Empowerment is the Key to Creating Engaged Team Members

Far too many employees are not actively engaged at work or worse actively disengaged, mainly because they are not empowered to make decisions; they always have to refer ‘up’ before acting to solve a problem or grasp an opportunity.

They are not trusted to make ‘the right decision’ despite having been employed based on having the necessary knowledge, experience and common sense.

The best way to equip Team Members to make ‘the right’ decisions thus empowering and engaging them, is to agree as a team a clear Vision Statement.

The agreed Vision Statement can then be used as each Team Member’s reference point or compass when making an autonomous (empowered) decision.

Easy to digest guidance for creating a jointly agreed Vision Statement is available in the highly recommended, fun to read book “Full Steam Ahead!” by Ken Blanchard and Jesse Stoner.

To illustrate the points made, here is an example of a Vision Statement agreed by a Credit Team:

Purpose: Nourishing Businesses...
The Credit Team seeks to provide credit solutions that enhance internal and external customers’ business models and sustainability; thereby promoting economic growth and stable employment.

Values:
Integrity, trust, transparency, creativity and enterprise

If a situation requires a choice to be made between one value and another, the values are stated here in order of precedence. For example if one can exercise integrity or creativity one must elect to honour integrity and forego creativity in that instance.

A Picture of the Future:
(A word picture describing the Credit Team as it will look when its Vision is realised)

The Credit Team is an innovative, market leading, customer focused credit solutions provider - fully aligned with the Strategic Intent of the Business. It is recognised as having great people with imagination, committed to delivering added value to customers. The team works ‘as one’; guided by its purpose and values.

The foundations for this work are:
1. Compliance with Credit Policy,
2. Holistic credit analysis,
3. A “Yes; provided …. Can Do” attitude, and
4. An on-going programme of research, development, participation in professional discussions and networking.

Books authored by Ron Wells are available from: BarrettWells Books

What Every International Business Traveller Needs to Consider – Practical Guidelines

Obtain a tourist guide that includes a street map of each city or town to be visited.

Check that your visit will not clash with a public or bank holiday or some other local festival that will make it difficult to arrange appointments or flights and hotel accommodation.

If a train or vehicle journey of three hours or less would suffice, then seriously consider these alternatives rather than flying to your destination.

Check the relative position of the airport (or railway station), your hotel and each appointment location. Decide the means of transport to use between these locations and check that enough time is allowed in your schedule to ensure punctuality.

Establish the street address of every appointment. Prepare notes for taxi drivers in the local script, so you can ‘show and tell’ - your accent may be difficult for a driver to understand.

Study the brief country history which is included in most tourist guides. This is a minimum requirement. Additional reading about the country and people is recommended whenever possible. This will help you to avoid potentially sensitive topics and it will help you to show respect where respect is due.

Obtain information about the local weather and dress codes, to indicate what to wear and what to pack.

Do not wear clothing or insignia which identify your employer, such as logo bearing jackets, watches or pens. Do not display company logo bearing files or baggage. Such items could mark you out as a target for theft or kidnap.

Arrange for an Interpreter if necessary. Do not assume that "everyone speaks and understands English" - this is absolutely untrue - check. In some cases your host will provide an Interpreter, this will reduce your costs but may be a disadvantage. See Working with Interpreters.

Make copies of your passport, visas and any other travel documents. Leave these with a colleague in your office - or at home - together with a copy of your itinerary (including times, contact names and telephone/fax numbers). This will be invaluable should you lose any documents or should you suffer some misadventure.

Obtain some small denomination bank notes in local currency, for tips. If local currency is not available outside the destination country, carry several US one-Dollar bills for this purpose. Your tourist guide will usually indicate local ‘tipping’ customs.

Check on the acceptability of credit cards. In Austria, for example, many restaurants do not accept credit cards. It is embarrassing to invite a business acquaintance to dinner and, at the end of the evening, to have to borrow cash from your guest to meet the bill.

Learn enough of the local language to say; "good morning / afternoon / evening", "please", "thank you", "goodbye", "I would like a mineral water / coke / beer / red wine / white wine / coffee / tea", "where is the restroom/toilet" and to count to twenty. Learn the appearance of important signs such as; "men’s restroom/WC" as distinct from "women’s restroom/WC"; "entrance"; "exit"; "push"; "pull"; "closed" and "open". Your tourist guide will usually include all of this information and a pronunciation guide.

Be aware of the adverse effects of ‘jet lag’ on your reflexes, on your coordination and on your ability to ‘think straight’ and speak coherently. Plan your schedule to allow time to overcome these effects both at the beginning of the trip and upon your return to base.

Arrive in any strange city or town the day before any business meetings are scheduled. Use any ‘spare’ time to learn about the locality; read local papers, visit shops, use local public transport and attend a concert or sports event. This will equip you to impress those you meet with the fact that you respect them sufficiently to invest time in learning about their home, their ‘team’, their culture and their concerns. This will be invaluable support for your efforts to establish a rapport with those that you meet and to build relationships.

Do not arrange appointments and your departure schedule such that you will have to rush away from an appointment in order to catch your flight or train. This shows a lack of respect for your host and could mean that you either;
(a) miss those valuable pieces of information that come to light as you are departing (after the formality of the meeting evaporates) or
(b) that you will be forced into making negotiating concessions in order to close the meeting on time.

Remember that one meeting may lead to another unscheduled-meeting, so you must build some flexibility into your schedule. At least you must expect to have to make changes to your plans without much notice.

Ron Wells

Redesigning Work, Employment & the Social Contract - a presentation by Heather McGowan

Published on June 4, 2015
Heather McGowan - Academic Entrepreneur and Innovation Strategist

In this 23 minute talk presented in Australia recently, Ms McGowan provides an easy to follow view of the future of work, careers and the skills that will be in demand. It is both amusing and thought provoking. Certainly it is a ‘must see’ video that can be viewed on YouTube via this link: http://youtu.be/zDf-zENKDsQ

BarrettWells

BarrettWells Credit Resources is a trading name of T3P LIMITED
URL: http://www.barrettwells.com

A Global Shortage of Required Skills Threatens Prosperity in the lead up to and post 2030

A study by Rainer Strack presented in an amusing TED Talk indicates that by 2030, many of the world's largest economies will have more jobs than adult citizens to do those jobs.

What is worse there will be a global shortage of people with the skills to fill those jobs. In order to view this 12 minute talk click this link: http://go.ted.com/tdV

Using the example of Germany, Strack illustrates that despite the global population ballooning to about 8.5 billion by 2030 the working age populations in major producing countries will have shrunk. The situation in Germany is illustrated here, bearing in mind that the demographic profile utilised exists so the 2030 position is accurately predicted; ignoring immigration/emigration and any unfortunate calamity that may occur.

The same exercise applied to other major producing nations indicates the seriousness of the situation:

Of course the skill distribution amongst the working age population versus the needs of these economies in 2030 is more important than simple numbers.

In this talk Strack describes the Skills Mismatch that will surface despite the use of robots and other artificial intelligence in the manufacturing and service sectors. He points to the motor manufacturing industry as an area that has adopted technology to more or less replace people on the production line but has spawned associated jobs, such that more or less the same numbers of people are now involved in the process. However those new jobs require very different skill sets.

This leads to the conclusion that the global community needs to take urgent steps to ensure a suitably equipped workforce is available to maintain global GDP at adequate levels in the future. The reduction in workforce coupled with a probable skills mismatch threatens the prosperity of future generations if action is not initiated without delay.

To retain talent the role demands of Finance must change, by David Axson

In the linked video Dave Axson discusses the rôle that Finance Professionals should be allowed to play in businesses in order to retain and attract the talent that they so desperately need.
Dave Axson is author of The Management Mythbuster (John Wiley & Sons 2010) and MD of Accenture.

“What we are dealing with today is an environment where there are many more variables that could potentially impact your business. Twenty to twenty-five years ago you were concerned about your competitors down the street…..” click this link to view this short but interesting talk.

The Art of Predicting Failure – Guidance from a successful Corporate ‘Doctor’

Tom FitzGerald (CEO of FitzGerald Associates) makes an excellent point in his blog viz:

‘Each company has a Trajectory that is independent of the economy. As it points - up or down - so goes the company. It shows how a company will react to threat. Or mobilize to create its future. It is not measured by the financials; those are history. (It is measured) by the causes, (the) Drivers of performance. These predict (the future) at the (same) moment (as) they are creating the future. They can be identified - easily. They can be measured - simply. They can be changed - readily. As they change, they change the future.’
See: http://fitzgeraldassociates.blogspot.com

FitzGerald’s excellent consulting work partly based on a London School of Economics (LSE) and McKinsey & Co research paper has proved the following predictors, if not corrected in good time, will certainly cause corporate failure. FitzGerald has identified over a hundred what he calls ‘Blockers’ that if left unchecked will cause a business to stumble into decline; four examples are:

• Distrust / Fear
• Complacency
• Need For Consensus
• Tolerance of Incompetence

When the rot is identified using simple tools that Fitzgerald has developed, it can be stopped and reversed by fixing certain ‘Critical Functions’ utilising certain ‘Generators’. Examples are listed here:

CRITICAL FUNCTIONS:
• Performance Management
• Talent Management
• Lean Operations / Cost Containment
• Profitable Growth Orientation
• Customer Orientation
• Innovation / Creativity

GENERATORS:
• Corporate Decisiveness
• Acknowledgement of Work
• Accountability
• Corporate Assertiveness / Energy
• Commitment of Management
• Openness of Management
• Adaptability
• Effectiveness
• Cooperation

It is easy to accept that when several of the ‘Critical Functions’ listed are not well managed within a business, that business is already on the slippery slope to ruin, even though its financial results may not reflect the fact. FitzGerald’s point is that when the financial results do eventually evidence that a company is in decline, a turnaround is much more difficult to effect and failure is much more likely.

The answer for FitzGerald is for corporate leaders to identify the problems even before Key Performance Indictors (KPIs) show weaknesses, and long before the financials are impaired, and to take necessary action to effect a course correction.

Credit Executives on the other hand could seek out the signs of danger in counterparty customers as a means to predict failure early enough to avoid being embroiled in a bankruptcy.

The message then for Credit Executives is, beware of businesses exhibiting the following, for example:

Indecisiveness

• Making poor quality decisions, the inability to table problems and resolve them, the inability to take decisive action and, worst case, the need for consensus.

Failure to Acknowledge Work

• Workers not discussing ‘the work’ with Supervisors. Supervisors not talking about ‘the work’ with Managers, except when a mishap occurs.

Accountability

• Managers not holding their peers accountable for doing what they said they would do.

The cause and effect of failure can be illustrated as follows:

Distrust is evident (a Blocker) that leads to…
Reduced Decisiveness (a Generator) and so to…
Poor performance Management (a Critical Function) that finally begins to generate….
Loss of Quality (a KPI) and too late the result shows in the Financial Reports as…
Reduced Profit

In summary, to quote Tom FitzGerald:

‘Drivers of Performance in any organisation are the Organisational and Human Factors that Underlie, Drive and Impel Performance’

This is food for thought indeed...

BarrettWells

A Negative Management Style Causes Employee Stress and Ill Health

Metal Health and Wellbeing (a UK Government Office of Science 2009 publication) reported that one of the leading causes of stress at work and ill health is linked to the style of management. That is to say that stress and ill health are minimised, if a manager provides autonomy to his or her subordinates, manages them by ‘praise and reward’ rather than ‘fault-finding’, provides them with flexible working arrangements and creates a ‘person-friendly’ organisation culture.

Studs Terkel, in his book Working, wrote; ‘Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying’.

Many people believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That is a mistake according to Daniel Pink, writing in his provocative and persuasive book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Leading at a Higher Level: Blanchard on How to be a High Performing Leader with its underlying theme of ‘selfless leadership’ as opposed to ‘selfish leadership’ is the perfect compliment to Drive.

It is to be hoped that all leaders of the future will read these or similar books, take the messages to heart, and make the world a better place.

Ron Wells

The Death of Modern Management by Jo Owen (full version) - YouTube

You may find it interesting to watch this video of the author providing a synopsis of his book The Death of Modern Management, which I have been reading. …..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiz-D8rm80E

As with so many books, you have to read to chapter 10 to find the real meat of the piece. The point made is that IQ and EQ are no longer enough - a manager/leader today additionally needs effective PQ: political quotient.

PQ is said to be 'about gaining the informal power required to achieve the formal requirements of the job.' Since managers can no longer rely on 'formal authority to make things happen.'

'…the core skills that make up PQ' include:

Building networks of trust and influence
Creating alliances to make things happen
Dealing with conflict
Shaping the organisation's agenda to meet your needs
Dealing with organizational conflict and resistance
Managing ambiguity and uncertainty
Finding the right assignments and projects to work on
Discovering the real rules of survival and success in your firm

Lack of PQ is why '….you may well find people who are both smart (IQ) and nice (EQ), but they languish harmlessly in the backwaters of (your) organisation. Meanwhile, people who are neither as nice nor as smart seem to levitate towards the top of the organisation, using nice smart people as their doormats on the road to the top.'
….according to the author

Ron Wells

Time for Thinking

I’m sure we have all endured management practices that seemed to be more examples of how not to manage successfully rather than the role models we had hoped to find. Nevertheless these management practices all too often seem to be successful as organisations are carried along on the tide of a benign market cycle. They are only tested when the cycle turns negative.

The result of a negative turn of events is usually howls of anguish from those who have done little, thought little, cared little, planned and strategized little; yet drained their organisations of much. Executives with no vision and no leadership skills but big pay-packets, no, obscenely large pay and benefits packets, wonder how their genius could have suddenly escaped them…..

Robert Heller writing in the January 2009 Letter to Thinking Managers remarked:

‘….the effects of working for the largest company in the industry for so long; managers become ‘comfortable, insular, self-referential and too wedded to the status quo’. Such habits, folklore would argue, will get driven out of supine corporations by the threat of failure and the impact of competition. But this process is not automatic at all.

….twin cults have played a noxious part in the fall of America’s one-time world champions. The Cult of the Chief Executive elevated some quite ordinary men into mini-heroes and mini-heroes into gods. The Cult of Shareholder Value, perversely enough, extracted large wealth from the value that rightfully belonged to the investors. The Congressional hearings on the Big Three auto giants and their pleas for bail-outs showed cultism at its silliest. The three CEOs turned up in separate corporate jets, with no documents or plans, giving the committee a field day. Would the trio accept a cut in pay to $1 a year? The Ford man reckoned that his massive $22 million was just about right.

The banks sum it all up: overpaid colossally, professionally incompetent, immensely conceited. That’s no way to run a bank, a car company - or the world economy.’

Today we hear only bad news, but is it all bad? It cannot be bad that inefficient, and incompetent leaders who lack vision and act only out of selfish greed are removed from the corporate decision making process. It is not bad that excess productive capacity is trimmed – redirecting scarce world resources to more useful activity.

There is no doubt that we live through a time of painful transition for many people, a transition that could have been eased, less radical, and spread over a longer time period if corporate leaders had had the skills and vision for which they were so handsomely rewarded.

Edward de Bono wrote in his January 2009 Letter to Thinking Managers:

‘Most executives regard thinking as a luxury. It is enough to follow the routines. Continuity is everything. Now and again there is a need to analyse a situation to identify a standard element and then the standard response can be applied.

When things are going well, then this continuity works because you are carried along on the tide of success. Unfortunately, the reverse happens when things are going badly, because the tide is going in the opposite direction.

Better thinking is never a luxury. Better thinking is an absolute necessity in difficult times.

This better thinking includes creativity. There is a need for creativity in order to look at things in a different way.’

Although many businesses will benefit from the state of transition in which we find the world economy; let us hope that new leaders of vision and compassion will emerge to enable the whole world economy to expand and prosper to the benefit of all participants.

Ron Wells

Members can subscribe to the Letter to Thinking Managers at http://www.thinkingmanagers.com