When I was around 18, I worked as a shift manager at McDonald’s Corporation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One of the assistant managers that helped me get promoted and then trained me was a man named Don Griffin. I admired Don because he cared about the work that he did and he cared about me and the rest of his employees. He was also very focused on producing results for the company. Don had a huge influence on my work ethic and basic management philosophy.

Over the years, I’ve never forgotten Don telling me “Performance talks, bullshit walks.” I could count on hearing it every time I tried to give Don an excuse for poor performance. That simple concept still influences how I interpret almost every interaction I have with people in my various work related roles.

I’m OK with folks dropping the ball and making occasional mistakes, and I’m OK with people not delivering as promised from time to time. We all do it – including me. But I have a very low tolerance for folks that won’t accept responsibility for their mistakes. I’ve never known anyone commit to fixing a problem without first admitting “I screwed up.”

Don still lives in the Tulsa area, and he and his wife have a son named Bret.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

I’d really appreciate your help with a survey I am conducting! Click here to learn more about participating.

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I’m very pleased to feature this guest post by Joel Garfinkle. Joel is recognized as one of the top 50 coaches in the U.S., having worked with many of the world’s leading companies, including Oracle, Google, Amazon, Deloitte, Ritz-Carlton, Gap, and Starbucks. He is the author of 7 books, including Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level. View his books and FREE articles at Garfinkle Executive Coaching. Subscribe to his Executive Coaching Newsletter and receive the FREE e-book, 40 Proven Strategies to Get Promoted Now!

Have you ever watched a figure skater glide across the ice and marveled at how easy it looks? So graceful, so beautiful, so effortless. It takes a lot of work to get to that point, though. Go down to the rink on a Saturday morning and watch the kids taking their first lessons as they stumble and fall and then get up to try again. It takes a lot of falls before you get good enough to make it look easy.

The same is true of many jobs. You get so good at what you do that no one realizes how hard you work. It’s great to be an expert at what you do, but it can sometimes backfire. If your boss thinks you’re hardly working—rather than working hard—he’s not going to want to give you any raises or promotions. It’s up to you, then, to make sure your boss knows what it takes for you to do your job so well.

For example, a local TV host in San Francisco named Ross McGowan was so skilled at interviewing his guests that his boss didn’t realize how much work went into the preparation for each show. He made it look easy, and as a result, when it was time to negotiate a new contract with his boss, the offer was much lower than he had anticipated. If he had taken care to ensure that his boss was aware of how much work, skill, and training went into making his interviews look so effortless, he may have received a better offer.

A passive approach doesn’t work when it comes to getting credit for the work you are doing. One of my clients, who worked at Amazon.com, thought his superiors would know what he was doing and value his efforts without any special effort on his part. This belief fell apart when he heard his co-workers getting praise at a meeting for work that he himself had performed. That was when he realized he needed to do something differently if he wanted to move up in his career, but he wasn’t sure exactly what he should do.

As we worked together, he learned how to be proactive about making sure he got credit for what he accomplished on the job. Every day, he would do something to sell himself to management and show them how valuable he was to the company. You can do the same thing, starting with three simple steps.

1. Keep track of your successes.

Most employees wait until their annual performance review is approaching, then try to remember what they’ve accomplished over the past year. If you’ve done this, you know how hard it is to remember everything. Make tracking your successes part of your daily routine. Every day, either at the end of the day or first thing the next morning, review what you have done for the day and record any significant progress you have made, projects you’ve completed, and goals you have accomplished. You won’t be able to tell anyone about your accomplishments if you don’t know what they are. If you keep track of what you accomplish on a daily or weekly basis, next time you’re updating your resume to ask for a promotion it will be a cinch.

2. Communicate your successes with your boss.

E-mail your boss at least once per week with an update. Let him know whenever you complete a project, and if possible, attach a dollar figure to it to validate your worth to the company. For example, if you saved the company $60,000 this week and you make $50,000 per year, you’ve already paid for yourself.

3. Tell others about what you have accomplished.

Your boss is not the only one who needs to know how valuable you are. Think of other people you can copy on e-mails, such as other department leaders to whom the results of your project are relevant. Engage in small talk with company leaders whenever you get a chance and look for opportunities to tell them about what you’ve been working on without sounding boastful.

As the leaders in your organization realize how much you contribute to the success of the department and the organization, you’ll be given opportunities to work on bigger and more important projects. Your visibility within the company will grow, and your chances of receiving a promotion will increase. Increasing your visibility at work helps you ensure that you’ll be paid what you’re worth and continue to move up in the company.

Thanks, Joel!

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below. Please also help me with my new research by completing my employee survey!

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I’m speaking today about The Progress Principle to the great folks at Leadership Douglas County, a program run by the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce. It’s beautiful county on the drive to the Genoa Lakes Golf Club.

This is the second time I’ve spoken about The Progress Principle, and I’ve streamlined my presentation for this audience.  Here are the main points I hope to make:

1. What your folks think and feel about the work they do, the workplace they do it in, and the people the do it for, affects their motivation to perform.

2. Helping people make daily progress in work they believe matters has a big impact on what people think and feel while they are at work.

3. Negative events are more powerful than positive events, so the most effective thing you can do to create a positive work environment is to clean up the garbage.

4. Partner with your folks to continually improve the work they do. It’s folly to think your folks will be motivated to deliver peak performance if you don’t listen to their ideas and treat them fairly.

5. Continuously improve your own capacity to genuinely care about your employees and treat them with basic civility and respect. Help them develop their own capacity to do the same for others.

I hope I’m able to communicate these points effectively and help them in some small way. I am passionate about helping other become more passionate about leadership.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Can you help me with my new work survey? I hope so!

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The most effective way to affect the inner work life of those around you is to help them make daily progress in meaningful work. In their book “The Progress Principle,” Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer go so far as to say “any manager’s job description should start with facilitating subordinates’ daily progress.” (p. 89). They believe this progress principle should become a fundamental management principle, and I agree.

The authors strongly emphasize that your efforts to support the progress of folks around you should focus more on avoiding the negative than accentuating the positive. Your influence is most effective when it is used to eliminate obstacles rather than create supports, because “small losses can overwhelm small wins” (p. 92). Bad leaders and the damage they cause have more impact than help of good leaders.

The power of setbacks to diminish happiness is more than twice as strong as the power of progress to boost happiness. The power of setbacks to increase frustration is more than three times as strong as the power of progress to decrease frustration. (p. 92).

Leaders also need to be aware of how they rob meaning from peoples’ work. In their research, Amabile and Kramer identified four actions that managers should avoid because they negate the value of work (p. 96):

1.     Dismiss someone’s ideas

2.     Make employees doubt the work they do is important

3.     Assign people to work for which they are overqualified

4.     Keep people from assuming full ownership of their work

In addition to meaningful progress, positive inner work life is also influenced by what Amabile and Kramer call catalyst factors (events supporting the work) and nourishments factors (events supporting the person). I’ll discuss catalysts and nourishment factors in future posts, so stay tuned!

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I love the concept of inner work life from the book “The Progress Principle“. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer describe inner work life as the “perceptions, emotions, and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workday.” (p. 20). Based on the work of Richard Hackman, Ed Lawler III, and Greg Oldham, we’ve known for over 40 years that how folks think and feel about their jobs affects their performance. We can change how folks think, and consequently how they perform, by making improvements to the work that they do.

Inner work life follows a very similar chain of logic. Employees perform to the extent they are motivated to do so. Given that employees know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, we have a reason to expect that they might choose to perform. Motivation to perform is strongly affected by what an employee thinks and how he or she feels about work. Perceptions can lead to emotions, and emotions can affect perceptions, and both affect motivation.

If you want to affect the motivation of your employees, you have to improve how they think and feel about the organization, the work they do, co-workers, themselves, and you. The choices you make as a manager influence the events of every work day, and it’s workday events that drive employee performance through employee motivation, emotion, and perception.

The fact that you can help improve the performance of your employees by the choices you make as a manager is great news! It’s your responsibility to learn how to partner with your employees to continually improve the work environment. In future posts, I’ll share with you more specific thoughts from Amabile and Kramer on how to avoid negative and promote positive events at work.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I first heard of “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins To Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer at Bob Sutton’s blog, where he called it “a masterpiece every manager should own.” I got my copy of the book free from the publicist. I don’t think it is a masterpiece, but I do think it is the most important evidence-based management book I’ve read this year; consequently, I do think every manager should strongly consider moving this book to the top of their reading list.

The book focuses on something the authors call the inner work life effect: “people do better work when they are happy, have positive views of the organization and its people, and are motivated primarily by the work itself.” (p, 47). They go so far as to claim their research shows “as inner work life goes, so goes the company.” (p. 3). That’s a bold claim that I’m not sure is supported by the data in their one study; however, I do believe it is supported numerous related studies on employee attitudes, emotions, motivation, and performance published in leading peer-reviewed journals over the last 30 years.

The book also highlights the power of events that are part of every workday. The power of events is great news for us as managers, because we can take planned, systemic action to control events that impact the inner work lives of our employees. Here are the main points that the book explains in detail (pp 8-9):

1. The types of events – what we call the key three – stand out as particularly potent forces supporting inner work life, in this order: progress in meaningful work; catalysts (events that directly help people work); and nourishers (interpersonal events that uplift people doing the work).

2. The primacy of progress among the key three influences on inner work life is that we call the progress principle: of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.

3. The negative forms – or absence of – the key three events powerfully undermine inner work life: setbacks in the work, inhibitors (events that directly hinder project work); and toxins (interpersonal events that undermine the people doing the work).

4. Negative events are more powerful than positive events, all else being equal.

5. Even seemingly mundane events – such as small wins and minor setbacks – can exert potent influence on inner work life.

The authors admit that their research does not establish causality – which is very difficult to accomplish. “Were all of these inner work life changes caused by daily progress and setbacks, or might some of them have caused progress or setbacks in the first place? There is no way of knowing from the numerical data alone.” (p. 79).

I love the concept of catalysts: events that support progress and positive inner work life. The authors identified seven consistently effective catalysts (pp 104-105): 1) Set clear goals; 2) Allow autonomy; 3) Provide resources; 4) Give enough time, but not too much; 5) Help with the work; 6) Learn from problems and successes; and 7) Allow ideas to flow. Please note these ideas are not new - they can be found in one form or another in most contemporary approaches to leadership and are evidence-based.

The book also provides a very helpful daily progress checklist that you can use to review your daily managerial actions and plan for the next day. I think it is brilliant. I concur with the authors when they state:

The aim of the checklist is managing for meaningful progress, because that is your real job inside the organization. This may require a significant mind-shift. Business schools, business books, and managers themselves usually conceptualize management as managing organizations or managing people. But if you focus on daily progress in meaningful work, managing people and the entire organization will become much more feasible. (pp. 174-175).

This book is packed with both sound philosophy and evidence-based advice. Anyone and everyone can benefit by reading this book, because “whatever your level in your organization, even if you lead only by your work as a good colleague, you bear some responsibility for the inner work lives of the people around you…you can become a better contributor to the climate and success of your organization. (p. 181).

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I have the honor of speaking today at the EcSell Summit in Atlanta. I am the last speaker on the last day of the meeting, so my role is not just to provide some new learning but also to help folks bring together the learning from the previous day and think about how they will apply it when they return to work. My first point will be that if as a result of attending the conference you don’t find yourself doing something different to help your team improve it’s performance, then don’t return to this or any other conference. If you spend two days at a professional conference and don’t learn anything new, you need to confront the reason why, and I would suggest that looking in the mirror is the place to start.

Here are some of the other points I hope to make:

1. How is the wrong question. Work hard to understand why things work, especially why your team and it’s customers behave in certain ways. Understanding why affords you the opportunity to create competitive advantage rather than competitive parity.
2. For most businesses, growth through excellence should be the top priority. If your business is not growing, it’s probably dying. If you are not growing personally, you are probably decaying as well.
3. Your people are the key to the growth of your business. You are the key to the growth of your people. If you refuse to change and grow as a leader, you will constrain the growth of your people and likewise the growth of your business.
4. Your ability to learn faster than your competitors is your core performance technology.
5. Help your folks become interdependent partners with you at work. Help them become better at working autonomously and asking for and accepting help when they need it. Give them a reason to perform with passion and care about what they do and who they do it for and with.
6. Be REAL in all your relationships with people. Assume responsibility, invite others to share their expectations of you, make accountability start with a look in the mirror, and never stop learning and growing.

I hope during my time today I am able to change a few minds about the value of partnering with others at work to create a more healthy, responsible work environment where everyone can thrive.

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Some fascinating new research on the effect of goal setting on group performance was recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (full citation below). The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 131 previously published studies on goal setting.

Goal setting and group performance by BretSimmons

The results show that the worst thing you can do for group performance is to set nonspecific goals. Even easy, specific goals are better for group performance than nonspecific goals. Setting specific difficult goals has the best effect on group performance. Specific goals supported by specific metrics send employees unambiguous and consistent signals about expected performance behaviors.

The most interesting finding to me was that “egocentric goals (aimed at maximizing individual performance) undermine group performance, whereas groupcentric goals (aimed at maximizing the individual contribution to the group) enhance group performance” (p. 7). Goals that force team members to compete with each other undermine group performance.  “When group performance matters, egocentric goals would best be framed as to emphasize the individual contribution to the group” (p. 8).

Select people that value collaboration over competition.  Train them in the knowledge and skills they need to work better with others. Challenge your teams to set high standards for their shared performance, and reward the members that do the most to help the team succeed. Think very carefully about the message you send by rewarding individual performance when the team fails.

Full citation: Kleingeld, A., van Mierlo, H., and Arends, L. (2011). The Effect of Goal Setting on Group Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology.

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Autonomy enables the helpful perform by BretSimmons

If everyone in your organization only did what was written in their formal job descriptions, your business would be mediocre at best. For your business to excel, your workforce from top to bottom needs to be full of good organizational citizens. Good citizens at work go above and beyond their assigned duties to try to help fellow employees and the organization.

Employees help each other by offering advice, lending a hand, resolving conflicts, and celebrating each other’s achievements. Employees that receive trustworthy help from others feel an obligation to reciprocate, which strengthens work relationships. Good citizens in thriving work relationships will be motivated to find ways to perform their tasks more effectively and efficiently. Employees that help each other strengthen the bonds of trust with team members and supervisors, and we know trust has a strong effect on performance.

Unfortunately, good team relationships won’t matter much if employees aren’t given the latitude to improve their jobs. And good team relationships will struggle to develop when employees can’t help each other because they are constrained to “just worry about getting your job done.”

A study by Muammer Ozer recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (full citation below) showed how autonomy affected the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and job performance. This study of 266 employees, coworkers, and supervisors showed that citizenship behavior improved work team relationships, and work team relationships had a significant effect on job performance.

Those relationships between citizenship behavior, teamwork, and performance are expected. What’s new here is the importance of autonomy in enabling this virtuous chain of behaviors. The study found that the links to performance were enhanced for those with the most job autonomy. Highly autonomous workers were better citizens, had better team relationships, and were better at translating those team relationships into improved performance.

Because autonomy matters so much to most workers, it matters to your business. Constrain your employees’ ability to help each other and work together to improve their jobs and you will likely also constrain the growth of your business. Help yourself by helping your employees help each other.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Citation: Ozer, M. (2012). A Moderated Mediation Model of the Relationship Between Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Job Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology

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What’s the most urgent priority of your business? Many of you would say making a profit is your top priority. It’s hard to argue the fact that your business can’t survive if it can’t sustain a healthy bottom line.

OK, so you want to make a profit; then what’s the single most important thing your business needs to grow the bottom line? Revenue. Money that does not hit the top line never has an opportunity to hit the bottom line. Growth, more than anything else, constrains profit.Too many leaders focus their people on line item costs instead of focusing them on the single line that matters the most – the top line. This is not a law of the universe, but if your business is not growing, it’s probably dying.

If growth is the most urgent priority of your business, have you made it everyone’s responsibility? Everyone needs to understand how their daily performance and behavior either helps or hurts the growth of the business.

Please take a few minutes to watch this brief video, then please share your thoughts in the comment section below.  Stay tuned, because my next post will cover the single most important thing you need to focus on daily if you want to grow your business.

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