Employee-manager relationships are under stress

Message to leaders: employees are demanding a new kind of manager-worker relationship. If employees do not trust the organization’s decision-making process and results, they also will not trust your ability to lead the company successfully.

Consistently demonstrate a set of core values, listen to employees, ask for their ideas, and communicate your strategies. Help employees understand that you value their contributions. If you ensure that employees feel valued, treat them with respect, and demonstrate a sincere interest in collaboration, you will engender profound loyalty that has positive and measurable returns: star talent will not be easily lured way, your overall attrition rate will decrease, and both performance and productivity will improve.

Communication and trust go hand-in-hand. If employees do not know where the organization is heading and why – and feel that their ideas do not matter – you will suffer the consequences. If you help your staff feel valued and engage them in key decision-making processes, the more likely is it they will feel a sense of job satisfaction. Happy employees make smarter decisions and work harder – simply because they believe their ideas and contributions matter.

Know Your Unique Value

Sure, you likely know what you contribute and how you add value to your employer. But are you in tune with the unique value you bring – the really good stuff that no one else has or no one else can replicate?

As Brett Simons reports in his blog, your value, what you can do uniquely well, is your currency. If you are remarkably good at helping others with something that really matters, then you will merit fair if not impressive compensation and rarely want for work.

Unique value could present itself in the form of a seasoned "intrapreneur" – a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation. Or perhaps you have the ability to see things in black and white when others cannot see things as well, giving you the ability to make sound and profitable decisions.

As a key organizational leader, it’s important for you to understand this value and also learn about the potential limits to your value. Perhaps there are ways for you to continue to increase your value? Individual self-assessments can help to give you these insights, particularly when supported by an independent business coach who can help you to interpret, internalize and further develop this value.

Knowing your value and being able to articulate it with confidence will be your source of competitive advantage. Having such self-confidence is important in gaining trust, loyalty and commitment – tempering that confidence with authenticity and genuine caring.

Knowing your value does not mean being able to tell people how great you are. Knowing your value as a leader is the confidence that comes with having a crystal clear understanding of what it is you can do uniquely well to help others seize opportunities or solve problems that matter to them.

Enlightened leaders have a good understanding of their unique value. It’s part of the foundation in rounding out their emotional intelligence, self-confidence and marketability.

Do you know the true value of what you bring to the organization?

What Do You See In the Mirror?

Trust in managers is in short supply these days. According to Deloitte’s annual Ethics & Workplace Survey, 48% of employed Americans report a loss of trust in their employers and 46% say lack of transparent communication from their companies’ leadership are the primary reasons for pursuing new employment at the end of the recession. Clearly, something is wrong.

Truly great leaders have acute self-awareness. They regularly look in the mirror, questioning, pushing and critiquing their own performance and perceptions.

Sure, 360 degree assessments can help in a formal way to gather feedback about what others think of your leadership style. But with social media, there are also many informal ways to solicit this input. Track sites like glassdoor.com to read employees’ candid perceptions of companies and their top leadership. In fact, your own firm may be rated on the site.

If your employees don’t trust you, they won’t follow you. And if they don’t follow you, no one is executing the business strategy. In essence, workers want to be able to follow inspiring leaders who demonstrate values they can relate to, someone who is authentic, has a vision, listens, communicates openly and honestly, supports and recognizes high performance and shows that he or she authentically cares.

Great leadership is neither a profession nor a science, but a practice. As Talent Management reports, individuals cannot lead others until they have mastered their own state of being — who they are, what they believe and how they behave. State of being speaks to the sum total of managers' attitudes, beliefs, actions and values. It spans their vision of the future and presence in the moment.

There has likely never been a time when leaders are under so much scrutiny to behave credibly and ethically. Credible leaders are trustworthy, competent, dynamic, inspiring and accountable. It’s not enough to demonstrate one or two of these attributes. Today, a credible leader needs to hold all of these attributes, while being proficient and competent to execute strategically. It is each leader's responsibility to build an engaged, high-performance workforce.

Do your employees perceive you as trustworthy and credible? Are you ready to take a look in the mirror?

Playing Nice in the Sandbox

Although we were told to “play nice” as children, it appears that “niceness” at work has become a misnomer.

So often leaders look externally to bring someone in to fix their organization. But it really starts at the individual level. It can’t be any simpler: be nice! How often do we treat co-workers as adversaries, fighting for limited resources or fighting for professional stature? Or perhaps withholding information, rather than openly sharing. So the question on the table: Is “nice” at work a goal worth pursuing?

Communication is the source for creating a positive and productive work culture. How we communicate, what we say and do, and how others communicate with us, provides the essence for what shapes organizational culture. In these leaner times when everyone is pushed to capacity, sometimes the fundamentals of respectful, supportive and effective communication begin to slip. As a leader, it’s up to you to lead by example and explore if your culture is one where people could be nicer to each other.

In Wendy Ulrich’s new book, The Why of Work, she suggests that leaders revisit some communication fundamentals. It takes personal responsibility to put effort into building happy and healthy co-worker relationships. Remember, you’re leading a larger team of people who are all working to achieve a common goal. Foster camaraderie. Have fun. We seem to have lost “fun” and “nice” in the pursuit of cut-throat competitiveness to produce results. They are not mutually exclusive. Check out 13 Ways to Have Fun at Work.

To do this requires conversations. Not one, but many. And genuine, open, authentic conversations. Where kindness and respect is mutual. Be nice. Say thank you. Acknowledge the good work of others. Buy some donuts. Enjoy! After all, you probably spend more time with your co-workers than your family.

Fostering good working relationships is really no different from fostering good personal relationships. It doesn’t cost anything to be nice to people.

Trust Erosion

Trust in managers is in short supply these days. As reported in TechRepublic, our research found that 19% of employees “rarely” trust their manager. Further, new research has revealed that nearly one-in-three employees perceive their immediate manager to be incompetent. The result: a workforce ready for greener pastures or one filled with silent saboteurs.

Lack of trust and faith in ability perpetuates a negative spiral inside organizations. Leadership is usurped. Employees quit and stay. Productivity suffers. And ultimately, performance dwindles.

As Robert Sutton cites in his blog on “I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me,” dysfunctional leaders often lack self-awareness. We’re talking more than just the run of the mill emotional intelligence. We’re talking about being insulated from reality, disconnected from subordinates.

Trust is a two-way street. Managers must show they have a plan, can articulate the plan to employees, and demonstrate that the plan is being implemented effectively. Employees need to trust that their managers have the capability to make the organization a success. And in turn, leaders must also show that they trust employees to drive the organization forward and make them valued partners of a common purpose. Employees want to know what the bigger picture is, and importantly, how they can contribute to that vision.

One of the most critical aspects in building trust is sincerity and candidness between an employee and his/her manager. This is the belief that each individual can be trusted to speak his or her mind openly, knowing that the other will listen with a helpful ear. With the degree of change taking place in many companies today, this growing erosion of trust is an indication that communication needs to be improved.

Have your created an environment to foster trust in your organization?

A change will do you good... but I don't want to leave

The recession is coming to an end. The business journalists are writing doomsday articles about the impending mass exodus of frustrated employees. Employers are supposed to fortify the dams and fashion retention ties (golden handcuffs are passé’).

What’s interesting is that most good employees don’t want to leave and most employers don’t want to lose good employees. (Read Jerry’s Harvey’s “the Road to Abilene”.) Where is the disconnect? Too many companies were too quiet for too long about how they were dealing with a troublesome economy. Hearing nothing, employees became anxious and subsequently disengaged.

One tactic in a solid engagement/retention strategy: talk with your employees. Let them know what's going on in the business and how they can help. More importantly, let them kow that develoment opportunities still exist. Good employees want development and want to know what the future holds. Ironically, most meaningful development doesn't cost a lot of money; and, it occurs on the job via projects, stretch assignments, attending conferences or meeting and working with clients.

Good managers - those who are good coaches and care about developing leaders and engaging their teams - hold the keys. People quit managers, not companies. How you feel about your manager directly affects how you feel about your company.

With what money companies have left after the travails of 2009, they should invest in developing managers to develop people. It will be the best investment made in 2010 and beyond.

Leadership as a contact sport

The key to effective leadership is clear, thoughtful, open communication. And, as more people connect via social media, what better way to reach employees than through the various ways they currently interact?

By leveraging social media for communication, leaders can help create a feeling of community, as well as improving the level of trust, according to Smart Blog on Workforce. But perhaps more important are the implications for boosting employee engagement. Why? Research from Right Management shows that engagement is linked to such factors as having a clear understanding of expectations, the company’s mission and how roles are linked to business objectives, as well as feeling valued by senior leaders and committed to the organization’s core values. And all of these issues are contingent on senior leadership’s ability to communicate and connect with employees.

Still, senior leaders can’t just jump into social media. First, they must understand beforehand the differences between social media and more traditional methods of communication. Most important, given the interactive nature of social media, successful communication requires being open to comments and suggestions and willing to respond in a give-and-take, as Donald Bulmer points out in "Why Business Leaders Should Care".

That’s not to say leaders should only use social media. In fact, when it comes to communication, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. While one person might prefer using Facebook or reading a blog, another might choose email or in-person meetings. But, if they use the right mix, leaders are sure to find they’ve contributed to creating an environment of mutual respect – and increased levels of engagement.

Is anybody listening?

It was refreshing to learn from a recent poll that so many employees want to make a difference. Fifty-seven percent said they make at least 20 suggestions a year. That’s a lot more than we anticipated, especially given reports of low employee engagement. Which leads us to ask, are organizations listening? Our research tells us that three top drivers of engagement include “my opinions count”, “senior leaders value employees” and “everyone is treated with respect”. If engagement levels are so low (our own research tells us that only 34% of employees are engaged), organizations may be missing an opportunity to engage workers and harness the creativity and innovation employees are anxious to offer.

But this is just one element of engagement. What wasn’t asked in our poll was what kind of suggestions were being offered. Far too many times, employees offer suggestions that are outside their scope of responsibility. Two additional top engagement drivers include “I understand how I can contribute to meeting the needs of our customers” and “I am encouraged to take ownership of my work”. Leaders would do well to direct employees to focus on their individual roles and processes where they can take ownership and accountability. As a result, their contribution to the organization is at a higher level and has a meaningful impact on the success of the business.

Bottom line: Build a culture of trust by showing you value contributions and that everyone’s opinions count. Demonstrate your trust in employees by giving them an opportunity to share and act on suggestions.