Over the past several months, I have been working with senior executives from several different industries on the design, development, and delivery of Business Leadership training programs. During this time, I have been fortunate to have worked with leaders in Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Hospitality, Digital Marketing, Retail, and Professional Services on a variety of learning and skill development engagements.
As part of this work, I have conducted more than 25 in-depth interviews talking about a range of issues related to business acumen, strategy, financial management, and leading execution. The information gathered is a goldmine of insights focused on current trends occurring in today’s marketplace. As I reviewed my notes looking for themes and patterns, a specific and interesting trend emerged:
“Business teams, associates, and individual contributors are not achieving game-changing, world-class results because they are only taking their work 90% of the way to completion and not finishing strongly enough.”
With a changing workforce where people change jobs every couple of years, there is the perception from leaders that employees aren’t as engaged as they once were, or should be. One CEO flat out said to me “It’s not that they aren’t engaged, it’s that they simply don’t care anymore.”
So why is this happening? Is this a perception or is this a reality? I strongly disagree with the CEO who said the reason is that employees don’t care enough. I think it takes great and strong Business Leadership skills and tools to create an environment where employees want to and know how to achieve success. Based on our experiences and insights from our clients, I present 3 thoughts about how to effectively lead teams and organizations to finish strong.
1) Employees Need to Skills and Tools to Finish Strong
Over the past decade, many organizations have scaled back on their investment in talent development. As a result, employees and organizations lack the foundational skills to know basic things such as how to run successful meetings, how to work with other people, and how to make the right decisions to create alignment to support the overall strategy.
Leaders must make sure that their teams have the skills and tools to achieve success.
2) Achieving Game-Changing Results by Finishing Strong is Hard
We are experiencing trends and looking at feedback that some millennials aren’t used to working hard and paying attention to the details needed to achieve excellent results. It takes creativity, innovation, and sometimes a lot of extra effort to finish strong. At the same time that millennials don’t want to work hard, more experienced employees may have become complacent, risk adverse, and also may not be working as hard. If both ends of the age continuum are not finishing strong, that means all of the pressure is on the middle.
Leaders must make sure that their teams have a strong understanding and clear expectations about the investment of effort that is needed to do a great job. Leaders must also be open and honest in terms of career conversations with people who aren’t going to make it. They need to help them transition out before it becomes a “lose-lose” situation for all.
3) Employees Avoid Conflict and Conflict is Needed to Achieve Game-Changing Results
Another challenge with today’s workforce is an aversion to conflict. It is easy to take the path of least resistance and just come to work without causing a disruption or doing something different, unique, or innovative. In the right environment, conflict can be a natural (and healthy) output of innovation and moving beyond the old way of doing things.
Leaders must create an environment where good and healthy conflict is encouraged to support pushing improvement and a strong finish.