Destination: Success | See Possibilities in Everything
In our last Destination: Success blog, we talked about leading personal and team engagement by not waiting for, or managing change, but by actively leading and engaging in change. We also introduced the 5-step model of leading effective change (shown in the graphic above). The first step in that model: Seeing Possibilities in Everything for change.
This week, you and your peers take 30 minutes to list 2-3 things that are working well around you and 2-3 things that are not working well. Then prioritize both lists by the potential positive or negative impact on the team. These prioritized lists are your employee-led change possibilities.
List things that ARE working.
List things that ARE NOT working.
Prioritize both lists by positive or negative impacts.
In addition to this group change engagement activity, just look around you. Is there ever blame and justification going on around you or in meetings you might be attending? If so, there is a possibility for change. Just intervene professionally and ask, “How can I help?” or “What would success look like if we got everyone aligned?”.
In addition, are there possibilities for you to build and cultivate more authentic relationships with your peers, your manager, or other parts of the organization? If so, those are possibilities for change. I could keep the list going but possibilities for change exist literally everywhere!
Now it is time to engage in change by trying step one in the change process this week. See the possibilities in everything!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Chart Your Destination
Are you and or your organization faced with any or all of these:
- Low personal or overall employee engagement?
- Often resigning to the status quo?
- A lot is said about wanting to be innovative but little or no signs of actual innovation is going on?
- Nothing really changes?
If so, you are, unfortunately, in the majority of individuals and organizations trying to compete in the new world of change and disruption while using the same personal and organizational strategies and responses that worked in the past but just don't cut it anymore. Over the next several weeks we will highlight ways you can personally engage in change, making a profound and positive difference, instead of just embracing change.
We will provide actual examples where people, leading where they are, made a difference.
One thing we do know, complacency never changes anything.
Chart your destination to success: Change, lead it, don’t manage it.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Don't Wait, Get Engaged!
Employee engagement is on you and me. True engagement is a personal choice. Maybe you don’t how or where to engage but even engaging to find those answers is a critical personal choice. In the last two blog posts we have explored engagement from the organizational level on how to enable engagement and from the leadership level on how to support engagement. Now, we will highlight how to personally engage which, bottom line, is what truly matters.
Let us start with these questions:
Are you personally engaged?
I mean truly engaged?
Do you come in each day to complete your tasks to the highest level and go home satisfied you have earned your pay check?
If so, great! But I challenge you and say there is so much more for you to engage in and contribute to. Organizational performance is evolving and rapidly changing and it requires each of us to actively engage in making success happen versus passively existing and expecting success will just happen to us.
There has not been one employee engagement survey conducted that produced greater employee engagement just by delivering the results of the survey. Not one PowerPoint presentation that explains the power of engaged employees and the initiative’s suggested to improve engagement that has actually engaged any individual employee. It is all just engagement talk, not personal, active engagement.
The only path to improved employee engagement is for each of us as employees to actually engage and stay engaged. We don’t need to wait for an annual survey to tell us we need better engagement. In over 20 years of conducting and looking at employee engagement surveys and scores, only one 500 plus employee organization out of hundreds we have worked with had 98 percent actively employee engagement, no other even comes close….just one! And it took 2 years of enabling and supporting by the organization and leadership, with a focus on engagement, to achieve such success.
So where can we personally engage?
Areas like engaging more actively in your personal performance. Try proactively setting expectations with your manager not your manager setting the expectations with you. And then you setting time on their calendar to actively lead every 6-week performance discussion on your progress to those expectations. That is active engagement!
- Engage in change – see possibilities in everything, think disruptively and create options and recommendations for change. Don’t just embrace change, engage in change.
- Engage in developing authentic relationships, move from transactional interactions to investing in building authentic relationships.
- Engage through accepting personal accountability no matter what. Make things happen, don’t let things drift and just happen.
- Engage with a purpose, find your purpose beyond delivering a task. Come in each day with your task to contribute to a more meaningful purpose in your work.
- Engage by either volunteering for or jump-starting an employee-led engagement team within your organization. Get involved!
There is a lot of talk right now about engagement, but the bottom line is that to get more engagement we have to be the ones to more actively engage.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination Success: Leading Relationships - Take Action
Over the last two success blogs we have been focusing on our current state relationships, who they are, and the relative impact each of our connections have. With limited time available to invest in each of our connections, it is important to create a relationship development plan that enhances our sphere of influence impact and better leverages the most important commodity, your time!
Look at your completed sphere of influence and relationship types. What percentage, as a whole, are transient? What percent are transactional? And what percent are authentic? Now look to your “Critical 20%”, the connections you identified that produce 80% of your productive value. These critical 20% are where you can take immediate action and put a connection plan in place to move any transient or transactional relationship into a more authentic relationship by investing in and cultivating it. Here is a solid framework to use in your relationship planning. Start with relationship CARE – Clarity, Alignment, Resources and Enablement.
- Define success for the connection or relationship.
- What is your role in achieving that success?
- What do you expect or need from the other participant(s) for a successful relationship?
- How do the other participants define relationship success?
- What do they need from you to assist in that success?
- Mutually define roles and expectations to ensure connection success.
- What other people, processes, or technology do you need to enable and sustain the success for the relationship?
- Summarize your personal actions and behaviors you know you will need to ensure relationship success.
- Commit to holding yourself accountable to doing what it takes for this relationship to grow and remain authentic.
- Don't forget to reward success and milestones along the way!
You have all the tools needed and a framework to lead any relationship going forward. Don’t let a relationship 'just happen' or drift, it takes a plan and an investment up front. If you will do this periodically for all your connections, your valuable time will be focused and your overall value and impact much greater.
Get started today leading your relationships and move from communicating with 'bits and bytes' to building and cultivating true authentic and more effective transactional relationships.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination Success: Leading Relationships
Leading Relationships – Not All Relationships are Created Equal
We began our journey to relationship success in our last Destination: Success blog with the action step of identifying your personal sphere of influence. Our second action step to leading your relationships is to define and prioritize your identified connections.
If you missed our initial blog in this series and have not identified your sphere of influence, no worries, you can download the exercise here. If you have completed your sphere exercise from last week go ahead and download this week's document as well as you will copy and paste from last week's connection inventory to continue to build it out.
Nearly all our connections fall into one of three types of relationships. Transient, transactional and authentic. Some connections may vacillate between two or more, but for the most part will fall predominantly in one of the three. You can find complete relationship descriptions by clicking here to assist in your assessment process.
With your completed sphere of influence in front of you, first identify and highlight top 20% of your connections that produce 80% of value in your daily/weekly/monthly work efforts that lead to both your near and long-term success. These are the critical connections worth investing the greater share of your relationship development time.
Now, quickly assess the type of relationship each of your identified connections are, whether they are in your critical 20% or not. The spreadsheet provides a quick drop down action menu for each connection to assist you in this. Which connections are transient, transactional, or authentic? This is a very important step since not all relationships are equal in impact, so your time invested should be commensurate to the return on that relationship investment. At this point, you should have a list of all your connections with either transient, transactional, or authentic listed beside each one. In addition, you should have a clear picture of your key 20% critical connections that we will develop specific relationship strategies around.
In next week's blog, in this Leading Relationships series, we will look at your completed work to date and develop a relationship plan that cultivates, leverages, and maintains the appropriate level of focus on all of your current connections. We are on our way to building a foundation for connection and relationship success.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination Success: Leading Relationships
Destination Success – 3 Weeks to Creating and Cultivating Authentic Relationships
It is widely known, discussed and documented the issues we face today with so much communication coming at us and how we are losing the interpersonal side of relationships. We are relying on "bits and bytes" to develop relationships, not genuine "Hello's" and "How I can help?" conversations and interactions. In fact, it is estimated that each of us receives over 35,000 messages a day in various forms and couple that with the average person speaking over 16,000 words per day...that is a lot of communication with little to no genuine connection or relationship.
If you stay with us over the next 3 weeks and engage in the actions and activities we highlight, you will have a relationship development plan that will lead to less confusion, better partnering and connection, and more effective time allocation. Bottom line... it will help you and your organization achieve success.
Week 1 Action Step – Sphere of Influence
Take 30 minutes this week to Identify your personal and if applicable, team’s sphere of influence. (who do you impact and who impacts you on a daily and weekly basis). It is important to identify all your relationships and determine the impact, importance and time required or committed to establishing and maintaining each relationship. As we know there is only so much time in a day to devote and not all relationships are equal in impact or importance and deserve the same allocation of your precious time. So, taking a reflective and honest assessment of where your relationship time is spent is a critical first step.
Areas to explore:
- Social media relationships and time spent on online interacting
- LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Cell and office phone histories
- Who are you calling? Who is calling you?
- Email inbox and sent files
- Frequency of communication
- Importance and impact
- Personal Calendar
- What meetings do you have and who are the primary participants that you communicate with in those meetings?
- Miscellaneous, Ad Hoc, Drop Interactions
- Who and what amount of time on average are these taking place?
Feel free to download and use our simple but organized Professional Connection Inventory excel document to help chart all of your weekly connections. It definitely helps to see everything in an organized format, and next week we will expand on this document with strategic prioritization.
The path to leading more effective relationships is a deeper understanding of who, what and where are your current relationships today. Take action this week on getting a handle on your sphere of influence. Understanding is the first step in effectively lead a change in your relationship strategy resulting in more effective use of your time in cultivating the relationships in the right way.
Next week we will take your sphere of influence and apply a method of prioritization to ensure you maximize your relationship investment.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.