Masters Of Employee Development

Your host, Mike Acker, talks with Gary York of Help Lightning. Help Lightning provides remote visual assistance software to hundreds of companies, across a variety of industries, with more than 60,000 users in over 90 countries.

To learn more about Gary's work, visit https://helplightning.com/

If you want to build a successful and sustainable company, you know that employee engagement and retention are critical. One of the ways to think about keeping employees engaged is to encourage them to chase things that they're really passionate about. Helping them chart their own growth path is also highly beneficial for any company, as you get to work with people passionate about their job.

In today’s episode, Mike is joined by Jonathan Finkelstein, CEO of Credibly, a company that helps organizations make better human capital decisions based on an individual’s unique skillset. Jonathan and Mike talk about many areas of employee development, including assisting them to discover how to grow into a role other than that of a manager, encouraging learning, paying them what they’re truly worth, and helping them unlock their true potential.

Tune in to learn more about being an efficient and welcoming leader.

EPISODE 10 SUMMARY & HIGHLIGHTS

What are the challenges to developing leadership in today’s times?

13:42

The most significant leadership challenge is going from a startup to a complete growth mode or having a more established company do digital transformation. A leader cannot continually work on the same challenges. They need to solve one entirely or proceed with the next at once. And that happens through technology, people, or partner support.

What are some of the things that keep people from passing on their legos to others?

16:25

The first thing is constraints on time. It takes time to invest in doing something better, and when there’s a lot going on, you cannot imagine adding more to your plate simultaneously. The second thing is knowing when to put something on the side or saying that good enough is good enough.

Talk to me a little bit about your leadership pipeline.

18:41

I believe that not everyone wants to be a manager ultimately. That's not the only sign of success and growth. You can be a leader without managing people.

In our leadership pipeline, we see individual definitions of professional growth and success. At our company, we have managers meet their team every week, and represent people who either are or have just become managers at the company. We have a lot of people who are first-time managers who didn't have management experience before they joined the company.

What are your growth goals for people who don’t want to become managers in the future?

24:03

Firstly, you can't assume anything about any one person. I believe the best way to understand what somebody considers success and growth is to talk to them and check in regularly. We try to understand what happiness means to every person.

The other thing is, when you open up new roles, don't just look at the immediate team where that new role is opening, but look at other parts of the company that are going to benefit from it.

What is your criteria for hiring new employees?

28:12

 We try to break the mold from traditional hiring practices. We believe people are super-reliant on resumes and referrals -- the two primary ways to hire better and think it's supercritical not to go back to the same tried and tested waters because that leads to stagnation.

What do you train your people on?

33:41

We help people unlock their true potential in their own teams. We try to elevate and amplify their potential. A lot of our weekly meetings are dedicated to a training or learning topic where we're either sharing our best practices or using our network to develop our teams. We provide professional development stipends to every member of the team to seek advice or figure...

Your host, Mike Acker, talks with Jonathan Finkelman of Credly. To create a world where every person can achieve their full potential based on their verified skills, Credly helps organizations make better decisions based on trusted information about what people know and can do.

To learn more about Jonathan's works, visit https://info.credly.com/

Your host, Mike Acker talks with Frida Polli, CEO, and Founder of Pymetrics. A platform that helps companies build the workforce of the future, using behavioral science and audited AI technology, resulting in more diverse teams and more efficient processes. In this episode, you'll hear about cognitive brain function, data science, cultural values, and more!

To learn more about Pymetrics, visit https://www.pymetrics.ai/

If you'd like to be a guest on the Masters of Employee Development podcast, click HERE

In this episode, your host Mike Acker talks to Restaurant 365's Tony Smith about being data-oriented, employee retention, growth, and more.

Connect with Tony Smith:

https://www.restaurant365.com/press-release/restaurant365s-ceo-tony-smith-receives-2021-ocbj-innovator-of-the-year-award/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-t-smith

Your host talks with RS Raghavan f Animaker. A platform for beginners, non-designers & professionals to create Animation and Live-Action videos for every for all types of content channels.

To learn more about Animaker, visit https://www.animaker.com/

If you'd like to be a guest on the Masters of Employee Development podcast, click HERE

Time and dedication are the biggest challenges faced by developing leaders. Being a leader requires you to balance your time between your leadership duties and your personal life. You need to ensure employee development and well-being, while also making sure that their individual goals align with the organization’s overall objectives.

In this episode, Mike is joined by Marianne Scarzello, an internationally recognized speaker on leadership, management, service and customer relations. She shares tips on employee development, interdepartmental communication, and valuable advice for new CEOs and HR representatives for developing a productive work culture.

EPISODE 5 SUMMARY & HIGHLIGHTS

What are some challenges to good leadership?

6:20

Time and dedication are the biggest challenges that we observe in developing leaders. Leaders should also make sure that the employees are given adequate time to attend training sessions and to learn new skills. Sometimes all the work can be overwhelming, so you need to break it into step by step. The leaders should also make sure that there is a proper two way communication between them and their employees.

What are some steps you can take to make sure that the employees

have adequate resources for their development?

8:02

I generally take a long walk around the office during which I interact with the employees. I ask them about their work and what work based challenges they are facing at the moment. Those conversations can go a long way when it comes to understanding the situation and getting a better idea of the current scenario.

What criteria do you look for when selecting someone for the team?

10:31

They need to have a drive to learn and grow. It’s important for them to prove that they need to make the current situation more efficient.  No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. The person needs to take the effort to improve and make the necessary changes. Another criterion to look at is interdepartmental communication. That’s a huge factor when it comes to smooth running of the organization. If you feel like your team is doing something that is not necessary, you need to intervene and make changes. So that extra communication and the willingness to go and talk with other teams is a big criteria for us.

How do you consistently train people?

12:34

In the case of supervisors, I constantly ask them to get feedback. I train them on getting feedback. We are not getting anywhere if we don’t get adequate feedback, especially when it comes to training employees. You've got to understand how to make your team be the best that they can be. It’s a challenge to train to ask feedback, because no entry level employee is going to give negative feedback voluntarily.

Every year we have a day dedicated to training where we go to another location. We work on communication and efficiency. The recent activity we did was where we had each team write down one of their drawback points, which they didn't know how to fix. Then we took that piece of paper and we gave it to the next team. They wrote down a potential solution from that point of view. We did that three more times. So by the end, we had full potential solutions that we could then discuss.  I think that this actually brought people to look at the whole company as the team rather than the individual units.

What is some advice you would like to give a fresh HR director or a CEO?

19:00

You need to focus on the individuals rather than only the end results. You have company goals as well as

individual goals. You need to learn how to align those two.

According to Dr. Daniel Pink, the three elements of intrinsic motivation are: autonomy, mastery and...

If you have employees that just sit there, without being challenged or learning new things, then it’s likely they are going to leave for another company. They will feel like their growth has been stunted and that the other company will provide a better opportunity for them to continue their education.

Create a culture that encourages learning where everyone can learn from each other and grow. Dave Anderson, our guest for today’s episode, shares some of the key points of creating such a culture.

Companies who foster a challenging environment where people are constantly learning new skills will be able to attract employees who want to continue growing in their current position or those who aspire to grow within the company. Tune in to learn the tips to generating the most efficient work team for your company.

EPISODE 4 SUMMARY & HIGHLIGHTS

What is it that makes people want to stay with the company and grow and develop?

3:54

It’s the culture of the organization that makes people want to stay. People want to be where they feel like they have a voice. You don’t always have to agree with them but it’s important that they feel heard and respected. One of the core values of Dave’s organization is entrepreneurial spirit. Another one is a positive mindset. We need people around us to have the same value systems. A culture andenvironment of learning and growing is necessary. How can you make sure that all the employees are on the right track?

5:48

This lies in having the right mix of team members. Dave’s organization wouldn’t have survived if it was just 100% scattered all the time.You need to have the right balance of various team members that continue to challenge the others. What significance does entrepreneurship have in organizations?

8:13

Not everybody is an entrepreneur, but there is not a single person who doesn't have ideas. There lies the real sense of entrepreneurship. We need to provide an environment where people bring ideas to the table.

Entrepreneurship is a very broad term that's interpreted in many ways. Dave interprets it as the ability to come up with ideas. That’s what we try to develop. Entrepreneurial spirit is really an “idea” spirit. Creativity is not exclusive to creative people. Walk us through the process after brainstorming to implement ideas.

11:53

When you have a lot of ideas it’s important to bring in other points of views. The next thing you have to do is to check if the idea fits in with your core business. Also make sure that the idea is going to help advance the business in the direction you wish to pursue. If it doesn’t fit in with the core business, save it for later campaigns or you can use it for an offshoot company. An offshoot company is a company, group, or organization that has developed from a larger one. What's your process of developing people into different roles of leadership?

15:14

It’s always hard when you bring somebody in from the outside. They need to really understand the culture and the way you do things. When I hire people for our company, I’m not worried about their college grades. I look for mindsets. I take in people with an attitude of learning and growing.

After a while, if they want to leave the company, their leaders need to accept that. Think of it as a positive point that we're helping develop people, even though their loss to the organization sometimes hurts. What do you keep in mind in terms of training your team?

18:16

The number one thing is learning and growing. When we hire people, we ask the question, ‘how do you learn’. It's important that you stay current in your learning. Apart from this it’s also important that you educate yourself on business, management and emotional intelligence. I believe in a very diverse catalog of learning material. That for me is the number one thing. All of our team members have a path of growth outlined for them. We try...

Hiring the right people is one of the most challenging things for any leader - and when you’re an emerging company, it gets even more complicated. Erin Roeder is the COO at Workspace, an enterprise SaaS company for commercial real estate. She joins Mike in this episode of Masters of Employee Development to share the pointers to building effective leadership skills. Erin and Mike talk about hiring people who align with the company’s overall vision and objective, the challenges faced in the early years of your leadership and how to overcome them. Listen in!

EPISODE 03 SUMMARY & HIGHLIGHTS

Do you have any advice for someone in the early phase of hiring or developing someone?

4:49

For someone in the early phase of hiring, they've got to know what they need. As a manager, if you don't know clearly why you're hiring, it's very hard to see succeed. Because you can't hold yourself accountable for a person gaining the skills to contribute in that way. So figure out what you need, and what success in a role looks like. And then back into the steps to get there. What are some of the major challenges experienced on developing leadership?

6:42

One of the challenges is to cultivate creativity and vision. You need to find a way to execute your idea, find smaller building blocks, and enable those who display that vision and creativity. What do you mean by finding your vision?

8:38

If you think about the job of a leader, a super important non-negotiable component is that the leader should get everything done. And that's sometimes harder than you would think. The other job of the leader is to follow through on the promises, build the systems, tools and processes to get it done. We have to find our vision for the organization in five years. Tell us about your leadership pipeline, how you are identifying people with a vision and creativity.

10:37

I believe that the best individual contributor should be on a path to management or leadership, and they can be the same or two different things. In the development of leadership, we're looking for some core skills - judgment, ability to motivate a team, ability to listen to multiple perspectives with an open mind, and then come to your own conclusion, an understanding of accountability. Those are some of the things that we think about in coachability because so much of leadership and management depends on being able to learn and adapt based on the feedback that you get from the people you work with. Things to look for in a team.

14:02

One thing is to be specific. There's a baseline intellectualism that we look for. We have a standard tool called a Wonderlic that we use as a first screening mechanism. If you don't score a certain score as a baseline on the intellectual component of the Wonderlic, we stop there. We have exercises for different roles that are designed to assess things like problem-solving, writing skills, communication skills, technical skills. So depending on the role, we may look at that. The other thing that's important for us to know is what it means to be a fit with a company. We evaluate how a candidate maps against those five values. And that one is a little bit more of a feel, and a little bit less evidence based. Do you have any closing advice for our listeners?

21:48

I’d say invest in yourself. Find other people who are managing teams or processes in a different way that you can learn from. Find a coach or peer but make sure you keep moving too because that's how you can best sustain growth in the team, in any organization.

KEY QUOTES:

2:41-2:48

“I think the first three months we set ou,t as we do with all our employees merely is -what you're responsible for doing is learning.”

4:10-4:16

“We break our organizational planning into quarterly periods into 3, 6, 9 and 12 month intervals and goals.”

5:30-5:49

“We look at the scorecard, both as a...