Recent research reports that there has been an increase in the total number of open Customer Success jobs for the first time since February. In June, there were 6,515 available Customer Success jobs posted. This number was nearly 500 more than in May.

Regardless of the organisation’s size, gone are the days of Sales and Marketing departments only delivering the business goals. Today it’s critical to have the customer success department straddling sales and marketing to achieve your deliverables.

Customer Success versus Customer Service

Most customer support roles tend to be reactive as they respond to inbound customer requests, complaints and issues. The opposite tends to be the case when it comes to Customer Success roles.

These roles are focused on working proactively in partnership with customers post-sale to ensure maximisation of the product or service value delivered to the client and head off any issues before they fester. It’s critical that Customer Success delivers a positive customer experience and creates a close professional relationship.

If done correctly, Customer Success’s broader and essential role leads to business success. It’s also a vital contributor to customer loyalty. When you help your customers succeed, they become promoters and advocates of your business. Customer Success is connected to your bottom line as it: 

• minimises customer churn rates, 
• improves renewal and satisfaction, 
• and in turn, boosts revenue.

Murphy’s law

Edward Murphy Jr. was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems and was born in 1918 in the Panama Canal Zone.

He is best known for his namesake Murphy’s law, stating, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

While Customer Success done well offers a significant commercial advantage to a business, if done poorly and with Murphy’s law at times coming in to play significantly affects business factors.  

But what can possibly go wrong with Customer Success?

For starters, to maximise productivity, organisations may allocate too many client accounts to one team or representative to look after. Or weight incentives are heavily towards revenue generation. Or worse still, wrong people are assigned to the role.

Spend any time with a sales organisation, and you are likely to hear a similar story—a story about a consistently top-performing sales rep who failed to make the transition to sales manager.

And the reason? The skills and attributes required as a successful salesperson are vastly different to those needed to be a top manager. The same is true applies to Customer Success Managers.

The abilities and traits required to be a successful Customer Success Manager are many and varied, and selecting the right people for this role certainly presents risk elements.

What makes a great Customer Success Manager (CSM)?

Firstly, there is no one size fits all. Industry type and service or product offering contribute to answering this question. CSM’s usually possess broad business experience. It’s not uncommon for people with backgrounds in sales, support, presales, project management, and even marketing roles to have made successful CSMs.

When we ask managers what makes a great CSM, they usually tell us their best people are proactive and tend to have similar traits such as:

• Great at managing stress
• Resilient
• Empathetic
• Customer-focused
• Sincere
• Keeps promises
• Positive attitude
• Calm in a crisis
• Self-assured
• Socially relaxed
• Strong reasoning and analytical ability
• Great communicators

It’s quite the laundry list. The complex nature of backgrounds combined with the challenge of pinpointing the varied attributes that align with your business and service offering is where many organisations fail.

In fact, studies tell us that failing to get the right person that fits your organisation will result in a decrease in productivity, higher levels of staff turnover and high levels of job-related stress.

Determine the requirements and spot the people

The challenge for organisations today, especially in the current tight market, is identifying the best potential CSM’s. Typically, in our work, we observe many organisations that rely on the job description, resumes and reference checks when making hiring or redeployment decisions. And this then results in a high level of three out of four recruits who just aren’t the right fit.

It’s a case of “rubbish in = rubbish out”. If we don’t have the right information,

how can we possibly make the right decision?

We have worked with many clients using our next-gen tools and helped them profile the critical success attributes that establish fit for a role. Using our 4-step robust process, our clients in the main enjoy a 3-fold increase in pinpointing top people that excel, 47% reduction in team turnover and a significant increase in productivity.

The war for talent is in play right now in Australia. You owe it to you and your business to remove the higher risk of getting it wrong.

Contact Great People Inside to help recruit your next outstanding CSM or top performers for other important roles to benefit your organisation.

The post Retention, revenue, and return: Why it’s important you identify and hire top Customer Success talent 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.

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.

Think about the last significant purchase you made. It’s likely that you obtained some objective data to help with your decision making, but what objective data have you available when making recruitment selection decisions?

Recruitment process

So, your business is going well and you’ve decided it’s time to hire a new employee or two. You define the role, quantify the qualifications and experience the person needs to have, place your job advertisement all over the internet, or depending on your business, brief your HR Manager or engage a recruitment company.

The “fun” has only just begun. Research shows we get it right about 25% of the time! By “get it right” we mean hiring a top performer, not just a good or adequate performer. Think about that, a process that delivers the right outcome only 25% of the time – I doubt you would tolerate this in any other part of your business.

Yes, hiring new people is far more than checking a resume, ‘liking’ a candidate at interview, and trusting the rest to luck.

But don’t be too hard on yourself, given that studies show around 50% of candidates embellish their resumes and a staggering 81% tell lies during an interview, it’s no wonder you struggle to get it right.

There’s a science behind the selection of new employees which can revolutionise your process and the way you identify and develop top performers.

The importance of “Fit”

Having followed 360,000 people through their careers during a period of 20 years, a major study published by Harvard Business Review demonstrated that a key ingredient in selecting and retaining people is ensuring that they are matched to their jobs in terms of their abilities, interests, and personalities. The study discovered that educational qualifications, experience, age, gender or race are not statistical predictors of top performance in a job. That’s a bit scary, because that’s what we see on resumes and also what most employers use when selecting new people.

The study demonstrated though, that when you put people in jobs where the demands of the job matched their own abilities, where the stimulation offered by the job matched their particular interests, and where the cultural demands of the position matched their personalities, staff turnover decreased dramatically, and productivity increased drastically.

What exactly is “Fit?”

“Fit” is the degree of compatibility between an individual’s strengths, needs, and wants in a particular job and work environment. When interests align, the employee and the organisation experience a good job fit. Establishing job fit helps to identify and place individuals in positions where they are likely to be successful. Job fit determines if a person CAN do a job, HOW they will do a job, and if they will ENJOY doing the job.

Why should you establish fit?

Did you know that employees who are well matched to their jobs are 2.5 times more productive on the job? Studies show that proper job fit improves engagement and job satisfaction, resulting in increased productivity, while negative factors such as job related stress, tension, workplace conflict, and costly employee turnover diminish it. There are numerous studies over the past five to ten years that demonstrate the significant impact increased productivity, reduced employee turnover and early failure have on your bottom line. CHA-CHING! It makes sense to establish fit.

How to establish fit

Do you wish you could consistently replicate high performers? It’s easy to recognise top performers when you see them in action or review their numbers. The challenge is understanding what makes these people successful, and ensuring future candidates share these success factors.

A key component in establishing job fit is to know exactly what the role or position in question demands. The first step we recommend is to create a comprehensive and detailed job description.

Then, using a validated assessment, identify the characteristics of employees who have demonstrated success in that particular position. You can then use this data as a basis for developing a performance model (benchmark) which can be used when evaluating potential applicants to help predict their future success. Our Job fit solutions combine tested and reliable data derived from employee assessments with customised data to create a benchmark, which will match candidates to the job and specific company. In essence, our validated assessments and people analytic tools help you extract the ‘success DNA’ of your most productive staff.

How does job fit help?

Job fit assessments help you make better hiring decisions by helping you understand the core characteristics of your top performers. There is no greater tragedy in business than hiring competent employees into jobs in which they are destined to fail. When this happens, their potential is wasted and its costs you between half and two thirds of their salary!

Our hiring solutions measure the essential behaviour characteristics you need to make the most intelligent hiring and selection decisions. Our assessment tool kits help business owners, professional recruiters and hiring managers predict job suitability, and accurately assist in matching people with the work they will do in their new jobs.

Today, many organisations use job fit assessments throughout the interview process to learn more about job candidates. There are many kinds of employee assessments available, but the most successful hiring assessments use job fit as a tool to increase consistency and success in the hiring process. By including job fit as a key factor in their employee selection and redeployment process, our clients hiring procedure is significantly more effective, and results in an increase of up to 300% in identifying future top performers.

So, whether you are business owner or leader, a HR manager or a professional recruiter, we have a hiring solution tool kit to meet your needs. Of course, you can also stick with that process that works 25% of the time! Contact us to get started finding the right fit.

The post There is a shortage of great talent out there appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

What exactly is a coaching culture?

A coaching culture is a workplace approach in which leaders, managers and staff members work together to increase individual, team and company organisational performance.

A workplace that has a coaching culture is one where workers feel empowered to work towards their own goals independently. Managers who foster this type of environment have a positive impact on employee engagement and organisational productivity. In the same report, Gallup found that managers are a huge influence on engagement rates, accounting 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 coaching culture in your workplace?

Teach coaching skills

A coach is someone who works one-on-one with an individual or with a team to help them unlock their maximum potential. In a workplace environment, a coach helps individuals achieve their professional outcomes while still holding them accountable for their work. They also provide non-judgemental support, ensuring the welfare of their coachee is met, both at work and outside of work.

Not all managers have a coaching mindset, but all great managers do. Prioritising coaching in your workplace training is the best way to create a coaching culture at work. This type of training is particularly important for employees who are transitioning into leadership roles, however can be beneficial for every employee within your organisation, no matter what their role is. Make sure your coach training is from an International Coaching Federation Accredited Coach Training Provider (ACTP). The IECL offers excellent courses that comply.

Adopting a leader-as-coach mindset will help you as manager/leader to identify coachable moments. And in turn encourage your team to model this type of behaviour with their team members The development of a coaching culture starts at the top. As leaders we are constantly on display so maintaining self awareness and composure especially in stressful situations is a must.

Communicate effectively

A coaching mindset involves asking the right questions and listening intently. Rather than saying “do this please”, a coach will ask “what approach do you think will help to achieve this outcome?”. This type of framing puts the onus on the coachee to think, gives them ownership and empowers them to reach their own goals and helps them to gain valuable problem solving skills along the way. A great leader/manager will arrange regular one-on-one meetings with employees to see where each employee is at with their work. They will check in to see if individuals feel good about their work, and they will give feedback, both positive and constructive, on a regular basis.

A great coach will prioritise the development of individuals because they know that in order to achieve vital business objectives, the company needs engaged, motivated and high performing individuals to work collectively towards a shared goal.

Prioritise employee engagement

Tying together talent and employee engagement to achieve important business objectives is what coaching is all about. The more engaged your workers are, the more motivated they will be to achieve results.

In Australia and New Zealand, the Gallup study found that employees have lackluster engagement scores, with just 14% feeling engaged in their job.

To keep employees engaged, it’s important to nurture their own professional development. In order to develop your people, a good step is discussing with each employee their own professional goals and communicating clearly and precisely how the organisation can support them to achieve these. In this regard it’s really important that the employee understands they own their own development and their careers and that the company’s role is to support them and guide them along the way. It should not be a case of the employee waiting for something to happen to them. Remember, not every organisation has the resources to provide in-house training or coaching but organisations focused on developing people can support their development through various outsourced initiatives and check in regularly to see how they are going. A focus on workplace morale should be prioritised in the same way that other important company objectives are. The wellbeing of individuals and teams will have a direct influence on their level of productivity and performance.

Foster an environment of trust

A workplace environment in which managers trust their employees and employees trust their managers is one where productivity can thrive. Creating trust is challenging and again this is where a coaching mindset can play a huge role. Professor Ralph Stacey 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. This connection helps to empower individuals to reach their highest potential.

To find out more about how to incorporate a coaching mindset in your leaders, contact us today for an obligation free discussion.

The post How to create a coaching culture in your workplace appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Importantly, this is where management and coaching intersect – every great manager must also be a great coach. According to a study conducted by Bersin & Associates, managers who effectively coach individuals achieve 21% better business results than those who don’t.

So, what is coaching?

Coaching concentrates on individual development, rather than the tasks of the job. Coaches help to facilitate and encourage learning as opposed to teaching. They will ensure that individuals are responsible and accountable for their work and therefore motivated to achieve goals autonomously. Coaches facilitate an environment in which individuals can grow and develop. A manager who utilises coaching techniques will support individuals on their own journey to success.

For more information on the benefits of coaching check out our article on this topic.

What happens if a manager lacks coaching skills?

Managers who consistently adopt a “tell” approach rather than a coaching approach are ignoring learning opportunities and therefore are less likely to achieve outstanding results with their team. It is well known fact that people leave managers, they don’t leave companies.

If you are appointed as a Manager, it is merely a title, however being a leader is something that is bestowed on us by others. Great leaders understand and appreciate their staff. They provide positivity and insight. And they have excellent motivational and communication skills – in other words they are great coaches.

For more information on how to be a successful leader check out our article on this topic.

So, how can managers integrate and adopt a ‘leader as coach’ mindset or approach into their personal management style? Here are our top three coaching skills for every great manager to get the best out of their team.

Asking and listening

How amazing is the human mind? Did you know the mind cannot not respond to a question? Our minds are geared to grapple with questions and find answers. What are the possibilities for you if you were to access the combined power of the minds of your team?

By asking open-ended questions, you release this power while simultaneously facilitating the learning process. By asking for example, “In your view what are the options that would deliver success in this task?”, rather than simply instructing an employee on how to do it, employees are given the space to think creatively and develop their own path to developmental success.

A large number of managers are promoted because they demonstrated to their superiors they are great problem solvers and “doers”. These traits have enabled them to be successful and get to where they are today in their role. The challenge for them is that these traits which have served them so well and helped them achieve, may not be effective when they are now faced with achieving results through others.

In addition to crafting great questions, a manager with a ‘leader as coach’ mindset will listen attentively to what their employees have to say. They will resist the opportunity to finish sentences, they will use silence. By doing this they will likely gain opportunities to demonstrate their true leadership by acknowledging to the team on occasions that the team or individual’s idea or approach is superior to their own. By not only listening but taking on board their employee’s concerns and desires, managers can help them to better develop in their role and in the company.

Building trust

The Oxford English dictionary defines trust as: “Firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something”. Successful coaching relies entirely on a relationship of trust between a manager and their employees. Adopting a ‘leader as coach’ mindset requires managers to start with a firm belief in the ability of their team members.

With trust comes accountability, and with accountability comes results. To reach their peak potential, employees need to feel accountable for their own work and therefore for their own achievements. While managers need to trust that their employees have the capacity to achieve success, employees need to trust that their work is being appreciated, that their manager has their back and that their job is secure. Building trust is a gradual process which can be achieved by maintaining open lines of communication and providing support whether it be task-related or emotional.

Giving constructive feedback

Constructive feedback is a developmental tool that is vital for organisational success, but which is often underused by managers. A great manager will give feedback to employees, often. They will make connections between an individual’s strengths and the company’s mission to improve development and drive success. Expressing these connections positively through regular feedback is the best way to achieve results.

For more information on how to deliver constructive feedback check out our article on this topic.

At Directions Unlimited, we understand how important it is for managers to incorporate coaching skills into their role, and we offer executive coaching to help you develop a coaching mindset. Contact us for an obligation free discussion on how executive coaching can prepare you to effectively manage your team.

The post 3 coaching skills you need to be a great manager appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Often when we look at highly successful people, we don’t stop to consider what might have gone on behind the scenes to help them get to where they are. Or in fact, who helped them.

An athlete wouldn’t dream of training without the support and development of a sports coach. Their training is crucial to ensure they are at peak performance. The same can be said about the executives and managers in a business. How can they perform at their best, with the most impact, without a coach?

What is executive coaching?

We like the IECL definition which is that executive coaching is the process of working with executives and managers in a solution-focused, collaborative relationship to help maximise their potential. It can take form in a variety of ways, but the overall goal is to help you be the best version of yourself as a leader, manager, executive, and person.

Coaching is not about mentoring, counselling, managing, leading, or giving advice. It is aimed at unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance by helping them to learn through doing rather than just telling them what to do. It’s about helping someone develop and advance in their business, role, or life.

Put simply, an executive coach can give you the tools and support you need in order to reach your potential and beyond. An executive coach can get you focussed on the things you usually push aside. This could be due to limiting beliefs, stories you tell yourself, or that ‘inner village’ chattering away in your head telling you why something isn’t possible. In effect, a coach helps you to get out of your own way!

Is coaching the same as mentoring?

No. While the terms ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’ are often used interchangeably, there are subtle differences.

Mentoring provides an avenue in which the mentee is given access to the mentor’s wisdom, ‘tricks of the trade’ and short-cuts to success – helping to shape their values and beliefs in a positive way. Mentors give advice and guidance.

Executive coaching, on the other hand, is less prescriptive. Coaches provide a balance of security – in that they are available to be leant on, and challenge – the coach provides a safe, non judgemental, supportive and confidential environment where they challenge the coachee to move beyond their comfort zone, think about things differently while also holding them accountable for achieving their own outcomes.

In executive coaching it’s the ability to explore ideas, issues, obstacles or opportunities with the help of a skilled coach in this environment that leads the ‘aha moment’ or what Dr Hilary Armstrong refers to as ‘exuberant learning’. Executive coaching is a partnership – think of it like a Pilot and Co-Pilot – which helps people achieve clarity of direction. It increases the choices available to them, and offers rapid development.

What are the benefits of executive coaching?

Some of the benefits you could see from executive coaching are:

Unbiased support

Often a person is so deep in the day to day happenings of business, that they can’t see the forest for the trees, and any internal support (unless an internal coach is employed in the organisation) they seek is often laden with ill-advice and a lack of knowledge.

When you engage an external executive coach, as they are not working in your business, they naturally approach the engagement with an unbiased non judgemental perspective which can be very helpful in supporting the coachee to explore alternate approaches and different ways of thinking about things.

Strategic direction

It’s pretty hard to succeed in business without a plan, and a good plan includes a strategic direction. Without one, it’s as though you’re hopping in the car for a drive and you have no idea where you’re headed!

An executive coach helps you to identify what’s getting in your way, supports you to identify your objectives and to clarify the direction you want to take. From there, they support you to map out different strategies and set clear goals. Setting goals is a crucial part to personal and business advancement, yet is often not done effectively. An executive coach can help change that.

Accountability

In addition to supporting you on your journey, an executive coach will be there to hold you accountable, ensuring you complete the tasks needed to reach your goals. Knowing that you need to report back to your coach and not wanting to disappoint them is sometimes all the push a person needs to stay on track to success.

Success

With the right coach you can identify what’s getting in your way. This may result in freeing up more of your time to work on the bigger picture items which will directly contribute to your success. By working with a coach you get to understand how you are ‘being’ in your role in the business (even as the business owner), develop further as a leader and identify what actions need to be implemented to succeed.

At Directions Unlimited, we strive to approach coaching as a dialogue, not as a dictation. Our first step is always to ensure the ‘chemistry’ exists between coach and coachee and we then partner with you and support you to identify and achieve your goals.  

Direction’s Unlimited Director, David Leahy, graduated from the prestigious Institute of Executive Coaching in Sydney, and has coached executives internationally in South America, USA, Europe, Asia and Australia – helping many individuals and companies attain their goals.

If you would like an obligation free discussion, contact us today and see how our tailored coaching approach can help you excel.

The post How can coaching benefit me? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

High staff turnover within a business can result in huge costs. The fact is that there is no line in your profit and loss that captures the cost of lost customers, lost opportunities, and dips in morale so it’s very difficult for businesses to track the real cost.

A study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that it can cost the equivalent of six to nine months of an employee’s salary in order to recruit and train a replacement. When you consider an employee with a salary of $100,000, this means it would cost over $50,000 to replace them! When that employee is a high performer, the costs are even greater as a result of lost productivity, lost customers or clients, and other opportunity costs.

Failing to retain high performers also impacts the rest of your team through increased stress within the workplace, dips in employee morale, and drops in productivity that can spread company wide. Even when a new employee has been trained, it can take months, if not years, for them to be as productive and high performing as a long term high performing employee.

So, it makes sense then to do everything you can to keep these top performers in your business. It’s not enough anymore to just assume that people are happy in their job because it puts food on the table. People require much more to be happy and engaged at work, and it’s our job as business owners and leaders to facilitate that.

Retaining your best people

The best way to retain your top performers is by understanding who they are as people, how they fit into their roles and your business as a whole, and what is likely to keep them engaged and happy. Essentially, you need to know what makes them tick.

Would a flexible working arrangement or free lunch bring out the best in them? Would above average pay or an extra week off in the year make your employee work harder? Would promoting from within and offering training and upskilling ensure that your employee remains loyal to your brand?

While all of these ideas are great for keeping employees happy and content, sometimes it can feel a little like throwing it all at the wall and hoping something sticks!

If you knew there was a way to learn everything you need to know about your employees, so that you can help them fit in and stay in your business, wouldn’t that be better? A directed and tailored approach to retaining your staff can help your business soar.

How to know what makes your employees tick

If you’re looking to understand more about your current employees so you can nurture and retain them successfully – a good, objective assessment tool can help you do this, such as the ProfileXT assessment.

ProfileXT gives you a full understanding of an employee’s abilities, personality traits, behaviours, and preferred learning styles. In addition, you also gain insights into the employee’s interests which helps you understand what motivates them and which parts of their role they are most interested in.

Overall, you’re learning whether or not the employee fits within their role and the overall culture of the team – we call this the JobFit. Now, the goal isn’t to pit your team against one another, but rather to understand them completely so that you can ensure they fit into their role, remain fulfilled, and optimise their strengths and skills.

Ensuring you have the right fit within your business is the most important aspect. When a person is the right fit in their role, they enjoy the work they do and as a result productivity and employee engagement increases. This leads to improved retention, better business outcomes and improved profitability.

The next steps

Once you better understand your employees, you can take informed steps to keep them happy and motivated. This will vary between workplaces and employees, so it’s a good idea to have a few branches to your ongoing retention plans.

You’ll get an understanding of what tactics will work best with your employees once you have assessed them using an objective tool. However, there are some common actions which contribute effectively to retention. According to a study by the Australian Human Resources Institute, the most effective ways to retain employees are through offering effective management and leadership, providing opportunities for career progression and promotion, and facilitating a positive workplace culture.

By implementing a strong retention plan within your workplace, you can reap benefits for your business such as significant cost savings, higher productivity and improved quality of work, along with boosts in employee morale and team culture. In short, everybody wins.

To find out how you can retain your top performers and ensure that they are fulfilled within their roles, contact us today.

Of course to retain top performers, you need to source them in the first place! To find out how, check out our posts on how you can source top performing talent for your business and how to avoid a bad hire.

The post How to retain your best people through understanding what makes them tick appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Unless these attributes are in balance, however, employees will not follow. Too much of any classic leadership trait can overturn the ship.

And trying too hard is a real no-no. Truly authentic leaders make it seem effortless. They know when to assert themselves and when to let others step up, establishing genuine common ground with those they lead.

While some leadership traits are inherent, there’s plenty of scope to work on others.

Let’s take a look at five fundamentals of successful leadership.

1. Creating a productive environment

The best leaders lay the foundations for a rich, fertile working environment, which recognises potential, rewards excellence and encourages creative thinking.

It’s all about mindset. They start with the belief that every one of their staff, given the right circumstances and support, has the potential to deliver great results.

This involves helping each employee to be the best they can be. Rather than expecting everyone to reach the same dizzy heights, shrewd leaders concentrate on bringing out individual strengths and minimising weaknesses.

Healthy work environments thrive when the leader takes an inclusive and supportive approach to staff, encouraging their feedback, rewarding their problem-solving and understanding their challenges.

So what leadership attributes help build a vibrant workplace?

• Ability to foster robust debate and manage many different personalities and working styles.
• Strong communication skills via clear expression, clever questioning and smart listening.
• Team and relationship building via empathy, motivational qualities and ongoing support.

Read more about how to excite your team to achieve greatness.

2. Building an appreciative self

An exceptional leader will work towards developing their ‘appreciative self’.

Put simply, this involves more focus on what’s working and what they want more of, and less focus on problems and what they want less of.

This theory is outlined by Gervase R Bush in his book, Clear Leadership: How outstanding leaders make themselves understood, cut through the mush and help everyone get real at work.

Bush criticises the traditional notion that problem-solving is the sole province of leaders.

Firstly, ‘top down’ solutions can lead to resistance from those who had no say in creating them.

Secondly, leaders are often too far removed from the actual problems to be able to draft an effective solution without input.

Empowered leaders shift problem-solving away from themselves, encouraging their staff to come up with their own solutions and solve problems at source, Bush claims.

This clears the decks for these ‘appreciative’ leaders to concentrate on positive solutions, honing in on areas of the organisation where things are going right and building on the gains.

With this approach, leaders’ beliefs are seen to be self-fulfilling. If biased towards seeing the best in people, the best is what they get. When focusing on the worst, they will receive more of that.

3. Building an authentic self

Fed up with slick personas and faceless ‘suits’, workers are increasingly demanding that their leaders are real people.

Today’s bosses can no longer hide behind a facade or remain aloof from their organisation’s people, as pointed out by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in Managing Authenticity: The Paradox of Great Leadership.

Building a genuine presence is tricky though, and it’s not something you can claim for yourself, Goffee and Jones say. Your employees and managers are the true judges of how authentic your leadership is in practice.

This is where balance makes its entrance. Expressing yourself whenever and however you like doesn’t make you an authentic leader – it’s more likely to make you a huge irritation to your staff.

Developing a truly authentic leadership self, according to Goffee and Jones, means striking the subtle balance between expressing your own personality and managing the multiple personalities of the people around you.

This is done in two main ways. Firstly, by ensuring your words are always consistent with your deeds, so leading by example.

Secondly, by finding genuine common ground with those you are leading.

The latter point is particularly important as staff instinctively know when their bosses are faking.

So an authentic leader must show different faces to different members of the organisation, while ensuring every face has a true element of their own self.

This is not impossible, but it’s not easy either, and requires some genuinely creative thinking to hit the right note each time!

4. Managing change

Organisational change is just as inevitable as any other change in life.

Nothing in this world stays the same, and we spend our lives working out how best to adapt to changing personal circumstances, working environments, national shifts and global trends.

Yet we often resist it, until we hit upon a solution to the new challenge – be it technological, behavioural or attitude-based.

The best leaders understand our inherent fear of change and are adept at guiding us through.

They know how to calm our anxieties, showing us the benefits of moving forward and mapping out new ways of doing so.
Leadership Management Australasia (LMA) points to the evolutionary nature of change in the contemporary workplace, claiming that change is not only inevitable but essential in terms of business sustainability, functionality, efficiency and profitability.

According to LMA in Leadership through Understanding, smart leaders negotiate change by:

• Skilling up the workforce. This equips staff with the tools and techniques to embrace change.
• Involving staff early and deeply. This increases staff commitment and helps them ‘own’ the change.
• Communicating wisely. Real staff input is gained by communicating change widely, regularly and consistently.
• Being supportive. Specific, ongoing support is essential to help staff successfully deal with change.

5. Eagerness to go on learning

Learning never ends. No matter how accomplished we are, and how high we climb in our chosen field, we can never know all the answers.

This is partly because human beings are inherently imperfect, and partly because the world is in a constant state of flux.

Even if we know everything there is to know about today’s labour force and economy, next month – or next week – it will change.

And we never stop learning about human psychology, constantly finding better ways to understand and relate to others.

The best and most respected leaders learn from their staff, managers, colleagues and peers on a daily basis, knowing that even the lowliest employee has something to teach them.

While people are the chief asset of every organisation, it takes a quality leader to exploit their full potential and ensure that the company thrives and grows.

The post The 5 Building Blocks of Successful Leadership appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

But happy, effective teams don’t happen by accident. How, then, can the employer find truly motivated recruits, bring out their best and inspire them enough to keep them?

It requires a new approach to a company’s people, extending far beyond their initial recruitment.

Smart JobFit tools and big data can help identify potential leaders. Coaching and mentoring help develop latent talent. Strategic workforce planning builds a strong, dynamic work environment, bringing on future leaders.

Result? The employer makes a genuine investment in human capital which boosts productivity as well as enriching company culture.

Employee engagement is the key

Real employee engagement can radically change a company’s fortunes, as research proves.

A major survey involving 650,000 people from companies across 50 countries compared the financial fortunes of organisations with a highly engaged workforce to those with less engaged employees.

Over a one-year period, the data collected by leading global research and consulting firm Towers Watson showed striking results.

Businesses with higher levels of employee engagement experienced a 19% increase in revenue, as opposed to a 32% decrease in revenue, and a 13% rise in net income versus a decline of 3.8%.

Strong employee engagement has its roots in identifying a worker’s strengths, aptitudes and interests.

When the true potential of employees becomes clear, it’s far easier to match them up with suitable roles, build on their strengths, plot career progressions and create positive, vibrant work teams headed by top performers – the leaders of the future.

This is why the concept of ‘occupational interest’ is gathering momentum as hiring managers seek to attract and retain people who share organisational values, are strongly motivated and feel appreciated in the workplace.

Let’s look at three smart strategies designed to boost morale, enhance team development and achieve high levels of productive engagement.

1. Understand the hardwiring

Personality type and the JobFit philosophy emerged in the 1950s, when American scientist and psychology professor John Holland developed his theory that most people fit into one of six personality types – realistic (doers), investigative (thinkers), artistic (creators), social (helpers), enterprising (persuaders) and conventional (organisers).

He showed that matching a person’s basic personality with specific work environments could bring out the best in their vocational abilities, helping them to flourish and achieve their full potential.

Conversely, putting a particular personality type into an ill-matched workplace could only lead to trouble – putting a creator into an organiser’s role, or a thinker into a doer’s position.

“The choice of a vocation is an expression of personality,” Holland claimed. And his theories now form the bedrock of much institutional career planning and recruitment practices.

The important thing to remember about hardwiring – or our basic personality type – is that it’s pretty much fixed throughout our lifetime.

We can change many things about ourselves – learn to be tidier, adapt to new situations, acquire new skills and think in different ways.

When it comes to our core selves, however, this will only be tinkering around the edges. If you try and fit a round recruiting peg (new employee) into a square hole (your position), no amount of hammering will make it a good fit.

MORE: Complete the Online Job Analysis Survey

2. Identify employee interests

As well as using JobFit tools to work out personality type, you need to assess what makes your people tick – what gets them out of bed in the morning, if you like.

Once you know their strengths, weaknesses and specialist talents, you can direct their energies into the most productive business zones and tap into the areas which really fire them up and drive them to succeed.

The JobFit tool is the perfect place to start when assessing new recruits and matching them up to the most appropriate and effective roles – ‘occupational interest’ in action.

Yet JobFit criteria are just as important when reviewing the performance, scope, leadership potential and career arc of your existing employees.

JobFit is known to increase success rates when selecting future top performers by a staggering 300% – whether they are new arrivals or longer-term staff.

When accompanied by Skills Testing assessments, these behavioural analysis tools can revolutionise the way you approach recruiting and career progression by identifying real potential and turning top performers into future leaders.

While behavioural testing has been around for more than 50 years, contemporary offerings are highly customised with a comprehensive range of high performance benchmarks.

3. Get strategic with workforce planning

As well as assessing individuals, behavioural tools play a critical role in long-term workplace planning.

They can help companies solve the perennial problems of career plateau and transition, along with the employee wastage and obsolescence which occur when workers become unmotivated, disillusioned and disengaged.

Workplaces are constantly evolving, and high-performance teams don’t run themselves.

Constant assessment, analysis, smart management and strategic planning is necessary to ensure individual talents are nurtured and harnessed for the benefit of the company as a whole.

Dynamic teams are constantly changing, requiring effective managers and smart development of ideas, relationships and innovation.

How is this achieved? By truly understanding your business needs, identifying and interpreting key business challenges, and ultimately developing sustainable solutions focussed on people, product and profit.

Clever strategic planning can form the basis of a powerful action plan designed to keep individual employees on track, identify clear career progressions and ensure strong team development.

Coaching and mentoring programs ensure profitable returns on your human capital, by coaxing out the full potential of every individual in your company.

It’s the combination of an employee’s personality, cognitive function and interests which determines their real value to a company, and their ability to work as part of a productive team.

JobFit can be the solution to identifying and developing this unique suite of attributes. So why not start your journey today?

The post 3 Smart Strategies to Boost Employee Morale and Motivation appeared first on Directions Unlimited.