What are Ten Common Gaps to Employee Success?

CEOs are very busy, focused, and hard driving. They have their vision and know where they want to go. So, why don’t employees follow the CEO’s lead?

Simple. In business and organizations, there can only be one boss, one vision, one direction, and one business model. But most employees don’t follow because, unless someone teaches them what to do, what to accomplish, how to team together, and how to align their own personal success to succeeding in the company…they often do what they think is right in their own eyes. Don’t blame employees for a lack of leadership direction resulting in organizational sub-par performance, dysfunction, and collateral damage.

Now that we got the “blame the leadership” off our chest, let’s face reality. Ultimately, the responsibility for our surviving and thriving is up to us. We are accountable and responsible for our actions.

Every day is an opportunity to learn within and outside the company. What are you learning? If you are holding your breath for training funds, don’t bother unless you like a deep blue or scarlet color on your face. It is up to you to take the initiative, even if it is on your own time and dime. After all, it is your career on the line. If you are not keeping up, others around you might get the promotion – or even your job.

Most CEOs hire a leadership team and staff to focus on the gap between the external strategic “business” and the internal details of doing what it takes for “the business” to be successful. In other words, CEOs assume their team is filling in the gaps of what the they can not get to, don’t want to do, or look for specialists to do.

Unfortunately, the result is that gaps can occur resulting in broken links in internal business performance matching what is needed to support the external business.

What are those common broken links? Here are ten questions for employees to ask.

1.  Are you working in a company that matches your passion and where you want to work? If not, have you started the process to identify who you are, what you want to do, and where you want to do it? Are such jobs in your current company? If you have to change companies or careers, do you have a game plan?
2. Are you a Value Worker or Entitlement Worker? Entitlement workers are found everywhere. You may survive but Value Workers have a higher potential for promotions and new jobs.
3. Do you know the business and how to contribute to the business? How can you add value to your company’s business grow if you don’t understand “the business?” How can you learn the business and give management what they want?
4. Are you sure you are in the right seat focusing on doing what you do best and enjoy most? If not, do you know how to discover your behavioral role in order to match what you were born to do with job opportunities?
5. Are you personally motivated to align your career success to the company’s business success? If not, then the synergy potential for company realignment can release transformational energy – but you may not be part of the realignment.
6. Do you know how to market yourself so that others can know who you are and how you can help them?
7. Are you worth knowing? Are you a company asset or liability? Are you trustworthy, loyal, hardworking, and a team player?
8. Are you teaming across silos in alignment with your business objectives? Or, are you a roadblock to team members and company success?
9. Do you know how to ask for help from managers, mentors, and sponsors? Are you currently seeking help?
10. Do you know how to develop trusted relationships, align with company objectives, and exceed company expectations? If not, your untapped teaming potential could become a gold mine for company success – and your career success.

Are these broken links or gaps easy to fix? Usually not by busy CEOs and staff fighting off alligators. However, these are the gaps and links that we have developed with thought leadership and practical tools to help companies release their internal success potential.

How do you score on the ten employee gaps?

 

What are Five Common Gaps to CEO Success?

CEOs have a lot on their plate. Top performing CEOs are focused on the core of “the business” which is really product development/management, marketing, and sales. If there is no product, there is no reason to go to market. If the market is not aware of their product or if the company has a bad reputation, there is no business. If there are no sales, there is no company. This results in the primary CEO focus being outside the daily activities of the company. That means little CEO time and attention is left for internal daily activities.

Most CEOs hire a leadership team and staff to focus on the gap between the external strategic “business” and the internal details of doing what it takes for “the business” to be successful. In other words, CEOs assume their team is filling in the gaps of what the they can not get to, don’t want to do, or look for specialists to do.

Unfortunately, the result is that gaps can occur resulting in broken links in internal business performance matching what is needed to support the external business.

What are those common broken links? Here are five questions to ask about your company.

1. Are you viewing your people as costs or investments? How you treat them and what you get out of them will be depend on how you view them.
2. Do your people “know your business?” How can they help your business grow if they don’t understand “your business?”
3. Are you sure you have the right people in the right seats focusing on your success? If they are the wrong people or in the wrong seats or focusing only on themselves, then changing that picture can dramatically improve your business success potential.
4. Are your people personally motivated by aligning their career success to your business success? If not, then the synergy potential for realignment can release transformational energy.
5. Are your people teaming across silos in alignment with your business objectives? If not, your untapped teaming potential could be a gold mine for company success.

Are these broken links or gaps easy to fix? Usually not by busy CEOs and staff fighting off alligators. However, these are the gaps and links that we have developed thought leadership with practical tools to help companies release their internal success potential.

What are our three distinct initiatives? Here is what we call them and how they apply to the common gaps:

1. Are you viewing your people as costs or investments?
   Human Investment Leadership™
2. Do your people “know your business?”
   Human Investment Leadership™
3. Are you sure you have the right people in the right seats focusing on your success?
   Teampreneurship™
4. Are your people personally motivated by aligning their career success to your business success?
   Jobpreneurship™
5. Are your people teaming across silos in alignment with your business objectives?
   Jobpreneurship™

When a company combines all three solutions, we call it Integrated Solutions™.

Next week we will discuss the same topics from an employee perspective. Then we will begin explaining in more detail how each solution can help companies reach their success potential.

How Can the Human Investment Organization Get Noticed?

There are some core paradigms that are important.

1. HR, just like other functions, is often viewed as having passive and compliant tactical doers unless proven otherwise.
2. HI (Human Investment) should seek to move from doers to influencers to trusted advisors – but never decision makers. The temptation is to be a watchdog over policy and procedures and assume that they are responsible for making the decisions but that is not their role. The C-Level owns the vision, strategy, and culture direction. Ultimately all HI policy and procedures should be driven by sound business judgment, industry best practices, government regulations, legal compliance,– and be approved by the senior executive team with delegations of authority. The P&L owner and functional chief own the daily decisions over their people. HI exists to serve the company by adding value to each management group in alignment with their goals and objectives – which should be in alignment with corporate direction.
3. HI needs to develop as an accountable organization with performance metrics, just as any other function. Every initiative will cost in resource, time, and money. The ROI needs to be measured either quantitatively, as defined by finance or qualitatively, as defined and measured by the P&L owners.
4. HI results need to be packaged and marketed for internal review, just as any other strategic function. A lack of measurable results and ROI metrics will create a distrust and dismissal of HI as a member of the strategy team.
5. World-class competitive organizations recognize that their performance needs to be measured against an apples-to-apples global standard, not an internal standard. Use external benchmarking to help evaluate measured performance.

So, how can HI begin to demonstrate value? Let’s take some examples:

1. Benchmark performance based upon an independent outsource bid. Most benchmarking is like statistics, you can pick the numbers to use to show how well you are doing. By going through a true outplacement bid process, with finance and procurement participation, you will see real numbers, metrics, and best practices that you can now either adopt to meet or exceed internally or be willing to outsource. A true HI function is focused upon being strategically willing to do what it takes to add the most value and results to the success of the company. Finance and procurement will add political support that your conclusions are trustworthy.
2. HR is often characterized as “not invented here” or “I don’t want to add more work or make any changes.” HI organizations constantly look for how to do more with less. Look for innovative ideas, best practices, and revolutionary ideas that will often mean fewer people offering greater results than before.
3. Competitively use third parties to leverage their knowledge and organizational resources to help you make dramatic improvements.
4. Create a marketing plan to communicate your new brand, value, and results to the executive team and executives of interest.
5. Create a relationship development sales strategy to find out what key executives want and how you can give them what they want. That includes an honest evaluation of what you can do with current investments, how you can reorganize existing investments, and what you can do with approved additional investments. Then you must deliver by exceeding expectations and with other functions agreeing that you delivered.
6. Create an enthusiastic, collaborative culture within the HI function as a model to other functions. Expand the culture to other functions.
7. Constantly challenge the HI function to deliver more value each year as measured by benchmarks and internal clients.

Now HI can be measured and accountable for their contribution to company alignment and strategy. Earned success will help you become a trusted advisor with a seat at the executive table.

Next week we will begin to show how Integrated Success™ can create strategic improvements whether implemented by HR, HI, or any department head.

How Can the HI Function Model Cross-Functional Teaming?

In my opinion, Human Investment (HI), combined with HR responsibility, has one of the hardest roles in the company – if done correctly. HI has internally all the requirements of running their own business within a business. Here are some examples:

1. Strategically determining what the customer (CEO and executive team) wants and needs for company success. (vision, strategy, and translation into implementation)
2. Development of products and services required to support company success. (product development)
3. Marketing of these products and services company wide from top to bottom. (marketing)
4. Selling their value and why others should want to “buy” into their solutions. (sales and delivery)
5. Creating regulatory and legal compliance for company wide employee treatment (legal)
6. Recruiting, Vendor selection (procurement)
7. Compensation studies, survey results, and financial fit to company budgets and plans (finance)
8. Payroll (administration and finance)
9. Technology improvements or automation (IT)
10. Employee Issues – development, counseling, dispute resolution… (HR)

These are merely a few examples. But notice that no one can do all of these activities well. Every activity is best achieved through cross-functional teams.

1. Strategy: Interfacing with the executive team informally to develop relationships and see what they want and need. Then review with them your thoughts and plans for how you think you can help. Agree on what can be done with priorities and resource constraints.
2. Product Development: Team cross-functionally with executives of interest, their designees, and P&L owners to develop solutions that gets companywide support.
3. Marketing: Develop the marketing branding, message, and communication plan to rollout solutions to every employee.
4. Selling: Develop relationships companywide for top-level support. Recommend the selling message as why new solutions are necessary for everyone’s success, even if that success is defined by declining benefits necessary to keep the company going and people employed.
5. Legal: Be the coordinator and advisor internally supported by internal or external legal counsel. Involve legal counsel as prudent to help each executive of interest with the balance of minimizing the risk and the cost of how decisions are implemented.
6. Procurement: Create a cross-functional team to follow procurement best practices with finance review of total cost and total value. The process focuses on better buying specifications (job descriptions or what the company requirements are), requests for proposals (resumes or vendor), evaluation process (resume reviews, interview process, and vendor evaluation process), score card summary process, recommendation to executives of interest (decision makers), final negotiation, legal compliance, and implementation (on-boarding or vendor implementation).
7. Finance: Request help from finance to participate in vendor cost analysis, compensation studies and modeling, and with any project that could impact the P&L or balance sheet.
8. Administration: Work with whichever function owns administration across the company. This is often performed in shared service centers, outsourced, or within the CAO or CFO organization.
9. Technology Improvements: Provide the user interface, requirements, and coordinate specifications across affected functions. Establish a cross-functional team to ensure input and results are optimal for all parties. Team with IT who is usually responsible for technical implementation, maintenance, updates, and integration within the company IT infrastructure. Provide implementation user training to all affected parties. Utilize a third party consultant or trainer as needed.
10. Employee Issues: Dysfunctional employees are usually the productivity and expense black hole that drives significant risk or cost to the company. Line managers and executives usually need assistance, direction, and support to assist with employee development, motivation, employee personal issues, and employee complaints. Here the HR representative is seen as the influencer or advisor who protects the company’s interest and legal exposure, helps with positive resolutions, works as a team member with the supervisor, and helps to instill a business culture in sync with both C-Level approval and within regulatory and legal guidelines. Internal or external legal counsel is used as needed to review existing practices and to minimize negative financial and public relations impacts.

You can see that any HI organization needs to team with others to be effective. This produces better results, helps build political buy-in, gains support from other functions, and helps integrate HI into the business model of the company.

Next week, we will discuss how the Human Investment Organization can get noticed.

How can HR Begin to Compete for Status?

Companies look to HR for helping with people issues and organizational teaming yet HR is often no better than other functions in working cross-functionally for company success.

The reasons are typical to any group. There are turf, credit, ownership, pride, and perception issues. However, to the CEO these are all impediments to company success. The average CFO, CTO, and head of HR is in the job from 18-24 months. So human nature is to try to survive by building walls, creating the perception that you are irreplaceable, and adding complexity to justify the need to keep you. The irony is that these steps are the opposite of how to survive and thrive in tomorrow’s global economy. Those who add the most value, become trusted advisors, team with others for joint success, and seek to help others succeed are the profile that CEOs are hoping for – and keep changing staff to find.

If HR wants to create value, it must begin within it’s own team. If HR wants status, it must earn it by modeling Integrated Success™ internally. Otherwise, HR will continue to be considered a tactical cost center while senior management debates over who has to accept the function under their umbrella – the CFO, the CAO, the COO, or the CEO.

However, like most innovations, demonstrating success creates notice and the opportunity to expand influence, trust, and value. These are the keys for HR political success and the first steps to becoming a HI organization.

So, what are the initial steps for success? Here is a suggested roadmap:

1. Be sure you have the right players on board. Are they self focused or company success focused? Are they behaviorally a fit for the positions you have and need to fill? Are they team players? If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, then every other effort will be diminished and potentially sabotaged.
2. Be sure that your hiring process filters out those who fail to answer the questions above with a “yes.” We have an assessment partner who can help.
3. Design what roles you really need to have. Everyone behaviorally fits in a comfort zone that can be matched with positions where they will be happiest, have lower turnover, and be most productive. This is the “should be” model. Our partners can help.
4. Train your staff on tactical skills to do their job. Design additional training to help them develop career success. Our partners can help.
5. Mentor your staff through the Jobpreneurship™ model, which is a highly recognized model that includes Career Success and Mentoring guides. This model places the responsibility upon the individual to do the work. Individuals not interested in pursuing have the same opportunity as others but get the results of their effort – or lack of effort.
6. Manage individuals according to their distinct behavioral fit. Our partner has ten distinct behavioral models that each requires a different management style. For managers, this information can be eye opening.
7. Ensure you have performance metrics, clear written expectations, and reporting processes that result in helping everyone add value to their own career, the team, and the company. For those not interested in performing, develop steps to help them consider their options, offer assistance as needed, and carefully separate as needed.

An amazing result will occur. Knowing the business that you are serving, designing a match between the positions and the behavioral roles that you need to serve that business, staffing the right people with the right behavioral profiles to match the business and roles, helping those individuals learn additional skills and behaviors to enhance personal career success through training and mentoring right, managing according to distinct behavioral profiles matched to objective metrics and performance criteria and feedback, and helping non-performers get on track or out the door will create higher team performance, higher employee satisfaction, and notice by higher level executives.

We call this process Teampreneurship™ as shown below:

 

 

Human Resources has the unique opportunity of implementing this model internally as a demonstration how others can follow their lead toward ultimate companywide success. The process will not happen overnight but HR can control their own destiny and prove their value by first demonstrating success and then helping others win as well.

Non-HR managers should also consider implementing the model within their own organization. After all, the decision maker line manager is ultimately personally responsible for the results of their Human Investment portfolio.

 

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