Category Archives: Staff Management

May 31, 2016 · 12:36 pm

Checkup: 4 Key Accountabilities an Executive has to Her/His Team

Unknown

There are baseline responsibilities all leaders have to their teams. Do an assessment—or better yet, ask your team.  How are you doing with these key accountabilities?

  • Establish a clear, commonly understood, and attainable definition of success.

To be engaged, teams have to know where they are headed, what success looks like, and they must believe they can achieve it.  Can your staff clearly and easily articulate what success is for them?  For your organization overall?

  • Create and maintain structures and processes that facilitate moving toward success.

Too many times, our systems, structures, and processes are not aligned with the goals we have established for success.  How do you monitor and adjust your management systems and processes so they help align and engage your team toward that clear definition of success you have established?  Perhaps more importantly—does your staff team believe that you focus on aligning systems and processes to help facilitate their success?  How do you know?

  • Provide opportunities for development and growth for your team.

To build and maintain excellence, you must offer your staff opportunities to learn and grow.  This can build your bench strength and cross train your staff.  For many smaller associations and nonprofits without a significant career growth ladder, you may be training folks to leave for more advanced work in some instances.  However, the price of not investing in growth and development is a non-engaged workforce and entropy.  What formal and informal mechanisms do you have—that your staff can identify—that gives them a sense that you care about their growth and careers?

  • Create and Maintain a culture of trust and safety.

A search of contents on Harvard Business Review shows 213 offerings on “employee trust.” Add articles on “leadership,” and “employee engagement,” or just “trust”, and the numbers go up exponentially.  The fact is, if your team doesn’t have confidence in you and a sense of trust and safety, it may not matter if you have met the other accountabilities listed above.  In fact, it may not be possible to successfully achieve the three prior accountabilities if there is not a bedrock of trust.  Again, it is your team that can best answer whether trust and safety is present in the workplace, not you as the leader.  How long has it been since you’ve asked?

Put these accountabilities to the test!  Create and consistently implement a plan to consistently ensure that you are meeting them.  These are keys to success.

Leave a comment

Filed under Associations, Executive Directors, Leadership, Staff Management, Sustaining Excellence

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 23, 2013 · 4:49 pm

Expanding Your Leadership Presence: Positioning

images

Changing levels of leadership requires new skills, and a new way of thinking about leadership. In particular, in speaking with new executive directors (either first time execs or those who have recently changed position), or those who aspire to become CEOs, it is not uncommon to find them struggling with how to assume a new role of leadership.  Should they position themselves to be more peer-like, a “one of the crowd” type of leader, or position themselves at the top of the hierarchy with clear delineations of role whose authority and position is unequivocal?

Both of these positions have fundamental flaws.  No matter how hard one tries, by definition a CEO has no peers in the enterprise he or she leads.  And merely staking a position of “authority” does not create respect, buy in, or “followship” that will build a successful cultural enterprise over the long term.

However, there is a different kind of positioning that can be quite effective in expanding leadership presence.  In 2011, Cuddy, Glick, and Beninger published an article in Research in Organizational Behavior that looked at the traits of competence and warmth, and how they impacted organizations.  Recently Cuddy, Kohut and Neffinger followed up with a Harvard Business Review blog that presented research and recommendations in an actionable way.  It’s worth registering with the site if you haven’t to read the entire article.  Cuddy has also given a TedTalk on some of her research findings.

What is one key to expanding your leadership through positioning?  Giving others a sense of your trustworthiness—a combination of warmth and competence/strength.  And what is the key to conveying trustworthiness?  It may be in how you position yourself physically.   The blog and the TedTalk show how to do that in a way you can begin today.

Granted, overreliance on body positioning or movement will not create a sense of warmth, trustworthiness, strength, or competence.  Rather, it will make you seen incongruent.  However, it has been scientifically demonstrated as one component of expanding leadership presence.  Practice positioning yourself differently.  See what happens.

Leave a comment

Filed under Executive Directors, Leadership, Staff Management

Tagged as , , , , , ,

May 28, 2013 · 1:02 pm

Hiring Well: Three “C”s to Consider

blocksIt is no secret: personnel issues are a point of pain for association and nonprofit executives.  To date, Assessing Personnel Problems: Three Questions to Ask has generated many further questions and follow up.  One major key in avoiding, or minimizing personnel issues, is hiring well.

There is no shortage of information to be found about the hiring process.  You can read about how to grade applicants, which body part to use when interviewing, and a method for determining who to hire.  It is true that many fall into less than optimal practices at the hiring point that lead to challenges later.

For mission and value based organizations, I have found three categories on which to evaluate a potential hire that maximize the potential for success.  While different words might be used, these are the dimensions on which I evaluate potential hires:

Culture

What kind of culture do you wish to create or enhance in your workplace?  Can you articulate it in clear and measurable terms?  Different workplaces can have profoundly different aspirations about culture.  Think of the difference between an NFL team and an arts organization.

I’ve learned over the years that this component is easy to overlook in the hiring process, or at least to minimize.  Sometimes it gets confused with chemistry—which is whether you like someone or not.  This is a more direct evaluation of how someone will contribute intentionally to the work atmosphere and values, not whether you could be friends with someone.  After several mistakes in this area, I’ve come to believe that if there are red flags here, it is better to leave a position vacant than to bring someone into the work environment who reflects an outlook, values, and comfort with a culture different than the one you want reflected in your workplace.

Competence

Obviously you want the person with the best skills and knowledge to perform the work defined in the position description.  That should be assessed clearly and well.  But there is another dimension here:  what is the person’s native ability to connect their work to the larger whole?  In a more connected world, competence no longer is limited to the specific tasks and outputs of a single job description.  To maximize impact, competence now includes the ability to multiply value by connecting that work to the larger whole.

Character

What is the core of this individual?  What questions do I need to ask relative to this work environment that will help me assess the character of this person?  And yes, there are many questions that are legal to ask in the hiring process that will get at this component of the hiring evaluation.  While companies rely more on background checks to assess basic information, and references become more skittish to provide an in depth statement about individuals for fear of possible litigation, this dimension is worth exploring with several questions directly aimed at assessing character.

Culture, Competence, Character.  If you assess in these dimensions, and find a fit that works for your organization, the instances of future personnel problems will be diminished.  Give thought to what you want, and don’t hire something significantly outside those parameters.

1 Comment

Filed under Executive Directors, Staff Management

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 13, 2013 · 5:56 pm

Assessing Personnel “Problems:” Three Questions to Ask

imagesNothing drains more energy or time from an association/nonprofit executive than when there are indications of a problem with staff.  It may be phone calls about poor customer service from members or leaders, missed deadlines or failure to respond appropriately, or any other number of signs that something is amiss.

Many times I hear execs say that they waited too long to intervene.  Other times I hear from staff that there is a sudden confrontation with no ability to explore the problem in a collaborative manner.   How can executives proceed in a fashion that will address the problem directly yet leave the most opportunity and ground for growth and ultimate success in dealing with a problematic staff issue?

I’ve found a three step process allows for an exploration, understanding, and creating a sound strategy for moving forward in these circumstances.   At times, there may not be a personnel issue at all.  Here are the questions to ask—and the order in which to move through the assessment:

Is there a systemic/process breakdown that is creating or exacerbating the problem?

There are times when what appears to be a problematic staff performance issue isn’t that at all.  There is, rather a systemic problem that is leading to breakdowns in staff capability to perform.  If the systemic problems are addressed, the performance problem may disappear.  Systemic problems may be problems of coordination/communication between people, processes, or departments, hardware or software malfunction, or any other number of structure/process/program issues.  If someone hasn’t been responsive, it is not productive to confront them only to discover that because of some communication breakdown they never received instructions, directions, etc.  Unfortunately, in human designed systems, whether management systems or computer, etc., there are sometimes built in glitches that create problems.  Before presuming you have a staff performance issue, make sure that there are not impediments that have been “cooked in” to the system.  That’s your first job as a manager in assessing performance and creating a context for excellence.

Is there a resource problem that is preventing the performance that is expected?

If you are sure that the management and communications systems are working properly and are coordinated well, the next level of question is whether or not there is a resource issue that is keeping the staff person from performing appropriately.  Do they have the equipment they need to perform well?  Do they have the training to function with excellence?  Do they have the information/direction needed to complete the task in line with expectations?  Do they have the time to do the work?  Is there so much work assigned that it is unreasonable to expect a well trained, appropriately oriented and equipped staff person to perform the work well.  Until these two basic questions can be answered in the affirmative, there is no way to tell whether you have a true staff performance problem, or a system/resource problem.

After answering the first two questions, then there is the third: Is this problem chronic or random?

Humans are human.  Even superstars make mistakes, and sometimes they make fairly big ones.  But these mistakes are outliers, and not the norm for a good staffer who is trained, equipped, and placed in a working system.

On the other hand, there are people who are either not suited for certain work, not compatible with an organizational culture, or not interested in performing to the standards of the organization (although I believe this is rare if the first two conditions are addressed appropriately).  In such instances, after having completed the assessments in the questions above, it is time for legitimate intervention.

The Bottom Line

Most people want to do well in their work.  For associations and nonprofits, it is much better to tap into that desire to do well, and to ensure that staff are embedded in a functional management system, with appropriate resources, direction, etc., and a clear sense of expectation.  You’ll save yourself a lot of grief, grow your staff toward excellence, and potentially even avoid employment related litigation (a large and growing concern in our sector) if you can demonstrate that you’ve done everything you need to do in terms of providing systems, training, and opportunity for staff to succeed.

2 Comments

Filed under Executive Directors, Staff Management

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,