Book Review: Under New Management (@DavidBurkus)

When I received a copy of Under New Management:  How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual by David Burkus, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  I work for a large company.  In fact, I am an operations manager for a large company.  The prospect of changing or upending business as usual seems a little scary and perhaps a little interesting.

“The purpose of this book is to challenge you and your company to ask whether the time has come for you to reexamine some of the most fundamental concepts in management today.”  David Burkus

When I opened up the book and scanned through the contents and the pages, I honestly questioned if this book was worth my time.  Here are some of the chapter titles:  Outlaw Email, Put Customers Second, Lose the Standard Vacation Policy, Pay People to Quit, Make Salaries Transparent, Ban Noncompetes, Ditch Performance Appraisals, Hire as a Team, and Close Open Offices.  Many of these chapter titles seemed to go against what I have come to know in my 20+ years at my company.  I was a little concerned about what would be in the pages I was about to read.  As I started to read though, I began to understand Under New Management was actually a book I needed to read.  And I’m not the only one who needs to read it.  Managers across the country and around the world should consider picking up a copy of this brand new book.

Change is not easy.

If we really want to grow, we need to learn to adapt, and Under New Management:  How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual encourages managers to consider how they might adapt to the changing world that we now find ourselves.  This work by David Burkus is an important text for any manager to read, and I would highly recommend it.  I think it will encourage managers took to consider how they might change the way they’re doing business.  They may not implement every single thing suggested in this book, but I think managers will find ways to do business differently and better as they read the pages of this book.

“Business isn’t usual anymore.”  David Burkus

Under New Management:  How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual by David Burkus releases this week, and I would encourage any manager who is serious about making a difference where they are in their workplace to pick this up and to at least ponder whether or not they are on the right track in their business.  I’m sure that this text will stretch the readers and that’s why I’m recommending Under New Management.

What changes would you like to see at your place of employment?  What action do you think you could take to make that one of those changes a reality?

Please note:  I received a copy of Under New Management:  How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual by David Burkus for free from Weaving Influence in exchange for a review.  I was not required to provide a positive review.  I truly believe that this new book is a worthwhile read for anybody serious about taking their leadership to the next level.

Also to note:  There are affiliate links in this post.  Should you purchase Under New Management:  How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual by clicking one of these links, I receive a small percentage of the purchase.  These funds are used to support The Stretched Blog and to extend ministry and missions to Guatemala.  Thank you!)

Today I’m Going Back to the Future

Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies.  The concept of journeying through the space-time continuum to another time and another space is mind-bending to say the least.  And today, I am actually already at tomorrow.  Let me explain.  My friend, Ralph Mayhew, lives in Australia.  He is a leadership blogger, and he is hosting one of my guest articles.  The post went live at 5AM Thursday Australia time.  But it’s 2PM Wednesday here in my hometown.  It boggles my mind.  Today, I officially went back to the future.

To see what I’m talking about, go visit my article – 7 Keys to Leading Yourself.  Click here to get to the article.

Leave a comment over at Ralph’s site, then come back and let me know what you think.  And in your own way, you’ll be doing some amazing time travel of your own. 

6 Actions You Can Take Today to Prepare for Your Promotion Tomorrow

What do I have to do to get promoted?

It’s a fair question everyone must ask themselves, their co-workers, and their management, if they want to achieve their career ambitions.  Over my 20+ year career, I have moved from an engineer to a project manager to an operations manager.  Each step on the journey has required patience, persistence, and plenty of planned actions.

Today, I will help you identify six actions you should be taking today if you want to move closer to the promotion you desire.

6 Actions You Can Take Today to Prepare for Your Promotion Tomorrow

1. Talk to a person who is already in the position you want to be in next.  If you want to become a salesperson, talk to other salespeople.  Go out to lunch with them.  Grab a cup of coffee with them.  Pick their brains, and find out what they like and don’t like about their positions.  These conversations will help you understand the realities of the position you are pursuing.
2. Talk to your boss about the position you want to be in next.  Communicating your career aspirations with your boss is a good idea if you want support moving along in your career.  Your boss has the opportunity to be your biggest advocate and career counselor, but this won’t happen if you don’t talk to him about your career goals.
3. Look in the mirror and learn about yourself.  Take time to do a self-assessment.  I’d recommend looking into the DISC profile, the MBTI profile, and StrengthsFinders 2.0.  These “tests” will reveal key information you need to understand your strengths and weaknesses.  These kinds of assessments will also reveal more about you and what kinds of positions are right for you.
4. Get the training you need for the next position.  What training will best prepare you for the promotion you desire?  Some people say that an MBA isn’t worth very much anymore, but my MBA was a major part of preparing me to move from a project manager to an operations manager.  Seeking out training helps you learn, and it also demonstrates to your managers a commitment on your part to grow.
5. Work hard in your current position.  Don’t expect your promotion to be handed to you.  If you don’t work hard in your current position, your managers won’t believe you are capable of working hard at the next position.  If you want a promotion tomorrow, you better work hard today.
6. Pray.  Don’t underestimate the power and importance of prayer in your career journey.  Prayer isn’t a magic wand to get you to the corner office.  Instead, prayer provides an opportunity for you to hear from God on your direction.  Prayers may seem passive, but I believe it’s active.

When was the last time you received a promotion?  What steps did you take to get the promotion?  What steps are you taking now to prepare for your next promotion?

Did you sign up for the 7 Week Stretch Challenge yet?  Sign up below!

The Healthy Stretch of Leadership

I’ve been leading people for over 20 years now and in that time I’ve discovered leadership stretches us in 5 different ways. Being stretched is a good thing, it’s the opposite of letting us retreat into ourselves. When we retreat into ourselves, we find what we think is safety, comfort, rest, protection, but this is just a facade. What really happens is we become unhealthy, self-serving, risk averse, lethargic leaders with poor attitudes and hearts that can grow toxic.

The apostle Paul issued the war cry of the stretched leader when he said ‘For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.’ (Phil 1:21) My life for the cause regardless of the cost, as the ultimate cost will be worth all I have. So how are we stretched as leaders and what happens to us when we aren’t?

I want to share with you what I’ve discovered about being stretched in leadership. Every leader begins the leadership journey with the same five components. The role of the leader is to steward these components toward anonymity, away from ambition, so as their influence is aligned to God’s influence, the cause they lead and the God whom they lead for is glorified. Allow me to elaborate.

Stretch 1 – Passion into Wisdom

Every leader is passionate when they first start. They are fired up, keen and excited, wanting to change the world. Passion however dilutes if it is not stretched. If passion is not pulled toward and informed by wisdom, passion at best fades to disengagement or at worst results in recklessness.

When a passionate leader presents an idea or initiative to their people they should be seeking the wisdom and not approval of those they lead. Approval does not necessarily result in the success of the idea, but wisdom always does. The passionate leader needs to seek out wisdom, for maturity to take place.

Stretch 2 – Trust into Integrity

Integrity is a leader’s greatest asset; it is from integrity that influence flows. Every leader begins leading with an empty integrity account, but they are trusted to have influence, all be it in small amounts. If a leader chooses integrity always, the trust they build increases.

Through every decision a leader either builds or bankrupts trust. Building trust is acting with integrity, so the trust others place in you is rewarded. To not build trust is to play the role of the hypocrite, pretending to be someone your followers will eventually discover you’re not. Leaders who seek integrity always hunger for the truth, whilst using it as a mirror.

Stretch 3 – Invincibility into Humility

When a leader realizes their weaknesses they begin to embrace humility. Every emerging leader is not aware of their weaknesses yet, as they’ve not been leading, but as a result they do not know what will disqualify them from leadership. They feel invincible.

It takes courage to examine yourself and have others do the same, to discover your limitations, blind spots and weaknesses. People frequently think humility is just thinking less of yourself. Humility isn’t thinking of yourself less it’s thinking about yourself less. Leadership is not about you, it’s about the God whom you lead for and the people you lead, period!

Stretch 4 – Confidence into Security

Even the most unconfident leaders begin with confidence. It’s why they decided to step onto the leadership platform. The direction they steward their confidence however determines how long they remain on and how far-reaching their platform becomes. Insecurity is not a lack of confidence; it’s the investment of confidence in the wrong things.

Every leader needs to explore what they have invested their confidence in and potentially reinvest it in something else. Insecurity breeds in us when we trust something that is untrustworthy, constantly changing, and ever unreliable. A leader needs to place their confidence in God and lead out of the security, which accompanies this.

Stretch 5 – Commitment to Resilience

Resilience is the most valuable trait a leader can have. Without it, leading is horrendously difficult. When a leader starts leading they are committed. That is until the first set back, knock down, disruption, heartbreak, frustration. It’s at that point they need to decide if they will grit their teeth and push on.

Resilience is the repeated and constant decision to not give up, to stay committed. A leader needs to constantly make this decision and in so doing, deepens the well from which they lead. Commitments can come and go, or rise and fall on any number of variables, but resilience is a white-knuckle refusal to give up. The greatest leaders are resilient.

Leading people will stretch you, it’s meant to, but you need to ensure you’re stretched in the right way. For more on this and to explore these and other concepts further you can pickup my latest book The Anonymous Leader: An Unambitious Pursuit of Influence.

How are you stretched as a leader and what is the result of that stretching in your influence?

It’s an honor today to host Ralph Mayhew.  Ralph and I connected through the blog world several months ago at Joe Lalonde’s site.  Despite living on the other side of the world (Ralph lives in Australia), we share several common bonds: a passion for leadership and a passion for Christ.  I hope Ralph’s post today challenges you to become a better leader.  His new book is fantastic!  And I’d highly recommend you pick up your own copy if you’re serious about becoming a better leader.

BIO:

Ralph Mayhew’s brand new Amazon bestseller The Anonymous Leader: An Unambitious Pursuit of Influence, offers a fresh understanding of leadership and influence, and is available at www.theanonymousleader.com. He also blogs at www.ralphmayhew.com.

The Best Way To Keep Your Best Employees

Why do you think employees leave?

More money?  A bigger, better title?  A more flexible schedule?

If you are a leader in your organization, this is a question you need to understand.  Employee turnover leads to additional hiring and training costs for the company and typically leads to a decline in overall team enthusiasm and productivity.

In his 2013 Forbes.com article (Six Reasons Your Best Employees Quit You), Louis Efron gives these six reasons your employees are leaving your company:

1. No vision
2. No connection to the big picture
3. No empathy
4. No (effective) motivation
5. No future
6. No fun

And in his 2005 article for The Center for Association Leadership, Leigh Branham lists seven reasons employees leave.  Two of these reasons include:

• There is too little coaching and feedback.
• Workers feel devalued and unrecognized.

As leaders, we have a challenge and responsibility to address these shortcomings.

Today, I will help you identify one of the key action steps you can take to positively change things.  By implementing my suggestion, your team members will get the coaching they desire, they will gain a greater feeling of value, they will feel like they are better understood, and they will experience a higher level of motivation.

Today, I challenge you to implement regular one-on-one meetings with your team members.  A regular one-on-one meeting will make all the difference in giving your team members just what they need to feel valued, appreciated, motivated, and excited for their future in your organization.

Here’s my story:

A few years ago, I started having monthly one-on-one meetings with my team members.

As an operations manager in the construction industry, I’m challenged to balance my time as I’m responsible to make sure my group is operating as planned. I meet with my team members monthly on an individual basis to review their projects from a financial, resource, risk, and customer perspective. These monthly meetings, which typically last about an hour, provide a pretty good snapshot of things from a business perspective, but they don’t provide a lot of time for diving deeper personally.

I’m also responsible for participating in other department and company meetings. Again, these meetings are important for certain aspects of our business success, but they typically don’t provide opportunity for connecting on a more personal level.

I’ve heard it said that “It’s business, it’s NOT personal.”  Well, I disagree.  As a leader in the workforce, I have a responsibility care for my team members.  For me, this means our relationships in the business world are meant to be personal.

How can we take time to connect with our team members with all the different demands on our time?

This is the question that rolled around in my head as first started considering the possibility of implementing regular one-on-one meetings.  I have so many things on my plate already.  One-on-one meetings just didn’t seem to fit into my already busy schedule.

How can you NOT take time to connect with your team members?

And so…I took Matt’s challenge and encouragement to heart.  And I started holding monthly one-on-one meetings with my team members.

We talk about business and the challenges that they are facing on a project or assignment.  And we also talk about life outside of work.  I’ve learned about their interests, their passions, and their families.

For the most part, these meetings have been 30-40 minutes each.  I use a one-page outline to guide our discussion and to take notes which helps me capture details of our discussion.  I first ask my team member for an update on how they are doing and what has them busy.  After 15-20 minutes of catching up, I typically have 5-10 minutes of items I want to cover with them.  We finish our meeting with an opportunity for them to ask for help.  With 10 direct reports, these notes have been essential to helping me remember our conversations.  And it helps with my follow through on any action items that I have taken from our meeting.  (NOTE: You can download Matt McWilliam’s one-on-one meeting template here.)

What difference does it make if you know your team members?

It makes all the difference in the world.

The average working person spends 9-10 hours of their days at work – every day. (That’s two-thirds or more of their waking hours).  Most people work over 2100 hours every year.  If my math is correct, most people work about 80,000 hours in their life time.  However you do the math, we spend a lot of time at work.

We are relational beings.  We are made to connect with others and to be in community with others.

We are missing a huge opportunity to connect with others if we go to work, come home, get our paycheck, but fail to connect with our co-workers.

Intentional connections

My one-on-one meetings have helped me be intentional in connecting with my team.  It’s helped my team to feel more connected to me.  And it’s also helped my team succeed from a business perspective.

I’m so thankful I listened to Matt and started having one-on-one meetings with my team.

Regular one-on-one meetings with our team members leads to reduced employee turnover, more satisfied employees, a better culture in your business, and greater business success.  I have also discovered that one-on-one meetings provide an excellent place to discuss employee development.  My team members have pursued advanced educational opportunities as a result of our discussions during our one-on-one meetings.  They’ve also taken steps to advance further on the road to achieving their career goals.

Call to Action:

• If you are leading a team, it’s time for you to implement regular one-on-one meetings (if you’re not doing this already).
• If you are not leading a team but you feel disconnected from your boss or your organization, it’s time for you to ask your boss to start having one-on-one meetings with you.

Do you have one-on-one meetings with your team?  If so, how have they made a difference?  If not, what are you waiting for?

Do you have one-on-one meetings with your boss?  How have these meetings helped you?

Looking to STRETCH yourself?  Sign-up today for the 7 Week Stretch Challenge:

Book Review: The 3 Gaps – Are You Making a Difference? by @HyrumWSmith

Gaps in our lives drain the power needed to make a positive difference in the world.

Hyrum W. Smith

The 3 Gaps: Are You Making a Difference? by Hyrum W. Smith officially releases today (January 11, 2016).  I received a preview copy of this book courtesy of Becky Robinson at Weaving Influence.

I took time to read this book between Christmas and New Years, and it provided a few great insights and ideas for me to pursue as I seek to clarify my beliefs, values, and priorities.

While I’m still wrestling with Smith’s assertion that the pursuit of personal inner peace is the ultimate goal of man.  I deeply agree with the thought that we can make a big difference in our lives and in the lives of those around us by clarifying our beliefs, by confirming our governing values, and by intentionally managing our time.

The 3 Gaps: Are You Making a Difference?is a quick read that will challenge readers to fill the gaps they may have in their beliefs, values, and time.  Personally, I was challenged after reading The 3 Gaps to write my own personal constitution, to define my governing values, and to practice the discipline of daily planning.  If you are looking for a book with practical advice to help you stretch, you should consider picking up a copy of this book.

What are the biggest challenges you are currently facing when it comes to your beliefs, your values, and your time?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

(Please note:  I received a copy of The 3 Gaps: Are You Making a Difference? for free as a gift from Becky Robinson at Weaving Influence.  I was not required to provide a favorable review.  I believe this book can be a helpful tool for being more intentional with your life.

Also to note:  There are affiliate links in this post.  Should you purchase The 3 Gaps: Are You Making a Difference? by clicking one of these links, I receive a small percentage of the purchase.  These funds are used to support The Stretched Blog and to extend ministry and missions to Guatemala.  Thank you!)

13 Things I Learned Through My Shark Tank Experience

Competing against three other finalists, I was not certain of the outcome.  I’m happy to report, my project won the competition and the investment to move ahead.

My experience in Phoenix was exciting, uplifting, inspiring, and educational.  Specifically, I learned a lot through my shark tank experience.  Here’s what I learned:

13 Things I Learned Through My Shark Tank Experience

1. Be creative.  When I was asked to come with ideas to submit to the Shark Tank contest, I had to put my thinking cap on.  In order to have opportunities, you have to be creative.

2. Be bold.  Dream big, and don’t be afraid to ask for investments.  When I initially submitted my idea, I wasn’t thinking large enough.  After getting feedback and advice from others, I decided to triple my request for investment.  We limit ourselves and the potential to do great things when we fail to be bold in our dreams.

3. Be prepared.  To be ready to face a panel of sharks and an active audience, you have to be prepared.  You must know your idea.  You must understand the math behind your request.  You must consider all the questions you will get.  In my case, I also had to make sure my technology was working properly before my presentations.

4. Be flexible.  Things don’t always go as planned.  You might forget a key point in your presentation.  The technical side of your presentation make not work correctly.  Your demonstration may not function the way you expected.  You have to adapt.  You have to keep going.

5. Be willing to ask for help.  I have been very busy at work, and I had to ask for help from my peers. I tapped into someone to help me with the technical side of my presentation.  I asked someone to watch me rehearse.  I asked a couple of people to help me with the actual presentation.  It takes a village, and we have to be willing to use the village.

6. Be grateful.  This was an amazing opportunity.  I am so thankful for all the people who made it happen.  Over the next few days, I will be writing many thank you notes to express my appreciation.

7. Be friendly.  In the green room, I had the opportunity to talk with the other finalists.  We shared our ideas.  We encouraged each other.  There is a tendency to be hostile when dealing with our competition – especially in the business world.  In the golden rule of business presentations, we should treat others the way we want to be treated.

8. Be humble.  Deflect praise to others.  I appreciated the exposure to top line management, and I want the notoriety that comes with this opportunity.  But I want to make sure others are recognized for their efforts.  It’s possible to be confident and humble at the same time, and humility is an important virtue worth pursuing and practicing in business and in life.

9. Be confident.  During the practices for my presentation, it became clear I was not being direct in my request for funds.  Thanks to some coaching, I shifted by sales pitch.  I was able to be more confident in my presentation when I realized how much I believed in my idea.

10. Be gracious.  I had an opportunity to get positive feedback from so many top line managers as a result of my presentation.  I also had the opportunity to respond to some tough questions from the sharks and the audience.  In all cases, providing a polite and courteous response was the best way to represent my idea, my office, and myself.

11. Be ready to take the next step.  After I received the news that my project won the contest, I was initially very happy.  Then I realized the work was just beginning.  Getting the funding for my project was only the beginning.  Now, I have to fully develop my implementation plan and execute on this plan.  There is a lot of work ahead.

12. Be inspired.  Towards the end of the day, I sat in on the presentation for one of the other finalists.  It was exciting to hear their idea.  My shark tank experience reminded me that people have great ideas.  We just need to stop long enough to listen.  As a result of my experience, I’m inspired to promote a local innovation day or experience in my own office.

13. Be inspiring.  I cannot tell you how many people came up to me to comment on my idea.  They are excited to try something like this in their location.  When you put yourself out there, you have the opportunity to inspire.  Don’t waste the opportunity.

Now, it’s time to get busy implementing my shark tank idea.  It’s also time to continue dreaming.  We all have the opportunity to be innovative.

How are you being innovative?  How are you promoting innovation?  What stops you from being innovative?  What keeps you going down the path of innovation?  What have you learned as a result of sharing your innovative ideas with others?

How To Connect With Your Team Members

Do you feel connected to your team?

Several months ago, Matt McWilliams encouraged his readers to establish and maintain weekly one-on-one meetings with their direct reports. At the time, I was contemplating what I could do to connect with my team on a deeper level.

As an operations manager in the construction industry, I’m challenged to balance my time as I’m responsible to make sure my group is operating as planned. I meet with my team members monthly on an individual basis to review their projects to review their projects from a financial, resource, risk, and customer perspective. These monthly meetings, which typically last about an hour, provide a pretty good snapshot of things from a business perspective, but they don’t provide a lot of time for diving deeper personally.

I’m also responsible for participating in other department and company meetings. Again, these meetings are important for certain aspects of our business success, but they typically don’t provide opportunity for connecting on a more personal level.

I’ve heard it said that “It’s business, it’s NOT personal.” Well, I disagree. As a Christian leader in the workforce, I have a responsibility (and privilege) to represent Christ well. For me, this means our relationships in the business world are meant to be personal.

How can we take time to connect with our team members with all the different demands on our time?

This is the question that rolled around in my head as I read Matt’s post. I have so many things on my plate already. One-on-one meetings just don’t fit into my already busy schedule.

But Matt challenged me with this question:

How can you NOT take time to connect with your team members?

And so…I took Matt’s challenge and encouragement to heart. I’ll confess, I haven’t followed Matt’s recipe exactly. Instead of weekly one-on-one

We talk about business and the challenges that they are facing on a project or assignment. And we also talk about life outside of work. I’ve learned about their interests, their passions, and their families.meetings, I started with monthly one-on-one meetings. For the most part, these meetings have been 30-40 minutes each. I use a one-page outline to guide our discussion and to take notes which helps me capture details of our discussion. With 12 direct reports, these notes have been essential to helping me remember our conversations.  And it helps with my follow through on any action items that I have taken from our meeting. (NOTE: You can download Matt’s one-on-one meeting template here.)

What difference does it make if you know your team members?

It makes all the difference in the world.

The average working person spends 9-10 hours of their days at work – every day. (That’s two-thirds or more of their waking hours). Most people work over 2100 hours every year. If my math is correct, most people work about 80,000 hours in their life time. However you do the math, we spend a lot of time at work.

We are relational beings. We are made to connect with others and to be in community with others.

We are missing a huge opportunity to connect with others if we go to work, come home, get our paycheck, but fail to connect with our co-workers.

Intentional connections

My one-on-one meetings have helped me be intentional in connecting with my team. It’s helped my team to feel more connected to me. And it’s also helped my team succeed from a business perspective.

I’m so thankful I listened to Matt and started having one-on-one meetings with my team.

Do you have one-on-one meetings with your team?  If so, how have they made a difference?  If not, what are you waiting for? 

(Note:  My article originally appeared at mattmcwilliams.com.)

6 Ways To Reward Your Employees

Rewarding employees appropriately is a key aspect of improving employee performance.  It’s essential that employees are recognized for a job well done.  Sometimes this recognition is tied to a monetary reward, and sometimes it’s necessary to find non-monetary methods for rewarding your team.

Inappropriate rewards could easily work against the overall performance of the business and it’s employees.  Rewarding employees who don’t deserve could be argued as grace, but this kind of “reward” sends the wrong message to employees, and it sets teams up for mediocrity.

Appropriate rewards push individual performance to new levels, and they raise the bar on overall company performance.  Here are a few reward types for you to consider as you seek to improve your team and company.

6 Ways To Reward Your Employees

1. Thank You Note.  Matt McWilliams wrote about the Thank You Revolution in his eBook available for free when you sign up at his blog.  And I wrote a guest post for him titled, The Power of Gratitude.  Rewarding employees should start with gratitude.  A simple handwritten thank you note is all it takes many times tell employees that they’ve done well or done something that deserves recognition.  Last week, I wrote to many of my direct reports to thank them for their hard work in bringing our fiscal year to a successful completion.  These notes gave me an opportunity to specifically recall good things that my team members have done this year.  One of my team members took time to write me back this week:  “Thanks for the card.  It means a lot.”  His simple response affirms the power of a simple thank you note.  Don’t underestimate the power of a simple thank you note.
2. Department Meeting Shoutout.  Let’s face it.  It’s easy to get caught up in the regular business items in agenda of a standard office meeting.  Make it part of your meeting agenda to recognize employees who have gone above and beyond the call of duty since the last meeting.  Maybe an employee did something to wow a customer.  Maybe they were key to a sale or project success.  Honor them in front of their peers.  It shows them their efforts are appreciated.  It demonstrates to others in the office the type of actions and behavior worth following.
3. Small Financial Reward Program.  Our company set up a reward program which permits managers and fellow employees to recognize employees who have done something special.  The rewards start at $25 and go up from there.  A small reward of this nature is a great way to show family members how their loved one is appreciated.  These rewards are often used by employees to take their spouses out to dinner or to purchase something for the home they wouldn’t have purchased otherwise.  This may not be possible for your company, but it’s something worth considering if your company can swing it.  A small financial reward of this nature rewards employees, and it encourages employees to do things which will benefit the company.
4. Merit Based Increases.  This is the time of year I decide on pay increases for my team members.  I have a fixed amount to work with as dictated by my company.  In order to reward high performers, it’s crucial I provide the higher merit increases to the employees who have earned it through their performance over the past year.  There is a market fairness factor that plays into this decision.  I am doing a disservice to my team though if I don’t reward team members based on their performance.  If I decided to give everyone the same increase regarding their performance, I would not be sending a positive message that would improve the overall performance of the company.
5. Incentive.  Finding ways to provide incentives to employees can be a great way to promote desired behaviors and outcome.  At our office our sales members are paid based on commission.  They have a huge incentive to sell profitable projects.  Our project managers receive an incentive bonus at the end of the year.  The incentive is based on individual project slip along with a couple of other key performance indicators.  And our management encouraged to work together towards overall business success as part of the management incentive program.  Managing your payment program to make room for this kind of program can be a great way to enhance the overall performance of your team and your business.
6. Special Assignment.  When an employee does something good, it is often a sign they are ready for the next challenge.  When a team members does well, give them the opportunity to try something different, something more challenging, and something that will draw attention to them in the future.  When one of my team members does a great job on one of their projects, I like to assign them a high profile project or a special assignment.  While this kind of reward will not immediately impact the paycheck, it will give your team member a chance to stretch, to grow, and to feel special.  Sometimes this is the best reward!

I’m sure there are some other ways to reward employees.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the above list and your ideas for rewarding employees.  Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

How do you reward your team members?  How does your company reward its employees?  Do you think rewards work?  Why or why not?

For more great articles on this topic:

• Reward Your People by Dan Black
• What Encouragement Is…And Isn’t by Matt McWilliams
• The Best Ways To Reward Employees by Entrepreneur.com
• 101 Super Effective Ways To Reward Your Employees by Peter Economy at Inc.com
• 25 Low-Cost Ways To Reward Employees by Kevin Kruse at Forbes.com

The Discipline of Transitioning Well – 4 Tips for Transitioning from One Event to the Next

When my son was a toddler, he struggled when it was time to do something else like go to bed, take a bath, or get in the car.  He was busy doing something else, and he didn’t like an abrupt end to what he was doing.  After enduring several tantrums, my wife came up with a plan.  She suggested we give Isaac a ten minute warning before it was time to do the next thing.  This gave him the chance to finish up what he was doing, and it gave him a heads up that something else was coming.  This strategy worked wonders in how Isaac handled transitions.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was talking with fellow youth leaders at our church.  We were talking about being ready to interact with students at least ten minutes before our meeting starts.  This requires me to put aside my thoughts from my previous appointments.

Too often, I abruptly move from one appointment on my schedule to the next without the opportunity to shift my mindset.  If I’m going to practice the discipline of being present, I must learn to first practice the discipline of transitioning well.  A solid plan for transition will help me make the most of my experiences before and after my schedule shifts from one thing to another.

Here are four tips for being intentional about your times of transition from one activity to the next:

4 Tips for Transitioning from One Event to the Next

1. Give yourself a buffer between appointments.  When I go from one thing directly to another thing, I don’t give myself an opportunity to transition well.  Learn to build ten minute buffers into your schedule so you have time to shift your attention.
2. Take notes to sum up your ending appointment.  One of the reasons we struggle to transition is that we haven’t left our previous appointment in a place of closure.  Our brains continue to process what we were just doing.  During your time of transition, take a few notes to help you remember where things were left in case you need to return to this activity later.  Use a journal, a note taking application for your phone or tablet, or a voice recorder to document how you are leaving things regarding your earlier appointment.
3. Take time to consider the objectives for your upcoming engagement.  If you fail to plan, you should plan to fail.  Use the minutes before your next appointment to plan – to process the goals for what is ahead.  For example, I should plan to interact with at least three students as I’m driving from my house to church for youth group.  Considering your objectives gets your brain ready for the next appointment, and it helps you to be more effective when you get there.
4. Make it a priority to make the most of every opportunity.  When we fail to transition well from one activity to the next, we are missing out on making the most of the present experience.  The discipline of transitioning well will minimize the possibility of wasting our time.

As I head into a busy day at the office, these are tips I need to remember TODAY.

How would your world be different if you made the decision to practice the discipline of transitioning well?  How has intentional transition made a difference in your life?