For most of my business life I've worked primarily on my own. Sure, I had associates, support staff, clients, and coworkers, but my office was in my home, so I didn't have daily contact with people face to face every day. I never really thought about until I began to look at creating a more consultive approach to my recognition business. That's when the concepts of a network of people with shared interests began to become important, as did the value of mentors.
While in Los Angeles last week, I was fortunate to be able to meet for a beer with Jim Cathcart (http://www.cathcart.com/), my friend, fellow author and mentor. As I was driving to the airport after our time together, I realized just how valuable a mentor can be.
A Mentor is someone who understands you, but has the advantage of looking at your situation from a fresh angle. This approach can often make the most frustrating, baffling and scary challenges become clear; and if you have a good one, this happens quickly and easily.
That's what transpired when I sat down with Jim. He was able to unravel my concerns about my new Umbrella Recognition Strategy with a simple analogy. Jim told me that, in his view, Schaefer Recognition Group is to the recognition and training business, what a movie producer is to a major film project. The best producers are able to tap into their broad Rolodex of actors, directors, cinematographers, sound and film editors, stunt people and all of the other specialists needed to make a quality motion picture. And this group changes for each project depending on the type of film and talent required.
That's just what we do in helping our clients optimize their investment in people. We bring in our team of recognition, incentive, custom award design, speaking, training, audio/video, and technology partners as needed to best achieve a company's growth and budget goals. In just a few minutes, Jim helped me see and appreciate what I've taken 20 years to assemble; a comprehensive team of experts and the experience to apply them effectively. Boy did I walk out of our meeting with fresh enthusiasm and confidence in spreading the word about this new and timely approach.
Mentors are important for many reasons, but as I learned last week, one of the most important things a truly caring mentor will do for you is help clarify your thinking in areas where you may be too close to see.
Thanks for your time and help, Jim. I look forward to your continued support and to sharing this team approach to serving our clients!
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Jim Cathcart is one of the best known and most award-winning motivational speakers in the business with over 31 years of professional speaking around the world, Jim Cathcart . He has delivered more than 2,700 presentations to audiences in every state of the US and many foreign countries. He has created over seventy video programs and is as comfortable in front of a camera as he is on stage. His works have reached hundreds of thousands.
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John Schaefer - The Vocational Shrink
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Everybody Claims to Value their Employees . . . but are they getting the message?
The concerns over our worlds economic chaos are many and obvious, but there is perhaps a silver lining when it comes to employee performance and what you are investing in people. I wrote the following article because so many of my clients are asking about better ways of getting the most our of their recognition and incentive investments. I hope you find this information both thought provoking and helpful.
Turn Recognition Expenses into Profit Centers –
Optimize your investment in people with an Umbrella Strategy
Do you truly care about your employees? Are they getting the message?
The way we communicate our understanding of their value and performance to our people will determine whether recognition and incentives become a cost item or a profit center. In today’s economy, nobody has new money to spend. Many of my clients are asking about ways to make sure they’re getting the most benefit from the dollars they’re currently spending to recognize and award their people. Or better yet . . . how to get even better results for less money!
Effective recognition is seen as appreciation, while disingenuous, poorly thought-out motivation can be interpreted as manipulation. There’s a surprisingly fine line between the two and it’s all about the employee’s perception of your motives. If they see your actions as more about you than them, whatever you do will yield minimal, short-term results. On the other hand, if your communication appears to value them as a human being first, you will light a fire that leads to discretionary effort – that extra-mile performance you can’t buy, but is only earned through trust.
Here’s the problem. Most companies use a variety of disjointed programs to recognize and reward their people. Even if they’re working, it’s impossible to determine the level of participation and financial return. Imagine if you wrapped your arms around all of the tools used to communicate with employees, so they could be properly measured, kept relevant to company goals and you could easily teach your supervisors the proper way to implement them.
We call this an Umbrella Recognition Strategy and the benefits are numerous; however there are potential challenges involved in transitioning your organization to this approach. First, you must realize that each existing program has an owner and an agenda. Some may be viewed as entitlements, so there is an inherent reluctance to open then up to scrutiny. Here are the three steps you must be willing to take to consider implementing an Umbrella Strategy:
1. You must have upper management support. Only then will you be able to get all of the program owners to open up and provide the information needed to analyze the current situation and begin to see opportunities for improvement.
2. Your team has to be open to new ideas and be willing to brainstorm all viable options. One of the few positives to this current economic downturn is that things are on the table today that would probably not be open to discussion during robust times.
3. The goal of your team needs to focus on developing the greatest ROI on your recognition investments, not protectionism or departmental isolationism. A macro view of the situation, where everyone is considering program initiatives from a broad perspective based on company culture, mission and long term objectives is the secret to getting the best overall program and the ROI you deserve.
As you begin to evaluate your current situation (we use a tool call a Recognition Inventory to help organize this) you will be surprised at both the amount of money leaking out of the organization in various ways and why there may be inherent confusion from the employees’ perspective. As identify redundancy, overlap, and unnecessary complication, the potential for improvement will come to light and doubt will be replaced with enthusiasm.
The Umbrella Solution puts everything under a single technology platform, so you can view all aspects of the program comprehensively, as well as easily engage both supervisors and employees. But, to make it work well, there’s more than just technology to consider. We recommend a Four Cornerstones approach:
1. Communications – Every employee wants to know the direction of the organization and the plan to get there. Communication addresses the “what to do” and provides a professional, well organized theme to overcome skepticism built on years changing strategies. First, you must communicate the commitment of top management to all employees. Then, managers need to be confidently equipped and incented to put themselves on the line. Finally, the strategy and measurements must be continuously communicated. This is done through strong visual concepts that have uplifting, ongoing visibility.
2. Training – Training focuses on the “how to do” and is an important (but often overlooked) element to Performance Improvement. Proper training deals with knowledge and skill that forces active engagement from the lowest level of the organization. Supervisor training must include a good working understanding of all of the programs components, but even more importantly a realization of the personal advantages to each supervisor. This is the elusive “why are we doing this in the first place” component. Simply put, if your managers buy it, so will your employees. If not, you risk your best intentions being seen as nothing more than “throwing ‘em a bone”.
3. Reinforcement – Employees need to “want to”, but how do we achieve this emotional engagement? It’s done by validating. Employees must feel important and appreciated. If they feel noticed and celebrated when they go above and beyond, your people begin to see your motives as team-oriented (not just company-focused) and automatically start to look for ways that they can help. Most of us don’t recognize others often enough or at the right time, so a formalized reinforcement strategy that is readily available, easy to use and continuously updated is vital.
4. Measurements – Measurements address the “how are we doing”. With the vision and strategy in place, the objectives and responsibilities of each employee to support the strategy must be determined. This is the most overlooked part of performance improvement programs, because it requires responsibility and can often be uncomfortable. Outstanding employees want to be measured and ineffective employees want to remain invisible. With this in mind, it’s important to create goals and measurement criteria that are fair and realistic for both individual and team performance. Keep things simple, determine the priority of measurements and create visibility at all levels of your organization. Establishing correct and useful measurements is a critical goal in program development. Only when this information is well organized and straight-forward to use will you achieve true Performance Management; not just a program, but a valuable management tool.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to this than just handing out awards and gifts, but therein lies the opportunity to turn accepted expenses into significant profits. Companies that take on the challenge of embracing this new view of employee engagement are seeing impressive improvements in productivity, profitability, morale and teamwork along with significant reductions in the turnover, recruiting and safety related costs.
References:
Cronin, Joe
Peak Performance – Maximizing
Performance Through People
Minneapolis, MN
Incentive Services Communications
Daniels, Aubrey
Bringing Out the Best in People
New York
McGraw Hill
Reichheld, Frederick F.
The Loyalty Effect
Boston, MA
Bain & Company, Inc.
John Schaefer is a Consultant with more than 20 years of experience helping companies realize and react to what he calls the Employer/Employee Disconnect. “Your people have the capacity and desire to become far more involved and productive than they are today. The resources required are freely available, if you simply choose to use them,” says Schaefer. “The key is to get your managers and supervisors to embrace this challenge by seeing what’s financially in it for them.” John is the author of The Vocational Shrink – An Analysis of the Ten Levels of Workplace Disillusionment, as well as The Vocational Shrink The Game and Manager Training Program “Why Should Supervisors Care (or what they’re really thinking) . . . What’s in it for Me?”
Turn Recognition Expenses into Profit Centers –
Optimize your investment in people with an Umbrella Strategy
Do you truly care about your employees? Are they getting the message?
The way we communicate our understanding of their value and performance to our people will determine whether recognition and incentives become a cost item or a profit center. In today’s economy, nobody has new money to spend. Many of my clients are asking about ways to make sure they’re getting the most benefit from the dollars they’re currently spending to recognize and award their people. Or better yet . . . how to get even better results for less money!
Effective recognition is seen as appreciation, while disingenuous, poorly thought-out motivation can be interpreted as manipulation. There’s a surprisingly fine line between the two and it’s all about the employee’s perception of your motives. If they see your actions as more about you than them, whatever you do will yield minimal, short-term results. On the other hand, if your communication appears to value them as a human being first, you will light a fire that leads to discretionary effort – that extra-mile performance you can’t buy, but is only earned through trust.
Here’s the problem. Most companies use a variety of disjointed programs to recognize and reward their people. Even if they’re working, it’s impossible to determine the level of participation and financial return. Imagine if you wrapped your arms around all of the tools used to communicate with employees, so they could be properly measured, kept relevant to company goals and you could easily teach your supervisors the proper way to implement them.
We call this an Umbrella Recognition Strategy and the benefits are numerous; however there are potential challenges involved in transitioning your organization to this approach. First, you must realize that each existing program has an owner and an agenda. Some may be viewed as entitlements, so there is an inherent reluctance to open then up to scrutiny. Here are the three steps you must be willing to take to consider implementing an Umbrella Strategy:
1. You must have upper management support. Only then will you be able to get all of the program owners to open up and provide the information needed to analyze the current situation and begin to see opportunities for improvement.
2. Your team has to be open to new ideas and be willing to brainstorm all viable options. One of the few positives to this current economic downturn is that things are on the table today that would probably not be open to discussion during robust times.
3. The goal of your team needs to focus on developing the greatest ROI on your recognition investments, not protectionism or departmental isolationism. A macro view of the situation, where everyone is considering program initiatives from a broad perspective based on company culture, mission and long term objectives is the secret to getting the best overall program and the ROI you deserve.
As you begin to evaluate your current situation (we use a tool call a Recognition Inventory to help organize this) you will be surprised at both the amount of money leaking out of the organization in various ways and why there may be inherent confusion from the employees’ perspective. As identify redundancy, overlap, and unnecessary complication, the potential for improvement will come to light and doubt will be replaced with enthusiasm.
The Umbrella Solution puts everything under a single technology platform, so you can view all aspects of the program comprehensively, as well as easily engage both supervisors and employees. But, to make it work well, there’s more than just technology to consider. We recommend a Four Cornerstones approach:
1. Communications – Every employee wants to know the direction of the organization and the plan to get there. Communication addresses the “what to do” and provides a professional, well organized theme to overcome skepticism built on years changing strategies. First, you must communicate the commitment of top management to all employees. Then, managers need to be confidently equipped and incented to put themselves on the line. Finally, the strategy and measurements must be continuously communicated. This is done through strong visual concepts that have uplifting, ongoing visibility.
2. Training – Training focuses on the “how to do” and is an important (but often overlooked) element to Performance Improvement. Proper training deals with knowledge and skill that forces active engagement from the lowest level of the organization. Supervisor training must include a good working understanding of all of the programs components, but even more importantly a realization of the personal advantages to each supervisor. This is the elusive “why are we doing this in the first place” component. Simply put, if your managers buy it, so will your employees. If not, you risk your best intentions being seen as nothing more than “throwing ‘em a bone”.
3. Reinforcement – Employees need to “want to”, but how do we achieve this emotional engagement? It’s done by validating. Employees must feel important and appreciated. If they feel noticed and celebrated when they go above and beyond, your people begin to see your motives as team-oriented (not just company-focused) and automatically start to look for ways that they can help. Most of us don’t recognize others often enough or at the right time, so a formalized reinforcement strategy that is readily available, easy to use and continuously updated is vital.
4. Measurements – Measurements address the “how are we doing”. With the vision and strategy in place, the objectives and responsibilities of each employee to support the strategy must be determined. This is the most overlooked part of performance improvement programs, because it requires responsibility and can often be uncomfortable. Outstanding employees want to be measured and ineffective employees want to remain invisible. With this in mind, it’s important to create goals and measurement criteria that are fair and realistic for both individual and team performance. Keep things simple, determine the priority of measurements and create visibility at all levels of your organization. Establishing correct and useful measurements is a critical goal in program development. Only when this information is well organized and straight-forward to use will you achieve true Performance Management; not just a program, but a valuable management tool.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to this than just handing out awards and gifts, but therein lies the opportunity to turn accepted expenses into significant profits. Companies that take on the challenge of embracing this new view of employee engagement are seeing impressive improvements in productivity, profitability, morale and teamwork along with significant reductions in the turnover, recruiting and safety related costs.
References:
Cronin, Joe
Peak Performance – Maximizing
Performance Through People
Minneapolis, MN
Incentive Services Communications
Daniels, Aubrey
Bringing Out the Best in People
New York
McGraw Hill
Reichheld, Frederick F.
The Loyalty Effect
Boston, MA
Bain & Company, Inc.
John Schaefer is a Consultant with more than 20 years of experience helping companies realize and react to what he calls the Employer/Employee Disconnect. “Your people have the capacity and desire to become far more involved and productive than they are today. The resources required are freely available, if you simply choose to use them,” says Schaefer. “The key is to get your managers and supervisors to embrace this challenge by seeing what’s financially in it for them.” John is the author of The Vocational Shrink – An Analysis of the Ten Levels of Workplace Disillusionment, as well as The Vocational Shrink The Game and Manager Training Program “Why Should Supervisors Care (or what they’re really thinking) . . . What’s in it for Me?”
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Play the Hand You're Dealt
Welcome to the Shrink's Blog. It's exciting to join this new technology, so thought I'd kick it off with a breif article I wrote about how to get the most out of your life opportunities. See if you don't realize some idle opportunities in you Life Hand.
Play the Hand You’re Dealt
We’ve all heard this saying before. It’s a motivational phrase that means to make the most out of what you have. I’ve always considered it a pretty simple concept, but lately I’ve seen ways that add more depth to this motivational cliché.
Your First Deal
We all grow up with a combination of genetic traits, positive and negative experiential events, and life lessons that develop into what I call your First Deal and represents the beginning of your Life Hand. This combination of good and bad cards is what you carry into adulthood. I’ll define adulthood as the moment when you begin taking full responsibility for yourself. It can be recognized as the point where you first begin to consider how to play your hand, rather than let it play you.
Drawing and Discarding
Since nobody has defined this “Life Hand”, I will go by the assumption that you can have as many or as few cards in it as you wish. The weakest, laziest, least motivated people will ultimately end up with a small hand consisting of only the negative, limiting cards. The strongest, most optimistic and successful will have a huge hand with cards sorted into many values within a number of suits.
Drawing cards happens when you add something to your life. It can be positive, such as education, a new talent or skill, a new thing or a new relationship; or it can be negative like a vice, negative habit pattern, or other limiting form of thinking. Discards are made when you consciously overcome a habit, drop a negative belief or make any other kind of life-changing decision. While most discards relate to decisions to drop or change an under-producing area in your life, you might also discard a positive card as a way of prioritizing or balancing your life at a particular time, a sacrificial decision, or it could be an accident or act of carelessness where a card is allowed to get away.
Playing Your Cards
Playing your cards can be seen as using an acquired or natural ability, either good or bad. If you get a college degree, then take a job in that area of expertise, you are playing that skill card, or perhaps several cards you’ve been preparing around this goal. However, if a criminal decided to rob a bank, he or she is playing a negative skill card and a risk card by conscious choice, too.
A card played from the hand of life normally is played without giving it away, something like laying down three of a kind in a game of Rummy. You still own the cards and can play off of them again later. Some cards however are lost when played. These would be things that are irreplaceable, perhaps health-related cards, tangible object cards or relationship cards that are lost forever.
Your Hand Changes Over Time
When you first reach the age of responsibility and become aware that you have a hand to play, it’s small and filled mostly with cards dealt to you by others that you received without choice. Over time, as you consciously add and discard, your hand becomes larger, more complex and more definitive of your life in the present. If you take the time to stop and look at your hand in total, it would give you a good idea of what you will achieve and accomplish in the future, too, but many of us fail to do that. Your hand becomes what you want it to be or accept it to be and will formulate your actions going forward. As Napoleon Hill said, “You get what you think about most of the time”, and what you think about and value most will be your hand.
The Success Hand
The more successful you become, the more cards you acquire. The danger, however, is that there is a point where you simply can’t hold all of your cards and view them equally. When this happens, you begin to sort them into groups by type and priority. They’re all still there, but you tend to view many of them by category rather than individually. A good example of this is your My Documents folder on your computer. Mine is made up of a number of subject folders, each holding a bunch of files, along with a list of loose, independent files that don’t go in a specific folder.
Optimizing Your Hand
Here’s where it begins to get exciting. How do you get the most value out of a hand that’s big and full of more things, information and tools than you can use? We need a better sorting and accessing system, or many of the cards will not be used to their full potential. One suggestion is to periodically purge your hand, discarding, trading or reinvigorating cards that have not been used in a while. Perhaps a “Sort by Modified” option, like we have in Microsoft Windows would be handy. Or use the suggestion of the wardrobe consultants – if you haven’t worn it in the past year, consider tossing it.
This exercise will yield a group of cards that have value, contain investment, and still hold some interest, but are not being used right now. Here’s where it gets tough, because we only have so many hours each day to play cards. You need to review this group and do one of three things:
Discard and realize that your simply have higher priorities
Play it in place of another card that is no longer as relevant, interesting or profitable at this time.
Lend it, share it or give it away to someone who can make better use of it; or perhaps even help you get some residual value from it.
The Value of Your Hand Goes Up Over Time
Because your hand includes all of the things you’ve invested time, money and effort in during your life, it is worth more than the sum of the individual cards. Many synergies are in your hand, some not realized yet, but there is potential value none the less. Go through your hand using the three criteria above and then lay out just the #3 cards. These represent the latent value of your Life Hand that is sitting fallow and may yield substantial rewards with minimal effort on your part. Perhaps they’ll be financial, but they could also be the seeds of another type of personal fulfillment . . . physical, spiritual, emotional, etc.
I submit to you that there are opportunities in front of you right now that could be taken advantage of by playing one of these valuable, but underused cards, that will add significantly to your life without taking additional time from your current activities.
Play Your Hand Fully Before You Fold
There’s only one way to Fold in the game of life and most of us don’t pick the time; (some do, but they are not usually the ones with many positive cards left in their hand, anyway). Set a goal of playing as many cards as possible before you fold, so that when that day comes, your hand is left with only the most important, valuable and meaningful cards. I envision this to be a hand of face cards, because in the end, it all comes down to the people in life who you’ve loved and who’ve been loved by you.
Play the Hand You’re Dealt
We’ve all heard this saying before. It’s a motivational phrase that means to make the most out of what you have. I’ve always considered it a pretty simple concept, but lately I’ve seen ways that add more depth to this motivational cliché.
Your First Deal
We all grow up with a combination of genetic traits, positive and negative experiential events, and life lessons that develop into what I call your First Deal and represents the beginning of your Life Hand. This combination of good and bad cards is what you carry into adulthood. I’ll define adulthood as the moment when you begin taking full responsibility for yourself. It can be recognized as the point where you first begin to consider how to play your hand, rather than let it play you.
Drawing and Discarding
Since nobody has defined this “Life Hand”, I will go by the assumption that you can have as many or as few cards in it as you wish. The weakest, laziest, least motivated people will ultimately end up with a small hand consisting of only the negative, limiting cards. The strongest, most optimistic and successful will have a huge hand with cards sorted into many values within a number of suits.
Drawing cards happens when you add something to your life. It can be positive, such as education, a new talent or skill, a new thing or a new relationship; or it can be negative like a vice, negative habit pattern, or other limiting form of thinking. Discards are made when you consciously overcome a habit, drop a negative belief or make any other kind of life-changing decision. While most discards relate to decisions to drop or change an under-producing area in your life, you might also discard a positive card as a way of prioritizing or balancing your life at a particular time, a sacrificial decision, or it could be an accident or act of carelessness where a card is allowed to get away.
Playing Your Cards
Playing your cards can be seen as using an acquired or natural ability, either good or bad. If you get a college degree, then take a job in that area of expertise, you are playing that skill card, or perhaps several cards you’ve been preparing around this goal. However, if a criminal decided to rob a bank, he or she is playing a negative skill card and a risk card by conscious choice, too.
A card played from the hand of life normally is played without giving it away, something like laying down three of a kind in a game of Rummy. You still own the cards and can play off of them again later. Some cards however are lost when played. These would be things that are irreplaceable, perhaps health-related cards, tangible object cards or relationship cards that are lost forever.
Your Hand Changes Over Time
When you first reach the age of responsibility and become aware that you have a hand to play, it’s small and filled mostly with cards dealt to you by others that you received without choice. Over time, as you consciously add and discard, your hand becomes larger, more complex and more definitive of your life in the present. If you take the time to stop and look at your hand in total, it would give you a good idea of what you will achieve and accomplish in the future, too, but many of us fail to do that. Your hand becomes what you want it to be or accept it to be and will formulate your actions going forward. As Napoleon Hill said, “You get what you think about most of the time”, and what you think about and value most will be your hand.
The Success Hand
The more successful you become, the more cards you acquire. The danger, however, is that there is a point where you simply can’t hold all of your cards and view them equally. When this happens, you begin to sort them into groups by type and priority. They’re all still there, but you tend to view many of them by category rather than individually. A good example of this is your My Documents folder on your computer. Mine is made up of a number of subject folders, each holding a bunch of files, along with a list of loose, independent files that don’t go in a specific folder.
Optimizing Your Hand
Here’s where it begins to get exciting. How do you get the most value out of a hand that’s big and full of more things, information and tools than you can use? We need a better sorting and accessing system, or many of the cards will not be used to their full potential. One suggestion is to periodically purge your hand, discarding, trading or reinvigorating cards that have not been used in a while. Perhaps a “Sort by Modified” option, like we have in Microsoft Windows would be handy. Or use the suggestion of the wardrobe consultants – if you haven’t worn it in the past year, consider tossing it.
This exercise will yield a group of cards that have value, contain investment, and still hold some interest, but are not being used right now. Here’s where it gets tough, because we only have so many hours each day to play cards. You need to review this group and do one of three things:
Discard and realize that your simply have higher priorities
Play it in place of another card that is no longer as relevant, interesting or profitable at this time.
Lend it, share it or give it away to someone who can make better use of it; or perhaps even help you get some residual value from it.
The Value of Your Hand Goes Up Over Time
Because your hand includes all of the things you’ve invested time, money and effort in during your life, it is worth more than the sum of the individual cards. Many synergies are in your hand, some not realized yet, but there is potential value none the less. Go through your hand using the three criteria above and then lay out just the #3 cards. These represent the latent value of your Life Hand that is sitting fallow and may yield substantial rewards with minimal effort on your part. Perhaps they’ll be financial, but they could also be the seeds of another type of personal fulfillment . . . physical, spiritual, emotional, etc.
I submit to you that there are opportunities in front of you right now that could be taken advantage of by playing one of these valuable, but underused cards, that will add significantly to your life without taking additional time from your current activities.
Play Your Hand Fully Before You Fold
There’s only one way to Fold in the game of life and most of us don’t pick the time; (some do, but they are not usually the ones with many positive cards left in their hand, anyway). Set a goal of playing as many cards as possible before you fold, so that when that day comes, your hand is left with only the most important, valuable and meaningful cards. I envision this to be a hand of face cards, because in the end, it all comes down to the people in life who you’ve loved and who’ve been loved by you.
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