the leadership challenge

The Point: We’ve all been there before as a leader… How do you effectively manage your worst employees? Every organization has them, right? They come in with a negative attitude and spread out like the ebola virus. The more negativity in the workplace, the less productivity there will be for you/your organization. So how do you effectively manage these “difficult” employees is a crucial leadership challenge. Here are some practical steps you can use to successfully identify/overcome this leadership dilemma… Enjoy!

Identifying Problem Areas

There are some defining traits of bad employees. To start off, they exhibit negative emotions toward the organization, and never miss an opportunity to make snide remarks about company leaders or co-workers. As mentioned above, such negativity can easily spread like the ebola virus in the work place.

This could eventually turns into insubordination, where the employee might refuse to perform a task, and in doing so, disrupt the entire workflow.

Secondly, bad employees also start or aggravate disputes in the workplace, thereby creating an uncomfortable team setting. This also makes problem resolution harder.

Thirdly, even if an employee isn’t overly negative and exhibit the traits described above, they may still be lazy and unmotivated. They neither focus on their work, nor let anyone do the same.

Assessing the Costs

Whenever you start to think that dealing with bad employees isn’t worth your time, remember that doing so can save your organization the expense of unnecessary hiring costs. The average cost to replace an employee is estimated at 150 percent of their annual compensation, and the cost is higher if they hold a leadership role.

Dealing with Bad Employees

Finding the source of bad employee’s bad attitude can help you manage behaviors without making them more upset. You have to consider factors like how does the employee interact with others in the workforce. You should also assess whether the change in attitude has followed a change in company policy, or their individual/personal workload. Many times, something happens in the individual’s life that triggers their bad attitude.

Once you know the root cause, confront the difficult employee privately and respectfully. Let the employee know how his or her behavior is negatively impacting the team and productivity. You have to be firm and discipline bad employees, but make it a point to keep the conversation professional and constructive!

Summary

To sum up, having crucial conversations with bad performers in your workforce is critical not only to the smooth working of your organizational operation, but also to your success as a leader.

To find out more about Tip of the Spear’s Business Advisory Services, including Leadership Development through The Leadership Challenge, please use the Contact Us page.

The Point: One mosquito, one damn mosquito can ruin the peace of the entire household. The same is true of a bad employee in your business. No matter how large your organization may be, a single lazy, unmotivated, and gossiping employee can negatively impact the performance of the entire workforce. Are you facing problems dealing with such people in your organization? Read on to learn some effective tips to handle this leadership challenge… Enjoy!

The Point: We want to hire/create the best leaders. The main elements that highlight and distinguish leaders from others are their creative thinking and an urge to take initiative. Great leaders are known for utilizing their critical thinking capacity, and thinking out of the box. They utilize their talents to aspire and reach out for the stars, something which others can’t even dream of! Creativity and initiative are the critical elements of a leadership development program… Enjoy!

A true leader is driven and exerts all efforts to successfully achieve their goals and ambitions. A leadership development endeavor should include a drive for taking initiative and utilizing creative thinking for acquiring excellence in the field. What is the leadership challenge then, right?

Leadership Development And Creativity

Aspiring to implement leadership development in an organization is a creative step in itself. Leadership development programs ensure prompting creative and critical thinking in an individual, being trained as a future leader.

To infuse creativity in an individual, the leadership development program ensures the adoption of a variety of tasks and additional responsibilities for the future leader, which trains them for the creative skills required in their organizational position.

360 degree feedback, formal coaching and job assignments are some methods and activities through which organizations strive to polish the creative skills of an individual being developed as a future leader. (Cauley & Velsor, 2004)

As creativity is a core distinguishing element of a good leader, every good and effective leadership developmentprogram ensures thorough polishing of these skills through vigorous efforts.

Initiative And Leadership Development 

Taking initiative and exhibiting the drive to take the plunge, is a factor which is deemed necessary for every future leader. The need to try out new ideas, learn about different techniques and methods and taking responsibility to take a risk, are vital and an essential skill of every leader.

An individual who does not try something new does not ensure personal development and growth, and this is something which leaders cannot afford to do. Without taking initiative, leaders can become stagnant and idle, and in this fast paced world, a drive and initiative to succeed is of vital importance.

Leadership development programs inspire initiative by encouraging employees to try out new ideas and follow them through. Assigning challenging and rewarding projects which inspire out of the box thinking, and utilization of unique methods, ensures skill development and personal confidence. Mentoring and coaching are effective techniques for prompting employees to take an initiative. New ideas and the initiative to try out something unique and ensure success, is one feature of an individual, which marks it as different from all the other leaders in the industry. A leader with a will to succeed and ensure personal and career growth, is one who can elevate an organization to new and superior heights in the industry, and ensure its prosperity and business expansion.

Summary

While developing leadership programs to ensure the proper training of the employees in a company, creativity and a drive for taking initiative is given great importance, as they are the sound pillars on which the foundation of leadership is built.

A multi layered and cross generational leadership, one which involves mentoring assistance and intervention is one which is required to instill and polish the creative skills in future leaders. Inspiring and encouraging aspiring leaders to take initiative and take the plunge prompts the development of the required leadership skills, within them.

To learn more about Tip of the Spear Leadership Development offerings, including The Leadership Challenge, CLICK HERE.

The Point: If you’re seriously considering a leadership training program for yourself/your organization, you can look forward to spending roughly $50,000 per participant (Need proof? Here’s a link to one of Stanford’s Executive Leadership Development programs). If you’re going to throw-down that kind of investment in an individual, you’re definitely going to want to see solid returns in short order! However, time and again, leadership development program after leadership development program seems to come up short on those success metrics. Worse yet, employees who participate often depart the organization around 25% per year over the next five years. So why does leadership development fail so often? In this blog post, we’ll take a look at what we at Tip of the Spear have identified as the number one (#1) reason… Enjoy!

The #1 Reason – It’s the Training

We’re not known at Tip of the Spear for beating around the bush, otherwise we’d be called The Handle Ventures or The Shaft Ventures (neither tested well in our marketing studies!) The number one (#1) reason leadership development fails is the training experience. Back in 2008 I wrote a then (and even now) controversial article that was published in about 100 magazines titled “Should You Fire Your Training Department?” At the time, I sat on the Board of Directors for a Chapter of the American Society of Training & Development (ASTD). With the ASTD’s recent rebranding to The Association for Talent Development (ATD?), I guess even they were trying to get away from the stigma associated with training in the modern business environment!

So What Went Wrong… You Like Training Don’t You?

If you’re like me, you probably attended a training session or two over your career. Believe me, while I was the “odd” one in the room that actually looked forward to the experience (I mean who doesn’t like to learn something new, right?), my peers were typically far from excited. So let’s start at the very beginning and say that Training typically involved people being herded to an event instead of volunteering. The act of having people participate against there will actually turned the events into more of a hostage scenario than a welcomed part of their individual development plan (You have an IDP, don’t you?)

Clouded Learning? It’s the Training & Trainers Fault!

Regardless of hostage/volunteer status of the participants, the only people that sometimes seemed less prepared for the training were the people that were actually instructing the course themselves! Bad visuals (read that as death by PowerPoint) accompanied by lousy presenters only exacerbates the training session. How many times since a training session (go ahead, pick a training session) can you actually recall what was put up on the screen, or what the trainer actually said that was supposed to propel you to a higher state? If you’re like me… and I’ve sat through nearly 1,000+ leadership development sessions, less than a handful of the time. Quite the leadership challenge!

It’s About Implementation/Execution/Action!

To top things off, I want you to look at your office bookshelf and tell me what you see? If you’re like one of our clients (before they started working with Tip of the Spear obviously), you see a bunch of books/binders from training sessions that are sitting their collecting dust. Now I know when you came back from the training session you had every intention of implementing what you action planned out. However, something happened… You came back from the session, put the books/binders up on the shelf… and business happened! That’s right, you went right back to doing what you’d always done the way you always had. So what did you go to training for again?

The Answer: Executive Coaching

When I set out to work with a few organizations back in the late 90’s, I was a little frustrated. I’d worked at a premier consulting firm that produced volumes of solid action plans. However, upon returning to the client organizations to determine implementation success I was often really disappointed. It wasn’t as though all of the wheels had fallen off the implementation vehicle, but at least 1 or 2 had (Read that as 1 or 2 too many!) I knew there had to be a better way, and it presented itself to me one afternoon when one of the participants in a leadership development session asked me if I could coach them… The clouded skies parted and the sun shined down… EUREKA! Just kidding, there was no divine intervention present or maybe there was. I began coaching the individual on implementation/execution/action on the action plan developed during the leadership development program conducted. The results were immediate and powerful! I tested the coaching model over the next year and found this fact: Results from those that experienced executive coaching versus those that did not resulted in 65% better results.

Summary

If you’re frustrated with your leadership development training program returning less than desired results, try adding executive coaching on at the conclusion to ensure that you achieve greater implementation/execution/action!

If you’d like more information on Tip of the Spear’s Leadership Development program offerings, including those that incorporate The Leadership Challenge CLICK HERE.