Enhance.training

Setting employee goals are at the heart of successful performance management. Goals align the efforts of everyone in the business, helping drive company level success. Setting clear realistic goals provide direction for employees, helps motivate employees and improves overall performance.

 I take you through 8 actions to set employee goals that get results. Use these actions to set employee goals and you will have clear, realistic goals, that the employees feel they own alongside you.

 Goal alignment – individual goals supporting team goals which in turn support company goals – is so important to maximise the effort everyone put in and to maximise performance. 

 To get employee ownership during goal setting, it is important that the employees set their own goals or at least significantly input into their goals. Ask them to work out their goals to enable the team goals to be met. 

 Make sure all the goals are SMART goals, so it is clear to everyone what the goals are and when they have been achieved.

 When thinking of how to set goals, make sure you plan how to measure progress against the goals set. It is largely pointless having goals without any way of measuring performance against those goals. 

 A really important part of setting goals is working out how to achieve them. Build the plan of how to achieve the goals set with your employees. This will take the pressure off individual and mean the goals are much more likely to be achieved. 

 Use carrots and sticks – rewards for achieving the goals and support those that are behind their plan to achieve their goals. Deal with any problem team members quickly. 

 When setting goals, always keep the main thing the main thing. It is so easy to get distracted by the latest idea or project, which makes achieving the original goals a lot harder. 

 Finally, in business change is always constant. So set aside the time to review goals set periodically – every quarter works well – and adapt your employee’s goals as needed.

 Take these 8 actions to set employee goals and enjoy better results and performance!

Giving good useful feedback to employees is not easy. Confidence and working out what to say are both big barriers. I hope the advice in this podcast will make giving useful feedback to employees a lot easier for you. 

 Giving feedback to team members starts with describing What Exactly Happened – what did they do to make you want to give them feedback. Giving general feedback – good or bad – doesn’t help – it needs to be specific with examples and facts.

 Giving feedback effectively should also include taking the person through the impact of their actions. How did they affect the team and the business?

 Next, in how to give employee feedback, you should cover why their actions were good or bad. The why provides great context and help the learning process.

 And finally, when giving feedback at work, cover how they could improve their actions in the future to get better results. After all, you are giving feedback to employees so that you get improved results. Walk them through how they can improve. 

 So this covers the 4 things you should include when giving employee feedback.

 How to give feedback – the way in which you deliver it – also counts for a lot. Delivered well and the employees will take in what you said and put it into action. Delivered badly, and they will ignore what you say. 

 Whenever you give useful feedback to team members, always approach with a mindset of how to help them become better. Have an “always educating” mindset. 

 Next, when thinking about how to give feedback, make your feedback to the individual or team timely. Feedback loses value over time, so give feedback soon after the event driving the feedback. 

 I always think your feedback should be honest. Tell it how it is. Don’t sugar coat it, dilute the message etc. Saying that, remain as diplomatic and consider as possible without diluting your message.

 Feedback should always be specific for it to be useful feedback. General feedback does little to improve performance. 

 And finally, the feedback you give should be focused as much as possible on actions rather than giving opinions about the other person. 

 Make the effort to give useful feedback to your employees and team members. This is a must if you want to improve performance and it comes with many other benefits too.

How to empower employees to make decisions is one of the hardest tasks many managers face. After all, you have been promoted to the management ranks in part because you are a good decision maker, yet your time each day to make decisions is limited.

 I take you through 7 actions to take to empower employees to make decisions with confidence. 

 4 great reasons to empower employees to make decisions:

1.                So you gain more time back in your day

2.                For you to focus on more value adding activities

3.                To increase employee engagement by up to three times

4.                To increase the work ethic and results ownership of your team

 Employee empowerment is very useful for you personally as a manager, especially as your team grows and your confidence as a manager increases. Plus many of your employees are closer to the coal face than you, so it makes sense to delegate decision making where there is low impact on the business and these decisions are routine. 

 Before you empower team members and start building their decision making skills, it makes a lot of sense to embed the goals of the team with each person making decisions so the overall team continues to move in the same direction towards achieving common goals. 

Defining which decisions will be made by whom is also important to manage the risk of decision making appropriately. By creating a framework for decision making in the team you are also giving authority to team members to make specific types of decision.

 To enable better decision making, key ways to empower employees are to share information relevant to the decisions they are making. Data and insights give them the tools to make better decisions.

 Don’t throw your employees in at the deep end. Start delegating the decisions that have a small impact on the business or are simpler to make a good decision, and as their decision making skills improve, move them on to more difficult decisions. This progressive approach will build their confidence and decision making skills and manage business risk. 

 One of the toughest parts of empowering employees in the workplace is resisting the temptation to make the decision on behalf of the employee. There will be times when the employee will in effect ask you to make the decision – this is easier and less scary for them – don’t fall into this trap. 

 And finally, make the time to coach employees through their decision making. This provides vital support and guidance for them during the process AND keeps you informed of each step allowing you to avert poor decisions. Coaching allows you to do this WITHOUT taking the responsibility away from the employee to make the decision. 

 Make the time and effort to empower employees to make decisions and you will be able to significantly leverage your time and skills freeing you up to move your career forward!

What makes an effective manager? Learn about 10 skills all effective managers have that make them successful, effective and respected. Included are tips, frameworks, and where to get additional information. 

 There are so many skills need to be an effective manager – those managers that get a lot done through their teams, keep their teams motivated through thick and thin, create the right environment for individual and team success, develop the skills of their team members so they can do more, manages all the people relationships and deals calmly with the pressures involved.

 Unsurprisingly these effective managers are the ones that get noticed and are consistently promoted. 

 One of the most important skills of an effective manager is self-awareness. If you don’t know what your strengths and weaknesses are, how your beliefs impact decisions and actions, it makes it much harder to learn and improve how you deal with other people. 

 Another vital skill all effective managers have is building and maintaining relationships. Managing relationships are at the core of management. 

 How to be a great manager absolutely includes setting clear expectations with all team members, stakeholders, and your manager. If you don’t know what is expected, how can you or your team members deliver against it. 

 How to be an effective manager also includes having great communication skills. Being able to get your message across, persuade, deal with emotionally charged situations calmly and being able to read other peoples non-verbal clues are all essential communication skills. 

 Highly effective managers all spend a lot of their time educating their team members and passing on the skills they have accumulated. This helps their team become more and more effective and be able to deliver increasingly impressive results. 

 The qualities of an effective manager very much include great delegation skills. There is a lot more to delegation that many people think. It is not enough just to tell someone to do a task or project. You have to support them, check up on them, get them the right resources and so on.

 Planning ahead is another key characteristics of an effective manager. There are nearly always so many moving parts in managing a team, a set of projects, tasks, requests and so that good planning skills is a must. 

 Problem solving is a daily occurrence for an effective manager. They solve problems personally AND help their team members solve problems. 

 And finally, effective decision making is another key skill, particularly being able to adapt their decisions making style to different situations and problems. 

How to welcome a new employee is a big deal. After all, you have spent time, effort and money finding a great person to join your team and help solve some of the problems you are wrestling with. You want them to be excited, get off to a great start and be happy working in the team so they stay and do the best work they can.

 There is a lot you can proactively do that doesn’t take that much time to make sure your new joiner receives a great first impression of you, the team and the company. 

 I share 10 tried and tested actions you can take to make your new team member feels welcome and valued and help them make the best start they can, so they are fully up and running as quickly as possible. What better way for you to demonstrate to the business you made the right hire.

 When planning how to welcome a new team member, send them pre-reads so they feel they are part of the team before they join. Introducing them within the company so the current team knows who they are and what they have joined to do is also really useful for everyone. 

 Getting all the IT setup before a new joiner starts is also needed. As a new employee, there is nothing worse than turning up on the first day and having to spend most of it chasing a list of people to get your computer working. 

 On the first day, get your new employee to start late, keep your diary free so you can greet them in person and introduce them to the team. Give them a bit of time to settle in and then take them through the induction plan you have prepared. Focus the induction plan on helping your new joiner build relationships within the business. 

 Book time in with your new employee to train them on how to use the systems they need, what the rules and expectations are so they can get up to speed as quickly as possible. 

 When planning how to welcome a new employee, I suggest you book in lunches with team members and coffees with all the stakeholders that your new team member will need to build good professional relationships with. 

 Next, giving your new employee a mini-project which they can own and start adding value to the company quickly. 

 Lastly, booking in a social evening with the team and your new joiner will help them all start to build relationships - both personal and professional – in a more informal setting. 

What to put into a career development plan to really engage employees, motivate them and keep them doing the best job they can. Learn about 6 actions to drive retention, motivation, and performance. 

 Creating a career development plan takes some thought and putting the career plan into action takes effort. Career planning is good for you, the team and the individual.

 Career development proactively helps the employee to learn new skills and gain new experience which helps them deliver more for the company in which they work. Retaining staff makes all the investments you have made in the staff even more worthwhile, and you get the benefits of their increased skills for longer.

 Writing an effective career plan requires at least 6 actions. The first is helping the team member decide on where they want to take their career. i.e. What is their professional goal. Without a goal, it is hard to work out where their career is heading and therefore how to help them. 

 Once they have chosen a goal, the next step is working out all the steps between where they are now and where they want to get to. Create a career map to capture all the career development roles available on the route.

 I recommend choosing to focus on the next two role along your prepared career route so that you have a career development plan covering the next 5 years. 

Fourth, Get the team member to spend time researching the skills, experience and qualifications needed for the next two roles. I suggest several effective ways of doing this.

 Then look at the gap between where they are now and the skills etc they need to progress to the next role for their career development. Look at the specific gaps and the scale of those gaps. 

 Finally, you are in a position to assign projects, tasks, activities i.e. the actions that will help the employee develop their career towards their career goals. I take you briefly through 11 different ways of helping your employee build their skills and experience.

 You will know what to put in a career development plan, have plenty of tips on how to put it into practice and hopefully more committed and motivated employees with building skills to help the company be even more successful. 

Get the right people doing the right job and you are halfway to your next managerial promotion. Getting this right is crucial for every manager yet it remains a tough challenge even for experienced managers. 

 I share 5 steps to get the right people doing the right job, to make overcoming this challenge easier.  

 The first step is to work out what the right job actually is. This sounds obvious and probably straight forward. In practice this can be quite hard to put down on paper. I share 10 questions to get you thinking more clearly about what the role is really about and what is needed. 

 Once you have the right job defined, working out what the right people are is the next challenge. It is always tempting to get those you like and get on with into the role BUT are they really the right people to overcome the challenges to job demands of them. Do they have the right skills, are in the right point in their career etc. I share 7 areas to think about to work out who the right people for the job are. 

 Once you have the right job and the right people worked out, then finding them is the next big challenge. The first step is to look internally at the talent pool. The bigger the company, the more likely you will find the right person. Getting them into the role and team can be hard and I share tips on how to do this. 

 If you draw a blank on the current talent pool, hiring the right people is the next step. There are a lot of factors in selecting the right people. Every manager has a tendency to hire in their own image.  How do you overcome this to recruit those best suited for the role. I share more tips on how to do this. 

 Getting the right people doing the right job is the next challenge. Create the best conditions for the right people doing right job. I share 5 areas to work on plus links to further videos to expand your skills in each area.

 Getting the best out of your team, when you have the right people doing the right job gives you a massive sense of achievement. It always did for me. Good team performance and atmosphere are usually good outcomes of getting the right people in the right jobs.

Enjoy the personal benefits of getting the right people in the right jobs!

5 steps to manage conflict between team members gives you practical steps that you can implement to reduce and remove conflict between individuals and teams. 

 How to handle conflict between team members is not easy. It can be tough to know where to start. Don’t put off taking action to resolve workplace conflict. If you don’t then chances are that is will only get worse, causing you and your team even more problems. 

 The first step when thinking about how to manage conflict between employees is to be proactive. Ask the individuals what is causing the conflict. Ask the team members around them, their direct reports. Get as many viewpoints as sensible. Understanding what is going on gives you a solid starting point to resolving the conflict. 

 Next, if difficult or incompetent people are the cause of the conflict, deal with these people professionally and effectively. You can’t let an individual disrupt the team with their behaviour even if it is unintentional. 

 Once you have discarded individual behaviour and competence as the cause of the conflict, dig under the surface. There are lots of organisational reasons that push individuals into conflict. For instance if goals are not aligned or worse are in direct conflict with each other across teams. Did under the surface to find the causes of the conflict. 

 The next step in managing conflict is to work on the communication. A lot of conflict comes from differences, a lack of understanding, fear or perceived threat. I share 5 tips to handle conflict between employees to break down these barriers. Communication can significantly reduce conflict when it drives understanding on both sides. 

 Finally, when planning how to manage conflict between employees, you need to help implement change. Those involved in conflict are likely to need help to change the situation. Change what is in your control to resolve the conflict and build support and find allies to implement change within the wider business. 

 Conflict does not help anyone at work. Take steps to handle conflict between employees as soon as you become aware of the conflict. There is a lot you can do!

Having to manage team members always off sick is painful. It is hard enough that you and the team have to cover their work. It is even worse if you suspect they are not really ill. 

 Learn 6 ways to manage team members always off sick which will help you reduce the amount of time employees who are not really sick spend away from work. 

 The 6 ways to handle team members off sick all the time are also very useful when you have to handle team members who are genuinely off sick. It is important to understand what you and the business can do to help them recover and get back to work as quickly as possible. 

 The first step when having to deal with employees off sick is to think about the causes of the sickness and see if there is anything that you or the company can do to prevent or reduce sick leave. This could be helping employees live healthier lives, putting on yoga classes at lunch or creating a small gym. 

 The day here and day there off sick, in my opinion, are much more of a management issue that two weeks off because of something more serious – because nearly all employees are genuinely ill if they are taking longer period off work sick. 

 When thinking about how to reduce team members off sick, it is very worth taking an honest look in the mirror. Is there anything that you are doing that is making the environment at work stressful, are the team members overloaded with work, under supported and so on. 

 Changing your approach or providing more support, reducing stress on particular team members can all have a very positive impact on the team, and the results they produce. 

 A vital tool to handle team members always off sick is a written sickness policy. This sets out the expectations for the employees and gives you a set of guidelines to help you manage the situation positively. 

 Keeping records of when employees are off sick moves the conversation from a opinion led to a factually led conversations when you have to deal with employees off sick.

 When you manage team members always off sick, make sure you always book in a return to work meeting. This is a fact finding meeting. If the sick leave is bogus, always having this meeting makes it much harder to take a day off without being ill. 

 When you have to manage employees off sick, take action. Don’t delay or procrastinate. There is a lot that you can do to reduce the pressure on you and the team and ensure employees don’t take a lot of time off sick without good reason. 

 Take action quickly, confidently and with consideration.