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Every day managers make decisions that can affect employee morale. The more people they manage, the more employee issues they have and the more opportunity for missteps.
What’s the best way to handle it? Today’s guest, Barbara Mitchell, co-author of The Decisive Manager, has some answers for you.
What You’ll Discover About Employee Morale:
- How to get employees excited about the work they’re doing.
- Three great strategies for improving employee morale.
- The challenge of influencing employee morale in a hybrid or remote work environment.
- How to use technology to promote company culture and support employee morale.
- How attitude and aptitude affect employee morale.
- And much MORE.
Guest: Barbara Mitchell
Barbara Mitchell is enthusiastic about helping organizations find, hire, engage and retain the best available talent.
That’s why she began consulting after working as an HR Executive in corporations.
She’s the founder and Managing Partner of The Mitchell Group, a management consulting practice that helps a wide variety of clients with people and talent management issues.
She is also coauthor of The Essential HR Handbook.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Human Resources episodes, especially Barbara’s earlier interviews:
- Three Management Leadership Traps You Need to Avoid with Barbara Mitchell
- Effective Employee Retention Strategies to Stay Afloat in Uncertain Times
Contact Barbara and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Visit her website and check out her books:
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HOW TO MAINTAIN EMPLOYEE MORALE IN TODAY’S TURBULENT ENVIRONMENT WITH BARBARA MITCHELL
Every day, managers make decisions that can affect employee morale. The more people they manage, the more employee issues they have, and the more opportunity for missteps. What’s the best way to handle it? Today’s guest has some answers for you.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, The podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their Bottom line.
I’m your host Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got a longtime friend of the show with me today. She’s Barbara Mitchell. Barbara is an enthusiastic HR professional who is all about helping organizations find, hire, engage, and retain the best available talent. She’s the founder and managing partner of the Mitchell Group, where she helps a wide variety of clients with their people and talent management issues.
She’s also a prolific author who has released a new book with her coauthor, Cornelia Gamlem, called The Decisive Manager: Get the Results, Build Morale, and Be the Boss Your People Deserve. So, let’s get the scoop on that.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Barbara.
Thank you, Hanna. Delighted to be back with you again.
[Laughter] It’s always a joy to have you on the show. You and Cornelia have written so many wonderful books to help businesses be more successful in managing their talent pool. Two that come to mind immediately are The Big Book of HR, and also The Manager’s Answer Book. Tell me, what inspired you to write the newest one, The Decisive Manager?
Well, we certainly know that managing people has not gotten any easier in the last couple of years. And so, we wrote this book during the pandemic. We didn’t make it pandemic centric, but we certainly took into consideration the fact that navigating the new workplace is even more challenging for today’s managers. So, we really wrote this to help people navigate and succeed in the wonderful way of managing people.
Well, we all want to succeed because we can definitely fail on our own. Thank you. [Laughter] That’s the way it goes. How is The Decisive Manager different from your Manager’s Answer Book?
Well, The Manager’s Answer Book was written to handle all issues about managing financial, legal, all kinds of other pieces. This one focuses only on the people issues that managers face every single minute of every single day. So, that’s the difference. It is, however, in the same format of question and answer, which we really love working in that kind of format. We think it really makes it easy for managers to digest some of the challenges that they’re facing.
And also, we love the idea of managers being able to have a copy of our book and hand it to a fellow manager who’s having a challenge and just say, “Well, check out page 72” or whatever the issue is. It makes it pretty easy to be a good colleague, as well as a good manager.
Well, that sounds really helpful, and I like the practical approach of “Here’s the question,” because typically when something crosses a desk, it’s in the form of “Here’s the problem. Here’s the question I need to answer,” not “Here’s the theory. Let me figure out how to somehow magically apply this.” So, that definitely makes your format and your book more user friendly.
Now, let’s talk about these employee morale issues. What are you hearing in the workplace? What are they? What’s the most common ones? How do they pop up?
Well, I think one of the most common ones these days is just how to get people excited about doing the work that they’re doing, where they’re doing it, and why they’re doing it. I’m not sure that morale challenges are any different in 2023 than they probably were in 2013, because we’re still dealing with people, and everybody, we think, wants to come to work and do a good job.
But there are so many challenges being thrown at employees these days, and we all know the controversy of where do you do the work, when do you do the work? Life has just gotten so much more complicated. So, morale issues, we think, focus mostly on how to get the best, of course, out of your employees, how to get them to be excited about the work that they’re doing and how to get them to be really wanting to contribute to your organization’ success.
And if you can do that, pretty sure that you’re going to have a successful workplace.
Well, there’s no question about that. But the bigger question is, well, how do you do that? I mean, yes, you need to know how. So, help us understand and give us some tips on what we can do to address those issues. Because, yes, life is complicated. In some ways, it always has been. We’re always dealing with something, and trying to balance work and home life and home responsibilities is important.
So, how can a manager address that and get the kind of morale and motivation about how, where, and why they need to work. Because they do need to work to earn a living in order to do all these other things that they want to be doing, but they want to be able to do it in a way that is agreeable. Right? I mean, nobody wants to hate their job or hate know any part of their work life because it does consume so many hours of the day and so many hours of the week.
So, help me out here, Barbara. How are we supposed to do all that as managers?
It starts with a very basic standard of hiring the right people in the first place. There is nothing more important to an organization or to a manager than having the right people in the right places. Jim Collins was so right back when he wrote Good to Great, talking about the importance of having the right people in your organization. We spend a lot of time in the decisive manager talking about finding and attracting the right people to the organization, onboarding them.
And then, the next really major thing that managers need to be focused on is how do you bring people into your organization? It used to be a little easier when we were all in the same place perhaps, but now with hybrid and all kinds of virtual organizations, now we’re having to onboard people, bringing them into our culture, letting them know what we expect.
Setting expectations is the next thing, I would say, is most important for managers to be able to do right now. Let people know what it is you expect of them, be real clear about that, and then hold them accountable.
The third thing, and this is my personal favorite, I love the subject of how managers need to be better listeners. They need to be focused on really hearing what it is that’s important to their employees, and they need to be able to then take action based on what they’re hearing. But really listening, not just listening the way most of us listen, and that’s to think about what we’re going to say as soon as the other person is quiet. No, that’s not listening. We really want to be hearing what it is the employee is sharing with you.
So, those are the very practical things, getting the right people, bringing them into your organization, listening to them, and then holding them accountable to do the kind of work that really is going to make your organization the success that you want it to be.
Those are three great strategies for doing that. I’m curious, though, let’s say the manager is hiring the right people. Okay? They’ve gone through a rigorous recruitment process, and they’ve narrowed it down, and they’re really bringing on the right people. When it comes to onboarding, especially onboarding the more junior members of a team who don’t have as much work experience, what recommendations do you have?
Because one of the criticisms I hear about hybrid work or remote work is that the kind of mentorship that a younger person would receive in an office environment is really difficult to replicate. What advice do you have?
I agree that it is more difficult, but it’s not impossible to onboard people virtually, mentor people virtually, and coach people virtually. I think we really need to just change our mindset on we don’t have to be across a desk or across a table from someone to have an influence on them. I really think that if organizations carefully think, “What does someone need to know to do the job that we’re asking them to do?”
I think this is one of those cases where you need to be really empathetic from the very beginning and think, “What would I need to know?” Put yourself in that new person’s chair, and think, “What would I need to know? What about this organization? What about our history? What about our culture? How can we share that?” And I think there are great ways to do it.
Technology really can help here. It also starts well beyond the whole idea of bringing people on board starts really in the hiring process, because during the hiring process, you should be sharing the history, the culture, letting the employee know – potential employee know what it’s going to be like to work for your organization, what do you as a manager expect from them.
And you start sharing that in the hiring process, then you certainly share it on your website, and give them all kinds of ways to connect with you during that wonderful time between when they accept the job and when they start the job. I think that’s what many managers really don’t think about that time as being so important as to bring people on and get them successful as quickly as possible.
So, I think there are things you can do. I’ve seen organizations put simple videos together, put them on their website that just shares what the culture is all about so that you really are using technology to the fullest. And then mentoring, coaching, all of the things, especially newer employees need can be done. Certainly virtually phone calls.
Most coaches that I work with now like coaching by phone, and they were doing this well before the pandemic, well before virtual work. Coaching on the phone seems to be much more impactful. People are more focused than they are, perhaps, when you’re in person. So, just thinking a little bit outside the box, I know the world of work is different, but virtual does not have to be a barrier. We just have to be a little more creative in how we how we use technology, how we connect, and how we listen.
Speaking of listening, what if you have an employee who is telling you how they feel, and you’re listening and you’re listening very intently, and what you’re hearing sounds totally unreasonable. It’s like, “This person is on another planet.” [Laughter] How do you recommend responding to something like that?
First of all, I would make sure you’re listening carefully to what they’re really saying now, not putting your own spin on what they’re saying. I know that’s a hard thing to do. If they’re telling you things, or asking for things, or sharing how they like to work and it absolutely does not fit your culture, I think you take the time to really have a heart to heart conversation about what it is that your organization is all about, what’s important to the organization, and maybe this is not a good fit for that employee.
Now, you certainly don’t want to make that decision quickly or arbitrarily. In fact, we have a whole section of The Decisive Manager on ensuring graceful endings. We don’t want to focus on that, we want to focus on the positives of bringing people on and getting the best from them. But there are times when you’ve got somebody that just is not right for your organization, and then you certainly do your best to counsel, train, develop, do all the things that you would do as a good manager.
But if the decision is that this is not right, then you make it as quickly as possible and as painlessly as possible so that person can maybe find the right place for them.
Well, it’s interesting that you talk about graceful endings, because I get the sense that sometimes managers just take too long to make the hard decisions. On the other hand, they don’t want to make them too quickly either if there is a way to bring the employee back in the fold, in line with what the expectations are that need to be met.
But if you let it go on too long, it affects the morale of the rest of the employees. Right? The employee morale goes down generally because it’s like, “Well, look what they’re letting that person get away with.” So, the accountability factor is pretty important.
What suggestions or recommendations do you have for how to balance that, and when does a manager know, “All right, enough is enough. I’ve given them plenty of opportunities to raise their game, and they’re either not understanding, or they don’t want to understand. It’s time we go our separate ways so they can find an opportunity where they can shine, because they’re not shining here.”
Really good question, Hanna. I have a saying that I’m not the only one that says this, but I’ll say it to you: “Good people want to work with good people.” You are so right about someone who’s not pulling their weight, so to speak, in an organization impacts the good employees who are left to pick up the slack. So, you certainly do not want to let something, a bad employee or a difficult situation, linger.
But there’s two things that I think you need to be looking at. One is, does the person have the right attitude for the job, and do they have the aptitude for the job? Because those are two very different things. The aptitude is something that do they have the skills? Do they come in with the skills? Could you get them the skills? Are there ways mentoring, coaching, developing, training, whatever? Can you help them get the skills that they need in order to be successful?
Attitude is something that you’re probably not going to be able to impact if the person is that one that you mentioned a moment ago that is telling you all the things that you’re doing wrong or the organization is doing wrong, or that they are not able to be a team player within your organization. Those are the hardest ones to really get to and know whether or not you can have an impact or not. Odds are, maybe you can’t if it’s an attitude issue where they just aren’t willing to do the work necessary to make an impact in your organization. That’s when once you come to that conclusion, If you have set clear expectations, if you have done everything you can in order to help them succeed, then it’s time to say, “Perhaps this is not the right place for you.” Let’s work to have that graceful ending that we talk about in The Decisive Manager.
It’s really interesting that you mention about setting clear expectations and having done what you can as a manager to help them succeed. Because sometimes I’ve heard managers tell an employee, “I don’t like your attitude,” but that’s not really helpful to the employee in terms of, “well, what am I doing wrong?” What do I need to change?
“I’m upset because of X, Y, Z, and that’s not being addressed.” Maybe the resources aren’t made available, or there’s a miscommunication or a misunderstanding, and they’re upset because they want to do a good job but they’re not getting the support that they need in order to do it. And they’re angry, right? I mean, that’s a normal type of reaction.
And so, when somebody says, “I don’t like your attitude,” granted, they may not like the attitude because they’re not getting what they want. But it’s a failure to communicate, really.
You’re absolutely right. And communication is something we haven’t talked about yet, but it just cannot be overstated that managers and their employees need to have so many ways to communicate, and early often, just keep talking and just keep listening to each other. And I totally agree. Saying to someone “I don’t like your attitude” will get you nowhere with that person. They’re certainly not going to be more cooperative with you. You have to be able to think about – give them an example.
We do a lot of work with clients on performance management feedback. Feedback is, just – it’s a word that we cannot overstress these days. Everybody wants to know, “How am I doing? What could I be doing better?” And managers need to be just giving feedback constantly.
I know a lot of managers who just say, “Well, they should know what to do” or “They should watch somebody else” or whatever. No, they need to hear from you about good feedback. “Today in the staff meeting, you did an outstanding job of turning things around when you shared the example.” And then, you really specifically tell them what they did and they can learn from that.
And the same thing if it’s constructive feedback. “Yesterday, when you were a little bit out of sorts, when we were meeting and you said X, Y, Z, to me, here’s how I felt when you said that, and here’s how my day was impacted.” What can we do to be able to communicate better, giving that good feedback so that that employee knows exactly what it is that you expect of them. Then if they can’t reach your expectation but you’ve been clear on your expectations, then and only then I think you have that unfortunate conversation about “Maybe it’s time for us to part ways.”
Understood. But by the same token, and I think you touched on it when you’re providing feedback, it could also be “Barbara, that project that you just finished, I really appreciate how you did X, Y, Z. That just made it that much better,” or you met the deadline with plenty of time to spare. Whatever it was that was going well.
Having people have that kind of feedback instead of, “Well, you’re really blew it there. They don’t want “Oh, she’s on the phone? Oh my god,” [Laughter] where they don’t want to deal with it because they just expect the hammer to come down. So, this way, you get more of the good type of results and not just people cringing when they hear your name or your voice.
Absolutely.
So, Barbara, what is the most important thing you’d want managers or entrepreneurs to take away from your book, The Decisive Manager?
I think the most important thing is to realize while things have changed, we are in a unusual part of our work life, there are solutions that can be found, and that managers can, if they listen, if they communicate, if they recognize the employee doing good work, if they say thank you.
You just mentioned a moment ago about giving good feedback when someone’s done a great job. I hear over and over is employees, they just want to hear those simple words of thank you. So, a manager can show a vulnerability, a manager can tell stories about what they have done in their life, share them with their employees, and learn from what they’re hearing from their employees, but also not being afraid to show some vulnerability. That goes a long way in today’s world with today’s employees.
They want to know that you treat them like a human being, not just as an employee. And I think if managers take that away, they say thank you, they treat people with respect. If they treat people as human beings and not just “You’re my employee and you’re going to do what I tell you to do,” I think that we will get through this time and move on into whatever is next for us as managers, leaders of organizations.
So, what I’m hearing between the lines is that the command and control style of leadership isn’t serving organizations well these days. They need to make a change?
They need to make a change. They need to be listening, they need to be understanding that people are seeing work a little bit differently, that they want to have a life outside of work, and they want you to acknowledge them as who they are, not just what you can do for me today, and they want to be appreciated for what it is they’re doing.
Now, that sounds like it’s the employees’ world, and in many cases, it is, especially right now with the difficulty in hiring people. But honestly, I think everybody wins. When managers treat people with respect, they listen to them and they say thank you for the work that they’re doing, I think everybody wins. Especially the organization is going to win because people are going to be more productive. And isn’t that what we’re looking for?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, Barbara. This has really been great. I think you’ve touched on a couple of really important themes. I appreciate your time, and especially the way you help managers be better leaders and the boss they’re people deserve.
If you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Barbara Mitchell, her work and her book, The Decisive Manager: Get Results, Build Morale, and Be the Boss Your People Deserve, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview can be found in the show notes over at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back in one week with another episode of Business Confidential Now. So, until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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