Motivation

Leadership Lessons

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What do leaders really need to know in order to inspire trust, create connections, and motivate others? Usually we look for methodologies and lessons that fall into ‘traditional’ leadership development categories. While these approaches to leadership continue to be valid, we live and work in untraditional times where organizational chaos resulting from constant change is the norm. As organizational leaders, Human Resources professionals need to know how to lead through the currency and consistency of change.

Patty McCord, ‘iconic former chief talent officer at Netflix’, provides us with some blunt lessons in her TedTalk – The Way We Work.

From a Human Resources (HR) perspective, at first, Ms. McCord’s approach seems almost blasphemous! She advocates for the tossing out of the precious acronyms, rules and processes, to which HR clings, to ensure order, system controls and best practice implementation. Upon reflection, however, the values Ms. McCord speaks to are about respect, excitement, passion, modeling, and collaboration.  While she advocates for the tossing out of the formal, once-a-year performance review, Ms. McCord reiterates the need for proactive and ‘in the moment’ feedback based in truth. When we treat our colleagues as adults in the workplace, we can all handle the truth, both positive and negative, because it paves the path to continuous improvement.

Understanding the business, living company values, building excitement for change into the future are ideas that are not new. These are lessons that we, as HR leaders, must continue to learn repeatedly, traditionally and untraditionally, until one day, we may be able to get them right and inspire others to do the same.

Discussion Questions:

  1. When is the last time you were told you are doing a good job at work by your boss?
  2. When is the last time you told a colleague that they were doing something right?
  3. As a leader and an HR professional, how do you inspire others in the workplace?
  4. How can you improve your own capacity for handling change?

Moving Past Maslow

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(Shade Design/Shutterstock)

It has been a good run for Abraham Maslow and his motivational theory The Hierarchy of Needs. But after 75+ years, a new generation of employees may be turning Malsow’s motivational pyramid upside down.

It was in 1943 when Maslow first publish his concept of the Hierarchy of Needs in a paper titled A Theory of Human Motivation (Click here to read the article)

In the rare case that you have missed or forgotten the concepts, let me refresh your memory of the long lasting and ground breaking theory of human motivation. Maslow professed that all human motivation goes through distinct levels. Here they are as summarized in Maslow’s original research:

“There are at least five sets of goals, which we may call basic needs. These are briefly; physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.”

Over the years, there has been criticisms of Maslow’s hierarchy theory. The main one being that one must start at one level and then pass to the next in a certain order. That being said, Maslow’s pyramid of motivation is still being discussed in every published organizational behaviour textbook today.

Society talks about companies such as Apple, Airbnb, and Uber as being societal and economic disruptors. Perhaps the millennials who are now the largest generation in the workforce (click here to read the official statistics) and their deep desire for meaningful work, is the ultimate disruptor in the workplace.

What would Maslow think of this statistic?  According to a recent survey, 47% of millennial respondents would give up a pay raise for more meaningful work. Of those who would forgo the raise, the average amount they would give up was $9,639. That is a huge reduction in income.

Click here if you wish to read the whole article.

It seems for the millennial workforce, self- actualization is the first step in their motivation – not the last. Almost 50% of millennial employees will forgo safety and security needs that come from earning more income in order to find employment that is meaningful to them.  Organizational and HR departments must start to deliver on this need.

This truly is disruptive behaviour in the workplace, and it turns traditional motivation and behaviour economic theory on its head.  How are HR departments going to respond? No longer can HR professionals stick their heads in the sand and think this trend will blow over. The largest group of employees in today’s workforce are demanding meaningful work and following a 75-year-old motivational theory will no longer cut it. There are not enough Gen Xers around to fill in the holes when the baby boomers are gone. What is HR to do?

Discussion Questions

  • Research and create a list on the ways millennials are different as compared to the baby boomers.
  • What are the key expectations of millennials in the workforce?

The Disengagement Gap

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(Keepsmiling4u/Shutterstock)

In many of the HRM NOW! blogs, I have talked about various gaps.

We have the pay equity gap, the PPE gender gap, and now we have a new gap for HR professionals to ponder – the disengagement gap.

But before we get to that, let’s discuss pondering.

Pondering is something more HR professionals should do. HR is good at strategizing, executing and implementing, but pondering is something to add to the HR toolbox.

To ponder is to weigh in with the mind, think about and reflect on, and with this disengagement gap, HR may need to ponder the causes. There seems to be some illogical human behaviour in the disengagement gap, and this is something HR should definitely ponder.

What is the disengagement gap and why is it happening?

An article on HRD calls the disengagement gap ‘a complacency conundrum’:

This DG or the complacency conundrum seems to be incessant in modern day workplaces. A recent North America survey showed the following:

  • 70% of employees are disengaged
  • Only 35 % are planning to leave their organization

This is a strange workplace behaviour. Employees are not happy with their work but are unwilling to change jobs.

This is especially strange when North America has some of the lowest unemployment rates in years. Low unemployment rates should make it easier for employees to leave jobs they do not like.  However, this was not happening in 2018, where 74% of employees were willing to leave their jobs, but in 2019, only 35% are.  Why the drastic drop?

HR professionals must consider why the change in employee’s attitudes. It’s not because employees love their jobs, because most do not.  All HR departments should begin a quest to understand how to engage their employees on a personal level. HR departments that start to ponder and develop some solutions to resolve this disengagement gap will see great performance benefits.

Discussion Questions

Improve your skills as a new HR professional by clicking on Dr. Natalie Baumgartner’s website. Pick one of her posts to read and review, and then ask yourself how an HR department could start to implement some of her ideas about employee engagement.

Building Experience Into Learning

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In our study of training and development, there are multiple theories about adult learning.

We know that adults learn differently from children. This does not mean, however, that adult learning cannot be fun. Fun comes in many different formats.

What is (usually) not fun is a training session that is boring, disengaging, and ends up being a waste of valuable time.

This is where experiential learning can come into play. In order to counter the negative experiences of one way, lecture-based training sessions, experiential learning provides for participation and engagement on the part of the learners. Adult learning happens best when participants in training sessions are able to put into action real-life scenarios that are linked directly to their work life experiences.

The advantages and disadvantages of experiential training sessions are explored in a recent post found on trainingzone.co.uk.

Click here to read the post.

As noted, good training programs allow the participants to ‘feel, taste, and experience’ that which they are there to learn. Experiential learning can go beyond the simple exercise of a role play when it builds on the actual internal individual reactions and responses to a given situation. That which adult learners experience, adult learners are able to remember, recall, and put into practice when the situation happens ‘for real’ in the future.

Experiential learning as discussed in our textbook and in the aforementioned post through David Kolb’s theories about learning styles, is not a singular approach. Kolb’s theories rely on a variety of individual approaches to learning and reinforce the need for including different experiential techniques or components into adult training modules.

Click here to access the article on Kolb’s learning styles.

Given that individuals learn differently, we need to ensure that different approaches are used when training programs are designed. Based on Kolb’s theories, not everyone will learn from a single group work activity during a training session, nor will everyone learn from a single training simulation, like a role play. Rather than designing a training program based on only one technique, it seems appropriate to use a variety of techniques in order to build the capacity for experiential learning for everyone.

It also builds the capacity for adult learners to have some fun.

Discussion Questions:

  1. As the HR leader for corporate training and development, how will you build Kolb’s experiential learning cycle into a customer service training module for tellers in a bank?
  2. Thinking about your own learning experiences; identify a course or a program that used experiential learning as the primary mode of training for the participants. How did it impact your own learning?
  3. How does experiential learning increase the development of ‘soft skills’ as noted in the article?

 

Smart tips for HR professionals

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Developing employees is a critical skill set for all HR professionals. But how do you know which system is the best to develop your employees?

There are many different performance management systems. Like any other complex organizational issue, there is never one right answer to an HR problem. Most of the time the right solution is dependent on many organizational factors. The best an HR professional can do is to learn and analyze many systems, and then make a judgement call on what is the best intervention for their organization at that moment in time.

You may want to start looking at what is happening in performance management trends. It seems that many HR professionals and organizations are rethinking their annual performance review systems.

Jason Averbrook in his new book called, the Ultimate Guide to a Digital Workforce Experience – Leap for a Purpose, shares this thought with us: “Employees don’t want feedback, they want attention.”

The once-a-year performance review does not give the employee enough attention. Averbrook goes on to say that 60 percent of companies are beginning to reshape their performance review systems.

Click here to read more about Jason Averbrook’s ideas. 

For decades, organizations have been using the traditional annual reviews that rate and rank employees. These annual rating and ranking systems seem to be of less value as time moves on and as organizational needs and employees’ values change.  Traditional performance review systems focus on the employee’s past behavior, and not their current behaviour. Today’s organizational deliverables are changing rapidly; looking back over the last year of an employee’s behaviour adds minimal productive value to the HR equation and therefore adds little to the employees’ or organization’s performance.

If the annual employee performance review systems are no longer viable, HR departments must begin to implement new modern day performance measurement systems that meet the needs of the employees and the needs of the rapidly changing business world.  Here is a list of the some of the recent trends in performance management:

  • Frequent real-time feedback instead of one-shot annual reviews
  • Decoupling performance reviews from administrative practices such as annual merit pay or bonuses
  • Dropping the ranking systems: think of what an employee can do, not what they have done

Employees want more frequent and focused attention to help them develop and perform. HR needs to investigate these new trends in performance management, and then begin to implement new methods to keep improving performance results.

Discussion Questions

Research and identify three large organizations that are moving away from the annual performance review system, then discuss what they are using to replace it.