Love It When They Leave

I believe a quality of a great leader is the ability to place the focus on your team members by mentoring and letting them go.  As a corporate leader, I had team members that were looking to expand their skillset, so they could be prepared for more senior roles.  I would meet with these team members to devise specific plans on how to expand their skillset based upon their personal and career aspirations. 

A part of these specific plans consisted of involving them in most aspects of my daily activities.  We did this in a way that would allow them to maintain their current responsibilities, yet get some experience of a more senior role.  How did we do this?  Here is a sample of how we carried this out:

Expectations:  We started with a conversation on expectations and set-up some ground rules.  Some of the items we agreed upon were that their current responsibilies would take priority, their workweek would expand up to 10%, confidentiality of sensitive information would be required, they can choose to stop at any time, questions are encouraged, all questions will be answered, and none of their colleagues information would be accessible.

Discuss:  I provided my official job description to these team members for review, and then explained the realities of the role that I play within the company.  We had discussions around this for them to understand the role on a high level, the expectations that the role entails, and some of the politics involved in the process.  These were honest discussions.

Action:  These team members were invited to sit-in on various company and/or client meetings, review and provide input on documentation that I was responsible for generating, review company and/or client documents, ask questions to gain clarity, and provide suggestions. 

The overall mentoring process proved to be a great success and team members were very happy to be involved.  I also encouraged my team members who had direct reports to provide a similar mentoring model. 

The biggest compliment that I received was a resignation letter from a team member that was part of the mentoring process due to a promotion or accepting a more senior position elsewhere.  I was genuinely happy for these team members and gladly let them go to pursue their dreams and achieve their goals.  I still keep in touch with many of these folks today.

The Power of Your Beliefs by Lisa Jimenez

Your beliefs are the driving force behind your behaviors.  Beliefs send powerful messages to your brain that affect your actions (and their outcome) in either a positive or negative way. Your beliefs will cause you to do one of two things:

        Be fearful and RETREAT! 

                      OR

        Be empowered and ACT!

That’s how powerful your beliefs are.  Your beliefs about failure, risk-taking, and success will either cause you to repel success, or act and attract it to you.  Success takes two ingredients: belief and time.  The more belief you have, the less time it takes.  How can you ensure your belief system is empowering and is actually attracting success to you?  Three things:

First, it is imperative that you are making daily efforts to get the negative messages out of your life.  You need to create an obsession with filtering what you allow in.  Television, newspapers, some movies and songs, negative thoughts and people, all need to be limited – even banned from your day. 



Second, you need to expose and replace the negative beliefs you presently have.  Think about what you say on a daily basis.  Observe your habitual behaviors in different situations.  Tell the truth.  Expose these negative beliefs.  Only then will you be truly free.  Then, replace these negative beliefs and bad habits with empowering ones.  Think on these new thoughts and beliefs about success and over time you will retrain your mind and change your heart.

Lastly, create a compelling vision of your success.  Craft a picture of you – as the person you want to be – in your mind and THINK ON THIS throughout your day.  Not only with this vision put a smile on your face, this habit will actually create success.

Remember middle school science class?  You learned the difference between potential energy and kinetic energy.  Potential energy is energy waiting to happen.  Not until it’s moving and active will you see it in its kinetic energy state.  When it’s in the kinetic state it is a reality. Wow!  That means you can create reality (the kinetic energy) with your thoughts and beliefs (potential energy).  Never underestimate the power of your beliefs! 



Change Your Beliefs and You Change Your Behavior

Change Your Behavior and You Change Your Life!

More on Lisa Jimenez at http://www.rx-success.com/

Modifying Team Behavior

One of the things I learned leading corporate teams is how to modify team member behavior.  There are numerous ways to modify behavior and in this post, I will focus on using Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.

In my role of leading professional services teams, we used KPIs to measure whether team members received a quarterly bonus and if so, how much bonus was distributed.  Initially, we had team member KPIs to match the professional services quarterly revenue target.  It was simple, the team members received a full bonus if the professional services revenue target was achieved.  If it fell short, then no bonus was distributed. 

The good news, professional services team members were focused on making the professional services revenue targets and would go to great lengths to keep themselves on track.  On the flipside, they were less than cooperative when it came to assisting team members from other departments like sales and product development.  The perception was if they assisted other departments, there would be less time to dedicate to professional services work. The impact would be no quarterly bonus because professional services revenue would fall short of projections.

At first glance, we were a bit confused.  The KPIs put in place to achieve the professional services revenue target was actually working against the company overall.  The professional services department may be doing well in the short run, but we had to step back and take a look at the impact to the company in the long run.  After some thought and dealing with some tense situations, we made some slight changes.

Instead of using the KPIs to just focus on professional services revenue targets, we used the KPIs to focus on both the professional services and company overall sales revenue targets.  The final result was that we applied a 60% / 40% split between the company sales targets and professional services revenue targets.  The professional services team members would receive 60% of their quarterly bonus if the company achieved its overall sales revenue target and 40% of their quarterly bonus if the department achieved its professional services revenue target.

This KPIs modification was felt almost instantly.  The professional services team was still focused on professional services revenue and they gladly assisted other departments as needed.  We also discovered that the professional services team would actually contact sales and other department teams to see if they needed assistance.  In the end, everyone focused more on the success of the company rather than on a single department and the result……..everyone won!