Tag organizational health

It’s impossible to avoid hearing about AI these days.

From those who praise it to those who warn about an impending apocalypse because of it, there is no shortage of opinions or predictions about it.

Instead of discussing AI’s pros and cons or capabilities, I will try something different in this post.

Today I will interview an AI by asking ChatGPT questions about leadership!

What do you think about ChatGPT’s responses?

We’ve all been there.

Once a year, our manager would call us into their office and review what we had done well throughout the year – or, more likely, what we had done wrong eleven months ago. Then we would leave the manager’s office and return to work exactly like before.

Nothing changed! This is why it’s time to replace the performance review process.

Read more about the difference between High Potential and High Performance.

Need more reasons?

Performance Reviews Aren’t Effective – Performance reviews rarely lead to a change in behaviour by the manager or the employee. Year after year, most managers give employees the same feedback. And most employees don’t do anything in response. One reported that as little as one-third of employees showed improvement after their annual review. That’s likely because performance reviews rarely offer actionable steps for employees to take when struggling.

Performance Reviews Aren’t Reliable – Seventy-seven percent of HR executives believe performance reviews don’t accurately reflect employee contributions, according to CEB research. And CEB’s HR practice leader Rose Mueller-Hanson agrees with those executives. She states, “Our research shows that individual performance ratings have zero correlation with actual business results.”

Performance Reviews Are Time-Consuming – A recent CEB survey found that managers spend an average of 210 hours yearly in performance management activities. Managers said their employees, in turn, each spend 40 hours a year. Deloitte reported that its approximately 244,000 employees spent more than 2 million hours a year on performance reviews. That’s much time spent on something that is proven to be unreliable and ineffective.

Performance Reviews Are Costly – Besides the time it takes to perform annual reviews, there’s the actual cost. According to information from the CEB, a company spends about $3,500 per employee on yearly reviews.

Given the time and cost of performance reviews, it’s surprising that more companies haven’t given them up yet. But if those aren’t enough reasons for you, the new research on how ineffective and misleading they are!

It’s time to stop evaluating performance and invest in potential.

High potentials can be challenging to identify for two reasons:

First, high performance is easy to observe and drowns out the less obvious attributes and behaviours that characterize high potentials—such as change management or learning capabilities.

Second, few organizations codify the attributes and competencies they value in their ideal employees—which means that managers don’t know precisely what to look for to assess potential.

As a result, most managers focus exclusively on performance, which can be a problem.

When performance is the only criterion employees are evaluated on, high performers will be the only ones moving up—and high potentials will move out.

You should value and reward performance, but it can’t be the only entry point.

Learn more about the Better Leader Inner Circle

What are the key characteristics of high-potential employees?

The characteristics of high-potential employees include Ability, Aspiration, Behaviour, Social Skills, Adaptability and Leadership. These traits are critical to identifying employee abilities that can contribute to the business and enable employers to put development programmes in place to maximize the skills of these individuals.

Ability relates to performance, an individual’s expertise, innate skills, and capacity to work autonomously and consistently deliver results. 

Aspiration is the desire to grow, taking accountability for decision-making. They share a drive to achieve, individually and as a team, and support and encourage growth.

Behaviour is one of the easiest traits to identify. High Potential Employees Show an increased capability to learn, cooperate with others and manage their behaviours and emotions and how they behave under pressure.

Social skills and High Emotional Intelligence allow High Potential Employees to adapt their personalities to different responsibilities and changing circumstances.

Adaptability. Under pressure, High Potential Employees usually remain calm, continue to perform, and can pivot easily.

Leadership is imperative for High Potential Employees to understand and respect quality leadership and aspire to fulfil such roles successfully.

The goal of a leader is to ensure that your team finds a solution to their problem.

To do that, they have to know what the problem is. You must know how to ask open-ended leadership questions to ensure successful conversations. Open-ended questions are essential for any leadership strategy because they allow you to understand your employee’s wishes and needs with subtlety.

What Is an Open-Ended Leadership Question?

An open-ended question is not one with a simple answer. When understanding an employee’s motivations and goals, you don’t want curt “yes” or “no” answers; you want them to deliberate and talk at length.

You want to know their point of view, and open-ended questions make that happen. The more the employee says in response to the first question, the more details you have to ask further questions.

The clearest example of an open-ended versus a closed-ended question is “Do you have any questions?” versus “What questions can I answer?”. The first could prompt a simple “no,” and then there is a lull in the conversation. The second, however, starts your listener to deliberate longer and ask several questions they may not have thought of.

Questions usually asked by leaders include fact-gathering questions, goal-oriented questions, and rapport-building questions. All of these are good and useful to the leadership process, but each needs to allow for an open-ended answer and tie in with the larger goals and needs of the employee.

Benefits of Open-Ended Question

Many things asking open-ended questions equips you with better leadership skills. For example:

• It allows you to build trust and rapport with the employee, as it demonstrates your interest.
• You can learn more about the employee wants and preferences and define needs, goals, challenges, and other data.
• It places you as the expert in the discussion, presenting the value you bring to the table. 

Open-Ended Rapport-Building Questions

Rapport-building questions start the conversation, get your employee talking, and help you understand the person you’re working with. It can also make you both more comfortable with a more personal connection and allow you to begin gathering the necessary information.

Examples:

• • Can you tell me about your priorities for this meeting?
  • What is your background?
  • How is business going?
  • Please tell me about your upcoming plans for the year.
  • What would you like to see improve?
  • What is your biggest challenge right now?
  • Could you list your concerns in this area?

 Open-Ended Qualifying Questions

These questions can help determine the interest level of your employee in how you’ve approached the conversation. It can also let you know how to proceed. Not every employee will buy what you’re selling, and it’s essential to figure out how much an employee is committed.

Examples:

• • What is your timeline for this to be resolved?
  • What do you see as the next steps moving forward?
  • How do you decide this?
  • When should you assess these solutions?
  • How should we move forward after this?

Open-Ended Priority Questions

These questions help discover and address your employees’ roadblocks or concerns and further understand their priorities and needs. These questions should be carefully constructed not to steer the conversation toward something that can’t be fixed. Be sure to treat each employee individually, and don’t assume you know their priorities based only on similar customers.

Examples:

• What would you like to achieve in the upcoming year?
• How is that problem changing how you operate?
• What isn’t working in the current setup?
• What improvements are you hoping to gain from this?
• What would prevent you from making this change right now?

 Open-Ended Discovery Questions

A discovery question should be clarifying and probing, provoking thought and deliberation in your employee. The better you understand the employee’s wishes, the better you can tailor a solution to their needs.

Examples:

• • What are your intentions for the future?
  • Can you elaborate on that?
  • What are your reservations?
  • What needs to be fixed with the current process?
  • What have I not covered that you’d like to hear more about?

 Open-Ended Goal-Based Questions

These help you discover the wishes and wants of your employee if you listen closely. When you know what’s holding them back from achieving their goals, you can better assist them with a solution. Focusing on the benefits of your product and how they attune to the purposes of the employee can also help close a deal.

Examples:

• • Why do you think this solution isn’t working?
  • How is the problem affecting your work?
  • What do you want this meeting to achieve?
  • How should we assess the success of this?
  • What could we do to avoid similar problems?

 Responding to the Answers to Open-Ended Questions

Be sure to ask your questions without rushing into them or being pushy. Show your genuine interest. Your questions should, fundamentally, make your employee talk for as long as they want, and you must be sure to listen to them and provide helpful conversation. Be patient and don’t interrupt; everything you hear can benefit a sale.

Learning How to Ask the Right Questions

Increasing your experience with leadership discussions will allow you to keep a better ear out for helpful information.

When you know what to look for, you will find that subsequent conversations will go easier.

Leadership is not for a select few people at the top of the organization; a healthy Organization has leaders at every level.

I hear it all the time, supervisors griping that their employees lack ownership in their work and projects. But the very same supervisors do not realize that they take actions that take ownership away from their people every day.

Hoping people take ownership is not a plan; leaders of healthy organizations implement systems and mechanisms that give ownership and eliminate mechanisms that inhibit a sense of ownership.

Read more about accountability.

Top-down systems rob people of their sense of ownership, so the more you can do to eliminate them, the better. I am not talking about monitoring data and results, as these should make the invisible visible.

The systems I am speaking about are where senior management determines what their subordinates should be doing and then holds them accountable.

I have experienced that people do their best work when they are accountable to themselves and their teammates.

When it comes to processes, adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the goal that the process was put in place to achieve.

It drives people crazy when the process becomes the outcome.

Edward Deming, who explored the principle of Total Quality Leadership, said that systems to monitor efficiency improved efficiency.

But processes that monitored the process caused the organization to become inefficient.

Monitoring processes, or how employees do their job, sends the message that we do not trust you.

And in the end, it drives employees away from taking ‘ownership.’

If you are clear about your intent and what employees are not allowed to do in carrying out your intent, you will drive ownership.

Read more about leading with intent.

Consider these questions:

How are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passions of your mid-level managers responsible for their departments’ results?

Which monitoring systems can you hand over to mid-level managers and department heads?

What are the top-down monitoring systems in your organization? And how can you eliminate them?

What are the Four levels of Accountability Systems?

Level 1 – Chaos: People are not told what they are accountable for and therefore don’t do their jobs

Level 2 – Inefficient: People are told what they are accountable for but don’t do their jobs because of overwork or focus on the wrong things. This is most inefficient because resources are invested in monitoring, but work isn’t getting done.

Level 3 – Compliance: People understand what they are responsible for and do their work because there are systems to hold people accountable. People often feel forced into doing their jobs. This is where most organizations are and work towards, but this is top-down leadership.

Level 4 – Healthy: People are not told what to do because they have figured it out independently. And they hold themselves and their peers accountable for results with a minimum of monitoring systems. This is a highly engaged, energized, and healthy organization where people have engaged and ownership of their work.

In top-down organizations, accountability processes are designed with the idea that you, the employee, cannot hold yourself accountable for your work; therefore, your boss needs to do it for you.

In a Healthy Organization, people hold themselves and their peers to account for their performance.

Leaders in a Healthy organization are not to hold employees accountable but to help them keep themselves accountable.

Read more about organizational health.

How wonderful would it be if people did not have to attend dreaded accountability meetings? How powerful would it be if people felt safe enough to ask others, ‘Can you help me stay on track.’

This would inspire accountability and efficiency, creativity and energy.

Do you have a “brilliant jerk” (or two) in your workplace? 

I teach a leadership class at my local University, and in a recent class, one student shared the story about a high-performing employee who was a jerk. That jerk created a toxic environment but was consistently the number one salesperson. She asked what she should do about the person when senior management focused on that person’s results but not the impact of her actions.

I advised the student to focus on the costs that jerk had on the organization; how many employees or customers did they lose because of this person’s actions? For example, if a new employee quits due to this person being a jerk, how much revenue was lost, and how much did it cost to replace that person?

If the jerk costs more than they earned, the decision becomes economical, not emotional.

Read what happened when I hired a jerk.

A High-performing Jerk is typically in a position of power and has awful toxic behaviours that negatively impact colleagues. Their harmful bullying behaviour “evades consequences” because they’re generally high performing in another metric.

Enough is enough; it’s time for workplace leaders to step up and stamp out these awful behaviours.

Pay Attention to the Brilliant Jerk

High-performing Jerks are bullies but do not have their behaviour dealt with because they may be high performing in another area.

Leaders need to take a more active role in stamping out toxic behaviours in the workplace by:

1. 1. not shrug off, laugh off or walk past anything that constitutes harassment in your workplace;
   2. speak up against harassment that occurs on your watch, and
   3. Investigate and, if substantiated, discipline and exit perpetrators of harassment regardless of their clients, relationships, public profile, revenue, technical skills, perceived brilliance or commercial value.

Ignore the Brilliant Jerk at Your Peril

When organizational leaders ignore or tolerate High-performing Jerks, they signal to employees and other stakeholders that they value profits over people. I shouldn’t have to point out the consequences; however, recent studies show that toxic workplace culture is ten times more likely to drive employee attrition than dissatisfaction with compensation.

“Enough is enough. It’s time companies considered the consequences of their actions. Toxic rock stars are the cancer of company culture. Leaving them in a position of power reveals what the company truly values: profits over people.” HBR

Failure to effectively deal with the High-performing Jerks has significant implications for medium to long-term company profitability (if you want to think about dollars rather than doing the right thing!) The cost of talent management (attrition replacement, talent sourcing costs, employee compensation) will skyrocket.

Do you have an unhealthy culture?

Leaders Must Take A Proactive Stance

Dealing with the High-performing Jerk after they have polluted your culture with their toxicity is a must. But how about we prevent it from getting to that stage in the first place?

Here is some food for thought. Ask yourself:

• • • Am I protecting an employee with toxic behaviours in my workplace?
    • Am I prioritizing some results over long-term positive, sustainable outcomes?
    • Do I reward harmful behaviour through my inaction or other ways?
    • Have I, in any way, contributed to a toxic workplace culture through my behaviours? (Particularly towards women)
    • Am I the reason that people don’t want to come to work anymore?
    • Am I the reason that our employee turnover rate is higher than ideal?

Here is what to do immediately.

• • • Publicly commit to creating and sustaining a workplace culture where everyone, irrespective of their identity, is respected, valued and can reach their potential.
    • Publicly commit to a Zero Tolerance policy (Brilliant Jerks are Not Welcome Here!)
    • Ensure there are robust procedures and practices for confidential reporting of brilliant jerk behaviours (workplace bullying, harassment and disrespect)
    • Ask people from all levels and all backgrounds, ‘Does your boss conform to what you believe are the values of this organization?’
    • Hold the leaders in your workplace accountable for [better] managing the brilliant jerks in your organization. And themselves!

And finally, do not underestimate the damage the High-performing Jerks have on your organization. Do not imagine that your organization is not affected.

Do not neglect your role as a workplace leader to protect your employees, including those who are already marginalized, predominantly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Women, Women of Colour, from the awful impact a brilliant jerk can have.

For decades the leadership ‘Talking-Heads’ emphasized that good leaders were learning leaders.

I, like you, fell for that platitude. But quite frankly, I think unlearning may be more critical.

I recently had a conversation about the changes we have seen since we grew up in the 60s.

Such as; A family friend’s son publicly transitioned from his birth gender of female.

In the 60’s, there were jobs that women were not allowed to do. Pot led to debauchery. LGBQ people were harassed, jailed, and ejected from institutions like the military. People of colour were routinely openly and legally the victims of racist policies. First Nations people were kept behind locked gates.

Today is where unlearning becomes essential.

Can you unlearn things you would have bet the ranch on?

Since the discovery of thousands of Residential School unmarked graves where babies & children were unceremoniously disposed of, we have been steadily unlearning the history that was taught us. There is a whole other version of history that includes people of colour and events so brutal it is heartbreaking.

I have spent the past few decades unlearning and expanding my view of how the world was made. And how we got here.

And celebrating the changes: women are serving in the military as combat soldiers. LGBQ people are proudly out in the open. ‘Off-Colour’ humour that was once perfectly acceptable is now recognized as horrifying.

These changes are 100% needed. We need to recognize the different versions of history and acknowledge that other people have perspectives that are as valid as our own.

The Post-Pandemic Workplace

Return-to-office planning is ramping up, and as many companies have experienced tremendous change in headcount over the past two years, the transition back to the office introduces the challenge of welcoming new team members and reorienting existing employees.

We know that many of us need to unlearn what the traditional workplace looks like. From space to desks to resources, for new to returning workers to what our leadership team looks like and does.

Since there is no one-size-fits-all approach, we need new methodologies to guide our organizations to face unprecedented challenges — and opportunities — to create a better workplace experience in the post-pandemic era.

We need to unlearn that headcounts and floor space are signs of importance and value. As the economy reopens, competition will be intense. Everyone will return to a changed workplace. Expectations will differ from person to person and could create tensions across generations at work.

These new sensibilities will affect how leading companies attract, retain, and inspire talent for many years. Culture is rooted in community and the “social infrastructure” that connects people and shapes how we interact.

The modern workplace will need to foster in-person and virtual relationships, build communities at work, and allow people to achieve more.

It is super hard to unlearn something.

It is a truism that nothing is harder to do than to unlearn something you hold to be true.

For many of us, historical leadership models point to outmoded arrogance and assumptions that the leader has a hold on reality and truth.

When leaders are 100% sure about something, they convey inflexibility. In turn, their obstinacy discourages debate and dialogue. Whether they are aware of that fact or not, a leader who radiates a high level of self-assuredness communicates to those who follow that they must agree with their boss or remain silent.

This leads to compliance and complicity — even willful blindness, which can lead people not to bring up big problems when they see them.

In his article “The Simple Difficulty of Being a CEO,” leadership consultant Patrick Lencioni refers to this trait as “invulnerability” and says it’s one of the temptations of a CEO that can lead to failure.

“The adage ‘Don’t let them see you sweat may be appropriate for actors or salespeople, but for leaders, it’s a problem,” he writes.

“Arrogance hampers your ability to build trust among your people.”

Lencioni says that when leaders do not admit to being wrong, employees mirror that behaviour, which becomes “a never-ending posturing exercise, where real dialogue dies.”

The longer a successful leader has been around, the more this assuredness can tune out different thinking, approaches, and ideas.

Don’t be that leader.

Here are three shifts you can make to continue learning and unlearning:

Shift #1: Engage in continual learning — and never assume you are done learning.

How? Ask open-ended questions that begin with “What” or “How might we?”

Shift #2: Be present and “quiet the chatter.”

How? Carefully analyze the critical events or communications that challenged your thinking and beliefs. Write them down, then reflect on which of these might be ones you need to unlearn.

Shift #3: Welcome diversity in thinking and approach.

How? Immerse yourself in a divergent perspective to gain a deeper understanding of it. Follow new people on social media, watch different news channels, and keep your mind wide open.

Remember the phrase, “Minds, like parachutes, work best when open.”

You may have to unlearn what you once thought true and sure to get your mind opened