The instant life coach
The top 20% bring in 80% of actual business. You need more of them. They embody the company in every way and will leave, regardless of money, if not looked after
Whilst out-of-the-box thinking is essential in all organisations, someone has to “stay in the box” to make it all still work. If everyone is desperate to get out of your box, there is something desperately wrong with your box in the first place
Keeping your staff engaged
If your employees don’t enjoy what they do, they won’t stay. The worst bit is you probably won’t know that day until it comes. Trainer and motivational speaker Dave Crane tells you what to do about it.
When you are a highly motivated individual, it’s very difficult to work with others, either as partners in the business or employees. Nobody cares as much about the results as you do. You can often feel far too close to the success of your company to be able to stand in the shoes of your team and understand what exactly drives them to turn up for work every day.
It’s time to take a step back and focus on them. After all, their drive makes your business thrive. Here’s how to life coach your team so they all stay highly motivated and boost your profits and productivity.
Most bosses don’t realise that their team is made up of 3 categories of employee. According to a Gallup survey, these are:
1) Engaged (26%)
This is the 80/20 rule – the top 20% who bring in 80% of actual business. You need more of them. They embody the company in every way and will leave, regardless of money, if not looked after or if they feel that the toxic “actively disengaged” are getting too much attention.
2) Not engaged (55%)
These make up the majority of employees. They go to work because they quite like it, but don’t love it. They would be happy becoming more engaged but you have to make them like that. They will go with the flow either way. When these guys ask a question (however stupid), they are not troublemaking, but qualifying you for where their level of engagement should be.
3) Actively disengaged (19%)
They hate their job or you (or both). They don’t want to be there. They also steal whatever they can from you whether items from stationary or time off as sick days. They will tell whoever will listen about how the company sucks but to your face, they’ll say nothing. They won’t even bother to complain to you because they have no faith in your culture or the process of problem solving ability.
Replacing a member of staff usually costs at least 150% their annual salary (as the old one loses interest, leaves and then the new one has to be trained up completely before achieving full speed again).
This is a big investment and getting it wrong is costing you a small fortune daily. So what do you do? How can you fix the problems and turbo-charge your team? Here’s how:
1) Look after your big hitters
Know your stars. Often your sales team are the most important and productive members of your team and can’t fake the results on the leader board. Pay them well, treat them like gold dust and motivate them whenever possible. The best ones will be self-sufficient but will need to know you are aware of them and want their success too.
2) Get rid of your toxic members
In contrast to your engaged team members, your trouble makers, or “low hitters” are time-consuming, cost you a small fortune and will always drain you. Test them and see if they can be easily upgraded to “not engaged” and, if not, be prepared to help them move on immediately. You can then replace them with people who actually want their job.
3) Introduce them to self-improvement
Train them on how to design their life. You may need to start the ball rolling but, once someone understands the principles, they can pursue this on their own with free tools like www.automaticlifecoach.com or just heading into the self-help section of any book store. Some will resist at first; they have to want to do it (sell the benefits) but you will find an amazing change in a team that takes personal responsibility, stops relying on you for everything and has a no fear culture about learning from positive mistakes.
4) Keep some people “in the box”
Whilst out-of-the-box thinking is essential in all organisations to help them rise above the competition, find their niche and effectively target their market, someone has to “stay in the box” to make it all still work. Manage that balance. If everyone is desperate to get out of your box, there is something desperately wrong with your box in the first place.
5) Work on their strengths and ignore their weaknesses
Most people have a job description that involves tasks they love and are great at doing, and work they loathe and are lousy at doing. The reason they dislike certain tasks is they are not part of their skill set. Whilst they can probably learn to do them, they will hate it and become average at best. Plus, the process will be painful and they won’t like it. As much as possible, marry up people who have complementary skills. Sales people love meeting people, closing deals and communicating. They generally hate paperwork. Accountants get angry that the sales people never give them the right completed paperwork. Change the process so both spend more time doing the bit they love.
6) Get mentors, not just managers
When a top salesperson gets promoted to sales manager they are using another skill set – managing not selling. More often than not, this has disastrous results when done wrong. They will probably lose commission and fall out with their team because they don’t have the patience to coach everyone or, more likely, can’t quite put a process together of what they do naturally – sell. Don’t promote these people to a level of incompetence, they lose interest and confidence and members of the engaged become actively disengaged and leave. Instead, “buddy” them up with an apprentice to mentor and train (think along the lines of the Jedi masters in the Star Wars films). Also, pay them for this extra responsibility. Remember staff leave because of their managers, not because of their companies.
7) Start embracing social media
Like it or not, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogs are here to stay. Why fight them? When used properly, they can be an amazing source of free advertising, relationship building with new and existing clients and a very effective revenue generator for your company. People use Google more than the phone book to find your services and so you’ve got to get visible. And it’s fun. Experiment with it and talk to experts about building a strategy for your business. Let your team grow their personalities online daily and promote your business at the same time (twittering takes two minutes and a message can be posted from your phone to about 100 sites in one go), and notice how automatically engaged they can become with this new no-cost media.
