What to Do If Politics Are Taking a Toll on Your Workplace Productivity

This week, I contributed to a piece Noreen Seebacher @writeNoreen wrote for CMS Wire about steps managers should take to deal with the continuing decline in productivity owing to U.S. election-related politics and governmental affairs distractions in the workspace. Here's a link:  http://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/politics-are-taking-a-toll-on-workplace-productivity-heres-what-to-do/  If you find it worthy, I'm sure Noreen and CMS Wire won't mind if you give them a shout out.

Growing Pains - How Do I Fit in Around Here?

Richard Hadden

"If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you."

- Steve Jobs

People involved in the work of any organization, large, small, or somewhere in between, need to know how they fit in with the purpose of the enterprise. This doesn’t get any easier with growth. In small startups, everybody’s doing everything, including taking out the trash, and the customer line of sight is short, and straight.

But as we grow, it’s virtually inevitable that people will begin to lose sight of where they fit in and how their contribution matters.

In the 21 years that Contented Cow Partners has been in business (no, we can’t believe it either), we’ve worked with some companies that grew substantially, by acquisition, organic means, or both, during the time we worked with them. I remember, specifically, one CEO telling me, “When we had 300 employees, and I knew every one of them, it was easy for most of us to make the connection between our work and our customer. Now that we’re twice that size, we have to work four times as hard to keep that connection as strong.”

It's Not About the Phones

Richard Hadden

If I hear this question one more time… I won’t be surprised. “How do we get these people to get off their phones and get their work done?”

First point: it’s not about the phones. The phones are irrelevant. They simply represent yet another distraction, and, let’s be honest, a tool which most of us (irrespective of generation) have rendered pretty much indispensable.

Second point: Please don’t rely on the law to solve this problem for you. It has little potential to do so.

In a day and age when we ask people to be electronically available more or less 24/7, we can’t really ask them to put away their phones when we want them to, but take them out when we need them to.

Last week, before speaking to an audience of 900 farming professionals in Chicago, I heard some sage advice from a successful entrepreneur whose farm provides fuel, food, and fibers to a large portion of the US, regarding this very subject. Here’s what he told me:

“I tell our folks, ‘You have a job to do. Here’s what we need, what we expect. I’ll reward you generously for meeting and exceeding our production goals, and for doing it the right way. Falling short will cost you. Because it costs me.

Workplace Productivity in the Post-Inauguration Period

By Richard Hadden

Psst! Psst! Yeah, you. Look around. Listen. What do you hear? Does your workplace look and sound like it usually does? I bet it doesn’t. Odds are that more people than usual are paying attention to news portals, be it television, radio, social media, or other digital news outlets. I’ll venture too that there is more politics and civics inspired banter between co-workers than one usually finds 11 weeks post-election. The bad news is that while this is going on, other things aren’t, like work. Your productivity is getting hammered, and it’s only a matter of time before customers and shareholders notice. Here’s a prediction - It’s not going to end anytime soon.

So, Mr. or Ms. Manager, your workplace productivity is getting dinged as your staff spends considerable time every day wondering aloud about their new government, and perhaps worrying privately about their healthcare, their job, and what it means to be an American these days. For that matter, this isn’t a we vs. them thing. You’re wondering and worrying the same things. So, what do you do?

Coaching Session Part 2, Debrief

by Bill Catlette

 NOTE: This post is a debrief of a mythical coaching session that was posted yesterday. If you haven’t already read that post, please do so before proceeding further.

The coach’s objectives in this case were to: 

1. Begin to build trust thru truth
2. Engage in a somewhat jarring, but narrowly focused session keyed to the individual’s self-interest
3. Define and arrest, albeit momentarily, unhelpful behavior
4. Create the first step and timely follow-up on a path to improvement and success

Coaching, particularly at senior levels, is an intensely personal, trust-dependent process. Each party must believe that the other is sincere, competent and is an interested partner. The player (President in this case) must believe that the coach has his best interest at heart.

Five things that I liked about this conversation:

by Bill Catlette

1/24/17 4:48P Memphis

Despite unprecedented increase in the amount of digital labor-saving technology applied to our commercial processes, the U.S. rate of productivity growth has effectively been sawed in half over the last decade. You heard that right, microchips and poor productivity in the same sentence. Federal Reserve Board Chairwoman Janet Yellen has declared this trend “a key uncertainty for the U.S. economy.” That’s about a 6.3 on the Fed-speak Richter scale.

While many are in pursuit of the next gleaming digital means to cut humanoids further, or even entirely out of the process in the interest of raising productivity, we’ve been stumbling around looking for (and finding) what world class process observer and branding expert Martin Lindstrom might term small data solutions… scraps and insights that are lying right at our feet that can be picked up and applied right now, many of them for free.

Like what? How about better ways of leading people so that they actually want to part with some of their discretionary effort in the workspace and thus contribute at a higher level. No capital expenditure involved. Here’s one:

Less Selfies, More Ussies

Bill Catlette

As a leadership coach, I work with managers up and down the ladder, helping them refine and capitalize on their strengths, discover hidden (to them) weaknesses, and rehab or minimize the impact of the latter. In a world that seems bent on becoming more inwardly-focused, where everyone is running for their next gig, one thing that we seem to be spending more time and emphasis on is maintaining steadfast focus on three core aspects of this thing called leadership:

On Being the New Sheriff

By Richard Hadden

As of noon today, for those of us in the US, there will be, as we say, a new sheriff in town. Based on the popular vote, more than half (about 54%) of those who voted in November's presidential election were disappointed in its outcome. But the Electoral College vote is what counts, quirks and all, and so there we have it.

Because I've not been asked to proffer advice to the incoming president, I'll refrain from doing so. But the rest of us - those who don't have our names on skyscrapers - often find ourselves, willingly or otherwise, put in new positions of leadership, taking over from someone else. Here are some things that will help make that transition work better, when you become the new boss: