delegation, coaching, the ability to get people to follow, the ability to create ownership in others, and the ability to teach others to be future leaders.
Communication skills allow a leader to communicate his vision to the team. Successful communication allows the team to understand the vision and goals and adopt them as their own. During tough times, a strong communicator will not sympathize with his team and console them; rather, he will guide them toward the winning path.
No one, no matter how dedicated of an employee, wants to be given an order and then told, “Now, go do it.” This communication style leaves them without input or the ability to use their own skills and knowledge to achieve a task. When communicating with your team and getting them to follow you, make sure it is on a path that has been created together.
Let’s Talk About It
How can you do this and still retain your leadership stance? Start by asking your team for their opinions – their visions. Be sure to stay on track and not let their input get you lost. In other words, you must know what the final destination is and what cost you are willing to spend, which is not always monetary. With your leadership and direction, let your team help make the road map to achieve their goals so that they own them and desire to achieve them. Use your action list to guide the process.
To reinforce this concept, I want to use a common, real-life scenario, which I am sure you have seen happen before. There are two teenagers. One teenager is given a car by Mom and Dad. The other
As with most things, there are exceptions to this as a leader. There will be times when you are given marching orders from the top that must be precisely executed – times when what must be accomplished is not negotiable. In this situation, it is much harder to create ownership for your team. At such a time if you did ask for their ideas, but followed the orders anyway it could easily appear that you did not care enough to use their ideas. During times like this, I find it best to ask for help from your team to create ownership on the atmosphere of the marching orders. Gain their understanding, not just their ideas.
Words in Action
In 2002, I took over a market and right away I was handling a budget issue with a large lack of return on investment. I had over 400 contracted sales people that were being paid extravagant amounts of money to sell a product with very little product being sold. I consulted the finance department about this specific problem and soon found out that this market spent the most dollars with the least amount of return in the country.
Based on the situation, I felt the best decision was to change the compensation structure in order to increase production. This was a time when I had to approach my sales managers who ran this department with marching orders, but needed their buy-in to help effectively communicate and execute the plan.
First, I explained to them the problem and showed them where we were headed if we did not fix it. Then, I asked for their help in executing the changes. Most importantly, I needed their help in creating a positive atmosphere around the changes (put more money in the commission and less in the salary, rewards for production, etc.) so that we could create a winning atmosphere around a perceived bad situation.
Within the first week, we created the new compensation plan along with the new expectations for all of the employees in this organization (did you read the ‘we’ part?). The first step was to take 30% of their current hourly wage and move it to their commission. The second step was to realign the leadership positions to maximize growth and profitability. This was done by having the twelve supervisors take on a coaching and training role and less administrative work by realigning their daily job duties and expectations. Then, we took the twenty-five senior sales people and put them in the stores to actually sell versus the training that they were previously doing.
Delivering this message was not an easy task, but getting everyone’s buy-in was a must. During the roll out of the changes, the division manager explained the current situation and showed the team that, by making these changes with the team’s help, the company and they would increase their results and profitability.
Not everyone agreed immediately (some even left right off the bat). But the core of the team started to work towards the goal and the others soon followed. Soon, the entire team was seeing the results and celebrating their new found success. Within twelve months, the contract labor team was number one in the country with the greatest return on investment and highest production.
Being a Leader: 20% - Coaching
Being a good coach means creating a culture of constant practice and improvement. While it is important to recognize your team’s accomplishments, you should never become content. Even though most companies will agree that coaching is one of the most important skills to building a winning organization, most companies do not actually teach their managers how to coach.
Instead, when a person is promoted to manager, they are given sexual harassment training, employee review training, process training, etc. If an organization expects its managers to train and develop their employees, they must teach the managers how to be a coach. However, very few organizations have training to help managers learn how to be a coach.
Be Willing to Train
The organizations which struggle the most are the ones that hold their training departments (or similar such departments or people) accountable for training and developing their organization instead of the direct manager. It may be the training department’s job to create many of the curriculums, but is the leader or coach’s job to teach and develop their team members.
A coach (leader), much like in sports, is the person who is responsible for making each team member better. Coaches must hold everyone accountable to expectations given. It is their job to skillfully identify and apply everyone’s talents on the team. Lastly, a coach understands how to help individuals achieve their best performance.
When someone is managing rather than coaching, he or she will focus on people’s weaknesses and try to help them improve their weaknesses while allowing their strengths to sometimes stay stagnant. A great coach will focus on the team’s strengths and continue to push each individual to improve their greatest abilities in order to over compensate for any weaknesses. I am not suggesting you should completely ignore their weaknesses; they just should not be your focus.
