Take Your Business Back!

I often hear from managers that employees have more power than their bosses. Studies have shown that the majority of workers in North America do not want to move into a management role. The current trend toward servant leadership and participative management has created a lot of very good results, but in many cases it has also created chaos, poor morale and reduced performance.

In the nineteen-fifties and prior, we witnessed command and control management styles in most businesses and Government service sectors. That method of leadership allowed manipulation, oppression and in some cases, outright cruelty to employees in the workplace.

Workers were threatened and intimidated in the name of better performance standards. Although command and control worked in its own way, it led to dissension, distrust of management and employee rebellion. Ultimately, it gave greater power to unions and paved the way for the servant leadership style that most leaders either espouse or give lip-service to in the twenty-first century.

The trend toward what I call, soft-servant-leadership is beginning to erode the ability of North American business to perform effectively. It is at least partially responsible for the lack of discipline that led to the recent American banking industry collapse and it is usually the root of cause of poor performance in any industry or public sector. When there are no apparent consequences, chaos is allowed to rule.  Command and control management has been replaced by some new phenomena:

IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY MANY ORGANIZATIONS OPERATE UNDER ONE OR MORE OF THESE CONDITIONS:

·         request followed by refusal

·         guidance followed by defiance

·         rules broken without consequence

·         leadership scorned or disregarded

·         poor performance rewarded or nurtured

·         bad attitudes ignored or avoided

·         management afraid of employees

·        insolence, tardiness, absenteeism, and laziness tolerated

(If you don’t see your favourite one on the list, please feel free to add it.)

Now is the time to take your business back! Now is the time to start a LEADERSHIP REVOLUTION and build organizations that will be able to withstand the onslaught of the financial recession and economic hardship that will continue well into the twenty-first century.

We cannot continue to be productive if we do not begin to hold our employees accountable for the work they do. I am not suggesting that we go back to the command and control management style of the fifties...I am suggesting that we temper servant leadership with effective accountability.

Leadership should not be about settling for less!

Leadership should be a combination of our currently understood principles of servant leadership tempered or fused with firmness, accountability and a respect for hierarchy.

We often compare the running of a business with coaching a team or commanding an army.

 When we make those comparisons however, we seem to forget that on a basketball team, if a player is insolent, disobedient or plays badly, he is benched or sent to the showers. The coach takes control and makes hard decisions for the betterment of his team. In the case of the military, if a soldier is insolent, disobedient or AWOL he is disciplined, court marshalled, or jailed.  In both cases, the performance of the entire team is placed in the paramount position and individual team members understand that they must do exactly as their leader instructs them or suffer the consequences. They know that their leader is in control and that his or her decisions are the best for the team.

You will probably never hear any suggestion that a tough but successful basketball coach is cruel or unfair, just as there is seldom any thought that a field commander is doing anything but the right thing when he brings a coward, a deserter or a mutineer up on charges. Hierarchy has worked amongst groups of human beings in mutual endeavours for eons and it will work in the twenty first century.

Please do not misunderstand me. I know that basketball teams and armies have different dynamics than industry, business or the public sector. With that in mind, we must accept that modern leaders cannot lead through intimidation, threats, unfair discipline, anger, rudeness or punishment.

If modern leaders want to be successful, they must retain control and generate maximum performance through strength and firmness while holding their employees accountable for their work. There must be measures in place that will allow leaders to exercise their control over their employees for the betterment and integrity of the team. Employees must understand that if they are not able to follow the fair and simple rules of their positions or are not able to show ordinary respect through things like consistently showing up on time, they will be held accountable and may be disciplined or terminated.  

Leaders need not set up an adversarial relationship with employee groups. If they simply outline fair and reasonable expectations to their people and gain their agreement, they will be able act responsibly in the future with little fear of criticism or discord. When employees understand the rules and those rules are monitored fairly and consistently, everyone benefits and everyone wins!

Communication and courage are the keys!

Let’s start a LEADERSHIP REVOLUTION! Let’s stop being afraid of our employees! Let’s stop settling for less! Let’s take our businesses back!

All the Best!

Wayne Kehl

Every Revolution Needs A Cause

How to start a Leadership Revolution

Before we can begin to create a culture of effective and powerful leadership, we must have a cause that everyone can rally around. Throughout history, every revolution came about as a result of the failure of leaders to understand or empathize with what the people wanted. When it became clear that they were not listening, the people chose to take action against their leaders. Don’t let that happen to you!

During the French Revolution of the late 1700’s the unfair, unjust French Monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in only three years at the hands of the disgruntled citizenry. During the American Revolution, the British Government was driven from the shores of America by the settlers who wanted the right to freedom and self-government. In these, and in all other successful revolutions throughout history, unjust, unfair, uncommunicative, leadership groups were overthrown by their subjects. Their causes were fairness, equal opportunity, inclusion and civil rights.  Although the methods and the results were much more extreme than what we normally see in business, a revolution of any kind is never good for those in leadership positions.

I am proposing that clear-minded, progressive leaders everywhere start their own Leadership Revolutions now...before their employees start one of their own!

Before we can start our Leadership Revolution we must identify what we are fighting for. Our causes should be designed to maintain and develop the success, perpetuation, and growth of our businesses. In order to prevent our workers from revolting against us, thereby reducing our corporate effectiveness, we need to include them in our revolution in a real and tangible way.

I would recommend that right now, you start thinking about your revolution, identify your causes and write them down. Show your employees what you believe your causes should be and ask for their input.

Important: When you ask for input from your employees, listen to what they have to say and implement as many of their ideas as possible.

If you ask for input, disregard it, and simply do what you were planning to do in the first place, the employees will start a revolution of their own...one that you cannot win!

Once you have communicated with your people and developed a plan for the future, give it a name. Create a slogan that everyone can easily remember and rally around.

Take a page out of the Hewlett Packard handbook and broadcast your leadership philosophy to the world. HP is known to be one of the most successful technology firms in the world and their success was not by accident. Early in their history, the leaders of Hewlett Packard developed a leadership system that they coined, “Management by walking around” or MBWA. It is a plan for humble leadership based on employee inclusion and communication. To simplify and personalize the 12 guidelines for MBWA, they dubbed their leadership style “The HP Way.” Not only did MBWA become the mantra of Hewlett Packard, it has been emulated and followed by thousands of successful firms all over the world. HP started a revolution and enlisted their employees before their employees felt the need to start their own. Over 70 years since its incorporation, HP is still one of the most successful and respected firms in the world.

Does your firm have a cause? Do your employees know what it is?

Of course, developing a cause is just the genesis of the revolution. All revolutions take time and all begin with small steps. The important thing is that the revolutionary army, (your staff) has a strong leader to guide the process and make sure that morale is continuously and consistently kept at a high level. The leader must have the integrity, dedication and like all battlefield commanders, the courage to carry on the fight until the war is won or until it is time to retire his or her command.

Are you that leader?

If the French Monarchy had listened to its people and worked alongside them for improvement in 1789, many lives could have been saved. If the British Government had worked with the American settlers in 1775 rather than sending troops in to crush them, things would be much different today. It could easily be argued that the American Revolution was the best thing that could have happened to the United States of America, but as you can imagine the British Government of the day did not feel the same way. Their loss was tremendous...and permanent. Don’t let that happen to you!

Start your Leadership Revolution now!

All the Best

Wayne Kehl

Managing Your Time In The Cyber World

There is a lot of talk about time management these days. In fact, in these times when technology is bringing new and better innovations to every person on earth at lightning speed, most people have trouble finding time to do everything that is available to them. Business leaders are always on the lookout for new ideas to increase the success of their companies and because there are so many great advancements flying around in cyberspace, they are bombarding their people with more and more information every day. So much information, in fact that people are buckling under the load of it all to the point that workplace stress is rapidly becoming one of the most common reasons for employee absenteeism.

We all must accept that because of the amount of information flying at us every day, we will never be caught up!

It is impossible to get caught up on reading and digesting everything we receive on our computers, so don’t even try. Before we can move beyond the inevitable information overload that technology brings, we must accept that if we don’t learn how to filter the data that we are exposed to, we will never avoid the challenges of the cyber world. As much as the great loads of knowledge that we are subjected to daily will never cease, we must become quite ruthless in the ways we handle it. We must have the courage to discard the useless or almost useless information and retain only that which truly matters to our work. Try this: If you can’t use it to assist you in your job in the near future, don’t read it...delete it or file it immediately!

Technology brings procrastination!

Even the most technologically handicapped of us can sit down at a laptop, a PC or one of the new tablet devices and find ourselves spending hours surfing and socializing. Technology has given us some completely new ways of wasting time that are quite subtle and frighteningly seductive. Facebook, Twitter and Linked in give us outlets for our social needs while also providing valuable information to help us with our jobs and our personal lives. There is a blog available for almost every concept, culture, occupation or opinion in the world and every company on earth that sells anything has a website. The challenge or more appropriately, the goal, should be to eliminate everything that is merely a pleasant pastime and focus on the things that we can actually use to improve our immediate, real-world environment. If you find yourself running out of time, review your day and remind yourself how much time you spent working on your job and how much time you spent staring at your monitor.

Email is time management death!

What did we do before email? ... We sent memo’s on paper via snail-mail or picked up the telephone and spoke with other human beings about our issues. Because both of those options were somewhat laborious and time consuming, we tended to do more things ourselves without outside intervention. Now, with access to cyberspace, whenever we have a question or a thought we spin around in our chairs and send an email. Often we will cc or blind-cc a bunch of other people just to make sure we cover all the possible bases. Then the person who is the primary recipient replies to all and adds a couple of more people to the distribution list just to make sure all of the stakeholders are in the loop. At that point all of the people on the combined distribution lists also reply to all and add a few of their favourite people to the list...And the next thing you know our one, simple question has spawned literally hundreds of emails that are flying around in cyberspace, wasting the time of countless people...some of whom we have never met and never will.

Not only do we waste time reading emails, we waste time waiting for replies to them. In the days before cyberspace when we needed to know something, we took the direct route of a personal visit or a phone call. Now, I find people putting important work off because the person they need information or permission from has not returned their email. When I ask, “Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call them?” I am often told that they don’t want, or will not take phone calls...they prefer to correspond by email. During the past decade I have found myself on several occasions explaining some weighty business subject over the telephone only to be rebuked by the person on the other end, saying something along the lines of, “That’s great. Send me an email explaining what you want and I will be happy to deal with it!” Arrrggghhh!!!

Don’t even get me started on emailed jokes, ads, or chain-letters!

The bottom line is that we have time management problems these days because we allow ourselves to procrastinate and waste time on computer-generated junk mail, spam, indecisiveness, and delays. If you want to move closer to well-managed time, turn off your email, resist the urge to surf, and focus on the job at hand. If you are a leader, impress upon your employees, the need to focus on their work and filter out as much unnecessary cyber-junk as possible. Hey, and here’s a novel idea...Instead of sending multiple emails, pick up the telephone and talk to someone!

There is no shortage of time...we just need to manage it better!

All the best

Wayne Kehl

Success through people...Surviving beyond a down economy

Current worldwide economic woes are extremely worrying for a lot of business people...and with good cause. We have seen the demise of a number of major financial institutions and extreme downsizing at a myriad of North American Corporations. Small businesses are dropping like flies on a daily basis. Despite the old adage desperate times call for desperate measures, during this downward spike in our economy we must maintain one major principle: We must preserve a culture of pride, quality and performance amongst our employees. Our people will take us through this current recession and support us while we are down...IF, AND ONLY IF we give them strong reasons for loyalty to us.

Keep in mind that even if your business survives the recession and prosperity returns within a reasonable time frame, it will be followed almost immediately by a worldwide labour shortage. The shortage will be at its worst here in North America where overall birth rates are the lowest. If you plan to continue on in business for the next decade and beyond, you must cultivate the loyalties of your employees by creating a culture of success NOW. Economists indicate that immigration application rates to the USA and Canada are at an all time high, but remember that immigrants require a greater level of training and naturalization than the employees you have now. You might be able to fill the vacancies in your employee manifest with folks from other countries, but if you lose the knowledge base of your current employees, your production will suffer for an indeterminate length of time.

If you are an employee, be aware that the current recession like every other economic crisis, will pass. When that occurs, the best of you will be living in a world of opportunity. Hone your skills now, learn your trade, increase your knowledge and populate your resume’. This is valuable advice whether you expect to leave your current employer at some point in the future or not. The future world will need educated, qualified people with experience and some degree of wisdom. Remember too, that in the future there will also be a shortage of good leaders; people who understand people and possess the ability to get the most out of each and every one of them. If you ever thought that you would like to try leadership, now is the time to start working toward that goal. Take some courses; make your employer aware of your desire to advance; become indispensable!

Employers need to accept the fact that the world is changing. The old ways of doing business will simply not work in the twenty first century. Generation “Y” will not bend to the demands of a dominant boss or an inflexible corporate structure. Many immigrants will not understand your methodologies, your work ethic, or in many cases, your language. Both groups will need a different work environment than that which you developed over the past decades. Business owners and leaders need to begin working for the future NOW. If you really do not understand your younger, Generation “Y” workers, YOU are the problem...not the young workers. You need to stop trying to make them more like you and you need to adopt methodologies they can identify with. Let’s face it, Generation “Y” is the largest generation since the Boomers and they will soon take over the world. There are fewer Boomers in the work-world every day and their grip on the throttle of the world’s economy is beginning to slip. Only those employers who recognize this undeniable truth and are willing to act on it will survive beyond the recession, thereby remaining household names decades from now.

If you don’t understand how to motivate your employees, create loyalty or build a culture of engagement, you need to learn now. If your production is slipping; if your performance is suffering; and/or if your profits are down, you need to learn how to do more with less. I am talking about more production with fewer resources and even fewer employees. The key to more with less is with your current employees. Become an open, honest employer with a transparent management plan. Let your people in on what you are doing, where you are going, and where you stand right now. More than ever in the history of North American business, employees want inclusion and a say in how their workplace runs. Give it to them! Stop hanging on to the old ways of doing business and start giving your employees what they want, no matter how difficult letting go of your old principles might be.

Most business leaders who refuse to let their employees in on things are simply afraid. They are afraid that their employees will take advantage of them, use the things they have learned against them, or even steal from them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employees are just like people in management...they want to keep score and they want to win. If they do not know where the company is going or what their contribution to it has been, they have no stake in the business and no reason to care about it. Ultimately employees who are not made aware of what their company is all about will either quit or mentally shut down. Either way, production and quality will suffer.

In times when there are more employees than jobs, employers have the luxury of high turnover rates. In the future when the economy stabilizes and there are more jobs than people, that luxury will be the death of many companies. Start working with your people now. They can either make you or break you. It’s your choice!

If you need help putting employee leadership, engagement, communication, or selection plans into place please get in touch with me. I am easy to find and I want to help.

All the Best!

Wayne Kehl