A recent August 8th article in USA Today [At Work, No More Mr. Nice Guy] stated that rudeness and bad manners are rising amongst the employees.  They’ve got fluid job descriptions and less role clarity.  Work is becoming more toxic.  Younger people are seeing what work has done to their parents.

While this reality is true in lots of companies, it doesn’t have to derail groups or projects.  As a leaders, we have to be more sensitive to these issues.  Have periodic meetings with your people and talk openly about these realities.  Then have the group members offer suggestions on how to reduce these stresses.   Let it be their ideas.  Keeping everyone focused on the stress reduction and the workplace civility issue, will help improve the work environment.

He said in the 1990′s they looked for technical people who already had 70% of the technical skills and then the remaining 30% in people skills.

Now 20 years later they look for a degree but 30% in the technical skills is acceptable with the balance of 70% in people skills.

I, of course asked, “why such a shift?”  He said, “Because it is much easier to teach additional techical skill than to teach people skills.”

I though this was profound and needed to be shared.

What has been your experience?

Then through reading and research, I realized that if I was going to find better opportunities, I had to improve my abilities and let others know about it.  So not satisfied with just a Mechanical Engineering Degree, I made a smart move to enter and complete the Executive MBA Program at the University of Houston.  This helped me a lot.  It especially helped me with the knowledge, but I still needed a good place to focus my knowledge.  I wanted to make a real difference in the business world.

That’s when I read an article on the value of a mentor (a business coach).  Someone who was an “older me” helping the “younger me” - someone who was wiser & who really cared.  A mentor will listen to your story and listen to your dreams.  He/she will then say, “Let me show you a better more efficient way.”  That is the point of this video.  An expert can show you a few simple techniques and get you on the right track.

As a coach and mentor, I get to witness first hand, the value I bring to individuals.  It is very gratifying.  Mentors can come in all types, shapes and sizes and from lots of different places.  You will not see them until you begin to look for them. SEEK & YOU SHALL FIND.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAFcV7zuUDA

However some of the most important leadership is done at the lowest levels in an organization. This is where one team member has to convince the other to step up and do the right thing or to do a job to a higher degree of quality. This is much easier said than done, because that team member with the good intentions has no authority over the fellow team member – he/she cannot make the other person do something. He/she can only convince the other person of why it is in every one’s best interest. This can be selling at its finest (like we teach in the sales session of Accelerated Professionals, everyone is in sales). One of the easiest ways to do it, is to Lead By Example.

The other extremely important place where leadership is conducted is between a supervisor and the front line worker. Because this is where the bulk of the real work is done in the organization. I just finished teaching some leadership courses to two different groups at a company. The first group was 15 supervisors and the second group 15 managers (the bosses). The supervisor class argued that it was more important that they implement the leadership methods we were covering in the class (vs. the management group) because the majority of the real work at the company was being done with the supervisors working with the front line workers. So we need leadership EVERYWHERE and we all need to LEAD BY EXAMPLE.

But let’s look outside of sports.  All the U.S. Military branches practice: The Army; the Navy; the Marines; and the Air Force – they all practice.  And then there are elite divisions within these branches such as the Navy Seals, who practice certain thing even more.  They get really good at it.  They get to know their team members very well too.  They want to know who they are working with when it is performance time.  They have to know who they can trust.  It is the same with SWAT teams.  When you see them in action on television, they are well organized, move with purpose and cover each other.

So I am teaching teamwork and it occurred to me, that companies are asking teams to become excellent performance teams with classroom knowledge and classroom practice alone.  This is not near enough.  Excellent teams practice.  I was recently training a ‘team’ of department managers from each department at a chemical company.  We went through all the classroom stuff and then I sold them on the idea that ‘excellent teams practice.’ 

They agreed with the concept but protested.  When do we have time to practice?  We are all very busy already - when will we have time to practice?  This is crazy, are we suppose to practice Monday before we have a Monday?  Practice a whole week of work before we have a week – this is impossible.  Then it occurred to one manager and she said isn’t Monday practice for Tuesday?  And Tuesday practice for Wednesday? etc.?  Then another manager said the truth is we hit the playing field and just go live and do our best.  There is no practice other than ‘yesterday was practice for today.’

After some discussions we agreed that they did need to practice some critical events such as upcoming customer visits, meetings with government agencies, meetings to discipline employees, meetings to hire a key employee candidate, etc.

They agreed that these meetings were all too important to just leave to chance and that it would pay dividends to spend a little time practicing before each of these key events.

EXCELLENT TEAMS PRACTICE !

Every company wants teamwork. But like all excellent teams – they have to practice. SWAT, Fireman, Sports teams and all the military teams practice. When do you practice? Well you obviously can’t practice each work day, but you can practice key events such as customer visits, sales calls, employee discipline, etc.