Month: January 2012

As a leader, it is your job to build an organization that trusts each other. Trust is the glue that keeps everyone together and opens up the opportunity for great things to happen.

In order to have trust, you must have accountability — it is not possible to get trust by edict. Without accountability, trust is damaged, and repairing trust becomes a management time sink.

Accountability comes when there is alignment with both rewards and consequences. We talk a lot about rewards and high performance, but we probably don’t talk enough about consequences.

There must be a shared upside when things go well and shared consequences when they do not. There must be proper analysis around the root cause of problems — often when you dig into the problem objectively, you see that it’s really a lack of connecting the dots.

Without accountability, there will never be trust. What are you doing to consistently require high performance from your team? How is that helping build more trust and results?

This blog was originally posted on TalentedApps.

Patty has a fantastic blog post about how you need to connect the dots for your team. I love how she makes it so clear that our job is to help people understand how their work matters.

Since we know that purpose is a key to motivation, doing so not only protects the results, it also increases the satisfaction of the results.

A perpetual cycle of goodness, if you will…

But, connecting the dots is not really a one-time concern.

As a leader, you need to build systems to identify places where people and processes are missing the connection. You need to be looking out for any evidence that the dots are not lining up for people – and you need to fix it.

People get busy. People are focused on other things, they can easily confuse what is locally important, with what is strategic to the business. It is not their failing when this happens, it is a leadership failing.

Your job is to connect the dots and keep them connected — when they are not, results will suffer.

This blog was originally posted on TalentedApps.

When I was younger, so much youngerthan today…

OK, enough with the serenade… I’ve been thinking a lot these days, about asking for and offering help.

I’ve come to realize that most are reluctant to ask for help — and I’m noticing this has a huge downside.

In trying to think about how to help people become comfortable asking for help (read that one again, it’s deep), I think the trick is to focus on being more helpful.

So, I want to know: 

• When was the last time you helped someone else? Is it something you are doing regularly? Is it a goal of yours?
• How do you think you could become more helpful to others?
• Do others think of you as helpful?
• When was the last time someone observed you being helpful?

When you come to terms with the idea that to be your best professional self you will need help, you realize that someday you are going to have to ask. When you are a helpful person, it is a lot easier to ask others for help, since you already know that being helpful makes you feel good.  

Which brings me right back to the starting point…

There is a lot of help needed out there. To satisfy this demand, we need more helpful people in this world — time for you to start picking up the slack.

I look forward to hearing about your progress. 

This blog was originally posted on TalentedApps.