Leaders face a near perfect storm today. Making sales and profit goals are tougher in the “new normal’, employee disengagement is near epic levels and Gallup research cites nearly one in three payroll dollars are lost because of disengagement.

The savvy leader begins to sort and understand what is going on in the larger economy and their own organization. One of the biggest challenges is an epic rush of resumes. Recent survey data from the Wall Street Journal, November 2009 cited nearly 87% of employees are distracted by thoughts, daydreams or plans to leave the organization. The 87% looks like this…60% actively seeking other employment, 21% networking, and 6% updating resumes. Bottomline, organizations may be about to experience a massive round of “free agency employees.”

The challenge for leaders is to reach out and engage employees… inspiring a new age of honesty and engagement. And reach out to actively disengaged employees. Often disengaged employees are fearful and they no longer trust…trust has evaporated. The loss of trust is serious and there is a cause and effect. The organization may not have met their needs.

Here are 3 tips to purge the wrong attitudes for excuses, whining and negativity.

1. “It’s the economy”, words of the employee blaming the economy. Every organization faces a tough economy. An employee who substitutes excuses for results is not a team player. The response: Discuss expectations of no tolerance for excuses. When mistakes happen, as they certainly will, the correct response is a simple “I’m sorry” and the employees adjustments if any to be sure mistakes are minimized.

2. “If only we had….” The whiner’s theme. It’s ok to find gaps and soft spots in the organization. But it serves no one to put energies into whining without smart solutions. The response: Ask that the whining to stop. Reach out and ask what could be better, what is missing? Ask employees for their personal commitment to help.

3. “Negative Nancy’ this is the naysayer, the one who loves to rain on everyone’s parade. The Response: When Negative Nancy says we “can’t”…respond… “I understand why we haven’t…tell us how we can”.

Try this as a leader. Write down all the things going on in your organization which bug you. Keep writing until you have at least a list of 20. Throw out the ones which are numbers…like sales numbers, profit…those results are simply symptoms of people issues. You want to focus on the human element. After the list of 20 personality irritants..the human things…group into patterns…keep working until you’ve sorted into a list of 3.

You’ve begun to sort and clarity…all will help you focus on the most important blockers to your organizations success. Your purpose is to clarify the 3 big blockers…the things that bug you…what does it call you to do? You may be ready for expert help to go to the next step. The next step is hard work…but the payoff is huge.

We’ve tackled big issues and big challenges and have been involved in just about every important phase of business. http://lighthouse-leadership.com By the way, do you want to learn more about creating a powerful workplace culture? If so, download our brand new free ebook Three Elegant Strategies for Your Organizations Survival Elegant Courage Jodi lead the cultural turnaround which was core to financial recovery. Mike is innovative and persistently explores new ideas.

Author: Mike Krutza
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Hybrid and Electric Cars

Dr. Max Blumberg :

The term silo has a well-known negative connotation suggesting uncordinated activity to the detriment of the organization. HR people are particularly keen on silo-busting because it inhibits implementation of best HR practices.

But HR functions can also fall pray to silo-creation if the various specialists functions do not work closely together and lead to unintended consequences. For example in many organizations, employees are rewarded for their individual effort and receive some kind of bonus if the organization as a whole performs well.

However, an employees’ locus of control usually extends to their own work and to that of their team. Unless they are a board-member or the CEO, they can seldom influence the organization as a whole and therefore company-wide bonuses (like share-schemes) are flawed from the start.

A more pragmatic approach is therefore for reward and performance-appraisal specialists to de-silo and work together to create rewards that are a function of individual and immediate team performance.

Such systemic effects can occur between all HR functions (employee development, relations, succession planning, and so on) and will be addressed in future posts.