There are five main problems that slow businesses down and prevent them from achieving the success they want and are capable of. We see these as doors that need to be opened to allow success in. Before anything is done to unlock and open those doors, we need to identify them and decide which one(s) need attention.
Door #1: Recruitment & Hiring
Getting the right people in the right seats is what effective hiring is all about. Too often, people look to hire someone quickly, so they don’t miss any productive time, but they fail to consider the job or the seat.
When someone leaves a position, the best approach is to stop and think about the job that’s open. Throw away old job descriptions and focus on defining exactly what the individual actually did – not just the skills they needed to have. What made that person successful and good at their job and what didn’t matter? Then consider what you would ideally like the new individual who occupies that seat to be able to do and do well. This is defining the seat and it makes finding the right person to sit in it much easier. Plus, it’s more effective in the long run.
Door #2: Employee Engagement & Retention
The next door is employee engagement and retention. The good news is that if you walked through the first door, defined the seat, and found a great candidate to sit in it, you’ve already boosted your chances to have an engaged employee who will stick around.
Of course, that’s just a start. Among your entire company people fall into four categories.
- Committed Champions. These people are highly engaged and performing well. This is the goal.
- Lone Wolves. People in this category are very successful but they’re not engaged and tend to have team dynamic issues.
- Silent Killers. These people are very engaged and loved by everyone, but when it comes down to it, they’re not performing well.
- Contaminators. These are the individuals who are doing the most to bring a company down. They have low performance and low engagement, and their attitude negatively spreads across the company. They should be a primary concern when looking at engagement and retention efforts.
While you can categorize your people into four engagement boxes, that doesn’t mean that you can help move them into the Committed Champions box in the same way. Effective management and engagement efforts need to take the individual into consideration and deal with them as individuals.
Letting your people sit in their boxes without addressing issues is one of the worst things you can do when it comes to engagement and retention. Unless they’re in the Committed Champions box, they’re not feeling entirely happy or valued in their job and not recognizing that can sabotage your performance and their engagement.
Door #3: Leadership Development
To effectively manage individuals and help them all move into the Committed Champions box, you need effective leadership. Leaders who are complacent or who treat all individuals the same are not working effectively. Before you can lead employees into a place where they’re engaged and want to stay with a company, you need to have management that’s capable of leading effectively.
Effective leaders don’t just show up, at least most of the time. They need a path to follow to successfully manage and shouldn’t be tasked with “figure it out yourself” approaches. Creating leaders and management success stories requires a development process that works and is easy to understand and follow.
It’s also important to note that management and executives can fail too if they don’t have a process to follow in developing their engagement and skills in their profession.
Door #4: Talent Mapping & Succession Planning
Consider this. If you don’t have a strategy for your employee’s success, there’s a good chance they will quit. 53% of people will consider leaving their employer due to a lack of career path (MRI Network). Taking a long-distance look at the future of each role creates a trajectory of engagement. Lay out key development pieces for your people that they can strive to master, this keeps them engaged in your business.
As you scale your business, developing the next level of leaders to think like business owners is vital. It’s important to have the data regarding individual accomplishments, to know your employees well enough to understand their individual strengths and weaknesses and how that fits into future roles. Also, do those individuals understand a system for managing the people underneath them to succeed?
Effective talent mapping and succession planning strategies have the answers to these questions.
- Do we know who really performs in our business?
- Do we know their strengths and weaknesses?
- Do our next level of leaders know how to hire and manage people to success?
- Do we know when to hire to fill talent gaps compared to promoting from within?
- Do we have a repeatable system around talent acquisition and development?
Door #5: Performance Management
If you want a great people strategy, you need to tie it into performance to get the buy-in at the executive level. If engagement doesn’t tie to performance in some way, you’re not hitting your management goals and the efforts will not get the results that you want.
This is why there needs to be a clear map of performance for each seat and the individual needs access to their own results so they can see where they’re succeeding and what areas they need to work on. This reaches across the board for the company, everybody needs to be able to tie their performance to results. Having a process in place to do this and to visually map success can be a critical tool when it comes to performance management.
This is where Manage 4 Performance™ steps in and gives you the tools you need to support your team, across the board, and realign your strategies to support employee engagement, satisfaction, performance, and retention.
Want to learn more about how Manage 4 Performance™ can revolutionize your business? Connect with our team by clicking the button below!
There are five main problems that slow businesses down and prevent them from achieving the success they want and are capable of. We see these as doors that need to be opened to allow success in. Before anything is done to unlock and open those doors, we need to identify them and decide which one(s) need attention.
Door #1: Recruitment & Hiring
Getting the right people in the right seats is what effective hiring is all about. Too often, people look to hire someone quickly, so they don’t miss any productive time, but they fail to consider the job or the seat.
When someone leaves a position, the best approach is to stop and think about the job that’s open. Throw away old job descriptions and focus on defining exactly what the individual actually did – not just the skills they needed to have. What made that person successful and good at their job and what didn’t matter? Then consider what you would ideally like the new individual who occupies that seat to be able to do and do well. This is defining the seat and it makes finding the right person to sit in it much easier. Plus, it’s more effective in the long run.
Door #2: Employee Engagement & Retention
The next door is employee engagement and retention. The good news is that if you walked through the first door, defined the seat, and found a great candidate to sit in it, you’ve already boosted your chances to have an engaged employee who will stick around.
Of course, that’s just a start. Among your entire company people fall into four categories.
- Committed Champions. These people are highly engaged and performing well. This is the goal.
- Lone Wolves. People in this category are very successful but they’re not engaged and tend to have team dynamic issues.
- Silent Killers. These people are very engaged and loved by everyone, but when it comes down to it, they’re not performing well.
- Contaminators. These are the individuals who are doing the most to bring a company down. They have low performance and low engagement, and their attitude negatively spreads across the company. They should be a primary concern when looking at engagement and retention efforts.
While you can categorize your people into four engagement boxes, that doesn’t mean that you can help move them into the Committed Champions box in the same way. Effective management and engagement efforts need to take the individual into consideration and deal with them as individuals.
Letting your people sit in their boxes without addressing issues is one of the worst things you can do when it comes to engagement and retention. Unless they’re in the Committed Champions box, they’re not feeling entirely happy or valued in their job and not recognizing that can sabotage your performance and their engagement.
Door #3: Leadership Development
To effectively manage individuals and help them all move into the Committed Champions box, you need effective leadership. Leaders who are complacent or who treat all individuals the same are not working effectively. Before you can lead employees into a place where they’re engaged and want to stay with a company, you need to have management that’s capable of leading effectively.
Effective leaders don’t just show up, at least most of the time. They need a path to follow to successfully manage and shouldn’t be tasked with “figure it out yourself” approaches. Creating leaders and management success stories requires a development process that works and is easy to understand and follow.
It’s also important to note that management and executives can fail too if they don’t have a process to follow in developing their engagement and skills in their profession.
Door #4: Talent Mapping & Succession Planning
Consider this. If you don’t have a strategy for your employee’s success, there’s a good chance they will quit. 53% of people will consider leaving their employer due to a lack of career path (MRI Network). Taking a long-distance look at the future of each role creates a trajectory of engagement. Lay out key development pieces for your people that they can strive to master, this keeps them engaged in your business.
As you scale your business, developing the next level of leaders to think like business owners is vital. It’s important to have the data regarding individual accomplishments, to know your employees well enough to understand their individual strengths and weaknesses and how that fits into future roles. Also, do those individuals understand a system for managing the people underneath them to succeed?
Effective talent mapping and succession planning strategies have the answers to these questions.
- Do we know who really performs in our business?
- Do we know their strengths and weaknesses?
- Do our next level of leaders know how to hire and manage people to success?
- Do we know when to hire to fill talent gaps compared to promoting from within?
- Do we have a repeatable system around talent acquisition and development?
Door #5: Performance Management
If you want a great people strategy, you need to tie it into performance to get the buy-in at the executive level. If engagement doesn’t tie to performance in some way, you’re not hitting your management goals and the efforts will not get the results that you want.
This is why there needs to be a clear map of performance for each seat and the individual needs access to their own results so they can see where they’re succeeding and what areas they need to work on. This reaches across the board for the company, everybody needs to be able to tie their performance to results. Having a process in place to do this and to visually map success can be a critical tool when it comes to performance management.
This is where Manage 4 Performance™ steps in and gives you the tools you need to support your team, across the board, and realign your strategies to support employee engagement, satisfaction, performance, and retention.
Want to learn more about how Manage 4 Performance™ can revolutionize your business? Connect with our team by clicking the button below!