The difference between a leader who achieves commitment from employees versus one who achieves compliance, is effective coaching. The most effective leaders are those who see themselves as coaches and leaders rather than managers or supervisors. But what makes a leader an effective coach? It’s their mindset.
Happy employees positively affect workplace operations. Statistics show that companies that foster employee happiness outperform their competitors by 20%. It’s no surprise, then, that some companies are taking more active measures to promote positive employee experiences.
64% of applicants wouldn’t respond to a job posting with a poorly written or confusing job title. And 60% find jargon to be annoying. Writing effective job descriptions is a challenging task, but it has a major impact on the quality of applicants your business receives. Small businesses can be especially susceptible to poorly written job descriptions — with a smaller staff and more at stake per individual performance. So, attracting the right talent is critical to business success.
The summer and holiday months are a busy time of year for many employers. Many companies ramp up their hiring during this time to accommodate the influx of demand from consumers and travelers. As such, hiring managers receive a deluge of applications, and they need to have a strategy in place in order to get through the high volume of resumes in a timely and effective manner, while remaining thorough and without sacrificing standards. This year, for example, UPS estimates that they will bring on an additional 100,000 employees for the holiday season. The challenge becomes, how do you manage a high volume of candidates while maintaining the integrity of your hiring process? How do you think about and frame the conversation of professional development when it’s seasonal work?
A new season of hiring means welcoming lots of new members to the team. Change can be challenging, so it’s important to focus on creating a long-term plan for your new hire’s success within your organization. This helps build an employee development framework for both you and the individual so they can make a smooth transition and feel empowered to take on their new role, while working toward their career goals and meeting organizational needs.
We’ve put together the four necessary points you need to focus on when planning and building out your long-term success plan for your employees.
The average annual turnover rate for salespeople is 20%. Many factors account for that number, but a sizeable amount of voluntary turnover occurs from burnout and lack of motivation. To combat turnover, it’s crucial to put added resources behind your onboarding and development process to ensure your hires maintain the engagement, mental toughness, and willingness to tap into the personality traits that contribute to success in the role. We’ve previously discussed what the different sales jobs entail and which personality traits are best suited to those jobs, but how do you nurture your employees so that they maintain their performance and resist leaving?
Just because a candidate exhibits the right personality traits doesn’t mean they will perfectly adapt to the role without additional coaching and development. Unproductive workers reduce revenue potential by 40%, and another 36% of your team can also experience negative performance trends when affected by negativity from a low-performing or unhappy co-worker. As we’ve previously outlined, it doesn’t always come down to experience. Look for candidates who are adept at navigating the modern sales force.
The office environment can be a challenging place. You have to deal with all kinds of personalities at any given time, you see things that are broken but lack the resources or influence to fix them, and, often, people who don’t understand your work are there to tell you how to do it. But, we all just want to produce good results and receive acknowledgment for our effort. In an ideal world, you are in a role that plays to your strengths and motivations and limits exposure to your weaknesses, and you are partnered with a manager who serves as your advocate. In reality, you’re likely motivated by some aspects of your job and not always by others, and your manager has many other responsibilities that prevent them from being the best coach they can be to their team. In this scenario, the best you can do is do your best. And achieving your best requires a measure of self-management.
Motivation is often a set factor. In other words, you can’t choose what motivates you at work any more than you can choose your height or your family members. You can’t make yourself be outgoing if you’re shy, and you can’t spark competition if trophies don’t interest you. And the external factors that can stand between you and your goals—economic upheaval, competitive threats, disruptive changes, and mergers and acquisitions—aren’t something we can always plan for. You can, however, choose how you conduct yourself.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about mental toughness in athletes; what it is and how to spot it. While some people are more naturally inclined to possess the traits that suggest mental toughness, it’s also a skill that can be developed. Not everyone needs to be a North Carolina point guard to understand mental toughness or learn how to leverage those qualities in their professional careers, you can also cultivate mental toughness on your own teams.
Before approaching a strategy for mental toughness, you should consider what it means to value mental toughness in the workplace. Why should you prioritize building these skills in your team if they aren’t naturally inclined to do so on their own? If these are skills typically associated with athletics, how can they apply to the workplace?
Building mentally tough teams requires mentally tough employees. In our latest whitepaper,our research team defines the psychological advantage of six essential personality traits that make up mental toughness. And while some people are more naturally inclined to possess these traits, mental toughness is also a skill that can be developed by honing in on these key characteristics and building upon them over time.
By Caliper, a human capital analytics company leveraging decades of data and validated assessment results to predict and select high-quality candidates. Caliper is a TMSA Affiliate member.
Great leaders often have several traits in common. We tend to see characteristics like strong communication, a positive attitude and a sense of integrity on the short list. But, where does self-awareness come into play? This attribute is often overlooked in leaders, but here at Caliper, we argue that this characteristic can make or break a work environment.
By Caliper, a human capital analytics company leveraging decades of data and validated assessment results to predict and select high-quality candidates. Caliper is a TMSA Affiliate member.
Everyone has seen the statistics about employee happiness and how it’ll change the way your workplace operates. Companies with happy employees outperform their competitors by 20%. Some companies have even gone as far as hiring an employee experience officer. One of the most notable companies to hire someone dedicated to employee experience was Airbnb back in 2015 when they transitioned their Chief Human Resources Officer to the Head of Employee Experience. The duties of the new role include shared HR functions as well as responsibilities that focus on their new “workplace as an experience” vision. To achieve this vision, most offices included a group of employees called “ground control” that focus on bringing AirBnb’s culture to life.
By Caliper, a TMSA Affiliate Member
With the number of jobs and applicants increasing, many professionals are turning to advanced tools such as personality assessments to aid them in the hiring process to determine if potential candidates are the right fit for their company. But what is a personality assessment?
By Mike Temple, TranStrategy Partners
By Mark Greenberg
“..at least 40% of millennials see themselves staying at their current organization for a minimum of nine years.” - Jennifer Deal and Alec Levenson (2016)
The current labor force in America is polarizing – there are lots of older workers, lots of younger ones, and fewer people in the middle. That’s a legitimate managerial challenge. There are fast-paced changes in work that lead to skill shortages and managers complain that they have no one ready to fill vacancies. And the numbers of women and minorities at senior levels are still insufficient.
When a key position is left unfilled for any length of time, important decisions cannot be reached and critical activities are delayed. Often it is difficult to meet or exceed customer expectations, to confront competition successfully, or to follow through on efforts of crucial long-term significance.There are also other general challenges – reduced loyalty among employees, increased turnover of identified successors and high performers, increased attrition in executive level positions, and a shortfall in the number of future leaders.
Retaining leadership talent is both a strategic and economic necessity. You cannot implement your strategy without the right leadership. Because of these issues, there is a heightened sense of urgency about succession planning. No matter how certain your future appears, now is the time to begin taking measures to close the gaps we face over the coming years. A succession plan can help organizations drive competitive strategy, reinforce values, and successfully secure their future.
To focus your succession effort:
The demand for talent has been picking up for the past few years, perhaps to the degree that the balance of power has shifted from employer to employee. Employees are also becoming more mobile and willing to work as contracted specialists and independent consultants, a development that has compounded the challenges associated with hiring, engaging, and retaining staff.
This is a true story: In a meeting at a popular technology company, the CEO and his team had just completed their annual talent review of up-and-coming leaders within the company. Retention of top talent was a high priority, and the CEO gave an example of “Joe,” a direct report of the Chief Operating Officer. The strategy included giving Joe a huge raise and assigning him to a high-visibility special project in addition to his demanding day job. The CEO stated that these actions would ensure Joe doesn’t become a flight risk.
In ancient mythologies from around the world, it’s common to find gods and monsters bearing multiple heads, and such beings are depicted as formidable and difficult to defeat. It turns out the ancient people were not just creative; they had good business sense too.
Imagine this. One of your top sales managers has asked to meet with you. You settle into your morning coffee, take a seat at your desk, and invite the sales manager into your office. Right away, you notice something off in his tone. And then it happens … he delivers his two-weeks’ notice.
