Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager and now The One MInute Entrepreneur says the most important way that the workplace has changed over the years is this,”Your people want you to be their partner. They don’t want necessarily to be boss. They want you to think they bring something to the party, that you are on their side and you want them to succeed”. 

Blanchard was interviewed by WayneTurmel at the Cranky Middle Manager site. You can hear it here http://cmm.thepodcastnetwork.com/. This is a great site and Wayne is a funny man.  

Blanchard pointed out that the old terminology for managers and employees is offensive to many employees. Titles like the head of the department and hired hands, superior and subordinate are demeaning. In fact my trusty dictionary defines subordinate as “of lower class or rank, inferior, submissive to authority”. A superior, on the other hand is defined as “one higher in quality or merit”.  Ouch!

So how can we give our employees those three things Blanchard mentioned? 

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Tags: Management Skills by Norma Smith Davis
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Many managers think they cannot measure attitude problems in their employees and therefore there is nothing that can be done. Wrong!  Once you have renamed those problems as professional behaviors, you can define them, measure them ,include them in job descriptions and even fire people with them!

You know the employees I mean. They may be technically capable and performing the specific skills that are measured on the job. They do the required amount of work; they make the required number of sales; they take the required number of calls. They may even be good with customers. But around the office or workplace they have attitude plus!  

They are the office nay-sayers, cynics and negativists. Or they complain about everything. They criticize every management initiative; they go to the union with every little issue. They are right out of Dilbert and they are driving you crazy. You are getting complaints from other employees who are affected and infected by their lousy attitude. 

Here are the steps to take to get a better handle on this issue and give yourself some solid   definitions to work with. 

Step One: 

Redefine the words attitude problem to professional behavior.  It’s perfectly reasonable 

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Tags: Communication, Management Skills, Performance Expectations by Norma Smith Davis
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If 55% of the impact of a communication is determined by the visual aspects, how do staff members who work with our customers on the phone build trust and confidence in our products and services?  Only 7% of the impact of their communication  is the actual words, the content or the verbal message. Yet that is what we spend so much time carefully crafting!  

For phone personnel that makes that 38% impact of voice quality very, very important. Voice quality includes tone, softness or loudness, accents, grammar, volume, tempo, rhythm, inflections–in other words how we say it.  These figures come from a study done in 1983 by Dr. Albert Mehrabian of UCLA.  

It makes sense to spend some of our training time for 

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Tags: Communication, Management Skills, New Employees, Performance Expectations, Training, Coaching by Norma Smith Davis
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 Does it seem to you that you revisit the same decisions over and over?  Do you make decisions only to have them fumble and die of apathy?  Having meetings that are as effective, tight and productive as a good girdle is great.  But if the decisions made at those meetings do not have buy-in from everyone at the table, or are not formalized, the decisions may be sabotaged and rendered useless and toothless.  What are some signs that a decision is being undermined?  See if any of these sounds familiar: 

1. 1.  The supervisor or manager goes back to his department or unit and announces the decision that has been made, rolls       his/her eyes and says, “ I didn’t agree with this decision, but I got out voted”.  Well there’s a resounding endorsement!  How studious do you think that manager will be at implementing the decision?
2. 2.  The supervisor/manager fails to even report the decision to the appropriate people!  Weeks later his/her staff hear about it from other departments.  
3. As soon as the decision is made some of the participants involved in the meeting and the decisions that were made, start buzzing about the decision, criticizing it, complaining about it, saying how it won’t work. This creates doubt in the ones who did agree wholeheartedly.  People don’t start implementing the decision because it is obvious it isn’t going anywhere.  And who can blame them? 

Here’s one way to get commitment about a decision.  Ask each person, individually, to 

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Tags: Decision-Making, Effective Meetings, Management Skills by Norma Smith Davis
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My local paper afforded me an opportunity to share some thoughts on the power of good communication and collaboration. 

Near my home in the wine country of Northern California there has been a decade long battle between an Indian tribe that wanted to put in a casino on their land and the neighbors who enjoy one of the most scenic and wealthy vineyard and winery regions in the world.  The tribe’s rather combative and secretive tribal leader and local government, environmental groups and wine industry associations duked it out for years.

When the casino parking structure suddenly went up, as if over night, the tribal leader finally admitted they had been “less than truthful”.  Not a good way to establish good relationships.  Back and forth it went over zoning, land use, access, fire and police protection, liquor permits and more.  

Then something very different happened. 

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Tags: Communication, Management Skills by Norma Smith Davis
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Organizations who have fully engaged employees have a much better bottom line than those whose employees are disenchanted. Intuitively we have always known this but a  2007 Towers and Perrin study of companies worldwide confirms it. Companies will earn more money if their employees are engaged, challenged and empowered. What does engaged mean?  It means that employees are willing and anxious to give more of their discretionary efforts to their work. They are connected to their organization emotionally, know how to add value and are willing to do so. Other facts from the study include:

•   Just 21% of the worldwide work force is fully engaged. So nearly 80% of people do not contribute fully and are costing the employer money in terms of productivity, effectiveness, customer service and more. But in America the percentage of engaged workers is 29% and 28% are disengaged or disenchanted.  In Mexico those numbers are 54% and 16%, in Japan the numbers sag to a whopping 3% engaged and 72% disengaged or disenchanted!  

•  The organization has a big impact on whether or not employees are engaged.  The notion that employees are just “free agents” 

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Tags: Management Skills, Rewards, Recognition by Norma Smith Davis
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Stressed employees are not the best, most effective employees. If you and your staff are undergoing major changes, a busy business cycle, end of the year budgets or other stressful events, you may want to know that new research puts a new light on the age-old idea that all people respond to stress with the “fight or flight” response. Until rather recently 90% of the research on stress has been done with men. Women, it turns out, have an additional response to stress. Researchers have termed it the “tend and befriend” response. According to a landmark study conducted by four women researchers at UCLA, a chemical named oxytocin is released in women who are in stress.  This chemical buffers the fight or flight response and encourages a woman to tend to her children and/or befriend others. As she does those activities more oxytocin is released and more calming occurs. Oxytocin is not released in men in stressful situations. 

So while men may respond to stress by  raising their voice or holing up somewhere until they become calmer, women can calm themselves by 

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Tags: Management Skills by Norma Smith Davis
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