General

[Guest post] Soft power is the driver of engagement.

July 28, 2017By Mike Hohnen

engagement

Managing people has changed considerably over time. Basically we are moving from hard to soft .

Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. at Havard Kennedy School was one of the first to talk about soft power and leadership.

To distinguish soft power from hard power in leadership, he compared the two as follows:

Type of Power

Behaviors

Sources

Examples

Soft

Attract and co-opt

– Inherent qualities- Communications

– Charisma- Persuasion

– Leading by examples

Hard

Threaten and induce

– Threats, intimidation- Payment, rewards

– Hire, fire, demote- Promotions, compensations

Looking at the Service Profit Chain, we know there is a connection between employee engagement and customer loyalty, and thus revenue. What do you think motivates you to work? Where does engagement come from? Is it the pay and other material benefits? Or is it because you love your job, your workplace, or you team?

Motivation comes in two basic forms: intrinsic and extrinsic. While extrinsic motivation is all about external rewards, intrinsic motivation refers to the joy and the fulfillment you have from doing something.

“Intrinsic motivation occurs when we act without any obvious external rewards. We simply enjoy an activity or see it as an opportunity to explore, learn, and actualize our potentials.”
(Coon & Mitterer, 2010)

Numerous researches have shown that intrinsic motivation plays an important part in employee engagement. Whether or not your intrinsic needs are met depends a lot on the leadership style of your line supervisor.

Let’s think about yourself in these two scenarios:

Your job pays well but you just hate your bossy manager who is always commanding and threatening to fire anyone who disagrees with him. You are always so stressed and you count down every second till the day ends.
Your boss is thoughtful and understanding and he just inspires you. And you believe in what you are doing even it pays a bit less and you feel you have a sense of belonging in your workplace and your team.

In which case do you think you will choose to commit? I think the answer is obvious.

Leading with soft power, managers will be able to not just to inspire and motivate their team members, but also to influence their behaviours and boost team performance.

On this blog, we have often discussed the need to shift our mindset from transactional to transformational. At the basic level, this is a shift from hard to soft power.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him; worst when they despise him.” Lao-Tsu

To learn more about employee engagement and transformational leadership, you can download Mike’s ebook Understanding Engagement. The ebook provides a very different approach to and perspective on leadership that I think you will need to rethink about how you are leading and managing your team.

Enter your email below and download the ebook now!

Leaders found less than proficient at leading others…

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Leader

Would it be fair to say that an important part of leadership has got to be the ability to lead others?

Yet, in a survey published by Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), only 45% of leaders are rated ‘proficient’ at this by their boss.

Wait a minute, are you saying that more than half of the European leaders out there are not considered very good at leading other people by their boss?

Yes exactly.

That is, if not shocking, then at least seriously thought provoking.

But the sad fact is that it correlates very well with the Gallup surveys that say that 60+% of our workforce are not particularly engaged in their job (and 23% are actively disengaged.) Engagement is, to a very large extent, a function of leadership.

These are depressing stats and to me, it just confirms that there is a serious challenge out there to improve our leadership capacity.

CCL recommends 3 ways to improve that situation:

Challenging assignments that offer opportunities to practice new skills in the workplace;
Relationships with other people who can provide feedback and support, including bosses and trusted colleagues; and
Coursework and training focused on leadership competencies needed by your organisation.

In all immodesty, this is exactly the way we do it and have been doing it on our GROW leadership program for some years now. We combine all there elements in one program.

You (and maybe your boss) define a challenging assignment that you would like to work on over the next 12 weeks. We prefer wicked problem to puzzles.

We use the Action Learning format for our work, which means you will be working in different constellations with your colleagues, sometimes the full set (a class), on other occasions, in table teams of five and most of the time, more intensely, in small triads that are supported by your coach.

The curriculum or course work is mainly introduced on a 3 day workshop that starts the 12 week course. We kick-off the leadership course with this workshop that introduces participants to a number of practical approaches on how to lead others, that they can pick and choose from – depending on the challenge they are working on.

The driving design principle is to take participants through as many interactions of the learning circle as possible.

If you are interested in learning more about how that works, you can watch a brief video below – and if you have the curiosity to take a deeper dive into the subject of how we produce engagement on our teams, you are welcome to download my ebook Understanding Engagement.

In this brief e-book, we will look at how the lack of engagement is to a large extent a function of leadership. And that if we really want to change the engagement levels on our teams, we will need to make radical shift in how we understand the world of work. The shift is all about moving from a transactional mindset to a transformational mindset. We will look into what that means, how it can help you as a manager and why it is so important.

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This is the 15th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

ETC is at the heart of your employee experience.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

ETC

What kind of employee experience are we delivering? That has been the theme of my blog posts over the past 3-4 weeks.

A few years ago, MIT Sloan Management Review ran an article entitled “Designing the soft side of customer service”. In it the authors argue that regardless of whether we are talking a pizza delivery or a complex consulting agreement, emotions are lurking under the surface and that our job is to make those feelings positive.

If we are aiming to create the optimal customer experience, we will need to start off by examining the kind of employee experience that is going to be the foundation of the customer experience.

A miserable employee is not going to provide your customer with a breathtakingly positive emotional experience – no matter how much you train them.

But this is not just about the full employee journey: recruitment to exit-interview. As managers, we need to focus on the day to day experience as well.

We have looked at endings, consequences and psychological safety in previous posts, so this week let’s take a look at what else we can learn from the field of behavioural science that can help us understand what drives a great employee or customer experience.

You need to focus on the “ETCs”.

Emotions influence what we remember. Emotionally charged episodes are easy to recall. “Experiences” that triggered no emotional reaction, positive or negative, are quickly forgotten.
Basically our emotions are triggered when something turns out better or worse than we expected. And the corresponding emotional response is then either positive or negative. A good manager does her best to manage the emotions of her team – and sprinkles the day with a few unexpected positive surprises as well. Positive surprises are anything from throwing a pizza and beer party to celebrate a win, to the simplest little gests of encouragement during the day.

Trust is the basic psychological variable that is essential to any form of relationship. No trust, no relationship. If we want engagement, there needs to be trust. And trust is the mirror of how we show up on a day to day basis as human beings. Are we reliable? Do we do what we said we would do? Do we care for and stand up for our team?

Control over one’s environment and knowledge of how events are going to unfold are fundamental psychological needs. But control is also linked to trust. In a high trust environment, the need for control is less. There is one more aspect of control when we are talking employees and that is the sense that I have some degree of control over how I do my job. This is one of the foundational cornerstones of employee engagement.

Every situation in the day that involves uncertainty either in outcome or in process will cause our team members to experience a loss of control – and that closes the loop back to emotions because a sense of loss of control creates some very negative emotions.

So there it is, as a manager, I need to manage the emotions, trust and sense of control of my team if I want to make sure that they are in the best possible shape to create a fabulous customer experiences.

It sounds complicated, but it does not need to be – In our next manager’s toolbox workinar*, we will talk about some simple tools and tips that can help you do a much better job at this.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 14th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

No fear, it is the foundation of a great team.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

No fear

The past weeks, we have been looking at the employee experience. If we buy into the whole concept of the Service Profit Chain, it makes perfect sense that creating a great employee experience will help us create the best possible guest experience.

So let’s explore another element of the employee experience.

At a very basic level, we all have a need to feel safe. Only when we feel safe can we do our best work – if we feel anxiety in some form or the other, our system directs our resource toward coping with whatever we feel as a threat and, at a very deep level, tries to answer the question: Fight, Flight or Freeze? Obviously none of these modes are conducive to producing great customer experience or anything else for that matter.

When we dissect great customer experiences, most of them are the result of one of our team members deciding to do something ‘different’ in a given situation. The guest’s situation does not fit ‘the script’ and there is a need for an improvised solution. The last thing that guest wants to hear is “Sorry, we can’t do that”. But in order for our frontline staff to produce those creative alternatives that win us customers for life, they need to feel safe.

A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, and successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison. – Charles Handy

That is also confirmed by research from Google where they have identified psychological safety as the number one driver of great team performance. Teams that experience a high degree of psychological safety outperform teams that don’t.

But what does psychological safety actual entail?

The research breaks it down into four components:

Tribe – A sense of belonging
Expectations
Hierarchy – what are the roles
Autonomy

So in simple terms, that means it is important that everyone feels included, that we set clear expectations and that we try and limit the surprises; that there is not an excessive focus on authority and positions – and finally the ultimate motivator: do I get to have a say in how I do my work? (Not what I do, that is a management decision, but how I do it.)

This is all fairly easy to understand and makes perfect sense to most of us. But how do you as a busy team leader actually do that?

Well it so happens that there is a very nifty way to approach this. It is called the high performance team model and I plan to explain how it works in details on my next managers workinar*.

If you have this approach in the back of our head as you tackle your day, you will notice a marked difference in team performance.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 13th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Employee experiences and why you need to focus on consequences

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Motivation
Last week, we looked at how progressive organisations are focusing on managing their employee experience as way to ensure the best possible customer experience. From a Service Profit Chain‘s point of view, this makes perfect sense.

We can create super sophisticated employee career journey maps – but we could also just look at what a day looks like on our team from an employee experience point of view. What are the emotional highs and lows in a day? So we looked at how managing positive ending has a huge influence on how the whole day is perceived.

This week, I would like to look at why managing the end of the day is just as or maybe even more important than managing the start of the day from a motivational point of view.

A reasonably accepted definition of motivation is:

“A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way”

So that reason, we call it the activator, for doing or not doing something can come from two main sources. It can be external; somebody does something to make you act (A request, a threat, a reward etc.). Or the activation comes from within yourself; you feel an inner urge to do something.

In either case, you end up doing whatever it is. That is the behaviour part. And all behaviour has a consequence. So there is this sequence: Activator – behaviour – consequence in everything we do.

In simple terms: You feel a craving for sweets. That activates you to get up and go to the cupboard and find a bar of chocolate. The consequence is that you feel good – your sugar craving is satisfied. (And, maybe you learn that eating chocolate is a solution for killing a sweet tooth.)

So now just pause for a minute.

What do you think has the largest influence on your behaviour on a day to day basis? The activator or the consequence?

If you are like most of the people I have in my workshops, you will say the Activator – We tend to think that we do things because there is a push. But that is not entirely correct.

80% of what we do or don’t do is determined by what we think the consequences are going to be. The drive is the consequence – that triggers the activator.

Ah, but that is not true, you may be thinking because I know that the consequences of eating chocolate is that I will get fat. So why do I still do it? Because we are all wired to value short-term consequences higher than long-term consequences. On top of that, we will value consequences that are certain, more than consequences that are a possibility in the future.

At 2 o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Eve – someone suggests that we crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels. The short-term well known consequence is that it is going to feel great. The long-term possible consequence is that we are going to feel terrible tomorrow.

That is also why it is hard to get people to stop smoking. The immediate 100% certain consequence is that they will feel a kick from the nicotine, the long term possible consequence is that it may kill them.

So back to managing our daily employee experience.

What do you think has the largest influence on our motivation to go to work? How the day starts (activation) or how the day ends (consequences)?

It’s a no brainer.

If we want our team to come in tomorrow, energised and ready to rock and roll, we need to think about how we manage the ending today. What was the consequence of their efforts today?

How are they going to feel when they go home: Elated, confident, positive? Or downcast, self blaming, frustrated and angry? Whatever it is, it is going to be our starting point tomorrow.

So how do we do a better job of managing our endings?

That is the subject of my upcoming tranings: The Manager’s Toolbox – you can join us and participate with your questions on comments live. Check it out here.

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This is the 12th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

What drives a fabulous employee experience?

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Progressive service organisations have for a while now been focusing on the customer experience. It is well established that the way our customers perceive the total experience is crucial to getting their loyalty – and loyalty, at the end of the day, is the magic path to profits and growth.

But only the most advanced companies are looking at the logical consequence of that thinking: How are we managing the employee experience? If you are familiar with the Service Profit Chain, this line of thought will not come as a surprise to you.

The customer experience at the end of the day is a reflection of the employee experiences. So it makes perfect sense to start looking much more closely at how we are managing our employee experiences.

There are different ways we could approach that. We could look at a classic journey map over the life span of employment. What is the pre-employment experience (recruiting, etc.)? How does the on-boarding flow? What is the developmental path proposed? And finally, what happens when people, for one reason or the other, move on? Who does the exit interview? You do have exit interviews, don’t you ? And how are we using the exit interviews to feedback into improving the current system?

Personally I think that any HR department worth its salt should insist that we create that map – and, once we have created it, do some research on what the emotional highs and lows are on the path.

But as a manager – the immediate supervisor of those all important frontline employees, there is possibly an even more important perspective to take on the employee experience. How does each day begin? How does the day then unfold and how does the day end?

Every day when we leave our work, we tell ourselves a story about how the day went.
It is not a factual objective recorded version of the day but our story of our day.

What shapes our story is basically three things: changes, significant moments and endings. These constitute the highs and lows of the day. Then we string them together and create a story from that.

When something changes for the better compared to what we expected, we have positive emotions and when something turns out to be worse, we have negative emotions. Positive or negative emotions trigger corresponding positive or negative thoughts respectively in our brain.

Depending on whether they are positive or negative, they influence our performance and relationships – as you probably well know. If you are aware of this, you can try and manage the day to the best of your ability to minimise unpleasant surprises. Often this is a question of taking the time to communicate with the team so that they understand what’s coming.

Significant moments are a bit in the same category – they are either positive or negative – if they are neutral, they would not be significant. What are your opportunities for building in positive significant moments? It can be anything from getting doughnuts for everyone on a tricky day, to having that important conversation with a key team member. Significant moments are very largely within your control – if you want to.

And finally, psychological studies have shown time and again that the ending is the most influential factor in how we evaluate an experience. A visit to the dentist that ends with sharp pain is remembered vastly different from the same visit extended with a 5 minute empathetic soothing talk and hug.

So how does a day end on your team? Have you ever given that any thought?

There is a nice process that you can incorporate into your manager’s toolkit for wrapping up the day in a constructive way – we call it the goals grid reflection – it’s a 5-10 minute process you can do at the end of the day with your team.

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This is the eleventh article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

You won’t get results by pussyfooting around the issues!

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Ed Catmull called Creativity Inc. Now you may not be familiar with the name Ed Catmull, but if I tell you that he was one of the three original founders of Pixar film then you’ll probably have an idea of who I’m talking about.

In the book is a chapter where Catmull describes the process behind making a successful animation movie. Catmull writes “Early on all our movies suck!”. This makes sense when you think about it. But when we see that fabulous animation, we often forget how that represents three years of hard work from an awful lot of people. And of course that rough idea was not born a box office hit. It was worked, reworked and polished endlessly until it became that work of art.

One thing is being a lone genius, a Picasso or a Rodin – tirelessly and self critically continuing until you get it right. But how does that work when you are 60, 70 or even 200+ people?

According to Catmull, one of the secrets to Pixar’s success is that they have this culture of candour. A feedback culture that is open, straightforward and honest – and maybe most importantly, never compromising.

So once a month, the management team sit down with the team working on a given animation project for the monthly review. Imagine this is meeting #24 i.e. 24 months into the project. Probably still another 12 or 18 months to go. The team that has been working on the project has been working long and hard on it, and they are probably relatively proud of what they have come to see as their baby.

“Success Is Going from Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm” – Sir Winston Churchill

But there is still work to do. So the challenge for the management team is, to give the ‘creatives’ the necessary feedback without them losing motivation and enthusiasm. So each management team member voices their opinion but in a very precise format. They explain what they feel worked well for them and they state very clearly what did not work well for them. “If the scene at 37 minutes, was supposed to make me laugh, I didn’t find it funny.” The management team makes a point of not suggesting what needs to be fixed or what they felt was wrong. They only communicate very clearly: Is this working for me or is it not working for me?

And so it goes on and on, iteration after iteration, and gradually the rough sketches and crazy ideas are honed into one smooth and fabulous animation movie. Management gives straightforward no nonsense feedback – but the project managers are always left with their ownership for the project intact. They must come up with a new solution or improvement.

It’s not personal, it’s a challenge

Note also that this type of feedback is not personal. This is not feedback that says you are a bad animator. It just says we need to try something different. It’s a challenge, not a criticism.

But now think of your own team and how you are conducting team reviews, feedback sessions, evaluations of past performance? Do you have a culture of straight talk?

Do you as the boss fall into the trap of telling them what was wrong and what they need to do in order to fix it?

No feedback, no progress.

Feedback is crucial to our progress, without it we would not see improvements in anything we do. But the wrong kind of feedback, the criticisms, the ironic comments, sarcasm and lukewarm endorsements, just kills motivation and engagement.

What is needed is a culture of candour.

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the tenth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Take charge of your energy levels!

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

In our ongoing summer series on how to best support the first time mangers, we now need to look at one of the big challenges – lack of time.

Landing that first managerial job is, for most new mangers, exciting and challenging: so much to do!

…and then the realisation: so little time to do it in.

The natural reaction is to just put in more hours. Crank up the work volume. And often it works for a while but then we run out of steam. Then in our pursuit to squeeze more productivity out of the hours available, we start researching time management tricks and tips – maybe we invest in a super To-do app for our phone or a fancy leather bound paper organisers.

But regardless, chasing more time quickly becomes exhausting.

There has got to be a better way.

There is.

But it is not about managing your time, but about managing your energy instead. When we are energised, we fly through the day – stuff seems to get done almost by itself – on the other hand, on the days when we are drained, even the simplest task seems to occupy the whole morning for us.

Where does our energy come from?

To some, it’s just a question of getting enough sleep and the right amount of caffeine in the morning – but it is actually more complex than that.

In the book “The Power of full engagement”, Tony Swartz explains that we draw our energy from four sources:

Body, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual.

Ideally, we need to manage them all to ‘Full’ in order to function at our best.

Body: physical energy

The basics are well known to most. You need your sleep and you need to eat in a sensible way. If you do not know what that means, there are lots of resources on the web to guide you – Google is a good place to start.

So assuming that you have the basics under control, you also need to manage your body energy over the day. This is less well known. You body is not a machine – if you don’t give it time to replenish and recover over the day, you wear it down in such a way that your productivity drops of dramatically as you move through the day. Ever notice a different in energy levels during the first hours of the morning and your 3pm drowsiness?

Every 90 min or so we need a break – a 15 min switch of, close your eyes, daydream or even better, take a brisk walk, whatever you can do to give your system a break from what you are doing.

If you apply these breaks every 90 min or so, you will experience that you can sustain the same high levels of physical energy throughout the day – afternoons become just as productive as mornings and thus make up for the time you ‘wasted’ taking these 15 min breaks.

Emotions: the quality of our energy

Maintaining a positive state of mind requires a conscious effort. The more pressure we face and the more fight-flight reactions we have during a day, the more we tend to slip into negative emotions. Being in a negative frame of mind reduces our effectiveness quite dramatically; we see problems where we need to see solutions and possibilities. And the negative impact is not limited to ourselves – negative emotions are contagious – they spread to our surroundings and make everyone else less effective as well. Apart from the fact that it ruins their day….

The two fastest ways to make a quick emotional reset when we sense that we are slipping into a negative state is to take a deep breath and exhale slowly – when we exhale slowly, we provide instant stress relief.

Secondly, we can shift our focus. Next time you are in a negative mood, notice where your focus is. You will be focusing on something that you don’t like or don’t want. When we do that, we trigger a negative emotional response. If we shift our focus to what we do want, what we could create, what would be a possibility then we also trigger a more positive emotional response – try it – it works wonders.

Negative emotions are like Tamagotchis, they need to be fed in order to persist. We can all experience burst of anger or frustration during a hectic day – that is unavoidable. Emotional bursts last on an average 90 sec if you just leave them to lose their steam. Only if you feed them with more negative thoughts do they survive for longer – Don’t feed them, shift your focus.

The Mind: Focus Energy

The fastest way to dilute your mental resources and energy is to shift tasks rapidly. In your brain, there is no such thing as multitasking, what we sometimes refer to as multitasking is just that we are asking our brains to perform several tasks at the same time by rapidly switching from one to the other – when we do that the loss in productivity is dramatic. Typically, you add an extra 25% time to tasks when you switch attention. So answering phone calls, replying to email, etc. while trying to finish that monthly report is a very bad idea.

Chunk and batch process your tasks in categories. Emails in one time slot, phone calls in another.

Big Rocks First

The number one productivity enhancer that everyone who implements it says changes their life dramatically is what Steven Covey called Big Rocks First: Start your day by tackling one big important project that you need to get done. (Decide the night before what it is going to be) Do it first, before the emails, and the 15 yellow post-it notes with things to do and people to call on them. Practice every day for a week and notice how much more you get done. It is amazing!

The Human Spirit: Energy of Meaning and Purpose.

How does it feel energy wise to work on something that in your view is meaningless? It’s a drag – yes?

On the other hand, how does it feel to work on something that you personally feel is ultra important and very meaningful? Now you are maybe thinking, but hey that’s not work, that’s called a hobby… Exactly. When something is meaningful to us – when we can see the purpose, it is so much more fun to do that we would even consider doing to for free.

So how do we tap into that energy?

We do so by becoming more aware about what is important to us. What we value in life. Becoming more aware of in what situation we have had this ‘flow’ experience and then asking ourselves so how can I organise myself in such a way that I get to do more of that.

Sometimes we are just in a situation that we will need to create our own meaning in order to survive. At the age of 21, I landed a job as a lift operator in a very posh Parisian hotel. Now that is not the most inspiring of jobs. So in order to preserve my sanity, I started to think what would it take to become the best lift operator in Paris? How do you run your lift in such a way that people (i.e my superiors) notice? That became my meaningful project every day and three months later, I was promoted to a new position in the hotel.

So in conclusion – and I do realise it is a bit of a cliché – but it really does apply here -Don’t try to work harder – you will just kill yourself – work smarter.

Take charge of your energy levels!

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This is the ninth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out