Google's Discovery About the Secret to Success at Work

 

I wrote this title because people will likely read it – we love secrets to success, and if they are surprising, all the better. Depending on your beliefs and experience, this post may be neither. Either way, what am about to share will make a difference for you professionally and for the organization you serve.

This Washington Post article got me thinking about this topic. The article is about what Google has learned about the most important skills they need. The surprise, at least to Google, was that technical skills weren’t at the top of the list. 

To quote from the article:

"In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas."

This is significant; one of the organizations that most relies on and had until that point focused hiring on the very best technical ability says that those abilities are the 8th most important to their organizations success.

To put it in another way, technical skills are the admission to the game, but winning takes far more than that.

Look at the rest of that list…

• Coaching skills
• Communicating and listening well.
• Possessing insights into others.
• Empathy.
• Critical thinking and problem solving.
• Making connections across complex ideas.

The first four of those are 100% interpersonal and people skills; what the article calls the soft skills. And since businesses (even Google, the technical giant) are made up of people, it makes sense.

The Forest and the Trees
You’ve heard the metaphor of not being able to see the forest for the trees – this situation is informed perfectly by this metaphor. Our organizations want the technical skills, whatever they are: finance, engineering, marketing, operations – name the technical expertise that is important to your organization.  These are the trees.  We must have trees in order to have a forest, but the forest is more than individual trees, it is a living system with all of the trees working together symbiotically for mutual success.

Hiring only for technical competence focuses you on the trees; but your organization is a forest.

It is easier to hire for technical skill – many of these skills are testable, tangible and resumes are filled with testaments to these skills. Easier – but not more effective.

 
It is harder to seek, suss out and select for the softer skills, like but not inclusive of those on the list above.  But if you want a successful resilient organization you must do the hard work of hiring for soft skills.

The Message For You Personally
I’ve taken an organization focus so far, but let me make the point personally now.  Organizational success is about people skills, so your personal success must rest on that foundation.  You need to be focused on building your technical or job skills – and while those are important (you need to stay abreast of changes in your field of expertise), they aren't enough – again they simply buy you entrance to the game.

If you want to play the game at a higher level you must build you interpersonal skills with the level of dedication and focus they deserve.

The Secret?
By now you know the secret.  The secret to success is being able to communicate with, interact with, collaborate with, and influence people.  Time spent investing in learning, improving and practicing those skills are the best investment you can make in your future success at work and in life.

To your greater success,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step... 

Interested in learning how soft skills training and coaching can benefit your organization? 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, 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.

The Single Most Expensive Mistake a Leader Can Make

 

The single most expensive mistake a manager can make is buying into the management myth:

"There isn’t enough time to coach people."

This myth comes from the fact that there are only 168 hours in a week and you have zillions of demands on your time—you have your own tasks and projects besides your management responsibilities.

What is the reality? Since your time is so limited, you definitely don’t have time not to manage-coach your people. Managers who do not prioritize time coaching people always spend lots of time managing people anyway. That’s because when a manager avoids spending time up front in advance making sure things go right, things often go wrong. Small problems pile up. Often, small problems fester unattended until they become so big they cannot be ignored. By that point, the manager has no choice but to chase down the problems and solve them. 

In crisis, the manager is virtually guaranteed to be less efficient, a further waste of time. So, these managers run around solving problems that never had to happen, getting big problems under control that should have been solved easily, recouping squandered resources, dealing with long-standing performance problems, feeling even more pressed for time.

That means in all likelihood, they will go right back to avoiding coaching people, and the next time they’ll make time for coaching is the next time there is another big problem to chase down and solve.

Remember, that the time you spend managing is “high-leverage time.” By coaching, you engage the productive capacity of your people. For every, say, twenty-minute coaching conversation you have with an employee, you should be engaging hours or maybe days of the employee’s productive capacity. If that twenty-minute conversation is effective, that twenty minutes of coaching should substantially improve the quality and output of the employee’s work for hours or days. That’s a good return on investment—that’s why it’s called “high-leverage time.”

When managers do not coach and proactively communicate: 

• Problems hide below the radar. 
• Problems occur that never had to occur. 
• Problems get out of control that could have been solved. 
• Resources are squandered. 
• People go in the wrong direction for weeks or months without realizing it. 
• Low performers hide out and collect paychecks. 
• Mediocre performers start to think they're high performers. 
• High performers get frustrated and think of leaving. 
• Managers do tasks that should have been delegated.

Also, your team should be getting more capable over time. Think about it this way. As a leader of a team, on day one, your team has a certain capacity. Your team can deliver a certain amount of work, in a certain amount of time, at a particular level of quality and complexity. They have a certain amount of knowledge and particular level of ability to perform. This is their capacity on day one.

If, after a year goes by, you have delivered everything you been asked, you have done part of your job. But if your team is not more capable in some way--if they can't deliver more, better, faster, or higher quality--or if they have no new knowledge, skills or ability to perform at a higher level, you have not done the second part of your job. You have not coached and developed in order to increase the capacity of the team.

The Secret of the 5% Solution

Many managers when exhorted to coach more and boss less will rightly say, “But my plate is already full. I can’t handle one more obligation. I rarely see my people because I’m so busy and they are scattered all over the place. There’s no way I can do all this.” 

You face a dilemma: Simple solutions don’t work for development, yet you don’t have time for complex solutions. So you need a coaching process that attacks the true challenges of getting a variety of people to change and yet is still manageable in light of available time and resources. That process is the 5% solution. 

You can be effective and efficient if you focus 5% of your energy and attention on coaching and development. Working smarter—not harder—helps you make the best investment of your time. The secret of efficient coaching is to know your priorities and then to create and seize coaching opportunities that arise in the course of your everyday work. If you are prepared, you can leverage a relatively small investment of your time into a walloping payback. 

There's a time management maxim that says, "We always find time for the things that we think are important."

Start scheduling time for coaching and watch your people grow and and improve.

Research by the Gallup organization supports the notion that you don't have time NOT to coach your people. Gallup's conclusion is that Failing to develop leaders is the single most expensive mistake a leader can make. Click here to read the article.

To your greater success,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Facilitator and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step ...

Interested in learning how leadership coaching and training can benefit you and your organization? 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, 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.

3 Key Steps to Measure the Impact of Coaching

Leaders who have experienced coaching can easily state their opinion about whether or not the development strategy had a positive impact. After all, effective coaching can be the best experience leaders have ever had in terms of supporting their own development and growth.

But actually measuring the impact of leader growth can be tough. For example, how does an organization measure the potential improvement of a leader’s influence on her team if she learns to stop belittling them? Or how a leader who elevates his executive presence will make a bigger contribution to the organization? Or how much improving communication will affect the profitability of a company?

Can the true impact of coaching be measured?

The answer is: it depends. Here are three key steps organizations can take to simplify the measurement process.

+ Be specific. What exactly does the organization want to change? Now be more If that change is successful, what will be the quantifiable outcome? Now put a dollar amount to the change.

+ Be clear with the leader/coachee about expectations. Specify the new behaviors and outcomes desired. It’s not enough to say improve communication. With whom? To what end? What would the improvement look like? What specific behaviors are necessary? How will the organization know that the change has been made?

+ Follow through. Engage appropriate people in the organization to observe and report on behavior change. An observer could be an HR business partner, a mentor of the leader being coached, a supervisor, or a member of the board. Ensure these observers are clear on expectations and outcomes. Provide tools, resources, and information on how to measure outcomes. 

Leaders need eyes and ears in the organization, as well as their coach, to help ensure changes made are on target to meet expectations.

The cornerstone of coaching is confidentiality—but this does not mean the leader being coached is left on their own to grow, learn, and develop without organizational insight. 

Being explicit on the front end about outcomes and ensuring all parties are in agreement about goals helps with measurement and evaluation when coaching is finished; i.e.:

+ Here is the specific target that was set.
+ Did the coachee meet the target?
+ Has the impact of that outcome been observed?
+ Has it been sustained over time?

Paying more attention at the beginning of any coaching engagement will make it simpler to measure and evaluate at the end.

To your greater success,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step... 

Interested in learning how coaching can benefit your organization? 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, 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.

5 Ways to 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 and 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 article: 

How to Get Clarity, Accountability and Results in Five Minutes

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.