On the HR Works Podcast we discuss how leaders can successfully step into vulnerability, how to build high performing teams and how to skyrocket employee engagement quickly.
“With organizations losing unbelievable amounts of money to poor employee engagement, I always wonder what stops leaders from properly addressing this problem. In this episode of HR Works, we find a critical ingredient to successful leadership and employee engagement: vulnerability.”
We also discuss how to use my free team building game, CardsAgainstMundanity.com, that more than 20,000+ employees are using to skyrocket trust, engagement, teamwork and performance.
This episode’s guest is Jason Treu, an executive coach who helps executives, managers, and employees to maximize their leadership and management abilities and perform at the highest levels. He provides coaching, workshops, keynote speaking, and other training services.
Jason also has “in the trenches experience” helping build a billion-dollar company and working with many Fortune 100 companies. He spent 15+ years working in marketing leadership positions in Silicon Valley working with influential leaders such as Steve Jobs (Apple & Pixar), Reed Hastings (CEO at Netflix), Mark Cuban, Mark Hurd (CEO at HP), Paul Wahl (President of SAP), and many others.
Teamwork is the number one soft skill. It’s the least understood and least prioritized. It’s the number one place for productivity gains for any organization. Here’s research to prove this out.
A high-performing team of five employees wastes 200-275 hours per month on misunderstandings, miscommunication, poor teamwork, and unresolved conflicts.
That more than 2400+ hours per year.
That’s 50,000 hours for an organization of 100 or more people per year.
Those are conservative numbers based research studies and on my own research study of more than 1000 employees over the past three years in a variety of industries and geographies.
The biggest challenge a company faces isn’t hiring. It’s integrating employees into a complex organism that can’t stop/won’t stop moving forward. Figuring this out (continuously) is mandatory.
The ones that do outperform others and have a major competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Here are three benefits your company will see:
Get employees to perform at their highest level on a daily basis, maximize their engagement and reduce turnover.
Significantly reduce confusion, conflicts, and unmet expectations.
Significantly increase communication and teamwork.
Here are four critical questions to askto see if your company is building the right strategies, systems, and processes:
1) Is my company building “extreme” trust with every hire? Do we ensure every team has it? Extreme trust is the #1 requirement for extraordinary performance and lack of trust is the root cause for 99% of the problems. It’s the glue that connects all the employees. On a 1 to 5 scale, “Do I trust my (manager/team/etc.)?” If it’s not a 5, research show’s it’s as good as a 1.
2) Do employees have a “user manual” to understand how each one of their team members and manager’s work?
Otherwise you are hope that employees figure out how to communicate, collaborate and engage with each other. This rarely works out well. And hope is a really poor business strategy.
3) Does my company have a set of operating values that provide the framework for all decision making? Are we using it in hiring and assessing performance?
Why? Because your company needs to build a process where you trust hundreds/thousands/ten-of-thousands of employees to do their work the way the management team would do their own work.
4) Are we conducting an employee every six months to track their experience? Are we asking the right questions? What are we doing with that information?
These four strategies and actions are essential to scaling a company quickly and getting every employee engaged and performing at their highest level.
Your company is like an organism. It’s complex, multi-faceted and ever-changing. You’ve got to care, prioritize, monitor and invest in it order for it to grow and flourish.
If you can’t, you’ll have a major problem that needs to be addressed because decisions and actions are being taking
How healthy are the relationships at your office? The stats on this are scary, ugly and worrying. We are really bad at developing relationships at work despite being the place we spend almost a third of our life. It’s hurting productivity and it’s hurting the bottom line. But worst of all it’s hurting us. Especially our mental health. It’s a terrible state of affairs. We are so bad at developing healthy workplace relationships that it is making us disengaged and bad at our jobs.
The good news is that it’s not that hard to fix and doing so won’t cost a cent. Creating psychological safety at work is a passion for my guest this week. Jason Treu is an Executive Coach who has made it his mission to solve this workplace crisis. He’s the author of the book Social Wealth and the creator of the team building game Cards Against Mundanity. He’s a team building and culture development expert.
Lessons Learned
Disengaged workers cost money
The statistics about disengaged workers are startling. 70% of American workers describe themselves are disengaged. The cost to American business is on the order of $550 billion. Most people who quit their job do so because of their boss. Innovation in the economy is at an all time low. 86% of executives say collaboration isn’t working. The problem is at an epidemic proportion and very few businesses are doing anything about it.
Cliques are the enemy
There’s a real danger of cliques developing in every office. A small group of high energy players can come across as ‘exclusive’ to those who are less socially confident. There is a unique dynamic at work. We know that having friends is important for workplace engagement. But we’re asking people to be friends with people who might not ever have met in their personal lives. But each worker needs to understand that the only way for you to succeed is for your co-workers to succeed.
Really get to know your co-workers
People tend to know very little about their co-workers. But there is tons of research that reveals that more psychologically safe a person feels the better they perform. In 1997 a team of researchers developed a series of questions for strangers to ask one another. They were questions like “What kind of superpower would you like?” and “What makes you feel alive?”. Then the group was asked how close they felt to each person in the room. Many answered that they felt closer to these people than anyone else in their life. The experiment reveals how important empathy is in human relationships. Jason has replicated those questions in his own card game he calls Cards Against Mundanity.
Want to be a great manager? Do this one simple thing to increase employee engagement by 3X (and their performance).
It’s essential that employees and managers build a great relationship. If an employee doesn’t trust their manager, their performance decreases and they are significantly more likely to quit their job.
Remember: People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.
And what’s one of the most important things managers can do? Gallup has found that people whose managers meet with them weekly are 3X as likely to be engaged. It may seem obvious, but most managers don’t do it.
