson

Make sure your new employee orientation is not a mind-numbing experience. Make it a fun and engaging way for people to experience your culture.

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Experiment: Redesign Employee Orientation

1. What could you do differently to make orientation a more fun and engaging experience? Seek outside ideas, if necessary. Make benchmark visits to other organizations to get ideas. But remember to make sure they harmonize with what is true about your culture, your people, your values, and your customs, beliefs, rituals, and perks.
2. Redesign orientation along those lines.
3. Reflect on what you have learned. How are your newest employees different after orientation now? Do they feel differently about joining your organization? Do they seem more ready to hit the ground running?

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Chapter 46
Welcome and Integrate New Team Members

For new team members, the first few days and weeks on the job set the stage for their entire tenure with you. Employee orientation helps acclimate people who are new to your organization, but you may also have an opportunity to welcome new people to your team who have already been with the organization for a while. Think about what happens when a new person joins your team.

• What is the experience like for that person?
• What is it like for current team members?
• What do you do to get that person comfortable and productive?
• What do you do to jumpstart trust and collaboration?

A seminar participant recounted her recent experience joining a new department in her organization. The other employees in the department were surprised to see her. They had no idea she was joining. Unfortunately, this experience is all too common. It affects your current team members negatively, too. As a manager, how can you make sure this never happens to anyone who is new to your team?

Many organizations have a formal orientation process for onboarding new hires, and research shows that effectively implementing those kinds of programs results in:

• Increased job satisfaction and commitment
• Improved retention
• Higher performance
• Lower stress¹

You do not need a cumbersome, formal process, but you should be thoughtful and intentional in crafting the experience. We discussed a simple process in Chapter 13, and a simple, consistently applied process is likely to achieve outcomes similar to the ones found in the research. Cultivating relationships should be your number one priority in creating a fruitful onboarding experience. The more rapidly you can get positive relationships going, the more rapidly a person will become comfortable and productive. To get relationships going, people must get to know one another.

Make sure new people get invited to join team members at lunch, on breaks, and at social events outside of work. If there are no social gatherings planned, plan one. It can be as simple as an informal drink or a pizza after work. Make it part of your department's culture for current team members to go out of their way to make new team members feel welcome. In some cases, it might be helpful to appoint a “buddy” (not a superv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Managing to Make a Difference
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I: Cultivate PositiveRelationships
• Section II: Accelerate People's Growth
• Section III: Maximize Engagement and Motivation
• Section IV: Build Extraordinary Teams
• Section V: Shape Your Culture
• Section VI: Embrace Change
• Section VII: Invest in Your Own Growth
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement