Within our leadership development initiatives and coaching projects, we spend time helping participants to reframe and get unstuck. The message is always the same . . . rather than spending time complaining about the current situation or wishing it were something different, empower yourself to move forward with positive action. The five questions noted below work like magic . . . they shift your mindset from one of victim to victor over the current situation.

1. What do you want?

In other words, what is your vision? Use your imagination and push yourself to think beyond what is to what could be. If you want something different, you have to focus on what it is you want, not where you are right now.

2. What are you learning?

Those situations that challenge you the most truly do provide the greatest opportunity to learn something about yourself. Through the recognition of growth within the situation, the challenge suddenly becomes more meaningful and you are provided with greater confidence to move forward.

3. What support is available to you?

You are not alone. Regardless of how isolated you may feel, there is always support if you are willing to open your eyes and ask for it.

4. What’s working well?

Be gentle with yourself and remember that you are doing the best you can with what you have where you are. Give yourself credit for the progress you have made, and continually look for ways to leverage your strengths.

5. What can you do to influence the situation?

Given your answers to all of the previous questions, you are ready to take action. While there will certainly be things that are not possible for you, there is always something you can do. Continue to focus on where it is you can influence the situation (regardless of how small the action may be) and watch your vision come to life.

Image: Asif Akbar

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Have you ever woken on a Saturday and thought, “What a beautiful day; I think I will go for a run. I need to get in shape and there is no better time than today for me to get started?” So you lace up your shoes, do a couple of calf stretches and you are off . . . for about a half mile. At the half-mile mark the legs start tingling, the heart is pounding, and the brain finally catches up with the body so all you can think about is when you can stop. The next day you feel uncomfortably sore, don’t run again for quite some time, and do not get in shape. Don’t worry—you are not alone.

Many organizations take the same approach to learning and development. Perhaps an incident occurs, you read a good article or book, or you have an uncomfortable conversation that leads you to think, “Wow, we need some training.” You set up a two-hour training session and participants listen to a dynamic facilitator, toss a few balls around, and leave energized.  You feel good about the effort, but you do not see any results or changes in behavior. Rarely does learning (like running) fail because of the event; it fails because of the lack of preparation and follow-through. You just wasted time, energy, and money. Don’t feel bad—you are not alone.

A few weeks ago some of my fellow marathoners and I decided that we should all do one last marathon together. We determined that we need to go BIG at a cool location, with all of us running together. We decided to run in Barcelona, Spain, in March 2011. The goal is set . . . done and done. Then reality set in. I haven’t run a marathon in seven years. My knees crack from years of athletic abuse, and I am now built more like an anti-cardio ex-football player who only does bench press and curls at the gym. The excuses come a lot easier these days for me (kind of like in business where we can blame the economy for all of our problems). The funny thing is, I know I will finish, as I know what it takes to run 26.2 miles—a goal, a plan, support, lifestyle changes, and lots of training.

Do you see the parallel to learning and development? The questions are very similar; all you have to do is substitute the “my” with “we” and put it in a business context:

• What is my SMART goal?
• What is my plan to achieve that goal?
• What support or whose support do I need?
• What lifestyle changes do I need to make?
• What type of training do I need (just like with learning it isn’t just one “thing”)? How much time will it take?
• What resources do I need to assist with my training?
• Is this something I really want to do and am I willing to put in the work in order to achieve the results I want?

Developing your employees takes a serious commitment and a well-thought-out plan. A longtime client and friend, Cindy Allen-Stuckey (HR director at Knauf Insulation), has always said, “If training is the answer, what is the question?” If you can answer that question, then employee development will be easy, just like running a marathon.

Image: Einar Hansen

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In my rush to be efficient the other day, I grabbed lunch and headed back to the office to eat at my desk. My coworkers didn’t have the same idea so when I returned, I was locked out with no keys and no cell phone.

I decided to head next door to the mall where I could sit and eat my lunch. With no iPhone to play with while eating lunch, I had nothing to do but listen in on other people’s conversations.  Lucky for me, there happened to be a job interview that was just beginning at the table beside me.

After a couple of minutes, I realized the candidate was being interviewed for an assistant store manager position by what sounded like a regional manager. I listened as the interviewer talked about the company, the challenges of being in store management, the role of an assistant store manager in increasing sales and creating a strong customer service environment, etc.

While I found all of this very interesting, it took up half of my meal and I had yet to hear the candidate say anything. The only real question that the candidate responded to was so leading that he just repeated back exactly the response the hiring manager asked for. It was at this point that I wanted to pull the hiring manager away to provide some free HR coaching!

I was left wondering how often this scenario is played out every day in interview rooms across the country. How can I really find out if a person has what it’s going to take to be successful if I spend most of my time doing the talking? How do I assess whether or not someone will fit within our culture when all I’m doing is telling the person about our company?

I experience this same thing in meeting with prospective clients. I’m always amazed at the number of times I’ve walked out of a prospective client meeting and couldn’t get a word in about our firm or our capabilities only to be hired for the project!

The value of listening (or, in this case, asking a question and then shutting up) is something we all probably need reminded of from time to time. Just asking questions of others forces you to listen. And when you really pay attention to what others are saying, you start to get drawn in – which often leads to a dialogue.

Is this the art of listening? Not entirely, but asking questions means that others will usually respond which forces you to stop talking and start listening.  How do you keep yourself from doing too much talking and just how important is listening in the work that you do?

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It still amazes me when I hear about organizations that do not have a formal performance evaluation or appraisal process in place. This is in a world that is being asked to do more with less—where performance, efficiency, and perfection drive our utmost decision-making. So, I say to myself…that just doesn’t make sense.

But after realizing that I may be making too much of a pre-judgment, I know I must understand why—why don’t these organizations have performance management programs? Below are a few common answers I heard along with my thoughts on each of them.

1)  We don’t have time to do performance evaluations. While we all are busy, performance evaluations don’t take that much time out of our day if we have the right tools in place. Having regular conversations with employees and taking a few notes about them can significantly speed up your composition of the performance evaluation—providing your performance evaluation is designed on actual measures that align with what the organization values. A simple 15-20 minute conversation each week can prove to be useful in communicating performance measures.

2)  Performance evaluations are a waste of time; all I do is check the boxes. Performance evaluations can sure feel like a waste of time, especially if your review form has nothing to do with your business or departmental objectives. This is where many organization’s performance evaluation programs fall short. We all know you can buy generic performance evaluation forms from major office supply companies—but this is one case where one size does not fit all. Each organization has different values, competencies, and behaviors it holds to be important. These are the items in which employees should be measured. When you check the box next to “communicates well” on the generic form, what does that mean to you, the company, the employee?

3)  Employees want their pay increases; they don’t care about their performance. Right on! But what if you link employees’ performance to pay, would they care then? Ask yourself the question, “What is an employee’s incentive to perform well?” If you are giving an average performer the same increase as a stellar performer, you may be sending the wrong message of what the company values. Pay for performance is not new, and in fact, it has been around for quite some time. By linking an employee’s pay increase with his or her ability to perform their job well, you create a direct reward to performance, efficiency, and perfection. Give employees a reason to “work hard for the money.”

If you don’t have a formal performance evaluation process in place, I encourage you to draw out your plans and begin construction. Performance evaluations are a GREAT tool for you to set expectations, measure performance, and increase your employee’s productivity levels. Plus, if you link performance to pay, you’ll incentivize employees to go above and beyond.

Image: Michal Marcol

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The following are follow-up resources to my blog post “Are you racked or on a roll: How HR and business leaders can stay connected to the deeper meaning in their work” posted July 27. Both books are strong resources that I recommend reading. The link takes you to a brief article on finding meaning in your work.

If you’ve already read the resources, what do you think? If you haven’t read them, I would value knowing your thoughts after you do.

Books

• Start With WHY by Simon Sinek

• The Why of Work by Dave and Wendy Ulrich

Article

• “Got Meaning? Creating a Why to Work” by Wendy Ulrich via Psychology Today

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How HR and business leaders can stay connected to the deeper meaning in their work.

We all work a lot—longer hours and wider job scopes leave many feeling stretched, pulled, and torn. I don’t make it through a day without hearing this sentiment and the visual that comes to mind is a common form of torture during the Middle Ages—racking.

Our work doesn’t have to torment us. In fact, it can be liberating and energizing. So, how do we get on a roll and find the momentum we need in our work and personal lives?

We can get started by discovering what is most meaningful in our lives and then focusing our time and energy accordingly.

Let’s tackle meaning first…

As it turns out, working on stuff we believe in is more satisfying—when we are happy with our work we perform better and our organizations are better for it. So, have you ever written down the answers to these questions?

• What do you want your life to look and feel like?
• What do you value most in your life?
• After it’s too late to do anything about it, what do you want to be able to say about your life?
• What is missing from your life?
• What are you most proud of? Least proud of?
• When you have the most energy, what are you doing? Who are you with?
• If you had to pick five words that describe what you want most in your life, what are those five words?

I invested some time recently in answering these questions again and my answers might be different than what you expect. It’s not human resource consulting or leadership development or leading FlashPoint or serving as a volunteer with Indiana community organizations. Finding meaning in my life hasn’t come through my job or my business or other positions (solely that is).

For me finding meaning started with knowing the answers to each of the above questions. My answers include growth, freedom, flow, integrity, big ideas, developing others, culture, art, travel, great relationships, and much more.

Your answers will be different, but no less meaningful.

Once I knew what was most important to me, I went to step two: focus

I began examining the things in my life and determined what fit and what didn’t fit—what activities were aligned with the life I wanted. This brought everything into focus and gave me a tool to make decisions and the momentum I needed to get on a roll. Sometimes we collect activities and tasks that are truly energy leaks…sometimes we feel obligated and sometimes we don’t know what we are getting into. This is exactly how we start to feel racked! In any case running our personal, work, and volunteer lives through a “meaning filter” could be just the trick to align your life with what is most important to you.

Since so many of my HR and business contacts feel the pressures in their work and personal life, I am curious what you have done to find meaning and focus in your life or how you have helped your employees do the same? Your turn to share!

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At the end of a recent keynote address, Dan Pink, author of the popular book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, left the audience with this question:

What is your sentence?

Pink had gotten the idea for the question from Clare Luce Boothe, one of the first women to serve in the US Congress. In the early 1960s, Boothe had visited JFK and told him “a great man is a sentence.” She was worried that JFK was trying to do too many things and that his sentence was becoming a muddled paragraph.

In describing the essence of this question, Pink offered a couple of examples.

• Abraham Lincoln’s sentence: He preserved the nation and freed the slaves.

• FDR’s sentence: He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a war.

The question of your sentence is similar to another that is often explored within leadership development programs:

What is your legacy?

While both questions may lead you to similar thoughts, I like the simplicity of summing up your influence in one sentence. The legacy question is more likely to lead to a muddled paragraph, while your sentence could be described as your mantra, your credo, or your something special.  The most important thing is that it’s yours.

Leadership flows from who you are as a person; while human beings are multifaceted and dynamic, the essence of who you are can be described in a sentence, particularly, if you are clear on your personal values and what’s most important to you. There is great value in the thought process of answering this question as it leads you back to your core. Many of us fall into the trap of trying to be too many things to too many people. You will never be able to be all things, but you can always be more of who you already are.

Since hearing Pink’s question, I have been working on my own sentence. Several years ago, I may have added aspects that I thought others would want to hear, but today, I appreciate my strengths and recognize the unique contribution that I bring. While my sentence may evolve as I do, for today, I feel confident in the following:

• Andrea Moore’s sentence: She empowers and shares positivity to bring out the best in others.

So, I’m curious . . . what is your sentence? Please share your ideas!

Image: healingdream

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“FlashPoint needs to blog!”

“You need to get on Facebook!”

“You need to tweet!”

OK, we get it and . . . ta-da  . . . now you’re reading our first blog. Let me tell you, though—we’ve struggled a bit with social media. We’re HR consultants. You know . . .  the people who write policies (even some about social media), who develop organizational strategies, who provide hr training on topics such as management development and workplace conduct. That’s right—REALLY exciting stuff that I’m sure you’re dying to hear about!

Actually, we do work on some really cool things that we think you’ll find interesting, and we’re excited to share them. But I’m trying to make a point here. As we considered a blog and started researching how businesses are using social media, we found more on what we SHOULDN’T do than on what we should. We found that some companies tweet so many times a day that a working person couldn’t possibly keep up. Some company employees post things that shouldn’t be said in a locker room, let alone a board room. And then there are things that are just . . . well . . . boring. Despite these bad examples, we’ve still decided to join the blogosphere. Our goal is to be engaging and relevant, to blog in moderation, and to mind our manners (so at least our moms will read what we have to say).

Here is what you can expect from our postings:

1. Some thought leadership around business trends
2. Information on our commitment to the community
3. Some fun facts about our team (such as Krista’s affinity for Vampire movies)
4. HR resources and tips
5. Client news and engagements
6. Information on current events

So there you have it. At times like this I feel like Lloyd Christmas in the movie Dumb and Dumber, when he looked at Harry while they were traveling to Aspen and said, “We’re really doing it, man!”

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