GreatWork Blog

Building better workplaces through compliance, culture, connection

Silos may be a natural and predictable phenomenon with work groups. They are certainly common. Are they always a bad thing? Probably not. When speaking of silos, typically workplaces are referring to the “I-am-only-interested-in-my-group” dynamics that occur between day shift and swing shift, or between sales and production, between administration and front-line service. Information isn’t shared, resources are hoarded, barriers are erected and business suffers.

Many of us have been invited into the supervisor’s role because we were competent in a specific area and others thought we should be “promoted.” Next thing we know we are dealing with human beings which can be rewarding or frustrating.

For years we have been teaching supervisors, managers and team leaders to over-communicate to their teams. We would encourage leaders to articulate with effective repetition our vision, rallying cries, day-to-day policy and procedure updates, team priorities, staffing changes. 

We shouldn’t create “false urgency,” employees see through that quickly. However, strong teams have a bias for action, for diving in, for making progress and mistakes that move us ahead.

As consultants to workplaces across the Northwest, Cascade Employers Association has been helping workplaces adjust to change for decades.

I don’t know about you, but in the past few weeks I have received about a ton and a half of advice about how to cope with all the change and stressors that have hit us recently. To be honest, I am also guilty of adding to the advice pile.

Before you say you believe in someone, before you encourage them to pursue their goals, it’s worth remembering: They need more than your words.

In a recent Coaching workshop a participant kept asking, “Isn’t coaching just some trendy buzzword that can really mean a lot of different things?”

Does your workplace see empathy and sensitivity as a strength or a weakness? Our experience is that workplaces send clear messages, intentionally or unintentionally, about the importance of developing these skills.

Gallup’s Q12, a twelve question survey administered to employees to measure engagement, has been around since 1996. Since that time tens of millions of employees from 195 countries have taken it. Every single question focuses on managerial or team soft skills rather than salary or benefits.

Nudges are a small feature in the environment that attracts our attention and influences our behavior. Nudges are everywhere.

“After all this time as a manager you would think I would be better at managing transition. After all, I have been through about a million changes.”

One of my favorite concepts regarding leadership development is about the interrelated concept of power. Leadership and power go hand in hand.

Resolve this year to improve the quality and effectiveness of your workplace conversations by challenging everything. Well, don’t challenge everything. That would take too long. But it may really pay off to work with your supervisory team to improve critical thinking.

I was working with a group of new supervisors last month and reviewing this thing we call coaching. I asked them to reflect on their willingness to dig in to the coaching role. 

According to a brand new EZ survey of 402 CEOs from 11 countries, together running companies worth $2.6 trillion in sales, 68% felt they were not fully prepared for their leadership position.

Engaged leaders are the key drivers of initiatives that ensure the “people programs” in a company support and contribute to the mission and strategic objectives of the organization.

It’s hard enough for many of us to summon the nerve to provide someone with constructive feedback. Ideally we’ve done some work preparing for the conversation: we’ve thought about a way to convey that we mean well from the start, we’ve identified the specific issue in question (rather than focusing on someone’s personality), and we know how to articulate our expectation for that person moving forward.

Though most of us associate succession planning with only the highest levels of leadership, identifying and developing new leaders is paramount at all levels of the organization.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of the Pygmalion Effect, but you probably have seen it in action. Essentially, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby higher expectations lead to increased performance.

In his program “Happiness is a Serious Problem,” Dennis Prager shares three keys to happiness.

Having a bad manager can make a great job terrible. The problem is that some managers were never taught the right way to manage people.

There are five primary approaches to dealing with conflict: 1) Authority, 2) Compromise, 3) Avoidance, 4) Accommodation, and 5) Collaboration. Many people are comfortable with a few of these approaches but not with all five. If you misuse, overuse or under-use any of the five, you take a risk the conflict will become worse. 

Many times meetings to discuss plans and change are poorly facilitated. Participants sometimes don’t share their concerns, or contradict each other and don’t commit to action.

Would you like to build a spectacular team? One great place to start is to uncover positive memories of your potential team members.

Once again, what we learned in early education is relevant to gaining insight in our leadership style. The four sentence types – declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory – and how you use them reveal much about your leadership competency. 

Arnie (names changed) dragged his Arkansas accent down the Oregon Coast to become a boat builder at Freeman Marine. His coworkers appreciated his hard work but thought him naïve. 

Do you want to be an ethical leader? First, relax. Being ethical shouldn’t require moral self-righteousness, rigid standards, covering up that we aren’t perfect, or even always following the rules. Bureaucrats follow rules, but ignore the spirit behind the rules. Ethical people try to find the best thing to do, given the limits of their perspective. We don’t know the long-term ramifications of each ethical act, but we try our best to take the long view.

In the last blog I emphasized that for training to gain traction it takes management support both before and after, and the trainer’s connection well before the event. So how do we get trainees to commit to any change suggested in the training content?