Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Leadership

The employee experience needs to adapt to the employee life cycle

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The classical way to define the employee life cycle is: attract, recruit, onboard, develop, retain and transition. But that is the HR perspective, not the employee’s perspective. And as good service designers, we know that we need to consider the perspective of the ‘customer’ or user if we are going to be successful with our journey/experience design.

The life cycle will vary from industry to industry and of course from employee to employee. So good experience design would require that we do more research on this, in order to understand what it looks like in our case.

But here is what it might look like from an employee’s perspective.

Is this for me?
Attracted to a job proposition and wondering if it is for me.

Will I make it?
Entering into the application, selection, interview, and final negotiation process.

I made it!
The excitement of being chosen and starting the new job. Flooded with new impressions and ‘firsts’.The lunch canteen is amazing. Loving the attention I get as a newbie. (Or so one hopes.)

Am I good enough for this?
The first feelings of being overwhelmed. Am I good enough for this? Imposter syndrome. Do I belong here? Is this really for me? Feeling very much outside my comfort zone. Should I bail out and limit the damage?

Challenging but do-able
Feeling more secure in the saddle. Challenged and on the edge of my comfort zone, but in an exciting way. Giving the job everything that I have, and enjoying it.

Cruising – no sweat
The daily routine sets in, and most of what I do is well within my comfort zone. (Canteen is not nearly as nice as when I started.) Engagement may start to regress, through lack of challenges.

Is this it?
The first doubts start creeping in. I am always well within my (now shrinking*) comfort zone. This is no longer meaningful for me

From here there are two options: change your job or stagnate completely.

Experiences are all about managing customers’ emotions, as we have seen in previous blog posts on the subject of Service Design Thinking. The same principle applies to employee experience design. We need to understand the emotions that the employee is going through at each stage of the cycle.

When we review the above life cycle it becomes clear that the overall principle we need to look at is where people are in terms of comfort zones. Growth and development are keys to engagement and enthusiasm. But learning and growth happen just outside our comfort zone. We have the misconception that if we do the same thing for a long time we will get better and better at it. Not true. Research shows that, if anything, we stagnate or regress*. (Could you pass a driving test today? Probably not. See what I mean?) In order to get better we need to challenge ourselves and make a deliberate effort to improve. On the other hand, if we get too far outside our comfort zone we trigger fear, and then all learning and development stops as we move into “fight or flight” mode.

Engagement is essentially the product of the accumulated emotional experience. It is what we in a service profit chain terminology would call content. It is different from context (environment, salary and work conditions), which forms the basis of satisfaction but does not produce engagement. We can all have tricky and less than satisfying days, just as we can have fabulous days. But over time the key to engagement is: is this meaningful for me overall? Do I regularly find that I am at the edge my comfort zone, in a constructive and challenging way?

So the key to engagement and retention is to create an environment where the employee can safely switch back and forth between “challenging but do-able” and “cruising, no sweat” modes.

When looking at the employee life cycle in this way, it also becomes clear that as a manager you have a huge responsibility to know where your employee is in the cycle, and to do what you can to support that person in the best possible way. And that may even include helping an employee to move on to a new and more challenging position, if you have no more challenges to offer.

 

Why culture is not enough to save your employee experience

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The four quadrants of the employee experience

Last week I argued that culture is an often overlooked and important part of the employee experience – and it is.

However, having a great culture is only part of the story – as we all well know, we can’t suboptimise ourselves to greatness.

A great employee experience is not about how high a fuzzy-feel-good factor you can score. It’s about sense making and meaning. Is this meaningful to me or not?

When things are meaningful, we thrive; when things become meaningless, we suffer.

When you look at it this way, it becomes clear it is not enough to make part of the employee experience pleasant. It is not about the free fruit or great lunch service. That is also important, but it’s also just another part – the same way that our culture is only a part of the whole experience.

So, if we recapitulate.

We are striving for high levels of engagement. Engagement emerges from an individual feeling of motivation, enthusiasm – call it what you like – but it is something that starts on the inside of an individual and it is influenced by the three other parts: culture, physical environment (system) and the job that we get to do (and how we are allowed to do it).

This is the very simple explanation why it is so incredibly difficult to achieve consistently high levels of engagement. If you are not hitting all the elements more or less perfectly, there is no engagement.

We can have exciting challenging jobs, but in a horrible culture that is not meaningful for very long. We can work in the loveliest of cultures, but where ‘nothing seems to really work around here’. That is also not meaningful. And, finally, we can build these beautiful work environments with lovely cultures, but everything is so controlled, right down to how I am supposed to do every little detail, and that is not meaningful either.

And, to top it off, we must, of course, mention the fourth variable – the individual. None of this works the same for everyone. Each individual has their preferences and their ideas of what is meaningful to them.

So, if you have a day where you feel frustrated that you have tried everything to create a great workplace, don’t despair! Getting it right is really hard, but if you manage to do so, the pay-off is amazing.

How is that for a meaningful challenge?

If you are interested in exploring what it takes to develop engagement you are welcome to download my free e-book here

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One thing that will dramatically improve your performance

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Think about it for a moment…, what is one thing you could work at that would dramatically improve your performance as a leader?

My theory is that most of us could improve the quality of our decisions. When I look at my own life and try to identify some of the main causes of difficult times, frustrations, etc., they can quite clearly be attributed to decisions that I have taken or possibly not take, which is in itself a decision.

So why is it hard for us to take consistently great decisions?

  • We are not as rational as we would like to be. We like to think of ourselves as super rational, but in reality, we are not. We make up a story that explains the irrational decision we took in order to convince ourselves and others how rational we are. Often, not always, it is bullsh*t.
  • We don’t understand what is really going on. We are looking at a situation through our own limiting mental models, and we confuse what in reality is just our perspective with reality or the truth.
  • We don’t take the trouble to gather enough information. We take decisions based on a few facts plus our own gut feeling. Sometimes it works brilliantly, but more often than not is doesn’t. A classic in this category is confusing our assumptions with facts. We think we know, but in reality, we are just assuming, and as my favourite coaching colleague from the US always used to say: Never forget Mike, that assumption is the mother of all f… ups.

So how do we work on improving the quality of our decisions? Once again it comes back to awareness. What we are aware of we can control, what we are not aware of controls us.

So the first thing to do is to start a decision journal.

Dedicate a notebook to this. And whenever you need to make a consequential decision, take a moment to think through: What are the options? What is your decision and what do you expect to happen? Make a note as well of your current state (tired, happy, stressed or whatever). Make space on the page for you to come back at a later time and note down what actually happened and what your key learning has been.

Start the decision journal today, by which I mean get it ready and commit to using it. Then the next time you need to take a significant decision, take the trouble to document it. Then on a regular basis go back and review your notes. Is there a pattern? What are you learning?

If you would like to get more sophisticated about this, check out this blog post from Farnam Street.

My personal experience of doing this is that I became aware that I had a tendency to take a certain type of decision very quickly, typically when something had not turned out as I expected and I felt an urgent need to correct the course. But what I had not previously noticed is that whenever something turns out different than what we expect, it triggers an emotional reaction and that emotional reaction would often tilt my decision toward the first idea that came into my mind.

Once I became aware of this, I have tried to postpone that kind of decision, to give myself time to get a different perspective, to resist the urge and that has definitely prevented me from a few bad decisions in the past 6 months.

Proving the point that more than anything, becoming aware of our own decision-making process helps us avoid the really bad decisions more than it makes us genius decision makers, but already that is not too shabby an outcome for many of us.

Once we have the decision journal in place, it’s time to practice getting better. A good place to start is to read Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath.

And what about your team? What is the one thing that really causes you frustration when you look at the people who report to you? If you in any way resemble many of the leaders that I coach, you will say: The quality of their decision… If only they could be trusted to take better decisions, my life would be so much easier.

Can you help your team make better decisions as well? Absolutely! It’s all about awareness, remember. We will have a look at how to do that in next week’s blog post.


This the thirteenth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

Are you an accidental diminisher?

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In my previous blog post, we looked at two very different leadership approaches: multipliers vs. diminishers.

In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the diminisher.

So how much output do we get from someone when we hire them to do a fair day’s work?

Well, there is quite a lot of research that indicates that on average, we are getting somewhere between 30 and 50% of what people are actually capable of.

This is also reflected in the Gallup engagement research that shows that +/- 65% of the workforce is not particularly engaged in their work. If you are not engaged, you are probably also not giving it your best.

So what are the barriers for our people to give their best? The top three, according to the research are:

  1. Rules, regulations, and structure in the organisation
  2. Lack of feedback and encouragement
  3. The leadership style of the immediate supervisor

So to put it in a nutshell: If you are not getting max output from your team, it is probably because of you.

Yes, let that sink in for a moment.

That is not because you are a slave driver with psychopathic tendencies, at least I hope not.

More likely your are just an accidental diminisher. Accidental because when you have a diminishing impact, you are likely to be completely unaware of it and probably the last to know.

The first thing you need to think about is your own assumptions and beliefs.

You see, diminishers see intelligence as based on elitism and scarcity. Diminishers appear to believe that really intelligent people are a rare breed and that they are of that rare breed. This naturally leads them to conclude that they are special and that other people will never work out what to do without them.

They also seem to follow a logic that says people that don’t ‘get it’ now probably never will. Therefore, I need to do all the thinking around here.

This is what Caroll Dweck, author of Mindset, would call a limiting mindset.

The Multipliers, on the other hand, have a growth mindset, which is a fundamental belief that basic qualities like intelligence and ability can be cultivated through effort.

Multipliers get more from their people because they are leaders who look beyond their own genius and focus their energy on extracting and extending the genius of others. And they don’t get just a little more back; they get vastly more.
_Liz Wiseman

As we all well know, our assumptions and beliefs govern our behaviour.

So the diminisher typically displays some or all of the following behaviours:

  • Micromanage things
  • Do most or all of the talking at team meetings
  • Have the answers and ask few questions
  • Be judgmental and critical of others
  • Create stressful environments that often do not feel safe
  • Take fast decisions (as opposed to getting everyone buy in)
  • Drown the team with new ideas and initiatives

So here are a few questions to ask yourself and reflect on:

  • How might I be shutting down the ideas and actions of others, despite having the best of intentions?
  • What am I inadvertently doing that might be having a diminishing impact on others?
  • How might my intentions be interpreted differently by others?
  • What messages might my actions actually be conveying?
  • What could I do differently, that would make more space for the to contribute and grow?
  • These questions can be tricky to get feedback on from your direct reports, for obvious reasons. But what you can ask when there is the right opportunity is: Is there anything that I could do differently that would help you do a better job?

And then listen very very carefully.

Check out Lis Wiseman’s book for yourself: Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

This the twelveth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

Are you a Multiplier or a Diminisher?

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If you want to reap the full benefits of your investment in training courses, you need to make a plan for what you are going to do when the course is over, because that is when the magic really happens.

We know from the 70:20:10 model that most of our learning comes from what we do on the job. That is the 70%.

And we also know that if we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got.

And even that is not quite accurate because research shows that if we just do what we do, without trying to get better, we will actually regress, and gradually get slightly worse. But that is another story.

So we need to inspire our team members to do something different than what they have always done. That is why we send them on a training course.

But if these training programs are just seen as an entertaining stand-alone event then they do not help us much, except maybe for a few high performers who have the drive to take the materials and build their own implementation program.

So assuming that only a few of our team players are so called high performers, we then need to manage how we can best support the ‘normal’ team members in actually trying out their new knowledge, experimenting, getting feedback and gradually improving in order to ultimately get really good at whatever it is they learnt on the training course. That was, after all, the objective of the whole exercise.

Your approach makes a difference.

The key differentiator in this post-course learning phase is the team leader or the immediate supervisor.

Immediate supervisors, whether they are CEOs, VPs or floor managers come in basically two categories: Multipliers and Diminishers, writes Liz Wiseman, author of the book “Multipliers”.

Multipliers are essentially leaders who make everyone around them smarter, they consciously invest in the success of others. Their basic attitude is that people are smart and will figure it out and when they do, they become even smarter.

Multipliers ask lots of questions – Diminishers have all the answers.

Diminishers, on the other hand, create dependency. They often jump in and save the day. They drive results through their personal involvement and they are never shy to remind everyone how much smarter and more capable they are. When they do that, they drain the energy and motivation from everyone around them, and ultimately that reinforces the dependency.

Multipliers make sure that we get a high return on our training investment whereas diminishers time and again end up reducing all the time and effort that has been invested to nothing.

The key to being a great multiplier is to get people to think for themselves. They will never develop that ability if you always tell them what to do and how to do it. Learning means exercising some degree of choice, as opposed to working to a predetermined script. When you exercise your choice, you have an experience. That experience gives you feedback on how well you did. For most of us, this is a deeply motivating process. So building our capacity based on what we learnt on the course means trying things.

So the multiplier makes sure to hold a debrief meeting when a team member ‘returns’ from a formal training program. The purpose of the debrief is to establish what the team member is now going to work on in order to reinforce and build on the knowledge or inspiration that has been given in the course.

You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.
– Johan C. Maxwell.

As with so many other new things, baby steps are the key. Don’t try and implement everything at once but make a plan. It’s the good old 20/80 principle again. What would be a small thing from the course that would make a big difference? That is a great starting point. Once we have that up and running, we move to the next item on the list, and step by step we build our capacity and performance. Use the GROW model to set it up.

So are diminishers evil egotist? No, most diminishers don’t even realise that they are draining the team. They actually mean well. They think they are being helpful. Next week, we will take a closer look at how not to fall into the trap of becoming a diminisher.

Check out Lis Wiseman’s book for yourself: Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

This the eleventh blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.


A great course gives you just 10% of what is needed to grow the team.

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Participants attending the GROW leadership course

Quite a few years back now, the Center for Creative Leadership developed the 70:20:10 model for learning and development. The research behind the model shows that most of our learning (70%) stems from hands-on, on-the-job experiences. We mainly learn from what we do.

When we learn from others, it is typically in the form of coaching, mentoring and various forms of collaboration. This accounts for roughly 20% of our learning, and finally, the last 10% of our learning is based on courses, books, lectures etc., what we also call formal learning.

This then raises the question: Should we just forget about the formal part? Are courses and books just a waste of time?

If we look at the research on how high performers learn and develop, it becomes clear that there is a pattern.

High performers are typically quick to grasp the basics and when it comes to new learning, they often get this in the form of more formal structured courses, training or books.  The 10% is their foundation. That is what they use to build their development on.

What makes them high performers is that the new knowledge inspires them and drives them to want to practice. They spend hours trying out their new learning. Through trial and error, self-testing and feedback, they gradually improve their capability.

They are also not shy to seek the support and help of colleagues. They may even take a coach for a period in order to make sure that they really get to master whatever the new skill is (Just look at any top performer in music, acting or sports and you will see exactly this pattern). They are not born like that, they work hard to get there.

It is their drive to improve that makes them high performers.

So back to the question about formal courses. Do we need them?

Yes, we do.

Because we need that basic input, that initial inspiration. But we must understand that if we do not reinforce the message and help set the scene for the additional 70% on the job learning and the 20% collaborative learning or coaching, then we have wasted our time and efforts. 

That means that if you, as a manager, have had one of your team members on a course, you need to think about how you are going to support that person in developing and improving their skills, building on the foundational knowledge that they have acquired on the course.

Most of them are probably not what we would define as high performers, they are just great team members. And therefore, they do not have the drive or natural inclination to do this by themselves.

The knowing-doing gap
The first step in that process is to have a follow-up conversation with your team members when they return from the course.  What have they learnt and most importantly, where do they see the knowing/doing gap? What is it that they now know, but that they are currently not doing?

How can you then, as this person’s manager, make sure that your team member gets to practice these new aspects? This takes us back to our famous GROW model.

If you have forgotten what that is about, check it out here.

You multiply the value of the course experience by at least 10 times if you help them actually implement what they are learning. But don’t forget, no feedback, no learning.

If you want to further maximise their learning, make sure that they team up with one or two others who also did the course and have them form an action learning triad or let them have the support of an experienced coach. That way you will also make sure you have covered the 20% that comes from collaboration and/or coaching.

In my experience, this is the way to create sustainable change. The key is not the learner as much as their immediate supervisor.

In this context, the immediate supervisor comes in one of two basic types: the ‘Multiplier’ and the ‘Diminisher’. Being one or the other makes all the difference, as I will explain in next week’s post.

This the tenth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

The secret to faster team development is a shorter year.

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Seriously.

Let’s first deconstruct how do you know what to work on in order to ensure that you and your team are developing?

One way to get a grip on that would be to ask yourself: “If I was doing this reflection one year from now and looking back on the year that has passed, what should have happened during this past year in order for me to feel that I and/or my team have made serious progress?”

Because as Peter Drucker famously said: “What managers manage is change. The rest is admin.”

So that is the project.

That is what needs to change in order for you and/or your team to feel that you are actually developing. And as I have written about earlier, development is not only important because it means that we are making progress, it’s a key to our well-being, motivation and job satisfaction

But a whole year’s worth of change is a lot of change. So what typically happens is that we undershoot the runaway and don’t get to where we wanted to be. It was a nice dream.

We fall short of our own expectations.

The problem is not that we are being over ambitious, we need to be ambitious. The problem is that we are trying to chew off too big a bite.

So now ask yourself the same question but reframe it to just 3 months, the magic 90 days: If I was doing this reflection 90 days from now and looking back at these 90 days that have passed, what should have happened during these 90 days in order for me to feel that I and/or my team have made serious progress?

This is a horizon that is within our reach, we can almost see the contours of the finish line as we get going. It’s not that far, we can do this. We have set a goal that we can see ourselves completing within a reasonable time frame.

So personally I have given up yearly goals and targets. I have a long-term plan, which is more a direction that I am heading than it is a measurable goal. With that direction in mind, I work in 90-day sprints. It gives me a completely different sense of accomplishment.

Try it out for yourself.

And if you need more resources to get you going, here are my favourite tools:

Best self 90-day planner – This is at the core of my productivity.

If you would like to study this 12-week-year principle more in depth, here is a great book that originally inspired me:

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

This the ninth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? If you would like to read other posts in this series, don’t forget to check out Mike’s blog.

Honest feedback that propels you forward!

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There are many ways to make sure that you learn and develop. Last week, I wrote about setting up a mastermind group as one way. This week, I would like you to consider coaching.

Great coaches can do much more than just influence behaviors; they will be an essential part of the leader’s learning process, providing knowledge, opinions, and judgment in critical areas. Which brings us back to the key issue of honest constructive feedback. For many managers, their coach may be the only place they get totally honest unfiltered feedback, from someone who only has their best interest in mind

To begin this process, you need to start the search inside of yourself. No amount of coaching is going to do you much good unless you are highly motivated to change, develop and or learn whatever the case may be.

Part of motivation includes being very clear with oneself that the only time any real learning and development occurs is when we are slightly outside our comfort zone.

“Executives who get the most out of coaching have a fierce desire to learn and grow.”
– HBR survey

Bottom line, do you really want to change and are you prepared to suffer a bit as you do?

If not, forget it.

Assuming that you are ready, you need to be very clear about what it is you would like to be different.

What is the challenge that you are facing? Is it a skill set your need to build? Is it behaviour that you would like to change? How will you know that the coaching has been successful?

Most good coaches work with a specific methodology and within certain fields, and the more clear you are about what it is you would like to work on, the better the chance of finding the right ‘specialist’.

Where are the good coaches?

I have still to come across a good web based ‘find a coach’ service (There are endless directories/listings but that is not much help. What is needed is a review based neutral service, a TripAdvisor for coaches if you like; if you know of one please do let me know). So as with so many things, you need to use the word of mouth method and start asking around.

Reach out to people you know and trust who might be able to recommend a good coach. Ask friends and colleagues, post on Facebook and LinkedIn. Once you start getting some names, you check them out in more details for fit.

A few good questions to ask the person referring a coach:

  • What specific things did their coach help them do?
  • Was there goal setting and were those goals clearly met?
  • What was the most valuable (or a couple of the most valuable) thing they got from the sessions?
  • Did they see a direct impact on their business because of the coach?
  • Did they genuinely enjoy working with the coach and if so why?

Eventually, you end up with maybe 3-5 possible names.

Then you schedule a first conversation with each of them. Most coaches worth their salt will give you a first conversation or shorter session for free. The reason the good coach will do that is that they too need to assure themselves that there is a good fit. (Personally, I turn down as much as 25% of the requests I get because I am unsure about the fit.)

“Good chemistry is a decisive factor in establishing a productive coaching relationship.”
– HBR survey

Online or face-to-face coaching?

Five or ten years ago it would have been a no-brainer. Coaching was almost per definition a face-to-face process. Today that is no longer the case. Face to face is still great but there are a huge amount of people out there who are benefiting enormously from coaching that is either done via SKYPE or even phone.

The perfect coach for you online/phone is in my view still much better than a so-so fit that you can meet with personally.

From a financial point of view, it is also my impression that you get more coaching for your money when you go online as the coach does not have to calculate travel time and expenses into their fee.

So what is holding you back?

Ask yourself that first crucial question. If I was reflecting on this a year from now and looking back on the year that had just passed, what would have happened this past year in order for me to feel that I had made serious progress?

And off you go…


This the seventh blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why and how to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

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