Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Leadership/Management

What makes a leader better?

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Silo organisation

In a recent article in Straegy+Business I came across the following paragraph:

The fact is that giving people bigger jobs with fancier titles and larger salaries won’t make them better. More complex assignments will. Just look at the leaders of ANZ, the global banking group headquartered in Melbourne. Each time an employee identified as having high potential is promoted, the company makes sure it’s not to the same job on a larger scale (in terms of budget and resources) but to an entirely new set of challenges—maybe it’s relocating to a new country, shifting from a staff to a line role, or moving from a turnaround situation to launching a new business unit.

 

It made me think: so how good are we at  doing exactly that in the hospitality industry?

In my experience we don’t do it very much. A really good waiter gets promoted to head waiter and then on to restaurant manager. A good chef becomes sous-chef  and eventually maybe head-chef.  

And then we wonder why we have silo-thinking.

10 leadership traits that people adore

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Great Boss?

Many books have been written about what leadership is – but what is it from a followers perspective?
This is what respondents reply when asked to list the characteristics of leaders they admire:

  1. Has a clear vision of how people’s work meets the leader’s expectations.
  2. Provides timely, clear, constructive feedback.
  3. Expresses appreciation and gives credit where credit is due.
  4. Actively listens and answers questions.
  5. Treats others with respect and kindness.
  6. Consistently fair in their treatment of others.
  7. Trains, develops, and grows their people.
  8. Willing to jump in and help out when things become difficult.
  9. Has an open door policy and is available.
  10. Supportive and protective of their people when things go wrong.

 
Source: SmartBlog on Leadership

So, all you need to do now, is rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 according to how well you doing on each of those points – and if you are honest with yourself you will have a very practical and workable t-do list on what needs working on.

If you are courageous you could even ask one or two close collaborators that are not afraid to give you honest replies to review the evaluation you made of yourself and give you some honest feedback.

Welcome back from summer…

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It time to roll up our sleves and get cracking again…

As Joyce Hostyn writes on her blog :

“Beauty is an outcome of a focus on the human side of business. Of a deep understanding of people’s dreams, desires and search for meaning. Of a pursuit of a higher purpose.”

Watch her inspiring presentation here:

Ready? Let go to work…

A culture of doing stuff

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Dialog drives culture-2

“Only the leader can set the tone of the dialogue in the organization. Dialogue is the core of culture and the basic unit of work. How people talk to each other absolutely determines how well the organization will function. Is the dialogue stilted,politicized, fragmented and but covering ? Or is it candid and reality-based, raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions. If it’s the former as it is in all too many companies, reality will never come to the surface.

You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue, one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor and informality.”

Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy (CEO Honeywell Int’l) and Ram Charan with Charles Buck.

Without trust no engagement…

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Employee engagement seems to be the new buzzword.

Everybody understands that it is important but there seems to be quite a lot of confusion about how one gets to full engagement.

Each year the Gallup organization pours more oil on that fire when they publish their Employee Engagement Overview.

Year after year we see that somewhere between 60 and 70% of the workforce is not particularly engaged. And only somewhere between 15 and 20% depending on the region are actively engaged.

Apart from the fact that it means that a lot of people are leading lives that could be so much more fun, it is also problem seen from productivity point of view.

Engaged employees are anywhere between two and ten times more productive than employees that are not engaged.

From a service point of view there is also a world of difference between the service that a fully engaged employee will give a guest and what that same guest will receive from an employee that is more or less indifferent.

We have all tried both – and we all know what a difference it makes.

So understandably most companies would like to raise their engagement levels.

However in my view lack of engagement is just a symptom. The problem is trust or more correctly lack of trust.

It is great to be fascinated by customer loyalty and the net promoter score – as long as we understand what really drives that metric.

This is also why when we want to implement the concept of the service profit chain we can’t just focus on attracting loyal customers, however tempting that may be. We must start out by examining our own culture.

So how do we create trust

And James L. Heskett makes this point very clearly here:

Managers do what they say they will do. Make few promises and keep them all. Setting and meeting expectations is critical to creating high levels of trust

Simon Sinek says it all boils down to this:

whether a leader puts themselves or their people first, determines if they are worthy of our love and loyalty.

In his book Why Leaders Eat Last he makes this point brilliantly.
in the book he also demonstrates what it really takes to develop trust

There is also an interesting article on trust here:

Great leaders build a culture of courage in a climate of fear

A great manager is a rare bird…

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According to a recent blog post on HBR Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. But mostly they get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Gallup finds that great managers have the following talents:

They motivate every single employee to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.
They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
They create a culture of clear accountability.
They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

But…

Very few people are able to pull off all five of the requirements of good management. Most managers end up with team members who are at best indifferent toward their work — or are at worst hell-bent on spreading their negativity to colleagues and customers.

However, when companies can increase their number of talented managers and double the rate of engaged employees, they achieve, on average, 147% higher earnings per share than their competition.

Read the full article on HBR her

The future of work … continued

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I was going to write a blog post on this subject – and while researching it i found this, and thought well I can’t convey that message much better than this ;-)

And the reason i wanted to write about this was because i read this wonderfull book by Scott Berkun

YWP-COVER-FINAL

From the books website:

The new behind the scenes book where Berkun goes back to work on WordPress.com. Learn what it’s like to work at WordPress.com, the 15th most trafficked website in the world, where everyone works from home, no one uses email and dozens of improvements launch to customers every day. The Year Without Pants is the best book you will read about leadership, productivity, and creativity in the modern age.

Her are a few of my takeaways from the book :

– Most people doubt that online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don’t work either

– There is nothing wrong with tradition until you want progress: progress demands change, and change demands a reevaluation of what the traditions are for and how they are practiced

– … and the culture’s confidence that the best way to learn is to do – to think (but not for too long ) make decisions, learn from what happens, and repeat.

– the culture in any organisation is shaped every day by the behaviour of the most powerfull person in the room

And if you dont have time to read the book – take a look a this great talk by Scott at Google

And then you will probably want to read the book any way ;-)