How to Help People Get Unstuck: 3 Powerful but Simple Actions

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Help people get unstuck|How to Help People Get Unstuck: 3 Powerful but Simple ActionsIndividual and organizational change can be difficult. Each time we go through any sort of change, some of us jump into it with seeming glee. Yet others seem to be held back by the very notion.

In the business world, this is often termed resistance. Moreover, business leaders often go on to tell us that our resistance is irrational or a misunderstanding. Some “experts” will even tell us that the reason we struggle against change is that all the change we see makes us exhausted. But it is not resistance, and it is not exhaustion that makes us resist change. Quite simply, we are stuck.

Getting stuck is a biological response to change that is rarely explored and even more rarely acknowledged in business and work. We build entire algorithms, schema, or mental models around how to navigate our worlds that are deeply wired into our brains. When a change comes along, it requires us to rewire these algorithms. And we don’t want to. We get stuck because our brains get attached to the way things are today.

MEL: The 3 components of our limbic system

More specifically, we have a part of our brain known as the limbic system that is responsible for writing these algorithms. It writes the code not in a computer’s zeros and ones, but rather in three key subcomponents — memory, emotion, and learning. We call this MEL. Every time we learn something new, experience a strong emotion, or create a lasting memory, we develop a new piece of MEL that stays with us and triggers again in a similar situation.

MEL is certainly helpful for navigating the physical world. For instance, it helps us drive to work every day, recognize certain faces, and even read emotions. It is even useful for building connections among our peers, colleagues, and family members. We use the same process to write positive (and sometimes negative) memories into MEL along with the associated emotions to remind us how to respond to certain people that we love and maybe even those we dislike. We also use MEL to build affinities for organizations. It is the core of organizational culture, as we take the positive emotions felt by certain behaviors in an organization and replicate them throughout the organization. These are all positive ways we build and develop MEL for life.


The challenge of getting unstuck

The downside is that MEL does not easily adapt. People feel uncertainty about the future because changes directly challenge MEL. As we consider something new, the positive emotions of the past are replaced with concern, fear, and even anxiety. These negative emotions manifest themselves in the workplace in the form of low morale, reduced motivation, and a decline in productivity (among others). Employees shut. down and get stuck. In turn, organizations get stuck as well.

So, how do we help people get unstuck? Three simple actions:

1. Start where people start

In order to re-code MEL (memories, emotions, and learning), you can’t start with data, logic, and strategy. As important as it is for any person to ultimately understand the business need for a change, it’s far more compelling and effective to meet them where they start: with memories, emotions, and learning. This means acknowledging and embracing the past — positive and negative — as part of developing a change initiative. Use effective storytelling, and create connection among people and the organization to drive change rather than simply rely on incentives.

2. Acknowledge uncertainty

The uncertain feeling people experience in the fact of change is really a feeling of loss. Their MEL is challenged by something new, and it registers as a loss. Having an empathetic response means acknowledging this loss and helping people move through the change process with support. Leaders need to accept that change is hard, explain why it is hard for them as well, and share the pain of change with their team members.

3. Re-write MEL

The only way for people to truly become unstuck is to write create new memories with positive emotions around a change. This can be encouraged through learning to help people feel what life will be like in a coming change. Strong communications can help build new emotional connections, and new positive memories can be developed through reward systems and incentives that help people feel appreciated and valued.

Organizations are inundated with change: it’s become such a part of the way business is done lately that it can seem like the new normal. Viewing change as just part of the working world, however, can set an organization up for failure — as its people shut down facing the prospect of whatever comes next. Understanding the dynamics of MEL, and using empathy and communication, can help bring your team around. And once a team has embraced and prevailed through change, it has that skill as part of its own toolkit. Adapting to change is far less daunting when you’ve gone through it once already.

About the Authors

Dr. Victoria M. Grady is the president of PivotPoint. She directs the MSM Graduate Program, is on the faculty of George Mason University, and is a research consultant at Dixon Hughes Goodman (DHG). She’s an expert on organizational change, working with public and private agencies across the globe. Patrick McCreesh, PhD is the managing partner of Simatree, a strategy, analytics, and technology consultancy. He leads teams through digital transformations and has developed analytics programs across the public sector and Fortune 500 clients. He also serves as adjunct faculty at Georgetown University and George Mason University Business School. Dr. Victoria M. Grady and Patrick McCreesh, PhD are the authors of Stuck: How to Win at Work by Understanding Loss.

Practical Ways To Minimize Laziness In Your Workplace

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Minimize laziness in the workplace|Practical Ways To Minimize Laziness In Your WorkplaceIt’s safe to say that no employer wants to work with a lazy employee. Not only do they waste time, but lazy employees can also do massive damage to productivity – at least, that’s what many employers believe, and rightfully so. But it’s one thing hiring a lazy person and quite another thing when a previously hardworking employee becomes lazy. Different factors in the workplace can cause workers to become lazy or act sluggish at work. Focusing only on hiring “active employees” will not necessarily be the solution if those factors still exist in the workplace. So are you dealing with an increasing case of laziness among your workers? Here are some ways to minimize the problem and bring out the best in your workers.

1. Create opportunities for engagement

Bill Gates said it best when he remarked that lazy people make the best employees. Bill Gates is considered by many as the epitome of success when it comes to running a thriving business. According to this business mogul, lazy workers only look for easier ways to get the job done. You can deduce that although some workers are perceived as lazy, it doesn’t automatically mean they’re unproductive. If they’re engaged appropriately, they always have the potential to do so much more. Bill Gates, for example, finds that he’s able to get the most out of lazy workers by testing them with the hard jobs because he expects them to find an easy way to complete them. Of course, this may not be the case for every employer, but ensuring that your workers are fully engaged is a great way to energize them and keep them from being slothful. The most important thing is to find the right employee engagement solution that will work best for your situation.

2. Give them more challenging or different responsibilities

Many employers contribute to laziness at the workplace without realizing it. If your workers have to sit around doing nothing, for example, you can expect some level of sluggishness to sneak into their working habits. In other words, you can sometimes attribute laziness to work not being challenging enough. If your workers follow a mundane and monotonous routine, they will get bored easily and may start being complacent with their work. As soon as complacency sets in, you can expect laziness to start lurking close by. One way to minimize complacency-induced laziness is to give more challenging responsibilities to your workers. Doing this will bring out the best in your hardworking employees. Another option is to switch up their tasks a little, so keep this in mind. Give different responsibilities once in a while or find ways to make mundane tasks more exciting.

3. Reward them

While it may help to give lazy workers tasks, there’s only a thin line between giving more responsibilities and becoming a hard taskmaster. So, find ways to reward your workers for the extra workload. Workers, in general, tend to have a poor attitude toward work when they feel they don’t earn enough for what they do. Even well-paid employees may lack the drive to do more work when they feel their extra effort will not be appreciated. Also, when less-motivated workers realize that their employers notice and celebrate hard work, that can push them to put in more effort at work.


4. Communicate with them

Communication is an essential key to good management. It’s important to first communicate with a lazy employee before you set challenging tasks for them. Different things can cause a worker to perform below par at work, and a lack of healthy and engaging communication will make it impossible to pinpoint what your workers are lacking. So, if you notice some of your staff becoming lazy, speak with them about it. Find out what the issue is and how best to address it. This is especially important if you have a capable member of your working team who has started underperforming suddenly. Next, it is vital to let the worker know that they’re an important part of your business, so keep this in mind. By taking the time to clear the air with a slugging worker, you can quickly create the morale booster they need to start performing at their best again.

But you don’t have to wait until workers become lazy before communicating healthily with them. Always ensure that you create a working culture that encourages communication.

5. Avoid giving special treatments and privileges

Workers who do nothing to earn their positions may sometimes feel less motivated to give their best. Also, workers who feel their positions are secure regardless of their lack of effort will find little reason to work above themselves. That’s why it’s important to give all your workers the same level of treatment – no special privileges.

Also, workers who notice that other employees are treated better than they are may feel discouraged to give off their best. And some workers who may not have gone through the same robust recruitment process as the others or may have secured roles they’re not suited to may lack the motivation to be their best. Plus, such special treatments can send the wrong signal to other workers and lead to worker satisfaction and even disillusionment.

6. Be a good manager to all your workers

Following the previous point, it’s important to be a good manager to every team member. Granted, some may be more talented than others, but everyone plays a role and deserves the same level of treatment. If you cannot deal with every staff member the same way, you’ll end up breeding discontent, contempt, and dissatisfaction. All these can drain worker morale and encourage laziness.

Also, it helps to set unique goals for your workers. For instance, you don’t want to assume that every team member will meet their appropriate deadlines on their own. Instead, set goals with deadlines attune with their strengths and weaknesses. This way, you can hold them accountable and, in the process, encourage them to work at a faster pace.

How You Can Get The Most From Your Employees

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Get the most from your employees|How You Can Get The Most From Your EmployeesThere is no doubt that when it comes to starting and running a successful business, one of the most important things that you need to do is to ensure you have a strong team of employees behind you. A lot of the time employees will be strong and able to benefit your business from their own fruition, but then there are steps that you as their boss need to take in order to ensure you are fully getting the most out of them.

If you are going out of your way to make sure your employees are happy, and you are giving them a good reason to turn up to work and try their hardest, you are going to see the benefits to your business very quickly. If you are unsure how exactly you can act in a way that you will bring out the best in your employees, then you’re in the right place. Below we are going to talk in more detail specifically about some of the different means available that will help you get the most from your employees.

Continue To Educate

You are likely going to have an elongated period of learning when somebody first joins your organisation in which you will show them how your different systems work, what their role is going to entail and bring them up to speed on your companies’ ethos. Of course, it is not enough to just educate your employees for this brief period and then leave them to it, it is important you continue to educate them and broaden their knowledge in order to get the most from them.

Frequent sessions with your employees where they are taught more about managing work, compliance, your industry or other topics, shows you are dedicated to their growth and helps them develop in their work. There are a number of different ways that you can teach your employees such as by using a Learning Management System. The benefit of LMS is that you will be helping to train your employees in a way that can be done in-depth and remotely so you are not spending too much of your time on the training, but your employees are still benefiting from it.

Have Good Communication With Staff

One of the most important things you’re going to need to have is a good communicative relationship with your employees. When you are all able to speak to each other in a way that is open and honest, this is one of the most fundamental steps towards creating a productive, positive and happy workplace. You should start this relationship by talking to your employees about the business, what your goals are and then what you plan on doing in order to achieve said goals. Communication needs to be of a particular focus the moment you are having a conversation with staff through some kind of period of change, whether this is in your company or in the wider context of your industry as a whole.

If your business grows then you need to be able to cope with that and one of the ways that you can maintain communication even in the face of growth is to keep employees up to date with written communication. A weekly or monthly run down about the business and your market is always a good way to keep in touch with your employees, even if you don’t see them on a regular day-to-day basis.


Give Your Staff Feedback

Following on from the above, having good communication with staff also means providing them with feedback on the different work that they do. When you are giving positive feedback to your staff members, you are strengthening overall employee engagement. You should be sure to conduct bimonthly reviews and always give meaningful feedback when you have these meetings.

You might be nervous about giving any kind of negative feedback but there are good ways to do this. You need to be fair when you give negative feedback and be specific about what needs improvement, do not simply provide some vague complaint. You should also get the employees side of things so that they know they have a voice within the company and that their opinion matters. Feedback is a two-way street so you need to see these meetings as a chance to improve what you do as well.

Delegate Necessary Work

You can’t do everything yourself, that’s exactly the reason why you have employees. You can ask them to do their role but then also do not be afraid to delegate work that comes with more responsibility when you think that they are ready for it. By giving your employees more responsibility, you are going to be showing them that you trust their judgement and believe in them when it comes to growing on the work that they do. By showing this, your employees are going to want to work hard and do a good job in order to continue to learn, and keep expanding on what they are capable of.

Encourage Remote Working

Remote working was met with scepticism when it was first introduced but now there are a number of businesses who are embracing some form of remote working on a permanent basis. One of the reasons for this is it can reduce costs of running your business due to having smaller office spaces; however, it is also because of the fact doing so brings out the best in employees.

When employees are free to make their schedule work around them, they are a lot more keen to do well for your business and feel like they are trusted more as well. As such, flexible working is certainly something that you should introduce if you intend on getting the most from your staff.

Conclusion

There is a lot that goes in to making a good business but one of the most important things is to have a good team of employees behind you. There are a number of different ways that you can bring out the best in your employees and these include but are not limited to the above.

Not About Us and Them: Dealing With Employee-Manager Conflict in 4 Ways

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |employee manager conflict|Not About Us and Them: Dealing With Employee-Manager Conflict in 4 WaysOne of the toughest things about being a leader is making employees feel more at ease with who they are so they can do their job better. When we encounter conflict between us and them, as inevitable as it is, we cannot avoid conflict as this will result in chaos, but we’ve got to ensure that we have the right strategies to resolve conflicts between ourselves and employees. If somebody disagrees with how you are leading, think of the following:

Actively Listen

One of the most difficult things in emotionally charged situations is actually focusing on the other person. One of the most fundamental tenets of any human resources training, whether it is coaching salespeople who don’t want to be coached or learning soft skills, is to block out any urges to form a response and just listen. If you find yourself preparing your response while the other person is talking, it can be difficult to get rid of this, but you need to actively listen, but you will need to do this from a place of empathy.

Showing empathy towards your employees is vital to establishing a trusting relationship. When there is a conflict between the employee and the manager, it’s vital to acknowledge how employees are feeling and understand where they are coming from. Rather than responding with something like “I’m sorry you feel that way,” if the problem has stemmed from you, accountability is important, and reframing the “I’m sorry you feel that way” response into “I’m sorry that I’m making you feel this way” is acknowledging responsibility rather than having a non-committal response.


Focus on Behavior

When we’re trying to resolve a conflict, we should never focus our words on the person. We need to focus on the behavior rather than the person responsible. If we target the person, it’s very much like pointing fingers at them and establishing blame. Somebody can behave in any way they want, but we should never enter into a discussion where we are calling into question the employee, whether it’s their beliefs or values.

Remove Yourself From Your Biases

Self-awareness is such an important trait in leaders. We need to acknowledge our biases, preconceptions, and trigger points, which form the basis of many aspects of unconscious bias training. Having the self-awareness to describe how you see the world means you can adequately enact strategies to see other points of view. This means you have got to be aware of how you respond to conflict. Do you avoid, accommodate, compromise, or collaborate? These four components provide the starting point to help you realize where you can improve.

Exhaust Your Toolkit Before Bringing In HR

It’s easy to rely on HR to deal with this, but any good leader will be able to understand if the conflict is an ongoing or a one-time situation. Documenting these conversations is so important, and if a simple conversation doesn’t solve the issue, this is when HR can get involved.

It’s one of the hardest things to get right, but conflict is commonplace, and to be a successful leader, you should know how to work towards a proper solution.

How to Motivate Your Staff – Enjoy Improved Productivity and Efficiency

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Motivate your staff|How to Motivate Your Staff – Enjoy Improved Productivity and EfficiencyBusiness owners often make the assumption that by hiring qualified staff, making sure all departments have enough employees, and setting up systems that appear user-friendly enough that everything will go well. But here’s the thing, staff are people – not machines – which means variables such as workplace stress and pressure can negatively affect them. Business owners must recognise this to be the case and have a workable solution.

Here’s a look at how you can motivate your staff, help them to cope with the stress and pressure of the job, and in turn enjoy improved productivity and efficiency.

Enrol in Resilience Training for Business

The first tip is to get educated. Being an effective leader means you recognize when something is outside your realm of knowledge and that you seek out information to educate yourself. Training that teaches you how to be more resilient is an excellent choice for a company owner and upper management.

Look for training courses that address how to cope better with pressure and stress, which you can apply to your employees and teach them about. This can be done when you create the kind of work environment that is proactive, solution-based, and positive. That is the exact messaging that motivates employees in all the right ways. Learning how to be more resilient also means that you roll with the punches and you learn to thrive despite outside stressors.


Encourage Communication at All Levels

Another useful tip is to encourage and improve communication at all levels of the company. Staff needs to feel comfortable communicating with each other, their supervisors, and upper management. It shouldn’t be fear-based wherein employees would rather stay quiet than “get in trouble”.

Communication ensures that systems and processes run smoothly, everyone is on the same page, concerns and issues are shared promptly, and those good ideas get heard. Excellent communication helps to build a more inclusive atmosphere where everyone feels valued.

Employee Rewards Can Go a Long Way

In terms of motivating employees, offering rewards for a job well done can go a long way. This can be in the form of extra holiday time, bonuses, profit-sharing, paying for courses that better their qualifications, and even incentive programs.

Give Thought to the Physical Environment

You can take all the training courses and say all the right things to your employees but if you don’t also think about the physical work environment, then you won’t be successful in motivating staff. Staff want to work in an environment that allows them to do their job safely and comfortably, so ask yourself if this is being achieved in the current set-up?

Perhaps you need to invest in new equipment (office furniture, computers, printers, and so forth), maybe you need to create more space for employees, offer them a fully-stocked breakroom, and bring more natural light into the space.

It Won’t Take Long to See the Benefits

Once you embrace these tips and realise that motivating staff is to the benefit of all, it won’t be long before you start to see the positive results.