Smart Manager Advisor – Page 3

How to Help Your Staff Achieve a Positive Identity

As a successful manager, it is your responsibility to clarify, emphasize, and establish the corporate identity of your support staff. Understand that you may have to contend with a corporate culture that has historically under-valued support staff importance. This is, unfortunately, apparently a common condition. Along with improving operations, you may further strengthen your brand and enhance your career options by establishing a support staff identity. Here are some suggestions to achieve this goal.

Foster innovation. Administrative, marketing, sales, and customer service support staff can make valuable positive contributions to operations. Innovation can be a huge motivator and contributor. Support staff, working daily in the corporate “trenches,” often develops wonderful innovative ideas and valuable suggestions to improve operations. Encourage the sharing of these ideas and suggestions. Exceptional pearls of wisdom may come from this open communications policy.

Instill a secure identity. Reinforcing the importance of support staff contributions creates security in the identity and purpose of their functions. Security in the importance of their contribution encourages higher performance and a more positive workplace. Feeling the security and confidence of management lifts the spirits and production of support staff, particularly if feelings of insecurity or unimportance previously dominated the workplace. Feelings of security lead most employees to strive for further achievement—leading to further strengthened security.

Encourage collaboration. Little establishes someone’s credibility and sense of value more than invitations to collaborate to create ideas to help solve a problem, or generate improvements at the workplace. Encouraging support staff collaboration to contribute to operational improvement establishes their identity as a meaningful source of help. Increased feelings of valuable self-worth, confidence, and empowerment supply the identity that support employees often lack.

Publicly recognize achievements to establish a pride culture. “Criticize in private and praise in public,” always improves workplace conditions. Public recognition of support staff achievements by managers can create wonderful on-the-job results. You will be impressed, even amazed by the reaction to your simple “Thank you,” spoken publicly to a support employee. Public recognition of an individual or team typically affects other employees, who now recommit to improving their performance to compete for future public recognition.

Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communication, in the world of business, is generally defined as the skill and ability of employees to “get along” at the workplace; the techniques of sharing information in a non-threatening and polite manner are the basis of cooperative communication, and when properly implemented, cooperative communication enhances the workplace experience and typically inspires better performance.

It is natural that, during the complexity and repetitive nature of typical workdays, person-to-person conflicts will arise. The pressure to perform, both individually and as team members, can generate high-level negativity and conflict in many employees. Cooperative communication often acts as an effective “pressure release valve”.

Studies have shown that when cooperative communication is lacking, feelings of hostility, operational problems, and poor individual performance are among the unhappy results. This begs the question: Why isn’t cooperative communication practiced by all companies to avoid the problems created by its lack of implementation?

Unfortunately, there is a general lack of cooperative communication for a simple, but often undiscovered reason: Most people have never been taught the skill. Few schools and higher education institutions have cooperative communication on their course menu. Unless employees learned the skill at home from their parents, most have little appreciation for or the ability to use this important commodity. Unfortunately, this skill is often lacking in otherwise high performing managers, too.

The simple act of cooperative communication can have a profound effect on management effectiveness in a variety of ways. For example, good cooperative communication will often:

Eliminate employee-to-employee friction. As workplace pressures escalate, so does the natural human conflicts that occur. Cooperative communication usually eliminates much of this vocal friction and helps teams work together more successfully.

Eliminate the attitude of “winning an argument” and introduce a philosophy of problem solving. Instead of a personal competition environment, staff normally adopts a winning attitude towards the team or department in which they function.

Eliminate professional personality and procedure conflicts. Instead of an attitude of “Do it my way. It’s the best way,” cooperative communication fosters an attitude of “Let’s work together to do it the best way”. This one attribute can help management immensely.

Eliminate conflict and wasted time at strategic and training meetings. Both staff and management often complain about the number of meetings they are required to attend. Yet, for all the jokes and complaints, management knows that most meetings are necessary. Cooperative communication in the meeting place saves time, helps the moderator stay on topic, and generates better results.

Eliminate many client and customer complaints about poor treatment by staff. Nothing can do more harm to a company’s branding and image efforts than a customer or client base that feels mistreated by staff. A habit of cooperative communication often eliminates much of the customer dissatisfaction (real or perceived) that afflicts many companies.

Cooperative communication is a simple concept that can deliver wonderful positive results to management. Managers should understand that because of lack of training at all levels of education many employees don’t understand how to use cooperative communication.

Depending on the size and/or structure of a company, the Human Resource (HR) Department, team leaders, or department managers can implement the training and support necessary to expose employees to the ways to use cooperative communication. This is a win-win situation for both staff and management, as employees will enjoy a more positive workplace experience by eliminating much of the natural conflict that occurs.

How to Get the Best Performance from Diverse Teams

As more businesses rely on teams to perform projects and achieve goals, management must learn to maximize their productivity and minimize inherent potential downsides. This challenge is spiced with increasing diversity, including age, education, language and cultural differences.

Managers’ performance ratings often depend on the achievements of their teams. This condition mandates that managers learn to work well with diverse teams, using teammate talents to the max, while building a finely tuned group that is motivated to deliver high performance.

University of California, Irvine, PhD candidate Kenji Klein noted in the published paper, “Culturally Diverse Teams that Work,” that culturally diverse teams “. . . can boost firm performance, but that potential comes with some risk.” Klein’s research displayed that results of diverse teams are divided—sometimes they work well; at times they do not.

The prime questions that managers must answer: How to take advantage of diverse teams? Team diversity works best when responsible for the following tasks.

Projects that demand focus from a variety of angles and perspectives.
Subjects that include understanding information from various sources, requiring innovative answers and out-of-the-box ideas.

Managers facing more obvious, routine tasks or projects may generate better results by using less diverse, more homogenous teams. In these situations, teams with educationally and culturally similar members can benefit from the following advantages.

Faster and better communication.
Better cohesion and quicker collaboration to solve problems.
Smoother implementation of changes and solutions.
Projects having short deadlines benefit from using less diverse teams.

Assembling diverse high-performing teams require managers to have one quality above all others—patience. Research from a variety of institutions, including MIT’s Sloan School of Management, indicates that newly formed diverse teams initially do not perform very well.

However, over time, team members become more comfortable working with their teammates and deliver higher performance when their leader (manager) has the patience to let teammates adjust to each other’s differences and perspectives.

Along with exhibiting patience, managers should allow diverse team members to integrate their different views instead of encouraging teammates to suppress their age, cultural or educational differences. If managers select the right team members, while giving them the freedom to become a cohesive group over time, diverse teams tend to perform better than more homogenous groups in the long-term.

Managers, who are patient and offer diverse teams freedom to find their own ways to collaborate, enjoy the following benefits.

High-level innovative ideas and solutions.
Team members who are comfortable offering out-of-the-box thinking and suggestions to each other and to management.
Teams that overcome initial conflicts rising from diversity to become high performing, cohesive groups.
The ability to give these teams complex projects, requiring innovation and creativity, with the confidence that their valuable combination of diversity and cohesion will deliver outstanding solutions.

Two conditions seem to apply across the board with few dissenters:

Globalization of business demands that managers find ways to work with highly diverse teams.
Most diverse teams take a while to fuse and integrate their differences to focus on collaboration to achieve their goals.

Managers who accept and understand these consistent tendencies should enjoy excellent results from their diverse teams. Leaders still must be aware of potential conflicts arising from personality, not cultural, diversity. Assembling winning diverse teams may demand some management tweaking of team members involved in bad chemistry situations.

Evaluating team cohesion is important, even when managers assemble homogenous teams for shorter-term projects. Patient managers, who give their diverse teams the freedom to work past their initial cultural differences, will be pleased they adopted this approach. Diverse teams, aware of their leader’s patience and understanding, typically form high-performing, cohesive groups that solve the most complex problems with innovative solutions.

How to Manage Your Gen Ys

If you’re like many managers, your employees are increasingly gen Ys who bring valuable qualities to the workplace. they’re willing to work long hours. and they relish working for organizations whose values matter to them.

To attract, retain, and get the most from Gen Ys, create the right kind of work environment. Start by emphasizing your company’s values, reputation, and community involvement to Gen Y job candidates. They often prefer to work on their own schedules, so be fexible about asynchronous work. Where possible, performance management should focus on task completion, not time spent.

What You Should Do Before Your Staff Members Go On Vacation

When a member of your team goes away for a few days, who will handle that person’s job duties? It is important to identify which pieces of their jobs need to be covered when your staff members take leave for any reason. Choose other employees on your team who can best cover certain parts of their coworkers’ jobs and have them train on those early on. Always have a back-up person for the pertinent processes in your office in case someone needs to take some time away.

Another important question to ask is whether or not your team member can complete parts of his or her job before leaving the office for a vacation. If there is a project you know will come up while that person is away, ask them to put in a little extra time and hard work before going away. This will ensure important reports, projects, or any other time-sensitive parts of their jobs will be performed before employees take time off. It will also likely make their first days back in the office a little easier because they’re not playing as much catch-up.

Finally, how can you mitigate the amount of vacation time an employee will need to spend being plugged in? With important projects out of the way beforehand and other employees available to fill in for vacationing team members, it all seems done, right? Not quite. It’s important to also consider questions from other colleagues and outside entities directed toward your vacationing staff member. Always make sure your employees set their out-of-office emails and voicemails to direct inquiring parties to the next available person.

While these steps for preparing for your staff member vacations seem like no-brainers, it takes careful strategy from you as a manager, as well as well-defined expectations from your team. Talk with them individually about their commitments and other skills to find out what they can help with while their coworkers take time away. Explain that their extra dedication will ensure more relaxation when they also take vacations from work. Have them document their job duties and general tips for coworkers who may fill in for them.

With a well-designed leave preparation plan, your employees can take much-needed vacation time while still providing the support you need for your team. They will also be willing to put in the extra time and effort leading up to their days off when they understand that this will allow them more freedom to turn off their phones and spend quality relaxing time away from the office.