Empower Your Employees

“An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.”
—Stephen Covey

When you think of empowerment what comes to mind? Do you view it as something that can be given or do you view it as an opportunity or process to enable an individual or team to become better and stronger?

“ Empower Your Employees To Greatness. ”
—Al Goodman

Empowerment does not mean relinquishing control, but simply stated it’s utilizing the strengths of individuals and teams to make decisions, implement process improvements, improve results, and perform in an autonomous way.

Empowered employees have indicated they have increased loyalty to their organization, enjoy working hard, feel they contribute to the overall success of the company, and are happy in their position.

We are all familiar with the term return on investment (ROI), but what about “return on recognition” (ROR)Ô? (Al Goodman of Albert James Associates coined this term).

RORÔ is how we as leaders can improve the performance of our team and empower them to greatness.  To begin with, we need to define the behaviors we desire; Mr. Goodman has identified the following 6 areas:

  • Talent Management
  • Accountability
  • Collaboration
  • Efficiency
  • Strategy
  • Customer Focus

These dimensions may be replaced with some that may be more meaningful or useful to your organization but the intent is to make your staff aware of them, and the associated behaviors you view as critical for success.

The next step is for you as leader to provide feedback and encouragement for the behaviors exhibited, and to create a work environment conducive for employees to act in empowered ways.  The benefit will be higher performance, an increase in results, and lower attrition. Do you want to empower your employees to greatness?

Understanding Your Customer

“If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will.”

Almost all of us have customers; they could be internal or external to our company, they could be within the public or private sector, or they could be investors and shareholders.

Regardless of who are customers are, we need to not only provide them with an excellent product or exceptional service, we must also understand their needs and expectations, and build a valued relationship.

Customer Service = Providing quality and value

How committed are you to providing customer service? Do you have a means of knowing if your customers are satisfied? Do you have a measurement system that rates how effective you are? What about a process for reporting and tracking issues and complaints, and for soliciting feedback?

Providing quality and value is huge. Most often we think in terms of a service, a deliverable, or a product, but what about cost saving recommendations, ideas for increasing revenue, or assisting with the attainment of goals? Or what about enhancements for how they service their customers?

We need to understand what’s expected of us and take the time to validate that we’re meeting (and hopefully exceeding) those expectations. We need to understand the critical roles and processes that best support each customer, and we need to anticipate the needs and expectations of our customers.

What Happens When You Don’t Deliver

Another key dimension that is sometimes overlooked is understanding the impact to our customers when we don’t deliver. Other than diminished satisfaction levels, there could be penalties assessed for non-delivery, expenses for non-productive workers, and of course losing the customer overall.

Last week a major airline had a 5-hour computer outage resulting in canceled flights and thousands of stranded passengers; the fall-out will be experienced for several more days and the true impact (loss of repeat business) may never be known.

We once saw a department of 500 individuals sitting idly for several hours because of non-delivery of a product. If we truly know our customer, we understand their dependencies on us, can equate our lack of service to their loss of revenue and other downstream impacts, and have an awareness that they could look elsewhere for service or product providers.

Knowing our customer, being customer focused, delivering what we commit to, and listening and responding to their needs will lend itself to a sustainable customer relationship  – isn’t that what we all aspire for?

Leadership Key Cause For Attrition

“A Gallup poll of more than 1 million employed U.S. workers concluded that the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs is a bad boss or immediate supervisor.”

Key Cause For Attrition – Lack of Strong Leadership

The lack of strong leadership skills contributes significantly to attrition. Employee satisfaction levels become low, performance suffers, absenteeism is high, and the inspiration and motivation to be an achiever and obtain results becomes close to non-existent.

Have you ever had a boss that made you feel demoralized? What about that “ruled by intimidation”? What about that made you want to quit?

People Quit Their Leaders, Not Their Jobs . . .

This same Gallup poll also discovered that poorly managed groups were 50 percent less productive than those with strong and respected leaders and that profits were reduced by 44 percent.

These numbers build a compelling case for ensuring your leadership team has the skills, behaviors, and respect to ensure your organization is successful.

Badbossology.com also conducted a leadership survey of 1,100+ individuals and found some very interesting results:

50 percent said they would fire their boss.

Almost 30 percent would have their boss seen by a workplace psychologist.

23 percent would send their boss for management training.

Do these numbers surprise you? They did us!

What Do Individuals Want in a Boss?

We’ve been told a good leader:

  • Appreciates them as an individual and as a professional
  • Wants to help them grow and succeed
  • Provides meaningful feedback
  • Rewards and recognizes results
  • Can be trusted
  • Is Authentic
  • Listens

Do you possess these skills?  Do you know others in leadership roles that could improve in these areas? We’d love to hear your thoughts and stories about “bad bosses”.  (Please do not provide names but do let us know the behaviors and skills that are lacking, and the associated impacts).