Practice the Eight Habits of a Great Work
Environment
Success is never an accident, and rarely a
solo effort. If you’re committed to creating a productive
and fulfilling workplace, you and your employees should
practice these positive habits:
Trust
You should be able to count on your
employees’ skills and commitment, and they should expect
the same of you. If people expect to be let down or cheated,
they won’t feel motivated to do their best work.
Sharing the bad and the good
In effective workplaces, people celebrate
victories and analyze failures. Members of dysfunctional work
groups brag about their personal victories and either bury
their mistakes or find scapegoats.
Listening
People in successful work groups
don’t waste time defending their own agendas, but pay
attention to everyone’s opinions and ideas.
Respecting each other’s time
Try to keep interruptions to a minimum
and deliver what you’ve promised on deadline.
Celebrating everyone’s success
Make a point of celebrating
everyone’s victories, not taking even modest wins for
granted.
Supporting growth and development
Encourage people to teach skills to one
another, share information, and provide moral support.
Honoring commitments
On ineffective teams, promises are
routinely ignored and broken, or only count when someone in
authority is likely to punish them for failure. Members of the
best groups strive to honor their commitments, large and small.
Maintaining high standards
People at all levels should be willing to
offer-and accept-feedback, assistance, and support in the
interest of continuously improving their performance.
Adapted from “Test your leadership
skills,” in in Leadership
Newswire
Source: “Leading for Results”
December 2002
Try These Tips for Helping Supervisors
Become Team Leaders
Demonstrating teamwork and working as part
of a team are two different things. Everyone recognizes the
need for the former-but it can be difficult to get frontline
supervisors to embrace the latter. You can help supervisors
warm to the idea of work teams by:
• Empathizing. Often
supervisors feel that becoming part of a work team means
they’ll have the same amount of work, but get less
recognition. Clearly explain their role in the new structure
and the positive effect being a team leader-as opposed to a
hierarchical supervisor-can have on their career path.
• Training. You
can’t just take a loosely connected group of workers, wave
your pencil, and say “Poof! You’re a team.”
Guide participants in how to work in a team culture, then stay
involved so you can observe how well they’re getting the
hand of it and offer feedback to help them stay on track.
• Redefining. Team
leaders must learn to be comfortable mentoring, coaching,
sharing information, dividing duties, and, when appropriate,
letting others take the lead. Make sure supervisors already
possess or can easily learn the soft skills that will help them
succeed in a team structure.
Help Build Deep Bench of Leaders
Two out of three employees have low or
moderate confidence in their companies’ top brass, new
research shows. Even executives are concerned, with three of
every five top executives admitting they lack confidence in
their organization’s leadership capacity.
More than 470 CEOs of major companies left
their jobs in the first half of 2001. Those who think the
economic slump will make it easier to find top talent are
wrong, warns the study by HR consulting firm Development
Dimensions International (DDI).
Reason: The roots of the problem run deeper
than the recession. The “lean” management fad of
recent years starved corporations of talent and the pending
retirement of baby boomers threatens to exacerbate the
problem.
Most companies have a long way to go. Only
1 percent of companies rate their succession plans as
“excellent,” and about two-thirds describe them as
“fair” or worse.
Top Strategies:
• Make a senior-level commitment to succession
planning. The research showed that
only a third of the companies surveyed had high commitment to
succession management, but as in everything else, success
requires commitment. This includes attention from the top
executives, especially the CEO and board of directors.
• Develop talent at all levels, not just the top
spots. Think about it: Talent
shortages among front-line or middle managers can be as
devastating as a shallow bench at the executive level. The
problem: According to the study, 80 percent of employers focus
on top positions. Seventy-eight percent plan for middle
management succession, but just 35 percent do so for frontline
supervisors.
Contact: Paige Pertz, DDI, (412) 473-3404
