Lately, I’ve been attracted to a show called Tabitha’s Salon Takeover because it is chock full of lessons in each episode.  If you haven’t heard of it, it is now casting for it’s fourth season and is being shown in re-runs on Bravo channel.  The show highlights hair salons who are in desperate need of intervention.  Tabitha Coffey, a professional stylist and educator with many years of experience, comes into a salon in order to asses why the salon is in dire straits, communicate what is and is not working, make recommendations for improvement and redesign the salon for a grand re-opening.  It’s not really about hair or salons, it’s about how to take a critical look at a business or department and see things with a critical eye in order to improve.

I watched an episode today that caught my attention.   The real issue of the salon was inconsistency.  The owner was inconsistent in her behavior, in her rules of running the salon, in her treatment of the stylists and of her overall expectations of what a successful salon should be.  Her stylists were inconsistent in their skills, their application of the skills they did have, their attitude and response to caring for their work environment and in their relationships with the owner and with each other.

It was one BIG mess!  Why?  Because an arbitrary approach to work leads to chaos and ultimately failure to reach business goals.

CREATING A PARADIGM

If you are advising a leader who behaves inconsistently or if you ARE the leader who demonstrates inconsistency in leading, how can you create a new model that will support and achieve new levels of success?

• Get honest-  Take a look with a critical eye.  If you are the leader or if you are working in a department where you’re not achieving success,  step back and try to look at how things get done, or don’t, as if you are a stranger seeing the group for the first time.  What are the behaviors you see that are supporting reaching the business goals?  Who are your informal leaders who can help turn the morale of the group around?  Are the inconsistencies coming from one or a small group of employees, or does the inconsistent behavior run rampant throughout the department?
• Share the results-  In human resources, we see leaders who not only turn a blind eye to what is really going on in the department.  We also see leaders who know what is going on but do not share their concerns with staff.  Part of being a good leader is being able to teach staff and without sharing results, you won’t be able to adequately teach so that the behaviors can improve.
• Set or “re-set” expectations-  We all have goals.  Most organizations set them each year.  Instead of just creating some formal document that is pushed to the side until the end of the year, gather your team together and talk about what specific behaviors and actions will achieve the goals. Your only chance of achieving success is by soliciting the feedback and gaining the buy-in from staff.  Skip this step and the house of cards will fall.
• Redesign-  This is another step that is so important but is often skipped.  As leaders, we tend to communicate that change is needed and even what needs to change.  Then, the staff are told to just get back to work.  This does not inspire change.  In order to get the ball rolling, think of some way to visually show that something is different.  Whether that means changing some work assignments, creating a new work group, making plans to change the physical work environment or another creative idea, the point is that staff who see that something has already changed and for the better will be more likely to embrace additional changes.  Shake it up!

The point is to be able to ban inconsistency and inconsistent behavior from our workplace.  What have you seen or done in order to support the change where you work?  What other tips do you give to support consistency?  

Yesterday, I had the privilege of listening to a keynote that stood out from the rest.  I attended the TALX Client Forum in St. Louis.  The event was kicked off by TALX President Dann Adams.  Dann was at ease in front of the large crowd.  He opened with humor and proceeded to describe why the theme Explore & Discover is relevant to some of the exciting changes going on at TALX.  As part of Equifax, TALX is using transparency around access to credit combined with their wealth of data around unemployment claims, I-9′s and employment verification to change the way HR professionals use analytics.

TALX launched Elements, workforce information solutions that allow HR professionals and executives to see data in a way that lets them drill down to where the problems lie.  It includes visual representation of the data which is helpful because people learn 17 times faster from interpreting pictures rather than just raw data.  Dann’s conversational style captured the room as he was able to easily describe how this journey has been one of exploring new strategic approaches and allowed them to discover new ways to work with clients to communicate people-related data.

With that, Dann transitioned to Susan Ershler, a twenty year veteran of sales in the telecommunications industry with ten of those years spent directing teams in Fortune 500 sales situations, Sue has her “business chops”.  She is also an accomplished mountain climber and was part of the first couple to climb all seven summits in the world.

Sue captivated the audience with her passion about climbing and she easily transitioned stories of her experiences to relevant examples of how those same lessons learned apply directly to our roles in the business world.  The connections she made around leading and guiding others, being a strong leader and mentor in times of trouble, and how to handle the feeling of failure when you or your team fall short of a goal even though you may have surpassed all prior performance were impactful.  I could relate to many of her stories and found myself inspired to either keep pushing myself.

My biggest take away was around visioning.  Sue explained how she found success in business, in climbing, and in her relationship with her husband by envisioning herself as a success.  She saw herself breaking all company sales records, she saw herself at the top of the summit and she saw herself having a happy, fulfilled marriage even though she and her husband experienced obstacles as many couples do.

Key messages from Sue:

• Surround yourself with people who won’t let you quit
• Push through the pain, pain is temporary
• Teams outperform individuals every time
• Project your future and focus on the vision- vision drives activity

I hope that future keynotes I hear are as relevant and inspirational.  Thank you to Dann Adams and the entire team at TALX for giving me clarity on how to motivate my team and remain focused on my vision in my organization.

I posed a question on FaceBook over the weekend to friends and family.  I asked, “If you could change one thing about your boss, it would be…?”

The overwhelming answer was that the respondent would change themselves and not the boss.  I admit, that would have been my answer too.  The more I thought about it though, what if you just accept the boss, flaws and all.  What if you just accept your family members, your friends, your colleagues for exactly the way they are?

Think about yourself for a moment.  Would you say you are happy with the way you look, with your health and fitness, or even the amount of sleep you get?  Assume you think you need to lose 10- 20 pounds.  What if instead of fretting each day about it, going on diets to lose the weight, then gaining it back again and again, what if you just accepted yourself the way you are?  Maybe you are supposed to be that weight.  Maybe you are supposed to feel the way you do.

Like I warned you at the beginning, today I have more questions than answers.  Are we too driven to change?  Can we ever be happy with the way things are?  Can you just adapt to what “is”?

They key I’ve found is to create a burning platform for change in order to ensure that each team member is going “all in” with me.  If you’re not familiar with the phrase, creating a burning platform is a way to describe the fact that many employees will not fully engage in any project unless you put a fire under them that causes them to change.  The “fire under their feet” must be great enough to give them no option but to change. The main steps of creating this fire are:

• Knowing and communicating that there is a legitimate need for change.
• Having a shared urgency that the employees either contribute to or have agreement about.
• Assessing the opportunity.  Is there a revenue gain to be had or cost savings?  What are the goals of the organization?

Leadership works with employees to create the platform to motivate employees to want to reach the goals, then each leader should take a hard look at their team members.  What are the goals of the employees as individuals and do they align with the overall company goals?  What personal issues in an employee’s life can negatively impact their focus on the business goals?  If a leader can answer these questions about the team members, they will be more likely to be able to adapt the projects for the most successful outcome.

Once you create agreement on the need for change and assess the employee motivation and ability to step up, you can begin to identify the truly important projects that will aid in reaching the organization goals.  I once worked for a company where no matter how exciting a HR project sounded, if it did not align with reaching the organization goals, we did not do it.  It made prioritizing work very easy.

Do you set your team up for success?  What methods do you employ to inspire them to do their best work?  Share in the comments.

These concepts are not new, but the application is new.  Business is now integrating the contract relationships differently.  I asked Anglea what she is seeing in organizations now that supports this idea of employees being a business within a business?  Is this something we should be encouraging?

Yes, this concept was originally introduced in the late 60’s and early 70’s. It has evolved. For a while, after Fast Company did an article about “Me &Co”, it took on a bad connotation of being all about the employee at the expense of the company. But, when done right, this is about being individuals being in charge of their careers and their futures. This is good for people and good for business. We want people who know who they are, have a strategy, and are passionate about executing on it. That might mean that they’ll move on when they need to but it also means you’ll get more contribution while they are there.

There is no doubt that we are also seeing many organizations rethink how they even think about staffing. The future holds for us a standard where fewer workers of the typical organization are full time, traditional employees, more are contractors or “come and go as their skills are needed” type people – a network of talent that surrounds the business, and other services will continue to be outsourced to provide organizations with ultimate flexibility. This means we have all sorts of new challenges to deal with. How do we keep those people engaged? How do we ensure we have the right skills at the right time in the right place when they’re not employees? What impact will this have on our culture? The list goes on!

What do you think?  Do you agree with Angela that the approach is leaning toward individuals being part of “You, Inc.”?  

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