• the rise of individualism and independence bringing out new confidence to show up as themselves at work. (Fjord Trends 2022)
• hybrid employment arrangements placing more emphasis on staff being able to work remotely and maintain productivity and service delivery
• continued challenges to organisations due to Omicron leading to staff shortages resulting in increased costs of hiring more or temporary staff
• Increased pressures on both existing and new staff in the present climate

Moving forward, employers need to relook at balancing the flexibility they offer to individuals with the needs of the team and the greater good of the organisation. (Fjord Trends 2022)

Obtaining the right information for remote hires

How can you increase your success rate and hire the right people the first time for roles in the current labour market? And what about remote work? How can you more easily identify those who will thrive and be productive in a work from home environment?

The traditional recruitment process leaves a lot up to chance. You’ll sift through a stack of resumes and cover letters trying to narrow down the people with the right experience and qualifications and get a sense of other relevant aspects. 

You’ll then perform a round of interviews to gauge which candidate sounds and acts right for the role.

You might ask yourself: 

• “does this person have the right skills to perform the job?.. 

• the right credentials?.. 

• enough experience?.. 

• will they fit in with the workplace culture?.. 

• can they bring anything to the table to benefit the business?” 

While some of these questions can easily be answered with a CV and interview, others are trickier. 

And let’s face it most employees, when asked if they would like to work from home, will answer ‘yes’. This is simply because they are only looking at the positive aspects of doing so. 

But this is the homeworking equivalent of asking someone ‘How are you?’. And accepting the answer ‘Fine.’ As confirmation that all is well.

Some key questions are difficult to answer through the traditional hiring process such as 

• “Will this person be engaged in their work and great in this role?” 

• “Is this person likely to be capable and productive in this remote work role?”

• In the long term will this person be able to handle hybrid working?

Engagement is critical for remote work

Great managers and business owners know that higher employee engagement levels in the workplace translate to higher productivity and better company performance. So especially in this current environment, how can hiring managers improve the likelihood of selecting highly engaged remote work top performers?

It all starts with thinking about how potential employees will “fit”, rather than experience and qualifications. Or even age and gender. Studies have shown that ‘fit’ is what counts if you want a high performer.

‘Fit’ refers to how well a person is suited to their job role, the environment, and the workplace culture. Whether or not a person ‘fits’ in a particular position depends on a few factors, for example:

• their attitude,

• personality, and

• enthusiasm for the work at hand. 

To find out which candidate is the right fit for the job and culture, hiring managers must check their biases at the door and use objective information to make their decision. Making this type of decision can be trickier than it sounds, but it is possible.

How does it work?

Hire someone who is objectively the right fit

Choosing the right person for a role can influence how long they stay in the job and how engaged they are with their role working remotely or onsite. 

According to Gallup, employee engagement is defined as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace”.

 According to studies they conducted, businesses are 21% more profitable with engaged employees; I am sure most CEO’s would take this profit increase as a Christmas present!

Use your top performers as a benchmark for new talent

When a top performer walks out the door, it often feels like you’re back at square one; scrambling to build your team from the ground up again. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies, teams and hiring managers can make the process of replacing top performers easier while improving their hiring process each time.

Not all candidates are suited to remote work

Buffer.com published an annual global survey on homeworking and discovered in 2020 (like in previous years) that the top 3 difficulties people experience with homeworking, worldwide, are not necessarily related to the pandemic and lockdown:

• collaboration and communication
• loneliness, and
• not being able to unplug.

This survey suggests that many individuals will either need help to overcome these problems or even that remote work is not a long-term viable option for some people.

To learn more about the Great People Inside assessments specifically designed for work from home employees and teams contact us 

The post Remote Work – What are seen effects of further shifts in this competitive market? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

All elements of your employee life cycle must be linked:

• from attraction through to talent management,
• leadership development, and
• ongoing performance management.

There is a great reward too in doing this. Studies tell us that organisations that prioritise their employee experience are four times more profitable than those that do not.

People Strategy v HR Strategy – what’s the difference?

HR Strategy tends to focus more on the planning side of people such as structures for hiring, onboarding, developing, and retaining.

People Strategy is more about helping employees grow by creating an environment that nurtures and enables high performance. People Strategy usually focuses on:

• values,
• fostering diversity,
• inclusion and employee wellbeing, and
• predicting and reacting to workforce needs.

In essence, creating a culture where employees share equal billing with shareholders and business goals.

According to the world-renowned Boston Consulting Group, the three pillars for developing a people strategy are leadership and culture, talent and skills, and HR.

“In these challenging times, organisations must elevate the most important asset they have: their people. By focusing on the fundamentals of people strategy—leadership, culture, talent, reskilling, and HR—companies can emerge stronger, more agile, more innovative, and better able to respond to an ever-changing environment.”

I’d like to explore two of these pillars.

1        Leadership Culture and Strategy

There are many levers at a leader’s disposal to drive their organisations success and effectiveness.  Strategy and Culture are the most important.

Strategy provides clarity of the company’s goals and helps to align people around them. Culture tends to express goals through organisational values and beliefs. Culture also guides tactics, activity, and implementation.

One thing is sure and that is culture and leadership are linked. Poor leadership and resultant toxic culture usually determine the fate of a business. Studies tell us up to 30% of employees say they left because of poor leadership. These findings highlight the need for every organisation to address this factor.

Culture in more detail

Culture is a more puzzling lever to activate. The reason for this is mainly because Culture can be ambiguous and embedded in unspoken behaviours, people’s mindsets, and social expectations.

Many leaders don’t always appreciate the power of culture.

A recent Gartner Survey revealed that 75% of leadership believe that they run a culture of flexibility. Unfortunately, only 57% of employees agreed.

This lack of appreciation can cause many leaders to either let culture go unmanaged or delegate it to HR, where it can slip to a secondary focus for the business.

Successful leaders embrace the ambiguity of culture. In my experience many leaders I have met avail of the valuable culture diagnostic tools to understand where their organisation’s culture is right now. These tools help them to answer questions such as:

• Is it more of a creative culture or a reactive culture?
• How do the culture snapshot of the board and senior leadership vary from the operational managers’ perspectives?
• How “real” is the conversation in the business?

Gaining clarity around culture can be as confronting as it is it enlightening – but well worth the investment of time and focus. We partner with many specialists in this area, so reach out if you’d like to explore further.

2        Talent and skills

Sixty-four per cent of the world’s most admired companies say they have a good understanding of workforce needs two or more years into the future compared to 54% of their peers.

That same recent Gartner Survey I referred to earlier also revealed the same 75% of leadership also felt that they did a good job incorporating employee voice in decision making. Unfortunately, in this case only 47% of employees agreed.

The forced extreme disruption, which was the last two years, has meant that most businesses naturally thought more about survival than future talent and skills needs. Now is the time to think about your future talent and skills requirements. Some steps to take include:

• Ensure Employee Pulse Surveys acknowledge and act on the feedback provided
• Use customised psychometric assessments to identify traits and skills gaps
• Incorporate customised 360° surveys as part of your development programs
• Facilitate regular check-ins between individuals’ teams and Mangers

Lastly, lockdown work from home is different from long-term working remotely. Most organisation psychologists accept that loneliness, communication, and isolation can trigger depression.

So, if there is a disconnect in your business between HR policies, or the leadership strategies propelling them, and employee sentiment on the ground, greater emphasis must be placed on the needs this new work approach demands.

For example, consider what capabilities and skills (soft and hard) are essential to be future-ready? Do all employees possess the discipline, conscientiousness, and results orientation to deliver in a hybrid environment? What might this mean for remote work and the flexibility we can offer?

Through our business offering, we have many people analytics resources and tools to assist with both these pillars. Reach out if you’d like to discuss how we can help with the future of your people.

The post People Strategy for now and the future – how to close gaps appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Many managers out there have likely experienced the unsavoury situation of managing someone who believes their performance is terrific when it’s just mediocre at best. Recent studies in performance management have identified that the “underperformer” is a frequent and draining problem.

But what contributes to the perception an individual has about their performance? 

There are several reasons forming the perception of an individual employee at work. It may be that the: 

• crystal-clear feedback they need to develop and improve is lacking, 
• manager is choosing not to address the issues for fear of some type of conflict, or 
• employee is doing ”a good enough job” and flying below the radar. 

In some cases, the individual may be unable to recognise that they’re struggling. 

But whatever the reason, if managers fail to address the situation, there is one thing for sure and that is that it will fester. Not only will the substandard employee’s work not improve, but also the organisation will experience: 

• hidden costs, 
• poor productivity, and 
• the value of a team member who would likely thrive if given the appropriate support and feedback. 

These five approaches will help you correct the problem behaviours. Or at least gain clarity as to whether it’s even possible.

Clear definition of work

It doesn’t matter whether we are delegating or providing feedback, we need to be clear and unambiguous about what needs to be done. There are lots of great feedback models out there. 

My go-to has been the STAR/AR feedback model. The STAR/AR model provides a great framework and helps the receiver understand exactly why what they did worked. And if they made a mistake, working through the model, they’ll learn what steps to take to improve. 

Provide support for people development

Most managers would agree that employees need ongoing support. Significantly, how we approach providing that support is important. Moreover, the build-up of frustration in these situations can lead to exasperation which can undermine our approach. 

 The late Sir John Whitmore, a pioneer of the executive coaching industry and creator of the GROW model wrote “whether we coach, advise, counsel, facilitate, or mentor, the effectiveness of what we do depends in large measure on our beliefs about human potential”.

The expressions “to get the best out of someone” and “your hidden potential” imply that more lies within the person waiting to be released”. 

Coaching your people supports performers across all levels, not just underperformers, to achieve their full potential. The result will be higher levels of employee engagement and profitability. 

Check your Relationship of Competence

There is no one size fits all or “sheep dip” approach to developing your people that works. Everyone learns differently, has unique development needs and motivations. It’s important to point out performing an objective data-driven gap analysis first to ensure the people you are looking to develop have the ability, motivation, and desire to grow. 

Caution: a little self-promotion here. As a coach myself, I find that the unique flexibility of our Great People Inside platform is outstanding. Both an assessment with dimensions (EG Strategy, Leadership, Creativity etc.) that measures precisely what you want to understand, and a customised performance model or benchmark against which you can compare results is created. The outcome is a one-pager graph that allows you to identify any gaps. This provides clarity before you invest in people development on the areas that need focus for each individual. And also highlights those who may not have what it takes to succeed.

Determine “Coachability” for people development

Not everyone is coachable. In contrast to imposter syndrome, many ultra-confident employees fall victim to the Dunning-Krueger effect, a cognitive bias in which “people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area”. Many employers will have encountered an employee that resented the suggestion that their skills needed to improve and ignored the coaching support that was offered to them. 

If left unchecked, this usually results in the employee blaming others, setting up their colleagues to fail, undercutting them, and misrepresenting their contributions and concerns. The outcome is a total train wreck. 

Praise with care

When an employee with an inflated sense of their own performance delivers a piece of high-quality work or conducts an interaction well, it’s important to praise them. But letting the praise stand-alone can reinforce for them that they’re genius! That everything they do is outstanding. 

Connect your positive comments to other things you want them to address. For example, you could say, “Now that you’ve done so well with the presentation to Client X, for the next one, I’d like you to also {insert the next thing they need to improve}. 

Articulating both the required new behaviour and why it’s needed as part of satisfactory job performance will ensure you improve your chances of getting the critical behaviours you need.

You may be finding it a little tougher in the current climate to find the right people for the jobs combined with the best fit for your organisation over the longer term. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you to inform your people development approach and recruitment decisions.

If you’d like an easier method of handling people development and recruitment, contact us

The post People Development – how to handle an employee who thinks they are better than they are appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

However, with the momentum of vaccine rollout in Australia and as the economy continues to rebound, research tells us the labour market will get tighter. For this reason, this situation will result in the war for talent becoming more likely to happen.

Hybrid work arrangements and work from anywhere policies are now the norms in most organisations. Then, to win this talent war, it’s now mission-critical:

• to have your dispersed team highly engaged 
• led by outstanding remote managers 
• supported by a strong organisational culture. 

Productivity

Markedly, more than 70% of employees state they are more productive working from home. And businesses report 47% productivity increases during COVID. 

Most business leaders agree that increasing employee engagement increases productivity significantly and improves bottom-line profit. 

The fact is, it’s never been more important to focus on the productivity of your remote teams for the long term. And equally, ensure your managers feel equipped with the skills and tools they need to meet and exceed company goals.

Managers hold the key

If you have been fortunate to work for a great manager, I’d like to invite you to reflect for a moment on what was great about them and how you remember them?

Certainly, the fact is that managers can make or break a team.   

The Oxford English dictionary defines a manager as –

“a person responsible for controlling or administering an organisation or group of staff”. 

This is one definition; rather, my personal definition of a manager in 2021 and beyond is –

“a person that leads, supports, and develops a team of people to deliver the organisational goals”.  

By and large, the way we work has shifted forever. Being a manager has always been a tough gig, but in the hybrid environment, it sucks!

So how can you ensure your managers are ready for the hybrid normal?

Future-ready culture with a coaching culture

A culture of coaching is an approach in which leaders, managers and staff members work together to:

– increase individual, team and company organisational performance.

The future hybrid workplace with a strong culture will be one where workers feel empowered to work towards their own goals independently. Managers who foster this type of working environment will positively impact employee engagement and organisational productivity. 

Gallup research has shown that managers are a massive influence on engagement rates. It was found managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. And with high engagement rates comes better company results.

So how can you transform your managers into coaches to create a culture of coaching in your workplace?

Teach coaching skills

The first steps are knowing:

• who you are as a leader, and 
• whom you have on your team. 

Its commonly accepted that not everyone has the required traits to work remotely long term. And business WHS responsibility for their employees does not change just because they are not working at the office. The solution we recommend is using established science to predict how your managers and team members will perform in a long term remote/hybrid environment.

I’ve used many people assessment tools over my 20+ years as a coach and a people leader. With this in mind, I find the bespoke next-gen people assessment tools from Great People Inside are easy to use and their predictive capability and insights are second to none for this exercise. They are outstanding, too, when you’re hiring a new remote employee as they truly de-risk the recruitment process and increase your success rate by 300%!

Not all managers have a coaching mindset, but all great managers do. Certainly prioritising coaching in your workplace training is the best way to create a coaching culture. This type of training is essential for employees transitioning into leadership roles or those coming to grips with managing people remotely.

Rank employee engagement as a top priority

Tying together talent and employee engagement to achieve important business objectives is what coaching is all about. 

To nurture employees’ professional development to keep them engaged, a good step is discussing with each employee their professional goals from their point of view. Then communicating clearly and precisely how the organisation can support them to achieve their goals.

In this way, the employee owns their own development and their careers. 

A coaching culture fosters an environment of trust.

Trust influences everything. A work environment in which managers coach and trust their employees and employees trust their managers is one where productivity can thrive. Creating trust is challenging. Again this is where a coaching mindset can play a huge role.

Professor Ralph Stacey, a renowned organisational theorist and Professor of Management at University of Hertfordshire, in the UK., says it best –

“the quality of the system is determined by the quality of the relationships which is determined by the quality of the conversation.” 

When individuals have accountability over their work, they are more likely to achieve important business outcomes independently. Autonomous workers also understand how their everyday work contributes to the overall success of the company. Having this connection to the purpose helps to empower individuals to reach their highest potential.

Contact us today to find out more about incorporating a coaching mindset for your leaders and our Great People Inside assessment tools.

The post A Coaching Culture – how does this Protect Productivity and Profit? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Now may be an opportunity for your business to increase focus on this area with employees recognising the value of these skills.

These skills help overcome challenges in the workplace and build your team and business for several reasons:

• handling interpersonal conflicts
• leading employee training
• managing deadlines
• communicating and distributing information between employees working remotely and onsite
• building a solid company culture, and
• developing your employees’ maximum capability.

Leaders who adopt people management skills provide constructive feedback and mentor employees to grow and succeed in their positions. Goals will also be able to be established and achieved. And overall, the work environment will be influenced positively.

A leader who has an in-depth understanding of their employees can evaluate:

• the strength and weaknesses of their team
• the resources required, and
• set realistic deadlines.

This approach encourages the employees to strive for success and not set them up for failure.

In addition, leaders are able to build rapport, ask the team for constructive feedback, and take actionable steps to make positive changes in the work culture. As a result, this benefits everyone.

Below are four critical people management areas to help you understand your team and individuals at all levels. From onboarding, developing new skills, preparing them for other roles, to working on specialised projects.

1 Understand Human Behaviour And Acknowledging Diversity

It is crucial to understand one simple concept – we are all different. Each individual will react and behave differently in any given situation.

A leader needs to realise that family, environmental and cultural influences have shaped some beliefs and behaviours. Understanding and learning some of the behavioural types and conditioning will allow leaders and managers to treat their employees with respect. In return, the business will be rewarded with best work practices, a motivated team and promote a culture where ideas and opinions are valued.

2 The Individual’s Purpose

It is also imperative to understand how the individual team member sees their own purpose in their role and how they can contribute to the business. This approach can lead to improvements at both the individual employee and business levels. A continued effort in understanding their sense of purpose, whether they are in the office or working from home, ensures the individual and business goals stay aligned. 

3 Transparent Communication

When there is open and transparent communication, it creates an atmosphere of trust. In effect, by employing people management skills, this communication works both ways, i.e., you tell, and they listen, and you have to do the same – listen to your employees. 

This area is more critical than ever for businesses undergoing managing teams remotely. Video-based onboarding and mentoring and a remote communication strategy are essential for employee skill development and project delivery. 

4 We Own This Together

While leading with example is great, it also benefits when you entrust team members with specific tasks which best fit their skill sets. It shows that you are acknowledging their skillset and allowing them to demonstrate their capabilities. As a result, the team is closer and creates an environment of ownership and positive experiences. 

In a remote setting, delegate tasks through shared online platforms that allow for the employee’s autonomy while still maintaining a sense of community in the workplace.

Responsibility and accountability on both ends improve overall morale and reduces people management skills coming across as complicated, unnecessary at times, and time-consuming.

Ongoing people management for development and retention

Just because you have hired a superstar does not mean you don’t have to continue managing and developing them to maximise their potential and business outcomes.

Development should start from day one of an employee’s journey with their new company. The rapport the new employee develops with the company can have long-lasting effects on the business, including the employee retention rate. 

Trends have seen employees become more focused on developing their individual skills. Placing importance on their progress can help connect their goals to the more significant objectives of the business. Supporting these goals can be achieved remotely from the onboarding stage and continue through employment by hosting video workshops and online training seminars. 

Many reasons cause an employee to leave an organisation, such as:

• a lack of training
• development
• engagement
• progression opportunities.

Quantify top performance 

Many assessments compare candidate results against generic benchmarks or no benchmark at all. In other words, this leaves the user with either no reference point or, at best, a near enough is good enough benchmark.

Great People Inside believes assessing an individual’s job performance as accurately as possible requires benchmarks built specifically for each role. Assessments can apply to both positions operating onsite or remotely. By identifying the success DNA of your top performers, you can create job benchmarks based on what success looks like in your business. Further development of your existing team members can be implemented where appropriate, including a coaching option.

As the employer, benchmarking flows through to promoting and succession planning of your people to measure candidate profiles against the relevant top-performing role profile in your organisation.

Given these points, assessments that treat people as multi-faceted complex individuals we are, open a world of possibilities with both your new and existing people. You will find yourself in the stronger position of identifying your people’s true potential and providing opportunities for laser-focused development.

If you’d like to trial GPI’s assessments for consideration as part of your organisation’s people management strategy – click here.

The post How do people management skills improve your business success? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

The VUCA acronym (Volatile, Uncertain Complex, Ambiguous) has been around since 1987. It was the US Army War College’s response to the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s.

No one was forecasting Covid-19, even in January 2020.

Without a doubt, it has been the most disruptive events in our lifetimes. It has devastated:

• countries, 
• economies, 
• businesses, 
• individuals, 
• families, and 
• communities. 

But it is likely there may be other disruptions waiting in the wings that, as yet, we know nothing about. 

What does VUCA leadership and uncertainty mean for organisations?

The BIG questions for organisations are:

• which elements will affect you, 
• to what degree, and
• how will a combination of consecutive catastrophic disruptions alter the change.

Despite the deliberations of many so-called thought leaders and experts, the truthful answer is no one knows what will happen in the future! 

What you can rely on, though, is that there will be significant change. VUCA leaders in your organisation means the capability of anticipating, responding and reacting to change when it happens in turn, reacting again and again when it changes again (and again).

“THE ONLY CONSTANT IN LIFE IS CHANGE.” – HERACLITUS (C535BC – C475BC) 

What makes an effective VUCA leader?

Effective VUCA leadership is demonstrated by those who can give their company more than an abundance of skills and experience. Traits of VUCA leaders are that they can:

• develop and communicate a clear and motivating vision based on an understanding of the constantly changing economic environment, and 
• apply it through quick decisions, well-adapted to ever-changing conditions.

In addition to skills learned for a role, experience, and qualifications gained, there is no substitute for the enthusiasm, motivation and vision these great leaders possess. VUCA leaders can mean the difference between an average team and a high performing team in an organisation. They are the leaders every company wants to keep, nurture and develop to their full potential.

VUCA leaders are acutely aware of the strategic goals they are striving for and what they need to do to get there. They share company values, strive to be the best at what they do, identify areas for improvement and actively engage with their own leaders to perfect their craft and leadership method.

Leadership style isn’t a perfect science – but what all great leaders have in common is their ability to be authentic. 

Future proof your business through VUCA leadership

Thinking back to the beginning of the Covid crisis, who among your managers disappointed you with their response? Who impressed you? Were any of these a surprise to you (either positive or negative)? Those who responded well are, potentially, your VUCA Leaders. If you manage to retain them, they are the people who will guide you through future change events.

Using the Great People Inside customised VUCA leadership assessment, you can identify and quantify which team members and potential candidates possess the required attributes. Gaps that may be obstacles to your organisation’s success can also be uncovered. 

Click here for a free trial.

The post VUCA Leadership today: how to identify great VUCA Leaders appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Finding high performing staff involves a specific hiring approach which targets those with precisely the right attributes for the job in hand.

Once you have the right players, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a question of matching them to the right sales roles, managing them and developing the sales team in an ongoing way to ensure maximum efficiency and results.

Remember the old maxim ‘If you can sell, you can sell anything’?

Well, times have changed. Not all sales positions – or reps – are created equal.

According to studies analysed by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney in their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer, around 50% of those working in sales lack the fundamental traits necessary in effective salespeople. A further 25% are selling the wrong thing, for the wrong managers, in the wrong place.

That leaves just 25% of salespeople operating to full capacity and producing great results.

So one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to finding the right salesperson to sell your product or services.

Financial benefits of hiring the best salespeople

Having a sales team composed of star performers can make a significant difference to your bottom line.

In a study of 100 businesses, Sales Force of Top Producers – A Manager’s (and Owner’s) Dream, reported in Employer’s Advantage, the company’s top performer outsold the bottom performer by a whopping average of 5.7 to 1 – with a range of 3:1 to 9:1.

Just imagine what kind of results you’d get if your entire team worked at the lower margin of 3:1, not to mention 5:1 or higher.

Salesforce Work.com and the TAS Group drew some more shocking statistics from their research. These include:

• Two-thirds of salespeople miss their quota.
• More than half of all salespeople close less than 40% of potential deals.
• Top-performing sales reps are 250% better at qualifying leads.
• High performers are 2.5 times more likely to be effective qualifiers than the general population.
• Around 40% of salespeople don’t understand their customer’s ‘pain’, addressing problems they don’t even have.
• Revenue can be up to 25% greater at companies where sales and marketing are well integrated.
• High performers are 57% more likely to come from companies where sales and marketing work in harmony.

Measuring an individual salesperson’s productivity

All this begs the question, just how productive is your own sales team? Can you measure individual productivity? And once you’ve measured it, how do you replace or improve poor and fair performers?

The answer is using the advanced science from the next generation of smart assessment tools. Our award-winning Great People Inside assessments will help you identify those essential success attributes for each sales role, enabling you to match it with the right employee.

Great People Inside’s dimensions assessment will tell you:

• what makes your top performers so great
• why your average performers are less effective
• how to improve your least successful performers

How to hire the best people

The right assessment tools can help you find the right people for your sales roles.

Applied correctly, Great People Inside tools can  make your recruitment of future high performers up to three times more successful and also significantly reduce sales department turnover by more than 27%.

These results should be music to any employer’s ear when considering the statistics.

Figures reported in Employer’s Advantage, show that three out of four new sales employees don’t last the distance. They have, in fact, only a 25% chance of staying with the company for a full year.

Of those that do stick, only one in 10 go on to become a genuine top performer within three years.

So what is the essential DNA of these star performers? Many have fundamental traits and attributes in common, which help drive their peak performance for the longer term.

Using our validated and reliable customised sales assessments, we work with you and scientifically evaluate your current top-performing salespeople.

These measures enable us to create a customised job profile benchmark specific to your company based on your company’s top performers, not a random benchmark based on a collection of external organisations. A company customised standard means you can clearly see what sets your top performers apart from the rest.

This benchmark can also be used to significant effect when recruiting new sales staff, ensuring that candidates fit these rigorous criteria and carry the ‘work genes’ critical to success in their roles.

What to look for in sales job candidates today

There are plenty of things to consider when hiring, but it’s vital that new employees are a good fit with company culture and embrace their new work environment.

They must be able to cope with challenges, build strong relationships with work colleagues – especially in the marketing department – and understand the needs of your customers.

As if hiring salespeople wasn’t challenging enough already, in this new world we live in, where face to face selling may not always be the accepted way, how do you know if the candidates have what it takes to sell remotely. Interestingly, psychologists tell us the many attributes for in-person sales success don’t work effectively when remote selling!

So what attributes do star sales performers typically have? Behavioural science tells us that they commonly possess the following traits:

• Agreeableness: Tendency to be friendly, approachable, and easy to get along with.
• Conscientiousness: Tendency to strive for perfection, sometimes at all costs.
• Stability: Degree to which one reacts positively to negative or stressful situations.
• Openness: Willingness to try new ways of doing things.
• Tenacity: Tendency to be determined and persevere.
• Control: Tendency to take charge of people and situations. Leads more than follows.
• Entrepreneurial Approach: The tendency to quickly seize and tenaciously pursue new opportunities for the organisation, taking calculated risks at a high level of autonomy.The right recruitment tools help you weed out unsuitable candidates and identify the cream of the crop.

Other benefits of hiring star sales performers

Revenue benefits are not the only advantages of building a high performing sales team.

By adopting a more scientific approach to recruitment, you remove much of your operational downside costs; costs that don’t always show up on your P&L:

• Frequent employee turnover – even from good people
• Time spent recruiting and training of replacements
• Lost sales through an empty seat during recruitment and induction training
• Wasted investment in salary and training for someone that doesn’t make it.
• Inability to close deals when not face to face.

Try us for FREE

You probably wouldn’t make a significant purchase without doing your research and acquiring objective data about your future potential investment. Then why would you hire a new salesperson costing more than $100K per annum using nothing more than your “gut feel” and highly subjective references?

At the end of the day if you’re happy with your current sales team’s success rate don’t change anything.

However, if you want to significantly increase your business performance talk to Great People Inside about our sales assessments – we’ll even let you try us risk-free and fee-free. Just click HERE, and we will be in touch.

The post What attributes do top salespeople have in common? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Practical ways to adapt your approach

Many of us can easily recall precisely when key events occurred around the world and in our own lives. It is fair to say that the current pandemic is one of those events and is well and truly etched in our memories for as long as we shall live.

In March 2020 you can probably recall the moment you first heard the word “lockdown”. It likely stopped you in your tracks as you were confronted with the thought, what does this mean for me and my family? Then came the closure of businesses, JobKeeper, Jobseeker and a mountain of eye watering debt, the likes of which we have never seen before in this country.

Except for Victoria, most states have since relaxed the restrictions imposed, however the constant media reminders and escalated infection control procedures practised daily in businesses across the country are a constant reminder of what running a business looks like in the year 2020.

This period marks the greatest challenge to leaders. Many of your peers and employees are likely worried about their future. Now more than ever, your people need the steady hand and re assurance of your leadership.

The problem though, is that leaders are human too and are not immune to the anxiety, stress and sleepless nights caused by the uncertainty we have lived through for the best part of this year.

Right now, as a business owner or leader you have a lot on your plate and sometimes it may even seem too much. This can impact your ability to think clearly or may cause you to lash out (metaphorically) at team members or even become short tempered with your customers.

But how can you morph and adapt your leadership to cope with the current demands? To help, we have outlined five practical approaches you can adopt.

1. Lead Self

It was Charles Manz who first used the term ‘Self-leadership’ in 1983; and from this we know that to be a successful leader we must lead ourselves first, before we can lead others. The current situation calls for in-depth personal reflection to truly understand who we are, how we got to where we are today and what our natural tendencies and behaviours are when we are in a crisis and under pressure.

Self-awareness is one of the key elements of emotional intelligence (EI), which Daniel Goleman, a renowned psychologist, refers to as a person’s ability “to identify and manage their emotions and identify and influence others’ emotions”

Self-awareness provides a leader with key personal insights and enables them to self-manage those circumstances when triggered by a situation, an event, or a personal interaction. At the end of the day, we cannot control the occurrence of “stuff” that triggers us, but we do get to choose our reaction. As leaders we are constantly on display, and our people and our clients are making decisions about us and our leadership based on what they observe.

2. Get ‘real’

Many leaders tend to think that showing vulnerability is a weakness- in fact, it is a strength of leadership. When leaders stop wasting energy trying to conceal what they think other people should not see, it allows them to start showing their “real” self. By accepting vulnerability as a strength, leaders can stop worrying about having every answer and realise it is okay to not know. True wisdom comes from stepping away from the fear of not knowing.

The idea of being “real” was popularised by American management guru Warren Bennis in his 1989 book On Becoming a Leader, and gained further attention through the 2003 publication Authentic Leadership by Bill George, a professor at the Harvard Business School. Such leaders know and accept themselves and present a genuine and empathetic face to their teams.

They communicate truthfully and directly, and lead with the heart, not just the mind. But they are no softies. Truly ‘real” leaders always keep their goal in mind – the good of the organisation they are responsible for and lead. Mission-driven, they can separate out personal feelings from work imperatives.

3. Model the behaviour

Peter Drucker a renowned management consultant once said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.  He did not mean that a great strategy is not important but rather that an empowering culture was a more certain route to organisational success.

Culture can be described “as the way we do things around here”. It includes leadership, communication, people, policies, vision, values, onboarding, and hiring and firing processes. Especially during the current situation, people like to work for and with leaders and managers who make them feel good, and these positive feelings result in improved performance. When leaders and managers do not promote these positive feelings throughout the business, performance decreases and mediocrity increases.

Most of us are familiar with the proverb that “a fish rots from the head”, which means that leadership is the root cause of an organisation’s failure and demise. This is true whether that organisation is a country, a company, or a business unit – toxic leadership can poison the emotional climate of a business quicker than you can say profit and loss! Modelling the type of leadership behaviour that you expect in your business is critical as it sets the tone, creates the environment, and builds your unique culture.

4. Communicate

George Bernard Shaw once said, “the greatest issue in communication is the illusion it has taken place”. As we know, great communication is much more than just getting your message across. It has to do with understanding the emotion and the intentions behind the information contained in the message. Leaders need highly advanced communication skills, not only to clearly convey a message, but to also listen in a way that gains the full meaning of what is being said and makes the other person feel heard and understood.

This is where favouring your right ear is important. While this may seem quite unusual, experts tell us that the left side of the brain is where the primary processing centres for both speech comprehension and emotions happens, and as the left side of the brain is connected to the right side of the body, favouring your right ear can help you better detect the emotional nuances of what someone is saying.

Many of us despite our best efforts to get the message across, on occasions find that the listener has heard differently to what was intended, the message somehow was blown off course and landed on a different landing strip than we intended! Adopting a non-judgemental approach and crafting powerful questions can help a leader explore deeply and increase their success of more effective communication.

5. Get data, get results

Leading others is difficult. It’s fair to say you would not purchase a piece of capital equipment for your business without the benefit of objective data, so why would you attempt to lead your highly valued (and costly) team without the edge that scientific objective insights can give you? As a good friend of mine in Dublin used to say, “Are you stupid or what?”

Your team members are made up of vastly different personalities, all with their own unique passions, backgrounds, views, and work styles. With the best will in the world, misunderstandings and differences of opinion can create friction within the group.

Left unchecked, this can put a damper on performance and enthusiasm, leading to conflicts which may be hard to resolve.

This is the last thing you need right now. So, how can you harvest the best each team member has to give, using their attributes to maximum benefit, while managing those behavioural traits with the potential to upset team dynamics?

The answer is behavioural assessments, which give you detailed information about you and each of your employee’s skills, behaviour, and personality traits. These next generation of unique customisable smart tools from Great People Inside that we recommend, provide leaders with heightened self-awareness and valuable pointers about the way their employees can function to optimum capacity at work – both as individuals and within the team.

Your choice

We appreciate that every business is unique, and that in the 21^st century, businesses invest in defining, developing and implementing that very specific culture, that state-of-the-art customer service, those distinguished values and dynamics that deliver their business advantage and success. In other words, we understand that a business’s uniqueness and greatness cannot, and should not, rely on a “one size fits all” approach.

The assessments we recommend are unique as they offer a menu of more than 60 validated dimensions from which you choose to measure precisely what is important to your business.

If you’d like to learn more, or if you would like a FREE trial, please click on this LINK and we will get back to you promptly.

David Leahy

Great People Inside

The post MORPH YOUR LEADERSHIP appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

What’s a team?

Joanne Richardson (2010:86) defines a real team as: “A group of people working together in an organisation who are committed to achieving clear team-level objectives upon which they agree; who have to work closely and interdependently in order to achieve these objectives; whose members are clear about their specific roles within the team and have the necessary autonomy to decide how to carry out team tasks; and who communicate regularly as a team in order to regulate team processes.”

Wow, I know that’s a bit of a mouthful but in essence it’s about having a unifying team objective, high interdependency levels, and being comfortable holding one another to account.

What’s a group?

When we talk about groups, we are talking about people who come together with a common interest but do not always have the same goal in mind. For example, a group of people may come together to be coached on effective leadership, but each individual has their own final goals to which they would apply their new skills to.

Both team and group coaching involve the gathering of people to learn new skills relating to professional development, workplace communication and leadership. So what really is the difference?

The renowned Professor Peter Hawkins in his book ‘Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership’ developed some great questions to help identify the difference.

Ask yourself:

Does your team have clear objectives?

Do you work closely together to achieve those objectives?

Do you meet regularly to review performance and how it can be improved?

If you answered “no” to these questions then you are more likely a group rather than a team.

If you apply this definition to your sales people, for example, do you really have a ‘sales team’ or are they a group of individuals? What would best serve your business?

Group coaching

Group coaching involves a session in which recipients discover new skills and enhance their professional performance together. Unlike team coaching, individuals who undergo the same group coaching session needn’t work together in any capacity nor have any common goals. However they should share a common interest in learning new skills and reaching their own workplace goals.

What’s the purpose of group coaching?

Group coaching helps individuals build the skill set needed to lead more effectively and develop their performance. Group coaching is often used as a way to follow up on training activities, as it can help individuals retain knowledge and encourages implementation.

Team coaching

In his book ‘The Complete Handbook of Coaching’, David Clutterbuck defines team coaching as “a learning intervention designed to increase collective capability and performance of a group or team, through application of the coaching principles of assisted reflection, analysis and motivation for change.”  

Like group coaching, team coaching helps individuals develop into better leaders. But it also gives teams the tools to work more effectively together so that individuals can reach their own goals and help the team reach its collective goals. While group coaching helps individuals, team coaching provides teams with the tools and communication mechanisms to reach success.

What’s the purpose of team coaching?

Team coaching helps to accelerate team performance. It is a tool for helping individuals work more efficiently together to reach common workplace goals. It is particularly useful for teams that are newly formed, ones that have experienced a change in leadership or those that would like to improve their performance.

Why is team coaching so important?

Team success relies entirely on how individuals work together. That’s why we call it teamwork. Team coaching enables individuals to work together to improve team outcomes.

Team coaching stresses the importance of each individual within a team in driving overall success. Team success isn’t achieved by having one outstanding team lead. It’s attributed to each individual within the team. Take sport for example. The star player on a sports team can’t be given full credit for a major team success as without the team, they would not be able to succeed.

Team coaching makes each individual within the team accountable for their team’s results, whether they are failures or successes. When individuals feel ownership over the results of their team, they are more likely to be engaged, to reach their own goals independently and develop their overall performance. Because of this, team coaching is a great way to not only boost team performance, but to improve employee engagement, build team morale and retain your best talent.

How does team coaching work?

Teams can hire an external executive coach to come into the office and help with team development. Or a coach can work one-on-one with a team leader to transfer coaching skills, giving them the ability to coach and lead their own team more effectively.

When a team leader knows how to lead, but also knows how to coach their team, it creates the foundation needed for effective lines of communication to thrive. A team coaching mindset is extremely beneficial for all leaders because it gives them the ability to communicate in the right way to help drive their team to reach important business goals.

Our approach

At Directions Unlimited, our team coaching programs consist of a 6-12 month process, that develops a team’s capacity to deliver sustainable high performance.

Guided by an experienced facilitator, our team coaching:

• Focuses on agreed business outcomes
• Provides tools for the team to continue enhancing its performance beyond the team coaching program
• Develops teams that trust one another and hold one another accountable for taking action
• Builds trust in the capacity of both relationship and task aspects of teaming
• Relies on the coach to facilitate a learning and action process, not to give advice
• Recognises the team as a living breathing “system” with attributes and identity that go beyond any of the individual team members
• Does not involve any private and confidential interactions between the coach and individual team members outside of the team setting
• Is not a “team building event”

If you would like to learn more about how Directions Unlimited can conduct team coaching sessions with your teams to improve morale, lift engagement levels and to help your company achieve better results, contact us: info@directionsunlimited.com.au

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Why do people avoid conflict?

Just as conflict is a part of human nature, the human construct of social niceties has brought with it the desire for us to avoid conflict all together. Our natural tendencies and how we are hardwired can influence how we believe conflict should be addressed. Managers who are naturally highly accommodating may want to be the ‘good guy’, but in doing so can often avoid important and constructive conversations that have the potential to ignite conflict. Equally, highly assertive managers may tend to take a very direct approach (the “four by two” approach) which can start the whole conversation off on the wrong foot. Which approach is right? Consider this.

Conflict happens. It’s a normal part of everyday life whether we like it or not. Although we might think that conflict interferes with our business objectives, the way we deal with it can have an even bigger impact on the overall success of your company.

Conflict that is swept under the rug will not just go away. Unresolved conflict can fester into a wound that is hard to heal, so it’s best to confront conflict before it turns into a bigger problem. If conflict goes unresolved, you could see employees’ engagement and productivity levels plummet and your best talent walk out the door. Taking an overly direct approach may see the employee defending their position rather than listening, and feeling hard done by, which is also likely to cause a reduction in engagement and productivity.

How does conflict interfere with communication?

When managers fear conflict, they can breakdown the communication lines that run within your organisation. If managers fail to communicate effectively with their subordinates and teams, employees might feel less likely to approach their leaders if and when something goes wrong. And if a manager is scared to give constructive feedback to an employee or team, it can negatively impact the growth and development of that individual or team.

So, how can leaders face their fear and address conflict head on?

Gain a coach’s mindset

Coaching skills equip individuals with the ability to communicate effectively, giving them the confidence to approach difficult conversations with ease. A coach will set regular one-on-one meetings with their coachee to see how they’re going with their work and find out what their challenges are, so that they can reach their goals independently. They will also provide regular feedback, both positive and constructive, so that individuals can better understand their strengths and areas requiring improvement. Regular and effective communication means that these leaders often know about issues before problems arise. Conflict is therefore less likely to occur and if it does, they’re well equipped to deal with it.

Be objective yet considerate

When conflict does arise, a great leader will consider each party’s concerns, while remaining focused on the overall objectives of the company. When dealing with conflict in the workplace, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of each individual involved with the conflict while formulating an outcome that will best serve the company. Remember, if one or more parties isn’t happy with the outcome, it could impact negatively on their wellbeing, engagement and productivity.

Be open

A coaching leader is open, trustworthy and approachable. Maintaining open lines of communication amongst individuals and teams is the best way to prevent conflict from arising and to address it effectively when it does. Giving regular feedback is a great place to start. It’s important to foster an environment in which people feel confident to approach their managers and fellow workers when there is a problem or when they would like advice.

Seek out conflict

Poor managers often have their blinkers on when there is a problem within their team or wider organisation. In order to address conflict, you’ll need to know when it is occurring. Seeking out conflict is not as investigatory as it may seem. You simply need to communicate effectively and follow the progress of individuals and teams so that you know if they have any concerns and if any problems are emerging.

Leverage conflict for growth and development

Where there is conflict, there is the opportunity to learn and grow. Addressing and resolving conflict is a huge learning curve for leaders and employees alike. It requires leaders to problem solve in a high pressure situation and manage relationships in an objective yet empathetic manner which addresses each individual’s needs and desires.

To find out more about how to manage conflict effectively in your workplace, contact us today for an obligation free discussion.

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