In this issue...
What does it take to get your people committed to the new year's challenges? How about a direct conversation. (See article at right)

Case Study
Try your hand at this conversation just for practice. See how you do before the employee meeting.

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New Year Conversations - the 3 R’s

 
 (How to get your people off to a great start!)

‘Tis the season… for the 3 R’s:

Start-of-the-year conversations with employees are an opportunity to review, reflect, and recommit. In this time of significant change, leaders need to be sure they are communicating effectively.  This conversation is critically important for leaders to set direction and tone for the coming year. From the employees’ point of view, it’s often the most important conversation of the year. It should be carefully thought out and strategically planned. The ALTtm skills are essential to help you achieve maximum positive impact.

What do you want to accomplish in the new year conversation? (Start with the end in mind.) Usually leaders want to “get on the same page” with their employees about where their performance has been strong and where it needs to improve, and to get a recommitment to high levels of performance in the future. It’s a look backward and a look forward in the same conversation, and sometimes requires a delicate balance: how to be honest and direct about performance that has been inconsistent in the past, yet be energizing and motivating about the future; how to be appreciative and affirming about past efforts, yet encourage even more in the future.

Strategic improvisation is needed here. Plan the conversation, identify what you want to accomplish, choose a strategy for getting there, and be prepared to use your ALT skills as you listen and improvise your responses.

 Review

By now both you and your employees should have a clear picture of their past performance, based on all the teachable moments and other coaching conversations you’ve had. This is an ideal time to ASK employees how they would sum up their performance.

• Looking back over the past 6 months (or 12 months), how would you summarize your performance against the expectations of the job and the needs of the business?

• What trends—positive or negative -- do you see in your performance over this time?

• Where have you made the most progress?

• What performance areas most need improvement?

These powerful questions encourage your employees to step up, own up, and be responsible for their own performance results. They also encourage employees to be honestly self-aware of both their strengths and their weaknesses, their successes and their failures. This part of the conversation is a time for honest self-evaluation – not for vague generalities. Getting them to say the words is far more powerful than you doing the TELLing, and the employees giving you the “company nod.”

After ASKing for a self-review, you have the opportunity to TELL – to offer positive reinforcement, praise, appreciation, encouragement, as well as to offer direct, factual observations of problem areas. This is no time for “kinda, sorta, maybe, just a little bit” fuzzy language. Your TELLing must be clear, unambiguous, straightforward.

Reflect

Successful people say they learned most in their lives from experience. But experts tell us that in order to learn from experience, we have to reflect on it. One of your goals in this conversation is to get your employees to think about their past performance, go deeper, consider cause and effect, identify significance and impact, and draw conclusions that will help them in the future.

So your plan or Path for this conversation should include the step of reflection. Open-ended questions and patient, active LISTENing (paraphrasing) are the tools to help you lead your employees to a deeper level of self-awareness, self-evaluation, and ownership.  Tag on to your Review questions by ASKing some follow-up questions:

• What do you think caused this (upward or downward) trend in your performance?

• While there were probably many things that affected your performance, what did you do (or fail to do) that contributed to this result?

• Why do you think your efforts helped your performance improve?

• What is the most significant thing you have learned over the past 6 months?

• How has this learning affected your performance so far? How will it affect your performance in the future?

• What impact has your performance had on our customers over the past 6 months (not what you hope it had, but what it actually had)?

• What impact has your performance had on the business over the past 6 months?

• If you could do one thing over, what would you do differently? Why?

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but they will encourage your employees to think, reflect, learn, and grow. Be sure to paraphrase the answers, as paraphrasing encourages the employee to go deeper, to take a different perspective, to reflect in a more productive and powerful way.

Re-commit

The business is in a tremendous state of change, and change inevitably brings discomfort and uncertainty. Yet here at the beginning of a new year, your task as a leader is to encourage your employees to stay in the game, and to re-commit their energies and talents to the task at hand.

All 3 of the ALT skills – ASK, LISTEN, and TELL – come into play in this part of the conversation.  In the TELLing, you have a hugely important responsibility to give the leadership message, to be the “keepers of the flame.”  Practice your story, because this is a time to tell it: what we’re here for, where we’re headed, and why it matters. You’ve probably said it many times this year already – how important it is to customers that we do our jobs well, do them right, and do it every day.

To encourage re-commitment, ASK open-ended questions:

• What 3 things will you focus on in the future that will delight our customers?

• How can you help us keep the team focused and energized in the coming months?

• What will you do to keep yourself motivated?

• How do you see yourself fitting in to the vision of where we’re going?

• What will make you feel, six months from today, that you’ve really accomplished something to be proud of?

• What do you feel you need in order to accomplish that?

• What do you need from me in order to accomplish that?

• How would you sum up what you’ve committed to here today?

In asking re-commitment questions, be sure to LISTEN carefully, and paraphrase back to demonstrate your interest and engagement, and to solidify the commitments.

Review, reflect, and re-commit. As we begin 2008, these conversations are a crucial step in leading people through change and pointing them toward the future. They’re too important to leave to chance, so prepare, practice, and then strategically improvise using your ALT skills.

Look for your next AHA! Moment message next month. It will provide help on communicating goals and expectations for the new year – especially behavioral goals.

P2P (People to People)

The ALT^TM Skills

Conversation is the primary instrument of leadership. Leaders can ensure that important conversations have the desired impact if they thoughtfully use the ALT^tm Skills:

·        A is for ASK

Successful leaders engage others in conversation by asking open-ended questions to draw out the other person, to demonstrate genuine interest in what others are thinking, to explore creative options, to develop mutual understanding of issues, and to encourage others to take a different perspective.

·        L is for LISTEN

Successful leaders genuinely listen to what others say and how they are saying it – they don’t just “reload their guns” while the other person is talking. They listen with their eyes as well as their ears. They listen with their brains, but also with their hearts. Real listening involves focusing attention, repeating back to clarify and confirm, summarizing key points, and expressing empathy.

·        T is for TELL

Most leaders do too much TELLing and not enough ASKing and LISTENing. But there is a proper place for a strong leadership message. Employees need to hear from their leaders where are we going, how are we going to get there, and why does it matter. Leaders need to tell their story, say what they’re passionate about. And employees need to hear direct, honest, specific feedback from their leaders.

Ask, Listen, and Tell – the leader’s toolkit for effective conversations that affect the success of the business. Without careful, deliberate planning and execution, leaders leave the impact of these important business conversations to chance.

Case Study 010108: New Year Conversations

You have a tenured employee who is steady, dependable, pleasant, easy to get along with, and well liked by all her team and colleagues. Her performance has basically met targets all year.

In several one-on-ones you have tried to encourage more initiative, more leadership because you feel she is capable of so much more. However, you have not been able to influence any improvement or change in her performance. She is agreeable, but nothing really changes. Since her performance has not been in the problem range, you’ve felt that there was nothing more you could do.

However, over the past three months the organization has undergone – and is continuing to experience – significant change. From your leaders you are hearing constantly of the need to significantly increase efficiency and consistency, and to improve the customer experience. You feel this is a time for everyone to step up and pull together to bring about significant change, and you believe that this employee simply has not stepped up.

Now it is time for year end reviews. In this employee’s review you plan to point out that the bar has been raised; her performance should have stepped up but has not. You plan to give a Proficient rating, even though her ratings in the past have been Exceeds Expectations.  In fact, you are feeling that next year this time, if she continues as she has been, she may even be rated Needs Improvement. You anticipate that this solid, steady, dependable person will be very unhappy with this review, and will feel that her dependability, organizational knowledge, and steady meeting of targets should be rewarded.

Questions

1. What questions will you ASK to get her to review this year’s performance?

2. What questions will you ASK to get her to reflect and go deeper?

3. What questions will you ASK to influence her to take a different perspective?

4. What will be the key message points you will TELL in this conversation?

5. What questions will you ASK to get her to re-commit?