Transform Empty Accountability into Real Accountability

Accountability has long had a finger-pointing overtone that often triggers a fight or flight response (Read: defensiveness). There’s a sense of being reprimanded for what hasn’t been done.

Being “held accountable” conjures dangling feet as a gangster type holds you up against a wall.

It’s also a empty catchall buzzword – almost always directed toward others. “We’d be more successful if only our team was more accountable.” 


And yet the reason accountability often gets an eye-roll, is it feels condescending and demeaning. When most of us agree to do things, when we take on commitments, it’s with the best of intentions. We think we can. We want to. We hope to. We strive to. We desire to complete said task by the time we said we would. We’re not liars, deceivers, connivers, agreeing to take something on with no intention of following through.

So how did we get here? Where we desperately want accountability in our organizations and yet, it feels elusive. 

5 Ways to Transform Accountability

1) Change the definition:

Accountability, said another way, is the ABILITY to COUNT. When we choose to be responsible – ABLE to RESPOND, then we have a chance to make a meaningful difference through our work.

• A chance to create progress
• A chance to help, to support, to create, to demonstrate, to alleviate, to revitalize, to expand, to open, to simplify…
• A chance to forward the meaningfulness of what we’re up to in the world as a workplace community

Real accountability is not about imposing punishments on people when they mess up. It's about getting in the habit of giving an account of performance on an ongoing basis. For the individual, it's the ability and willingness to follow through on your own promises and commitments.

2) Change the manager approach and employee experience:

Accountability is often a top down experience. As the parent scolds the child for not doing chores, the manager questions the employee for not doing tasks.

As a manager, accountability is your responsibility to actively notice your people. To witness them – to praise their successes when they are able to respond and when their work makes a meaningful contribution. As well as support, guide or direct them in their challenges when they are struggling or not bringing their “A” game.

3) Change ownership and add peer witnessing:

Implement “Cadence of Accountability,” a rhythmic meeting process that comes from the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution. Once a week small work teams come together for a 10-15 minute standing meeting in which each individual self-defines and declares the 1-3 tasks they are committing to accomplishing that week to strategically move forward the current team goal. And they report on their follow through (or lack thereof) on the task(s) they declared the week before. This simple process is great on several levels – my favorite of which is empowering peer pressure and support.

4) Change the context from morality to workability:

Accountability isn’t about being wrong or right, or about someone being good or bad. It’s simply about follow through on getting the work that needs to be done, done. When there’s a lack of alignment between commitments and completion, refer to the “Whole Integrity Checklist.” 

5) Think of accountability as a dial with five steps (Or notches):

You start at the low end and then turn up the dial if necessary.

It’s the first three steps — what are called the mention, the invitation, and the conversation — that most managers skip over, leading to employee disengagement and cultural stagnation. The last two steps, what are called the boundary and the limit, cover the ground of PIPs and termination, albeit in a far more humanistic and supportive frame. 

Fortunately, most managers have to use these more extreme steps only rarely; unfortunately, too many managers jump right to them, bypassing the first three steps and leaving employees blindsided by tough feedback that too frequently falls on deaf ears.

The first three steps cover the essential skills of naming, framing, and unpacking performance issues in a way that quickly moves from surface-level events to meaningful and actionable personal growth themes:

The mention. The first step is naming small but problematic behaviors in an informal way in real time. By pulling an employee aside to put words to what you’re noticing, instead of waiting for a crisis, you start to build a relationship of mutual respect. You show that you genuinely care about their growth by acknowledging that they’re overwhelmed instead of pretending you don’t see and by helping them find their contribution to a conflict instead of letting it fester.

The invitation. We’re great at seeing patterns in other people’s behavior; it’s harder to see those patterns in ourselves. The invitation is taking the time to help your employee connect the dots. For example, let’s say you saw typos in a team member’s customer email on Monday, they seemed disengaged in a team meeting on Wednesday, and then there was a miscommunication with a teammate on Thursday. Ask them what those events might have in common, or point to a deeper theme.

The conversation. This is the place to go deeper, by asking questions that guide people to the “aha!” moment, when they discover for themselves how changing this pattern at work would have positive impacts at home. It might sound something like this: “We’ve been talking about you taking on too many projects and the impact that’s having on the quality of the most important ones. I’m not asking for you to share what you come up with here, but one question that helps me is, ‘Where does this pattern show up in my personal life, and what would be the benefit if I stopped?’”

The key to building the bridge between work performance and personal growth is to focus on impacts. How are people showing up in a way that is making life harder, more complicated, or more frustrating for the people around them? It’s your job to guide them to make those connections. It’s their job to do the work from there.

In short, be observant and address problems that you see. Follow up with your employee to let them know it’s important. Then walk it down with them — to the place where the line between personal and professional growth disappears. Not because you’ve gone over that line, but because you’re treating them as a whole person.

At work as in life, we all need the people who care about us to reflect us back to ourselves, to be centered enough in themselves to let us work through our initial defensiveness and excuses so that we can let them go and get back to the work of becoming a better version of ourselves. Accountability can help do that.

In case you missed it, check out our related articles: 

How to Get Clarity, Accountability and Results in 5 Minutes

Accountability: How the Best Managers Get People To Take Ownership

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com
Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, branches, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Building Rapport: Establishing Strong Two-Way Connections

Establishing Strong Two-Way Connections

Reach out and build a rapport with those around you.

Have you ever known people who have a knack for connecting with others? No matter who they meet, they manage to create a sense of trust and understanding within minutes.

It doesn't matter what industry you're in or what position you hold – knowing how to build rapport can bring you countless opportunities. After all, when you have a rapport with someone, he or she will usually want to help you to succeed.

Some people might argue that this is all a natural gift – either you can build rapport with people or you can't. However, this is not the whole story. Rapport can develop naturally, but anyone can also nurture and improve rapport, just as they can any other skill.

So what is rapport, and how can you become skilled at developing it? We'll examine this, and more, in this article.

What Is Rapport?

Rapport forms the basis of meaningful, close and harmonious relationships between people. It's the sense of connection that you get when you meet someone you like and trust, and whose point of view you understand. It's the bond that forms when you discover that you share one another's values and priorities in life.

According to researchers Linda Tickle-Degnen and Robert Rosenthal, when you have a rapport with someone, you share:

• Mutual attentiveness: you're both focused on, and interested in, what the other person is saying or doing.

• Positivity: you're both friendly and happy, and you show care and concern for one another.

• Coordination: you feel "in sync" with one another, so that you share a common understanding. Your energy levels, tone and body language are also similar.

This connection can appear instantly – when you "click" with someone – or develop slowly, over time. It can grow naturally, without intent, or you can deliberately set out to build it.

Rapport isn't just a tool for building relationships, though; it's often the foundation of success. When you have a rapport with someone, you're better placed to influence, learn and teach, particularly as the trust that you've built up means other people are more likely to accept your ideas, to share information, and to create opportunities together.

Whether you're being interviewed  for a job, selling  something, or trying to improve a relationship , knowing how to build rapport can help you to perform successfully.

Tip:

Rapport is similar to trust. You can build trust  and rapport simultaneously, but rapport focuses more on establishing a bond or connection, whereas trust relies more on establishing a reputation for reliability, consistency and keeping your promises.

How to Build Rapport

Rapport must be a two-way connection between people, so it's not something that you can create by yourself. You can, however, learn how to stimulate it by following these six steps.

Warning:

Use your best judgment when applying these techniques. Be sure not to use them cynically or dishonestly, to sell people something that they wouldn't otherwise want, for example, or to manipulate them into a course of action that's against their best interests.

1. Check Your Appearance

First impressions count , and your appearance should help you to connect with people, not create a barrier. A good rule of thumb is to dress just a little "better" than the people you're about to meet. However, if you arrive and see that you're overdressed, you can quickly dress down to suit the situation.

2. Remember the Basics

Always remember the basics of good communication :

• Be culturally appropriate .
• Smile.
• Relax .
• Remember  and use people's names throughout the conversation.
• Hold your head up and maintain a good posture.
• Listen carefully and attentively .
• Don't outstay your welcome.
• These basic tenets form the foundation of great communication. It will be hard to establish rapport without them, as they will help you to establish trust, empathy, and a feeling in people that you are listening to them.

3. Find Common Ground

Identifying common ground can help to establish rapport, so use small talk  to find something that you both share.

Most people like talking about themselves, and the more genuine interest you show in them, the more likely they are to relax and "open up." Use open-ended questions to discover personal information: perhaps you attended the same college, share the same hobbies, grew up in the same city, or support the same sports team. Even just expressing your shared frustration at the traffic that delayed your journeys to work can help you to draw closer to someone.

Tip 1:

It's important to be genuine  and sincere, and to avoid overdoing things. Don't make up an interest or try too hard, just to create rapport. Not only can this seem desperate and off-putting, but it can also dent your credibility!

Tip 2:

Laughter is a great tool for building rapport, but do use humor with care. Not everyone can tell a joke, and what might seem like acceptable sarcasm to you could cause offense to somebody else. If you think there's a possibility that a comment might be taken the wrong way, don't make it.

4. Create Shared Experiences

Rapport can't grow without human interaction, and a great way to interact is to create new, shared experiences. Shared experiences can be as simple as attending the same conference session together, or as complex as cooperating on a new management process. Working collaboratively to define problems, devise solutions, and design strategies, for example, can help to bring you and the other person closer.

5. Be Empathic

Empathy  is about understanding other people by seeing things from their perspective, and recognizing their emotions. So, to understand and share another person's perspective, you need to learn what makes him tick. As we've already mentioned, many people enjoy talking about their likes and dislikes, needs and wants, and problems and successes, so ask open-ended questions and give them space to talk.

You need to really hear what they say, so that you can respond intelligently and with curiosity. So, it's important to be a good listener , and to fine-tune your emotional intelligence . 

Tip:

It's hard to establish rapport with someone who wants to talk only about herself, so try to balance the conversation. Aim to share as much as the other person does. You'll both feel more comfortable as a result.

6. Mirror and Match

Research shows that we prefer people who we perceive to be just like ourselves. Mirroring and matching are techniques for building rapport by making yourself more like the other person.

How you do this is about more than just what you say. Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell found that the words we speak account for just seven percent of our communication. The nature of our voice makes up a greater percentage (38 percent), and our body language makes up as much as 55 percent. So, you'll be missing a trick if you don't consider the "whole picture" of human communication.

So, try these techniques to build rapport:

• Watch the other person's body language , including gesture, posture and expression. If, for example, he rests his chin on his left hand, consider mirroring him by doing the same with your right hand. To match it, you would use your left hand.

• Adopt a similar temperament. If the other person is introverted or extroverted, shy or exuberant, you should behave in the same way. If he's reserved, for example, then you should be, too, or you'll risk being seen as brash or invasive.

• Use similar language . If he uses simple, direct words, then you should, too. If he speaks in technical language, then match that style. You can also reiterate key or favorite words or phrases.

• Match the other person's speech patterns, such as tone, tempo and volume. For instance, if he speaks softly and slowly, then lower the volume and tempo of your voice. (Research by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation suggests that this is the most effective way to establish rapport. It's subtle, but it makes the other person feel comfortable and that he's being understood.)

Discretion and common sense are essential when mirroring and matching. Don't, for example, mimic every word and gesture. If you do, you risk causing offense. Be subtle and aim to reach a point where you're naturally synchronizing your behavior, so that the other person is unaware of what you're doing.

Mirroring and matching can be difficult skills to master. However, remember that we all unconsciously mirror and match family, friends and colleagues every day. If you want to practice, try using role playing .

Tip:

If people know about body language, they'll pick up that you're mirroring and this might have the opposite effect to the one that you want. So, don't be mechanistic – be relaxed and appropriate.

Re-Establishing Rapport

It takes time to rebuild rapport when it has been lost.

First, address why you lost rapport in the first place. Be humble  and explain honestly and simply what happened. If you need to apologize , do so.

Next, focus on ways of repairing any broken trust. Put in extra work if you need to, and keep your word. Transparency and genuine concern for the other person's needs will go a long way to rebuilding trust and re-establishing rapport.

Key Points

You build rapport when you develop mutual trust, friendship and affinity with someone.

Building rapport can be incredibly beneficial to your career – it helps you to establish good interpersonal relationships, and this can open many doors for you.

Follow these six steps to build rapport:

1. Check your appearance.
2. Remember the basics of good communication.
3. Find common ground.
4. Create shared experiences.
5. Be empathic.
6. Mirror and match mannerisms and speech appropriately.

Rapport is best built over the long term. However, you can use these strategies to build it quite quickly, if you need to.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, facilities services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Building Good Work Relationships

Making Work Enjoyable and Productive

How good are the relationships that you have with your colleagues?

In this article, we're looking at how you can build strong, positive relationships at work. We'll see why it's important to have good working relationships, and we'll look at how to strengthen your relationships with people that you don't naturally get on with.

Why Have Good Relationships?

Human beings are naturally social creatures – we crave friendship and positive interactions, just as we do food and water. So it makes sense that the better our relationships are at work, the happier and more productive we're going to be.

Good working relationships give us several other benefits: our work is more enjoyable when we have good relationships with those around us. Also, people are more likely to go along with changes that we want to implement, and we're more innovative and creative.

What's more, good relationships give us freedom: instead of spending time and energy overcoming the problems associated with negative relationships, we can, instead, focus on opportunities.

Good relationships are also often necessary if we hope to develop our careers. After all, if your boss doesn't trust you, it's unlikely that he or she will consider you when a new position opens up. Overall, we all want to work with people we're on good terms with.

We also need good working relationships with others in our professional circle. Customers, suppliers, and key stakeholders are all essential to our success. So, it's important to build and maintain good relations with these people.

Defining a Good Relationship

There are several characteristics that make up good, healthy working relationships:

Trust – This is the foundation of every good relationship. When you trust your team and colleagues, you form a powerful bond that helps you work and communicate more effectively. If you trust the people you work with, you can be open and honest in your thoughts and actions, and you don't have to waste time and energy "watching your back."

Mutual Respect – When you respect the people that you work with, you value their input and ideas, and they value yours. Working together, you can develop solutions based on your collective insight, wisdom and creativity.

Mindfulness – This means taking responsibility for your words and actions. Those who are mindful are careful and attend to what they say, and they don't let their own negative emotions impact the people around them.

Welcoming Diversity – People with good relationships not only accept diverse people and opinions, but they welcome them. For instance, when your friends and colleagues offer different opinions from yours, you take the time to consider what they have to say, and factor their insights into your decision-making.

Open Communication – We communicate all day, whether we're sending emails and IMs, or meeting face-to-face. The better and more effectively you communicate with those around you, the richer your relationships will be. All good relationships depend on open, honest communication.

Where to Build Good Relationships

Although we should try to build and maintain good working relationships with everyone, there are certain relationships that deserve extra attention.

For instance, you'll likely benefit from developing good relationships with key stakeholders in your organization. These are the people who have a stake in your success or failure. Forming a bond with these people will help you ensure that your projects, and career, stay on track.

Once you've created a list of colleagues who have an interest in your projects and career, you can devote time to building and managing these relationships.

Clients and customers are another group who deserve extra attention. Think of the last time you had to deal with an unhappy customer; it was probably challenging and draining. Although you may not be able to keep everyone happy 100 percent of the time, maintaining honest, trusting relationships with your customers can help you ensure that if things do go wrong, damage is kept to a minimum. Good relationships with clients and customers can also lead to extra sales, career advancement, and a more rewarding life.

How to Build Good Work Relationships

So, what can you do to build better relationships at work?

Identify Your Relationship Needs
Look at your own relationship needs. Do you know what you need from others? And do you know what they need from you?

Understanding these needs can be instrumental in building better relationships.

Schedule Time to Build Relationships
Devote a portion of your day toward relationship building, even if it's just 15 minutes, perhaps broken up into five-minute segments.

For example, you could pop into someone's office during lunch, reply to people's postings on Twitter  or LinkedIn , or ask a colleague out for a quick cup of coffee.

These little interactions help build the foundation of a good relationship, especially if they're face-to-face.

Focus on Your EI
Also, spend time developing your emotional intelligence (EI). Among other things, this is your ability to recognize your own emotions, and clearly understand what they're telling you.

High EI also helps you to understand the emotions and needs of others.

Appreciate Others
Show your appreciation whenever someone helps you. Everyone, from your boss to the office cleaner, wants to feel that their work is appreciated. So, genuinely compliment the people around you when they do something well. This will open the door to great work relationships.

Be Positive
Focus on being positive. Positivity is attractive and contagious, and it will help strengthen your relationships with your colleagues. No one wants to be around someone who's negative all the time.

Manage Your Boundaries
Make sure that you set and manage boundaries  properly – all of us want to have friends at work, but, occasionally, a friendship can start to impact our jobs, especially when a friend or colleague begins to monopolize our time.

If this happens, it's important that you're assertive about your boundaries, and that you know how much time you can devote during the work day for social interactions.

Avoid Gossiping
Don't gossip – office politics  and "gossip" are major relationship killers at work. If you're experiencing conflict with someone in your group, talk to them directly about the problem. Gossiping about the situation with other colleagues will only exacerbate the situation, and will cause mistrust and animosity between you.

Listen Actively
Practice active listening when you talk to your customers and colleagues. People respond to those who truly listen to what they have to say. Focus on listening more than you talk, and you'll quickly become known as someone who can be trusted.

Difficult Relationships

Occasionally, you'll have to work with someone you don't like Add to My Personal Learning Plan , or someone that you simply can't relate to. But, for the sake of your work, it's essential you maintain a professional relationship with them.

When this happens, make an effort to get to know the person. It's likely that they know full well that the two of you aren't on the best terms, so make the first move to improve the relationship by engaging them in a genuine conversation, or by inviting them out to lunch.

While you're talking, try not to be too guarded. Ask them about their background, interests and past successes. Instead of putting energy into your differences, focus on finding things that you have in common.

Just remember – not all relationships will be great; but you can make sure that they are, at least, workable!

Key Points

Building and maintain good working relationships will not only make you more engaged and committed to your organization; it can also open doors to key projects, career advancement, and raises.

Start by identifying the key stakeholders in your organization. These people, as well as your clients and customers, deserve extra time and attention.

Then, devote a portion of your day to laying the foundation of good relationships. Even five minutes a day, if it's genuine, can help to build a bond between you and a colleague. Be honest, avoid gossip, and try to compliment people on a job well done. After all, the more you give in your relationships, the more you'll get back from those around you!

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com
Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, branches, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Whole Integrity Checklist

A lack of integrity can devour credibility – especially if you’re in a position of authority.

Being “out of integrity” in our society is almost unforgiveable:

• He’s a hypocrite.
• She’s a liar.
• He can’t be counted on.
• You can’t trust her; she says one thing and does another.

These character judgments are part of the reason so few people admit to mistakes and lean on weak excuses for lack of follow-through.  And it is this fear of being judged that quietly destroys workplace cultures.

And yet we’re all human.  We’ve all failed on a New Year’s resolution.  We’ve all arrived late to an appointment.  We’ve all had the best of intentions.

And our nature is to forgive someone who comes to us with hat in hand, who owns their mistakes and commits to a different future way of being.

So what if integrity wasn’t a question of morality, ethics or character?  But rather, simply one of workability.

When someone on your team is out of integrity, you can easily say, “this isn’t working.”  And then work with them to get back in integrity – on the project, on the communication, on the commitments, etc.

Inspired by and reorganized from a quote by Landmark Education, here is the Whole Integrity checklist:

WHOLE Integrity checklist:

☐ Nothing hidden
☐ Being truthful and honest
☐ Doing complete work
☐ Working from an empowering context*
☐ Doing very well what you do
☐ Doing it as it was meant to be done or better without cutting corners
☐ Honoring one’s word
☐ Doing what you know to do
☐ Doing what you said you would do and on time
☐ Doing what others would expect you to do even if you haven’t said you would do it**
☐ Saying when you are not doing this as soon as you realize you won’t be doing it or won’t be doing it on time

*Empowering context means one refers to coming from a place of commitment and agreement.  You’re not disparaging, undermining or bemoaning the task at hand.

Examples:
•  “I’m only doing this because he said I had to do it.”
•  “This is stupid, but I’ll do it anyway.”
•  “I think this is a waste of time, but someone’s got to do it.”

We are all responsible for our words and actions.  If you think it’s a waste of time, constructively have the conversation to find out why the person who asked you to complete said task thinks it’s worth your time.

**This is the one where people resist. What?  I have to have integrity with something I didn’t agree to?  Yes.  It’s what’s expected of you.  And you very likely are aware of those expectations, and unless you openly negotiate them, you are responsible for meeting them.  For all the parents out there, has your child ever pulled, “You just said I have to go to bed, you didn’t say I have to go to sleep.”

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com
Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, branches, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

What Motivates People: The Real Story

The Motivation Dilemma

The motivation dilemma is that leaders are being held accountable to do something they cannot do –– motivate others. Understanding what works when it comes to motivation begins with a phenomenon every employee (and leader) experiences –– the appraisal process.

To experience the appraisal process, think about a recent meeting you attended. Reflect on your different thoughts and emotions as you noticed the meeting on your calendar, jumped off a call and rushed to make the meeting on time.Whether mindful of it or not, you had thoughts and feelings about attending the meeting –– you had both cognitive and emotional responses to the meeting.

Is the meeting a safe or threatening event? Am I feeling supported or threatened?  Is it a good use of or a waste of my time? Am I excited or fearful? Am I attending  because I want to or because I feel I have to?

Ultimately, how you feel about the meeting has the greatest influence on whether your sense of well-being is negative or positive.Your well-being determines your intentions, which ultimately lead to your behavior.

Every day, your employees’ appraisal of their workplace leaves them with or without a positive sense of well-being.Their well-being determines their intentions, and intentions are the greatest predictors of behavior. A positive appraisal that results in a positive sense of well-being leads to positive intentions and behaviors that generate employee engagement.

Our desire to thrive is innate, but thriving doesn’t happen automatically –– especially at work. Human thriving in the workplace is a dynamic potential that requires nurturing.The workplace either facilitates, fosters and enables our flourishing, or it disrupts, thwarts and impedes it. In fact, conventional motivational practices have undermined more often than they’ve encouraged our human potential.

The essence of motivating people lies at the heart of the science of motivation and the revelation of three psychological needs –– autonomy, relatedness and competence. Regardless of gender, race, culture or generation, the real story behind our motivation is as simple and as complex as whether or not our psychological needs are satisfied. 

Psychologists use the terms autonomy, relatedness and competence when exploring the individual attributes of these needs and ARC when pointing out their collective power –– which is substantial.

What Really Motivates People

The First Psychological Need: Autonomy
Autonomy is our human need to perceive we have choices. It is our need to feel that what we are doing is of our own volition. It is our perception that we are the source of our actions.

The Second  Psychological Need: Relatedness
Relatedness is our need to care about and be cared about by others. It is our need to feel connected to others without concerns about ulterior motives. It is our need to feel that we are contributing to something greater than ourselves.

The Third Psychological Need: Competence
Competence is our need to feel effective at meeting ev- eryday challenges and opportunities. It is demonstrating skill over time. It is feeling a sense of growth and flourishing.

When a person experiences high-quality psychological needs, she will have an optimal motivational outlook. In other words, if her needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence are satisfied, the result is an aligned, integrated or inherent motivational outlook.

When a person experiences low-quality psychological needs, he will have a suboptimal motivational outlook. In other words, if his autonomy, relatedness and competence are not satisfied, the result is a disinterested, external or imposed motivational outlook.

The ARC Domino Effect
Imagine you have a manager with control needs. He micromanages people and projects –– whether they need it or not. His micromanagement is undermining your sense of autonomy –– He is controlling your work and not allowing you to think for yourself. You are afraid to go over his head to complain because you’ve seen what happens to complainers.

This is how the ARC Domino Effect begins.Your lack of autonomy raises questions in your mind about your competence.Your inability to manage your manager’s over-involvement or the organizational politics involved further erodes your competence. Your manager’s ineffective leadership, lack of sensitivity to your needs and apparent self-interest prevent any sense of relatedness. Intangible external forces (his micromanaging style and your fear) dictate your internal sense of well-being.

People revel in the positive energy, vitality and sense of well-being that occur when all three psychological needs are satisfied. But –– and this is a big but –– one depends on the other.The ARC Domino Effect is in full force when even one psychological need is missing. 
If A or R or C falls, the others are diminished  as well.

The ARC Gap

Every year or so, the Gallup organization releases a poll on employee engagement that inspires the collective hand-wringing of news anchors and editorial writers around the country. The results are as predictable as they are bleak.The latest figures indicate that a full 70 percent of American employees feel disengaged at their jobs. 

Of these, 18 percent are “actively disengaged,” meaning that they’re not simply failing to meet their potential — they’re acting out in ways that measurably damage their company.

Organizational leaders have tried to increase employee engagement, but they’ve gone about it the wrong way. As Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being, put it, “There is a gap between knowing about engagement and doing something about it in most American workplaces.”

The real story of motivation is that people have psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence. It is a mistake to think that people are not motivated.They are simply longing for needs they cannot name.

How do you get employees engaged in their work? By daily providing opportunities for autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Psychological Needs are at the Heart of Employee Engagement.

To promote autonomy, provide a rationale when tasks are presented, offer flexibility on how and when a task is performed and minimize the focus on rewards. Help employees feel competent by creating a workplace that provides them with immediate feedback, meaningful recognition and opportunities for growth.

Within the business world, relatedness has long been the most underappreciated of the three psychological needs. But connecting employees to one another doesn’t just
help them enjoy being at work; it leads to quantifiable gains in their performance.To build employee connections, it’s important to create interactions that harness the natural catalysts of close relationships: proximity, familiarity, similarity and self-disclosure.


Most organizations have a vision, mission or purpose statement, but few employees have one for their work-related role. Collaborate with your employees to find alignment between their perception of the role-related values and purpose and your perception. Come to conclusions together that meet both their needs and those of the organization. 

A great irony of leadership is that motivating your people doesn’t work because people are already motivated. People are always motivated. 

What does work is helping people understand why they are motivated.Your opportunity lies in facilitating people’s shift to an optimal motivational outlook so they flourish as they succeed. When you activate optimal motivation for yourself, you provide more than a role model –– you create a ripple effect that encourages your people’s optimal motivation and emotional engagement.

Imagine people choosing to come to work because they experience a sense of positive well-being, the feeling that they are contributing to something greater than themselves, and the thrill of continued growth and learning.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com
Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, branches, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Dealing with an Absentee Boss

Dear Leader's Digest,

I have a manager who seems to be missing in action. In all fairness to my manager, my work is independent and in a different location. Nonetheless, his communication is superficial, and he doesn’t act as if he’s genuinely interested in my performance. He’s difficult to find (always in meetings), fails to provide me with vital information, and continually misses deadlines on information or decisions that I depend upon to do my job effectively. 

I decided to call him every other week to brief him on my work outlook, issues, successes, etc., but when I do he acts as though he’s in a hurry and I’m taking up his time. I truly find my work rewarding, but working for this unengaged manager is frustrating.

Signed,

Cut off


Dear Cut Off,

You face an interesting decision. Do you talk to someone who doesn’t appear to care about your job, your results, or your relationship–and by extension might not care about any of your concerns? You weigh the possibilities and wonder if the odds favor you or not. He might suddenly “feel your pain” and take corrective action of some sort. He might smile politely and do nothing. He might act upset and say it’s not his fault that you’re located in a different building and then resent you for attacking his leadership style. Hmmm. What will happen?

So the real question is: What can you do to increase the odds that the outcome will be beneficial?

Before I offer any suggestions, let me say that our own research has revealed that the single best predictor of satisfaction with leadership is frequency of interaction. The more two people interact, the greater the satisfaction. People who are directed and reviewed by individuals in different buildings, or even different states, universally dislike the arrangement. You’re not alone. People rightfully wonder: How can my boss evaluate my performance, coach me, provide me with career advice, mentor me, and sponsor me to a better position without ever seeing me in action?

Within a corporate context, absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. The more accurate expression would be: out of sight, out of mind. I mention this because you may want to take a job where you won’t constantly be facing such a large barrier. No matter what you do, the distance can be daunting.

If you love the job itself and really want to stick with it, here are few things you might consider.

First, ask what’s in it for your manager to correct the problems you mentioned. He is causing you grief by not providing you with essential information, meeting deadlines, or making timely decisions. You feel your pain, but if you can’t link his relatively insensitive and unprofessional behavior to something he cares about, you’re dependent on him caring about your pain–something that currently doesn’t seem to affect him.

So, here’s what you have to ask. In what way does his poor performance affect you–and then affect him? For instance, when he doesn’t give you time-sensitive information, you have to track him down, interrupt him in meetings, leave notes with secretaries, call his boss to see if he or she can find him etc. This can’t be pleasant for him. When he doesn’t provide you with X, harming your performance in Y, this is how it affects the department–which in turn causes problem Z for him. The point here is that if you only enter the conversation with the idea of his changing for the sole purpose of making your life better, it’s harder to achieve the results you want. Link his existing bad behavior to the existing negative consequences he’s already experiencing.

Second, ask what can be done that doesn’t call for him to change his behavior. How can you manipulate the environment? The idea of talking on the phone to update him may indeed interrupt him. How about e-mail that he can read at his leisure? There are some fairly decent video conferencing solutions out there. Maybe an electronic face-to-face will work for him. How can you get his support staff to be cued to send you critical information the minute he gets it? The point here is that it’s far easier to manipulate processes and *things* than it is to change human behavior. Look at environmental solutions.

Third, if you do choose to talk to him directly about the problem, bring your best skills into play. In the book Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Resolving Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior, they teach a step-by-step process for dealing with crucial confrontations. Here are a few tips from the book.

Be careful with your conclusions. You may believe that your boss is uncaring and unreliable (you didn’t say this, however you could easily conclude this), but this should never be your starting position. Pick one of the behaviors that has you concerned and deal with that behavior only. Don’t pile on a bunch of problems. In a similar vein, take special care not to pile on inflammatory conclusions. Trade “You’re unreliable, insensitive, and uncaring” for “Yesterday I was expecting the O’Malley workup but it didn’t come. I was wondering what happened.” Then stick to the problem of not delivering on his promises. Deal with untimely information, lack of support, and the other problems at a different time. Start small. Stick to behaviors.

Once you’ve decided which issue to deal with, carefully unbundle it. Even though you think you’ve picked one problem, it could easily have several component parts. For instance, if the problem you pick is a pattern, focus on the repeated nature of the behavior. Talk about the pattern, not a single instance. If the problem is now harming your relationship (and it sounds as if it is), then this may be the problem you want to address. Talk about the problem (say, not meeting deadlines) from the point of view of how it’s affecting how you work together. “When I don’t get what I need from you, I end up trying to track you down and I don’t want it to feel like I’m hounding you. I can see that you don’t like it and I’m starting to feel reluctant to follow up. And yet, if I don’t find a quick resolution, it affects my performance.” Pick one problem, unbundle it, and then pick the issue that matters the most. Ask: “What is the one thing I really want to see change?” and then focus on this.

Good luck as you step up to a tough situation. 

Prepare carefully, be on your best behavior, and hopefully you’ll start to resolve some of the problems that have you rightfully frustrated, one at a time.

To your greater success,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com
Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, branches, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.