In my last Insight, I discussed why it’s important to create a culture of customer service at your company.

Once you have the culture part figured out, your next steps are to focus on the tactical aspects of your customer service.

• Ensure you have customer-centric work processes—Although your company processes take place behind the scenes, you still need to be thinking about how it affects your customers. For example, if you tell a customer she has to wait a week to get her issue resolved due to a certain process, you need to make sure that process is appropriately explained to her and have it structured in a way that provides a high level of service.
  
  Something that might be efficient internally, from a business perspective, might not be something that is customer-centric. So re-examining your work processes to see if they meet your customer-focused angle is important for making improvements.
  

• Determine if your employees have enough knowledge of your industry—In order to resolve any concern a customer has and in order to troubleshoot for customers, your employees need to have well-rounded knowledge of your specific industry. This includes industry news, information, products, etc.
  

• Train employees to have proper telephone etiquette—Make sure your employees who are answering customer calls are using tonal voice properly and are able to address irate customers in a calm, compassionate manner and turn customers’ experiences around.
  

• Look to see if you can empower your service providers—This is particularly important in larger organizations. Customers are used to calling a company and asking for the supervisor because the frontline person either doesn’t have the knowledge and expertise or doesn’t have the authority to accomplish what the customer needs.
  
  When you make your customers go through multiple layers in order to get their concerns resolved, you reduce the level of customer service they receive. So by empowering your call-center employees—through training, education and authority—you are ensuring that these employees can provide the highest level of customer service possible. This will make your customers feel much better about calling your company with their concerns.
  

• Make sure you have a way of measuring all these tactical aspects—Unless you have a way of measuring, you have no idea whether you are improving your customer focus or not. So develop some metrics, internally and externally, to see how you’re doing, and then reach out to your customers in the same way you reached out to them about their expectations. Find out what their perceptions of the results are, because that’s ultimately going to drive whether or not they come back to do business with you in the future.
  

• Put together some kind of quality assurance for your customer service—Reaching out to your customers for feedback is one method, but I always recommend having a system in place to drive the behaviors of your customer service providers to ensure they are pushing themselves and that customers are receiving a consistent experience.

By taking the time to focus your organization and culture on providing high-quality customer service, you’ll be on the right path toward retaining—and gaining—customers now and in the future.

The quality of your focus on customer service determines the quality of your business success. There are a couple reasons for this:

• In a down economy, it’s more important than ever to really focus on retaining your existing customers. The statistics will vary from industry-to-industry, but it’s generally accepted that it costs about five times as much to bring a new customer into your business then it does to retain an existing one.
  
• There’s a lot of competition out there in just about every marketplace, and customers have two kinds of needs—personal needs and practical needs. The practical needs are the goods and services they need. But multiple companies can provide these goods and services, and probably for comparable prices. So what drives a customer to choose one provider over another is whether their personal needs are being met. The customer needs to feel they are getting value, that they are being listened to and that they are being respected in all their interactions with the company.

These two things drive the difference between a high-performing organization and organizations that are just scraping by.

Quality Customer Service Defined
There are two components of quality customer service:

• Follow the “Golden Rule” (Do to others as you want them to do to you)—We all want to feel listened to; we all want to feel valued; we all want to feel like our patronage means something to the company we’re buying from and that they value our business.
  
• Commit to creating a culture of customer service in your workplace—The second thing that really drives quality customer service is the behavior in your workplace while you’re creating a service-focused culture. You actually have to take the opposite tactic and say to yourself, “You know what? We don’t define what quality customer service is; our customers define our quality of customer service.” And in those situations, every organization will have a slightly different definition of what they consider quality customer service that’s based on what their customers’ expectations are.

The most important thing, however, is for high-performing organizations to really strive hard to define quality customer service for themselves by reaching out to their customers and finding out what their expectations are, and then shaping the company’s approach in order to meet that.

Steps to Improving Your Company’s Customer Service
There are a number of elements that play into improving your company’s customer service, such as:

• Create a service culture that’s part of, not only your company processes and procedures, but also a part of how you do business.
  
• Review your company’s mission, vision and values to ensure that they focus on customers and quality customer service.

Once you establish a customer-focused culture in your company, then you can work on improving the tactical parts of your service, which I will discuss in my next Insight.

No matter what the economy is like, succession planning is a must for every company.

What’s interesting, however, is, due to the current economy, people are calling it an “employer’s market,” meaning companies don’t have to worry too much about employees leaving. But that’s not really the case.

It might be the case with a company’s “B” and “C” employees, but when it comes to a company’s “A” employees—the ones who are going to take the company to the next level—that’s not the case at all.

A company’s top talent—the “A” employees—will always be looking for career growth opportunities, whether that be at your company or at another company. So employee retention is still very important during a down economy.

If you fall behind, your top talent will go elsewhere.

Using Succession Planning to Retain Employees
A lot of times, companies don’t have a formalized process in place for succession planning. This is a big mistake.

Another mistake companies commonly make—which can also be a liability issue—is basing succession plans on who the boss likes, even if the person doesn’t fit the criteria for moving up within the organization. Favoritism is definitely a mistake.

When you are succession planning, you want to make sure that you make every effort to keep employees informed and be as transparent as possible in your choices and communication.

You also want to make sure you inform the employees who you’re choosing to succeed a higher-up for a couple reasons:

• You want to make sure the employee actually wants to move up to that position.
• You need to groom the chosen employee so he/she can be successful if he/she does move up.

In order to be effective with your succession planning, you need to map out two things:

• Career paths—This requires you to look throughout your organization and make people aware of the growth opportunities that are available. You never know what paths employees might be interested in. The move might not necessarily be vertical, either. Sometimes employees want to move horizontal and learn different parts of the business.
  
  
• Competencies—You need to map out competencies for each position within your company. This means taking a look at what skills a person needs to have in order to accomplish the job, such as professionalism, technical skills, communication skills, leadership skills, etc.

Once you map out both of those things, you need to encourage employees to be proactive about seeking out feedback. Employees need to know where they rank in the different skills needed for succession positions. They need to know what their largest area of opportunity is and what their current weaknesses are. Most importantly, they need to know what they can do to move past these weaknesses.

The next thing you need to do after mapping out the necessary competencies is to provide employees with the tools, training and resources they need to improve their weaknesses and gain the skills they must have to move up in position.

For example, maybe an employee needs to work on listening skills. So keeping this in mind, you need to work backwards to determine what the best resource is. Is it instructor-led training? Is it one-on-one training? Is it a seminar? What about a book?

In some way, shape or form, you need to provide employees with the resources they need to acquire those competencies.

When the economy is bad, employees don’t have the disposable income to go and take formal classes on their own, unless your company offers tuition reimbursement. So offering the resources to them through work is the best way to give them the skills they need for advancement.

You always want to make it personal to the employee and specific to the organization’s needs. Also, an easy way to get started is to offer beginner, intermediate and advanced training options.

The more time and effort you spend “watering the seed,” helping to grow employees and following up with them continually, the better-groomed for succession each employee will be.

Although it’s often confused in the business world, business process mapping and business process improvement are not the same thing.

Regardless of whether or not a process can be improved upon, there are still advantages to mapping it out. Here are the distinctions between the two:

• Business process mapping is when you map out all the steps in a process for a certain task.
• Business process improvement is when you take a process you already have in place and look for ways to be more efficient.

A down economy is not only a good time for training and developing employees, but it’s also a great time to take a look at all the processes—or lack of processes—at your company.

There is one common mistake that many employers make:

• No standardization—It’s important for companies with a lot of processes, such as manufacturers or retailers, to have a process book that employees can refer to. Not having process documentation of any kind is a big mistake.
  
  What if something happens? What if an employee is on vacation and someone has to cover his/her job? What if there’s turnover? What if a new employee comes into the company?
  
  All of these questions are reasons why employers need to have process documentation. Also, documentation helps with training and with reducing the “ramp up” time for new employees.

If things are mapped out accurately, then employees and the company will know what needs to happen in order to accomplish a task.

You also run into fewer problems when you have all your processes mapped out.

If you want to effectively utilize business process mapping in your workplace, you should start by creating basic flow charts.

There are plenty of tools on the market that can help you do this, such as Visio. Or you can do it by hand on paper or on a whiteboard using Post-Its and markers.

Do whatever you can to get employees to start thinking about how a task is accomplished—what steps it takes to get from start to finish.

A horseshoe diagram is another way to process map.

How you use this type of diagram is you draw a “U” on your paper/whiteboard. The top-left point represents the beginning of the process. The top-right point represents the end of the process. The catch to a horseshoe diagram, however, is you start at the end of the process and work backwards.

For example, let’s say the ending point in a process is that a document ends up in someone’s inbox. So what you need to do is work backwards and say, “OK, what has to happen before the document goes to the inbox?” Maybe it has to be signed off on. Then you need to think about what has to happen before it’s signed off on, and so on.

When you work backwards through a process, what you’ll find is steps will surface that you might skim over if you worked from beginning to end because we’re often subconsciously on autopilot when we perform tasks frequently.

Working backwards causes your brain to have to really think things through, which ensures you catch all the steps in a process.

There are many different ways to utilize business process mapping in your workplace. You just need to take the time to completely document everything.

The new, multigenerational workplace is a complex and dynamic organism that requires flexibility from everyone, but especially from managers.

It almost seems like a no-brainer these days, as pretty much everyone is starting to recognize that workplaces have a lot of diversity and variety in them.

But generations in the workplace and how managers handle them is a separate issue.

Employees have their own personal accountability for communicating properly and dealing with co-workers in an effective way, but accountability for the day-to-day business and for being effective as a team falls on the manager.

It’s the manager’s job to make sure the generations in the workplace are getting along and everything is going smoothly.

The biggest mistake I see managers make in the workplace, however, is not giving employees enough information to communicate properly with each other.

Typically, managers often inform employees about how to communicate with the various generations in the workplace.

They don’t, however, typically go a step further and let employees know why Generation Y prefers to be communicated to in a specific way. Or why Baby Boomers have a specific set of values. Or why the Silent Generation responds to authoritative structure differently than a Generation X employee might.

Employees need context and/or background information about the different generations in order to fully understand each one.

Giving employees this kind of “insider” information will help them truly understand their fellow co-workers. It will also give them an intrinsic motivation to meet their co-workers “where they live,” as opposed to just doing it because their manager told them to.

 In order to be more effective when training your managers on the different generations in the workplace, you should really take a look at the background of each generation and the context of it.

For example, the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers grew up learning to have an adherence to loyalty to their company because the company took care of them with a pension at the end of their careers.

But as a Generation X employee, I saw my parents give loyalty to a company and then get fired after years of dedication because it was no longer economically viable to employ them. I didn’t see the loyalty returned that the Silents and Boomers saw. So these types of things feed into my world view and into what drives my values in the workplace—what I want out of it and how I interact with it.

That’s why it’s so important for employers/managers to provide as much context as possible for each of the generations in the workplace.

Recently I’ve had some instances where companies have had Boomers or Silents getting ready to retire, but then, due to the economy, have had these same employees decide not to retire yet.

So with that happening, and all the new Generation Yers who are coming into the workplace, I’ve had some opportunities to direct companies on what to do.

Coaching is a big part of my recommendation to employers. Coaching each generation on how to deal with the other generations in the workplace makes a big difference.

With a little bit of understanding and preparation, companies can find ways to help bridge the gap between the different generations in the workplace.

In my last Insight, I discussed the four “roles” that make up leadership core competencies: Inspirer, Manager, Teacher and Champion. 

If you’re interested in developing effective training on leadership core competencies for your managers, here are some basic ideas to get you started (keep in mind this will vary based on the type of business you run): 

• Conduct one-on-one training
• Conduct some training through distance learning (if necessary)
• Offer independent study options (for employees to learn at their own pace) 

It’s important to really spell out for your managers the four competencies they need to be skilled in by making a list or creating a “model.”

For example, think about Frankenstein. If you were able to mix and match all the best parts of your more successful managers, what would that “Frankenstein” look like? What skills would it have? How would it be successful?

Create that picture and then put it in place at your company by basing your training program on it.

Once you have that in place, then you want to take a step back and analyze what’s realistic for your current managers. Take an honest look at all your managers and rank them in your “Frankenstein” areas.

When you do this, the “low hanging fruits” are going to pop out at you right away. This is where you need to focus your training.

When you look at developing your training, you’ll need to hit those “low hanging” areas first and get everyone to the base-line level. 

Once you have a base-line level established you can take a look at some of the higher competencies in your “Frankenstein” model that you want your managers to have. 

For example, some managers might have an analytical perspective and be good at time and project management, but they can’t effectively communicate.

Or sometimes you have managers who are good with people: they can inspire them, motivate them and get their buy-in, but they have a difficult time keeping everyone on-task because they don’t have any analytical skills. 

So sometimes creating a picture of your perfect manager or perfect leader will help you determine how to go about training your current managers. 

In the training I’ve done most recently, one the biggest “low-hanging fruits” I’ve seen is creating two-way communication. 

That’s why when you’re analyzing your managers you have to make sure you’re being honest about each person’s skill level. 

The biggest tool I’ve given companies regarding two-way communication is the one-on-one approach, with the manager working one-on-one with the employee and learning to communicate together. 

Once you get all the low-hanging fruits up-to-speed with the rest of the group, then you’ll be able to give them the tools they need to coach and develop employees. 

You also need to understand how to give feedback that’s positive, yet constructively critical. This is so important for maintaining your managers’ self-esteem. 

Make sure you set aside time at least once a month to get together with each manager and ask for their thoughts from the previous month. Get their input on anything that occurred or any changes that need to be made. 

If you really take a look at your managers and rate them appropriately, and create a model of your ideal leader, that’s probably the best step you can take toward successfully instilling leadership core competencies in your managers.

Leadership core competencies serve as the foundation for developing leadership skills. 

Leadership competencies are kind of like a company’s vision statement, mission statement or values—Unless you have those competencies defined, what you train your managers for or what you’re building is going to be hit or miss. 

When you have your leadership core competencies defined, you really have a much stronger map as to what direction you need to head in. You can evaluate your managers on where they stand in each of those given competencies, and that’s going to give you a priority list in terms of what you need to work on with your managers and in what order. 

There are four “buckets” I tend to split manager roles into: Inspirer, Manager, Teacher and Champion. 

Here’s a list of competencies I see falling under each of these: 

• Inspirer—motivation, employee recognition and creating a positive work environment.
• Manager—ability to time manage and project manage, decision-making ability, knowing how to set expectations. This is more of the administrative role.
• Teacher—ability to drive communication, listening skills and coaching skills.
• Champion—team-building and trust-building abilities. 

A common mistake I see employers make is, a lot of times they are focused on the analytical skills that fall under the manager bucket. I see the core competencies often being defined as the analysis of employee skills, decision-making skills, time and project management skills.

These skills are important, but when you leave the other skills out of your core competencies, particularly coaching skills and championing skills, that’s when you start to run into issues.

The managerial/administrative skills are important. They can drive a business, but they can’t retain talent. They can’t develop talent. And the cost of turnover for a company—having to find and train new people, having untapped talent that goes elsewhere to get developed—these are things that will hurt you in the long-run. 

So even though you’re driving your business appropriately, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re up-to-speed in where your leadership needs to be competency-wise. 

Focusing only on administrative tasks, while ignoring other important competencies, can be a costly mistake. 

In my next Insight, I’ll explain some steps you can take to start effectively training your leadership on important core competencies. 

Greater levels of collaboration require collaborative leadership. I truly believe this. 

When a company is looking to improve and create a greater level of collaboration within the organization, they often don’t realize they need to bring collaborative leadership into the equation. 

In a lot of cases, the company “doesn’t know what they don’t know,” which is why education is important. 

Sometimes you get educated by reading a book and sometimes you get educated by just jumping in and putting collaborative leadership into action by restructuring things within the company so people work on teams. 

A lot of times when people hear “collaborative leadership,” they still tend to leave off the “collaborative” and leave off the “leadership.” So what happens is you end up with a group of people that are usually the same skill level and the same tenure level working to make things happen. 

But collaborative leadership is about the skills and techniques individuals within a team use to help make sure everyone is meeting the team’s goals and moving forward. 

I think that’s probably why there are so many misconceptions about collaborative leadership. 

A lot of times when people work on a team, there’s no position of authority assigned. This is a misconception. 

Teams still need to have a traditional reporting structure and/or the usual administrative/managerial tasks that would normally be associated with a hierarchical structure. 

When companies attempt to institute collaborative leadership, the hierarchical structure gets left off. So the company does gain the additional creativity from the collaborative structure, but it loses out on a lot of productivity it would normally gain from having a team structure in the first place. 

In order to develop collaborative leadership at your company, you want to build up the framework that’s going to support collaboration, but without letting it run rampant.

It’s really about striking a balance and not letting the pendulum swing too far in one direction or the other. 

Before you move your company from a more traditional structure into a team-based structure, there are some things to keep in mind: 

• Clearly defined expectations—In a team structure, you’re going to have people collaborating on the final output, as well as collaborating on what the output should be. You’re going to have a bunch of employees “wrestling” to be the visionary leader of the team, and a lot of times this causes the company to get stuck in the initial implementation phase.
  
  So if you’re going to send people off to solve a problem together or to be creative together, they need to have a clear vision that is shared, or some clear expectations, beforehand.
  
  
• Hang on to your management and administrative functions—You want to make sure that, once you implement collaborative leadership, you’re not losing all your management and administrative functions.
  
  For example, a project management function usually includes a project manager who has the authority to delegate tasks, but in a collaborative structure everyone works on the same level. This means there’s no position of authority, and a lot of times, as a result, the team isn’t holding people accountable for maintaining schedules for completing tasks.
  
  You need to make sure that all your management or administrative functions—reporting functions, project management functions, etc.—are assigned to individuals within the team.  
  
  
• Structure your meetings—You need to make sure the members on your teams have effective meeting skills. This is important so meetings are productive and not a waste of everyone’s time. It’s also important so meetings have a structure and someone to run them.
  
  
• Teach employees to lead by example—In a collaborative structure, usually what happens is the most dominant personality will attempt to take the leadership role within the group, rather than working in a new way.
  
  In order to stop this from happening, you really need to “roll up your sleeves” and show people how collaboration works and why it’s the best option.
  
  
• Lead by logic—If you can develop the skills to show other people your logic-chain, that helps you build consensus and prove that you’re basing decisions on logic and not on anything subjective. This will also help you maintain employee relationships and ensure everyone agrees. 

Taking the above-mentioned points into consideration will help you transition your workplace from a hierarchical structure to a team-based, collaborative structure.

In my first Insight in this series, I explained why it’s important to be proactive and have a change management plan. In part two, I gave you three of the five change management best practices. 

Here are the final two change management plan best practices: 

4. Recognize Your Early Adopters—Your employees who jump onboard, that are using the new policy, that are using the new procedure—particularly if there’s a client success associated with it; you want to make sure that you’re publically praising those employees within your organization.

When you do that, folks that may be dragging their heels a little bit will see the positive recognition associated with jumping onboard, and so they’re much more likely to jump on, too. 

5. Be Prepared to Take Corrective Action If Necessary—Whether it’s an internal culture change or a change that influences how you interact with your customers, it’s about dealing with increasing your profits and moving forward. That’s non-negotiable. 

So if you’ve done all the other best practices and you have employees who still aren’t onboard, it could be a behavioral issue. This would require immediate corrective action because if you have one person who is getting away with not making the change, that will drag others back into doing it the old way. 

People will get sucked back into their comfort zone if they see no consequences for not doing things the new way. 

Another Important Thing to Remember about Change Management 

You need to have regular communication with your people. You can do this once a month via a newsletter or once every two or three weeks with a phone call. It’s up to you.

You just need to do something to get your employees used to hearing tidbits of news about other changes that are happening around the company, even if the changes don’t apply to everyone. You want to get your employees used to being in the flow of change on a regular basis. 

This will help you develop long-term trust. 

Also, if you’re communicating with them frequently, they’ll feel more a part of the organization. Then when change does happen to them, they’ve had advance notice that it’s coming and they know everyone else has gone through it so it’s nothing strange or new. 

When you talk about change management, you want to be as prepared and as visual as you can be. If you can’t make a flow chart or something like that, it’s going to be a little bit more difficult for people to understand and adopt the change. 

If people feel like they’re running up against a brick wall of policies and procedures, it will be tougher for them to deal with the change, as well. 

But if you provide them with the resources they need and communicate the change to them in an enthusiastic way, explain to them why the change is good, recognize people who are embracing the change and communicate frequently, you’re setting yourself up for success. 

An Example

A lot of the change management I work with is helping companies to move from traditional to modern. 

For example, a company may be transmitting information orally at the present time. What that means is, there’s one person who is the “hub” or the “expert” that you turn to for information. But when that person is out sick for a week, the entire place shuts down. 

So the change management I would help with in that specific example is I would sit down with the company to figure out how we get the information from the “expert” to a shared source. 

There’s a lot of change happening in the culture of a company during that time and people are moving from a place where there were no policies and procedures to a place where there is documentation, policies and procedures. 

Now this doesn’t mean the company is sacrificing a fun culture for one full of policies and procedures. But that’s another issue I run into with companies. 

And that’s where best practices come in. Communicating with passion and enthusiasm; and communicating the whys of the change. This will make the difference.

All companies should be proactive and have a change management plan. 

If your company is interested in developing a change management plan, here are some best practices you can apply: 

1. Give the Change Time to Sink In—Simply, give employees advance notice. Not “this change is happening tomorrow” or “this change happened yesterday,” but if you can, give people a month. Obviously, depending on what the change is, that window of time for notifying people could be shorter or longer, but at minimum, give people two weeks.
   
   People need time to let change sink in. Some people have been doing the same thing, the same procedure, the same way, for years and years of their life. Implementing change is asking them to jump outside their comfort zone.
   
   If you give them time to let the changes sink in and to consult with the available resources you are providing for them, it will make the change a lot easier.
   
   
2. Be Prepared to Discuss the “Whys”—Anyone who has parented a child will tell you that “because I said so” or “because I’m your mom/dad,” only works as a reason for the first couple years. After that, the child has some individuality and “because I said so” is no longer an effective tool for managing change or getting someone to change their behavior. The same goes for employees.
   
   You have to be prepared to discuss the reasons why these changes are being made. People want to feel like they’re part of something; people want to feel like they’re contributing to the greater good.
   
   If they don’t understand why the change is happening, how it benefits the organization and how it benefits them, you’re going to get a decreased amount of buy-in and you’re going to have to do a lot more damage control on the back end.
   
   And a caveat to that is you need to be prepared to communicate your reasons with passion and enthusiasm.
   
   If people can see your positivity behind the change—even if it’s a tough change; even if it’s something that presents a challenge to your organization—they will be more accepting of it.
   
   If you communicate the change and the tactics that you have in place to manage the change in a positive manner, that attitude will be infectious and will be a lot more likely to be adopted by the rest of the organization.
   
   
3. Document Everything—If there’s a new policy or a new procedure that’s coming into play, don’t just talk about it and ask employees to do it, make sure that there’s a documented resource employees can refer to.
   
   It doesn’t have to be fancy, just something on your company’s intranet or Web site where employees can go and pull up the new policy/procedure and look at it on-the-fly.
   
   Providing some sort of written reference will help employees feel like they have a safety net.
   
   This would be bare minimum.
   
   Obviously, if it’s a larger process/procedure or a larger policy change, then you have to ask yourself, “Does this change require training?” and if so, “What does the training need to consist of?”
   
   There are many effective ways to communicate with and train employees. 

In my next Insight, I’ll detail the fourth and fifth best practices for developing a change management plan.

Someone told me recently, “Nontrivial developments need to be change-managed in order to avoid chaos.” I have to say I agree with 80 percent of that statement. 

I absolutely agree with the nontrivial developments. I see that sometimes when someone latches onto the concept of change management, it kind of gets done to death, and you don’t want to take it to the point where it interferes with the organization. 

But the whole concept of “to avoid chaos” I don’t agree with. Sometimes people have this view of change as employees running in the streets Godzilla-style pointing to the sky like it’s falling. 

A lot of times with workforces there can be a smooth transition when making changes. 

Sometimes it’s not about putting out a fire or stopping something from happening; it’s just about making sure that the transition is as successful as possible. 

My first solid experience with a change management plan was when I worked for MCI WorldCom when the Bernie Ebbers scandal went down. I took part in probably one of the largest change management plans that ever existed. 

The company went into bankruptcy. We had to prepare people at the call center level for what was going to happen—what it all meant, how to deal with the press, what it meant for their jobs, what it meant for the company’s policies and procedures, what to expect moving forward. 

The scale of the change was huge and the time frame was very, very short. So I had to read through the change management plan created by the company and then go out and keep a mutiny from happening. 

Utilizing a Change Management Plan

I think a company should view a change management plan as a proactive—rather than reactive—tool. If you make the change management plan part of your standard operating procedures and part of how you handle things, then it doesn’t seem like you’re “pulling the wool” over employees’ eyes. 

When employees get ambushed with change or bombarded with change, that’s where there are going to be some negative feelings and unnecessary resistance. 

That’s why companies should view change management plans as part of what they already do. 

When you’re thinking about bringing a new project on board; when you’re thinking about interfacing with a new client; when you’re changing a policy or procedure, you should automatically be thinking: 

• “How are we going to communicate this?”
• “What are the reasons behind it that we’ll be communicating?”
• “What kind of resources can we provide employees to help ease this transition?” 

In my next Insight, I’ll explain the steps companies can take to develop a change management plan.

Leadership skills training for members of Generation Y is going to be different than leadership skills training for other generations. 

One of the biggest issues companies often run into is having Generation Y employees who have access to so much information, but who maybe haven’t had much guidance in the past, so their focus can be scattered. 

In this case, time and priority management are the top leadership skills Gen Yers need. 

One way to help them get the leadership skills training they need is to provide it to them. But you want to make sure you have a range of different resources for them to use, such as: 

• Online courses they can take at their own pace;
• Instructor-led courses that allow them to interact with the person teaching;
• Seminars they can attend; or
• Books they can read on their own time. 

Generation Y loves to learn, but they love to learn in the ways they want to learn, so it’s important to provide them with a variety of options. 

Being able to provide different options is going to allow your Gen Y employees more control over their learning processes, which will keep them intrinsically motivated and more engaged. 

Just give them what they need and let them run with it.

Some experts believe that leadership style and effectiveness is the number one motivation for members of Generation Y and I agree with them. I am a member of Generation X, but I work all the time with folks that are Generation Y, and having experienced both groups, I see some similarities between them.

One of the main similarities between these two generations is a distrust of organizations. There are so many corporate scandals that go on these days that employees, and especially Generation Y employees, don’t feel like they can trust companies.

When it comes to Generation Y, they’re not going to respond to institutions or ideologies as much as they will to individual people. They’re not going to just blindly put trust in something that’s freestanding. They really need to have their trust earned, and that trust is only going to be earned by an individual who takes an interest in Gen Yers’ careers. 

Difference in Leadership Skills Training
There is a difference in leadership skills training for Generation Y than the training for previous generations. The difference you’re going to see is in what the focus is on.

Gen Yers are self-motivated and have grown up with technology more than any other generation to date. So when you look at Generation Y, they are really the most tech-savvy group, which means they have access to a wealth of information and wealth of data right at their fingertips.

Sometimes, however, that savvy can result in “data overload,” so companies need to be able to give them the tools they need to make critical decisions without forcing them down a specific path.

This is a very important leadership skills training difference. Managers need to teach Gen Yers how to weed out the information and data that’s most important from the information and data that’s not as important.  

Give Them the Tools They Need
Unfortunately, it can sometimes be tough to give them what they need. A really good way to start giving Gen Yers what they need is by teaching them time and priority management.

Gen Yers are often high-volume multitaskers, meaning they can handle 20 different things at the same time. This is a fabulous skill to have, but when only three out of the 20 tasks are truly valuable, that can be a problem.

This is when the Pareto Principle comes into play. The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, “For many events, 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes,” according to Wikipedia.org.

What this basically means is companies or managers need to help their Gen Y employees (and all employees, for that matter) identify what their high-quality activities are and teach them to discern where they’re really getting the value out of their time. This will allow them to pare back their activities to mainly focus on the ones that are essential to reaching their—and the company’s—goals.

Gen Yers have the ability to attack projects from every angle, but managers need to make sure they have the tools they need to pick the two or three angles that are going to give them the most bang for their buck. Once they have the tools in place, then they’ll have everything they need to attack a project from those two or three essential angles.

Communication is Key
When I’ve worked with Baby Boomers who are leading a workforce or hiring people into a workforce that’s now primarily made up of younger generations of workers, there really needs to be a focus on communication and trust building. Managers need to institute some one-on-one, face-to-face communication. They also need to learn how to get two-way communication flowing because it’s really the first step to building relationships and trust with Gen Y employees.

Managers need to teach younger employees “the ropes” and then allow the employees the freedom to operate within those boundaries. This is the best way to segue into providing them with leadership skills training.

In my next Insight, I’ll detail some steps a company can take to provide leadership skills training to Generation Y employees. 

Effective Managers Reach Goals Through People

My first HRTools Insight, “Leadership and Management: The Best Managers Also Lead,” made the case that effective managers wear various leadership “hats,” depending on their roles and business and employee needs. In today’s competitive business environment, employers need to hire managers with strong leadership potential.

First of all, every organization needs to have a good leadership development program or succession plan in place as it continues to grow. And as they say, “Look at the talent right underneath your nose.” It is expensive and time consuming to recruit professionals at managerial levels. It can be downright draining.

In other words, some organizations have local talent that can be groomed for managerial roles. So if a business has a strong succession plan in place, they are teaching their front-line people how to manage effectively. These manager-trainees will have already been groomed for reaching business goals through people.

Generally, managers should be able to demonstrate high-level competencies in areas such as:

• Decision-making
• Monitoring
• Planning
• Organizing
• Communicating

Then, should you experience employee turnover — you will have adequately prepared internal candidates who are “pre-groomed” to adeptly move into managerial roles.

When Hiring From the Outside, You Need Specialized Recruiting Methods

If a business does not have a sufficient internal pool of managerial candidates, I suggest consulting with a trusted third-party vendor that specializes in HR recruiting. To hire at this level, you want to make sure you have someone highly qualified and experienced in interviewing and screening qualified candidates.

More specifically to recruit and hire managerial-level professionals, you want HR professionals trained in behavioral-interviewing techniques. This type of interviewing requires in-depth screening and questioning of candidates’ backgrounds, skills, experiences, etc.

For example: Rather than simply asking a candidate about their background and skills, an HR recruiter trained in behavioral-interviewing techniques asks questions such as:

1. Tell me about a time where you led a great team. What was your role in making it a great team?
2. Let's imagine that you are angry about an unfair decision. How do you react?”
3. Describe what you would classify as a crisis.

In other words, you want to put the managerial candidates in situations that will shed light on how they handled leadership “hat-wearing” roles in the past, or how they see themselves handling tough situations in the future. (Again, for details about these significant roles, read my first HRTools Insight “Leadership and Management: The Best Managers Also Lead.”) 

If you get pat answers or responses that are less than well-thought-through, you may not have a well-rounded candidate before you. Normally, you are looking for someone who can adeptly wear any of the managerial hats such as the champion or teacher hats. This type of candidate is more likely to be suited for serving you and your organization in the long term. 

To sum it up, you want managers who can also lead people. Effective managers help your organization reach its goals through the people. You need managers who can coach, teach, inspire and champion their people. As a start, it is important to look at yourself first because your managers will reflect and mirror your values and qualities.

Look for my next Insight to learn more about how employers set the bar and standards for leadership in their organization.

Leaders are in the business of preparing for the future.
Small business owners and entrepreneurs are known for seeking new beginnings, risk and change. They thrive on a healthy appetite for uncertainty and challenges. In order to grow and succeed, they need the combined expertise of leadership and management.

Like entrepreneurs, leaders crave and relish change and challenges. Leaders are qualified to challenge others because they first challenge themselves. They purposely seek out new and unfamiliar situations. In the business world these leaders similarly manage employees by challenging them to move out of their comfort zones. 

To lead others to new heights, leaders first start with themselves.
I work with small businesses and help train leaders. I’ve always thought that to be an effective leader, you must first begin with “self.” You can only take others as high as you have already taken yourself.

Authentic leaders get up every morning and think about ways to make the world a better place. If you think about it, not all managers are good leaders. However, in most cases, a successful leader is also an excellent manager. Successful leader-managers produce high-achieving teams by:

Basically, they inspire others to go beyond the day-to-day requirements and commit to following a vision and goals that have been clearly communicated.

In other words, the best managers embody both leadership and management expertise. They engage and energize their teams. They send out and receive “good vibes.” They are cheerleaders who genuinely and enthusiastically inspire motivated teams.

Four Leadership and Management Hats
Let’s face it. Starting and growing a prosperous small business is not easy. To help you grow, employ people equally adept at performing complementary leadership and management roles. Typically, you want managers who can successfully wear the following leadership “hats:”   

1. The Teacher Hat: As teachers, they seek to enhance employee competencies. Teachers find the key to unlocking potential. They focus on employee strengths, not their weaknesses. They understand that not all employees work in the same way. They know how to recognize each employee as an individual. They work with them to recognize their talents and put them to good use.
2. The Administrative Hat:  As administrators, they are visibly in control and they ensure productivity. Operating in multiple environments, they are coordinators and disciplinarians. They track statistics and if employees are not meeting performance expectations, they coach and, if necessary, redirect resources. They not only ensure that the work gets done; as time goes on, they see that it’s done in a process of continuing improvement. They are always asking their employees, “We did well at that level; now how do we get to the next level?”
3. The Inspirer Hat:  Inspirers find ways to influence others. They inspire a commitment to work toward common goals or a vision. By stepping forward to make a difference, their everyday actions reflect the talk. They set an example for embracing change. They offer fresh insights and get people excited about them. They also demonstrate the flexibility required to drive and make necessary adjustments and changes for the common good.
4. The Champion Hat: Champions support employees as whole people and they focus on mutual gains. They understand that it’s critical to communicate and achieve mutual benefits for both the business and the employees. This is what a leader does; a leader supports their team. You hear the term “Servant Leadership” in organizational development circles. In my view, that term describes someone who is truly willing to show their team that they are a part of their team; they do not behave as someone above or apart from them.

For example: I recall two popular movies, Braveheart and Gladiator.  The protagonists were respected as great leaders because they fought along side their troops. Likewise, when managers roll up their sleeves and work along side their teams, they earn respect and admiration; and they instill confidence. They figure, if the manager jumps into the trenches then they have no excuses for underperforming.

We know that small business owners take a leap of faith to start and grow a business. To successfully wear these four hats, effective leader-managers will mentally and emotionally connect with their employees.

Simply put: To compete in this fast-paced economy, you need leader-managers who are big-thinkers and have big hearts for their people.