Making Sure Your Employees Succeed

It's common knowledge that helping employees set and reach goals is a critical part of every manager's job. Employees want to see how their work contributes to larger corporate objectives, and setting the right targets makes this connection explicit for them, and for you, as their manager. Goal-setting is particularly important as a mechanism for providing ongoing and year-end feedback. By establishing and monitoring targets, you can give your employees real-time input on their performance while motivating them to achieve more.

What the Experts Say
So, how involved should you be in helping employees establish and achieve their goals? Since failure to meet goals can have consequences for you, your employee, and your team, as well as the broader organization, you need to balance your involvement with the employee's ownership over the process. Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and co-author of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, says "A manager's job is to provide 'supportive autonomy' that's appropriate to the person's level of capability." The key is to be hands-on while giving your people the room they need to succeed on their own. Here are some principles to follow as you navigate how to best support your people in reaching their objectives.

Connect employee goals to larger company goals
For goals to be meaningful and effective in motivating employees, they must be tied to larger organizational ambitions. Employees who don't understand the roles they play in company success are more likely to become disengaged. "Achieving goals is often about making tradeoffs when things don't go as planned. [Employees] need to understand the bigger picture to make those tradeoffs when things go wrong," says Hill. No matter what level the employee is at, he should be able to articulate exactly how his efforts feed into the broader company strategy.

Make sure goals are attainable but challenging
Since employees are ultimately responsible for reaching their goals, they need to have a strong voice in setting them. Ask your employee to draft goals that directly contribute to the organization's mission. Once she's suggested initial goals, discuss whether her targets are both realistic and challenging enough. "Stretch targets emerge as a process of negotiation between the employee and the manager," says Srikant M. Datar, the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University and contributor to the Goal Setting module of Harvard ManageMentor. Be careful though: your team members are likely to resent you if you insist on goals that are too challenging to accomplish. At the same time, you don't want to aim too low, either. If you are overly cautious, you will miss opportunities and settle for mediocrity. "When done well, stretch goals create a lot of energy and momentum in an organization," says Datar. But, when done badly, they "do not achieve the goal of motivating employees and helping them achieve better performance as they were designed to do," he adds. Even worse, poorly set goals can be destructive to employees' morale and productivity, and to the organization's performance overall.

Create a plan for success
Once a goal is set, ask your employee to explain how he plans to meet it. Have him break goals down into tasks and set interim objectives, especially if it's a large or long-term project. Ask your employee: what are the appropriate milestones? What are possible risks and how do you plan to manage them? Because targets are rarely pursued in a vacuum, Hill suggests that you "help your people understand who they are dependent on to achieve those goals." Then problem solve with them on how to best influence those people to get the job done.

Monitor progress
Staying on top of employee progress will help head off any troubles early on. "We often get problems because we don't signal that we are partners in achieving goals," says Hill. Don't wait for review time or the end of a project to check in. Review both long-term and short-term goals on a weekly basis. Even your high-performing employees need ongoing feedback and coaching. Ask your employee what type of monitoring and feedback would be most helpful to her, especially if the task is particularly challenging or something she is doing for the first time.

When things go wrong
Very few of us reach our goals without some road bumps along the way. Build relationships with employees so that they feel comfortable coming to you if and when problems arise. If your employee encounters an unforeseen obstacle, the goal may need reworking. First, however, ask him to bring a potential solution to you so you can give him coaching and advice. If his efforts to solve the problem fail, you will need to get further involved.

What about personal goals?
Some managers neglect to think about what an employee is personally trying to accomplish in the context of work. "If I account for the interests of the whole person, not just the work person, I'm going to get more value from them," says Stewart D. Friedman, Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School and author of Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. For example, if your employee has expressed an interest in teaching but that is not part of his job responsibilities, you may be able to find ways to sculpt his job to include opportunities to train peers or less experienced colleagues.

The first step is for you to understand what these goals are. Ask employees if they have any personal goals they want to share with you. Don't pressure them; they should only share these aspirations if they feel comfortable. Friedman suggests you then ask, 'What adjustments might we try that would help you achieve your goals?" This allows the employee to take ownership over the solution. Just as with work goals, you need to be sure personal goals contribute to your team, unit, or to the company. "It's got to be a shared commitment to experiment and mutual responsibility to check in on how it's going. It's got to be a win for both," says Friedman.

When goals aren't met
There will be times, even with the best support, when employees fail to meet their targets. "Hold people accountable. You can't say 'Gee, that's too bad.' You need to figure out what went wrong and why," says Hill. Discuss with your employee what happened and what each of you think went wrong. If the problem was within his control, ask him to apply the possible solutions you've discussed, take another stab at reaching the goal, and check in with you more frequently. If it was something that was outside of his power or the goal was too ambitious, acknowledge the disappointment but don't dwell on it. "Do the diagnosis, get the learning, and move on," says Hill.

It's possible that you may have contributed to the problem. Be willing to reflect on your role in the failure. Were you too hands off and failed to check in frequently enough? Did you not review his work in a timely way? Have an open discussion about what you can do next time. "If you don't hold yourself accountable, they're going to have trouble with you," says Hill.

Principles to Remember

Do:

• Connect individuals' goals to broader organization objectives
• Show employees that you are a partner in achieving their goals
• Learn about and incorporate employees' personal interests into their professional goals

Don't:

• Allow employees to set goals alone
• Take a hands-off approach to high performers — they need input and feedback to meet their goals as well
• Ignore failures — be sure people have the opportunity to learn when they don't achieve goals

Case Study #1: Being a partner in goal attainment
Meghan Lantier is known at Bliss PR for being a natural people developer. As the vice president of the firm's financial services practice, Meghan manages several senior account executives, including Shauna Ellerson*. Meghan has overseen Shauna's work since Shauna started at Bliss four and a half years ago. Since the beginning, they have set goals through a collaborative process: Shauna develops draft goals, Meghan comes up with ones she believes Shauna needs to focus on, and then they identify the overlap between them. "I want to make sure they are manageable but stretched too," says Meghan. The two regularly check in on these goals. Meghan takes a hands-on approach, providing Shauna with regular input. They also sit down together at least four times a year to have a more formal discussion about Shauna's ambitions.

One of Shauna's goals is to become more of a thought leader on one of their largest financial services accounts. She has mastered the day-to-day work of managing the client and now needs to focus on the bigger picture. Shauna has been working on this goal for several months now by speaking up more in client meetings and providing more input into the content, not just the process, of their work. "We don't need a goal review session. I give her constant feedback in the context of the work," says Meghan.

Meghan also knows that ultimately Shauna is responsible for her own achievements. "I'm fully invested in making it work but I realized the limitations I have as a manager to make it happen," she says. It hasn't been necessary to talk about the consequences if Shauna fails to meet the goal — there are natural consequences in Bliss's high-performing culture. If you don't succeed, you don't get the better assignments.

*Not her real name; changed since publication

Case Study #2: Supporting personal goals
Amy Werner took a job at the New York City-based search firm On-Ramps just over three years ago. Amy joined at an integral time in the firm's growth and quickly became a key asset to the small firm. Sarah Grayson, one of the firm's founding partners, manages Amy and explains, "Amy has a lot of institutional knowledge and is a high performer." When she first began she was working toward a degree in social work but taking classes at nights and on the weekends. A year and a half into the job, Amy's school schedule became more complicated. Her internship requirements made working a traditional, full-time schedule difficult. Because of her star performance, Sarah and her fellow partners were keen to keep her on board while encouraging her to complete her degree. Amy remained full time but now works two days a week in the office, completing the rest of her hours on nights and weekends. As Amy says, "They have been nothing but supportive."

The firm has a semi-annual review process where goals are set and discussed; they also do more frequent check-ins on goals during weekly meetings. Amy and Sarah have talked a lot about how On-Ramps can support Amy not only by providing a flexible schedule but by thinking about the intersection of her studies and her work. They've found that there are lots of transferable skills between her job as a search associate and her work as a social worker, such as interviewing and client management. In explaining why they are so supportive of Amy's educational activities, Sarah says, "We wouldn't have done this for a low performer. We have to ask ourselves, 'What would it take to hire another Amy?'" Amy will be finishing her master's degree in May and she and Sarah have begun to discuss what's next for her. Both hope that there is a way to combine her skills in search and her interest in social work to create a job that is ideal for both her and On-Ramps.

Source: HBR

Should You Hire an Overqualified Candidate?

As politicians and economists puzzle over America's jobless recovery, managers who have started to hire again face another problem: how to handle all the overqualified candidates coming through their doors. The prevailing wisdom is to avoid such applicants. But the unprecedented availability of top talent created by this recession and new research on the success of these candidates may be changing that.

What the Experts Say
Recruiters have traditionally hesitated to place overqualified candidates because of several presumed risks, says Berrin Erdogan, a professor of management at Portland State University and the lead author of a recent study on the subject. "The assumption is that the person will be bored and not motivated, so they will underperform or leave." However, her research shows that these risks may be more perceived than real. In fact, sales associates in her study who were thought to be overqualified actually performed better. And rarely do people move on simply because they feel they're too talented for the job. "People don't stay or leave a company because of their skills. They stay or leave because of working conditions" she says.

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at Egon Zehnder International and the author of Great People Decisions and "The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad," agrees that there are more benefits to hiring an overqualified employee than there are risks."When making hiring decisions, visionary leaders don't just focus on the current needs, but on the future," he says.

Here are several things to consider next time you are looking at a stack of overly impressive resumes.

Overqualified or over-experienced?
Don't assume someone is overqualified based on a quick screen of their credentials. "There is a lot of misunderstanding over what overqualified is," says Ergodan. "We define it as meeting and exceeding the skill requirements of the job. So having a lot of education doesn't over-qualify you." Nor does experience, if the person's prior positions are not directly related to the job in question. Get to know the candidate before you decide to pass. There may be reasons why he is interested in this specific position. He may want to shift industries, move to a new location, or achieve greater work/life balance. And there may be ways that you can make use of his "extra" experience.

Think bigger than the job in question
When considering a candidate who is, in fact, overqualified for the job opening, ask yourself if there is room to expand the role and make use of the skills he brings. "While the old paradigm for hiring was to determine that a job was vacant and look for the right candidate, in today's world one should also consider the talent opportunities at hand, and try to find the jobs that may be created or open in the near future for them, in the larger organization," says Fernández-Aráoz.

"Hiring overqualified candidates can help you achieve much higher productivity, grow, and achieve opportunities that you may not even be thinking about pursuing right now." There are other less obvious benefits too: these employees can mentor others, challenge peers to exceed current expectations, and bring in areas of expertise that are not represented at the company.

Bring them on carefully
"Effective onboarding is essential, especially for the overqualified," says Erdogan. "Unmet expectations are one of the more common reasons for turnover," so you should be clear with yourself, the new hire, and the rest of the organization about what the job entails, as well as what it could become. Adds Fernández-Aráoz: "You need a clear and explicit plan for the future, whether you are thinking of a promotion, a lateral move, or a new project altogether. You need to think and discuss beyond the initial stage where he or she may be temporarily underutilized."

Both he and Erdogan caution that recruiters need to manage an additional risk: a boss who feels threatened. "Managers often worry, 'Can I supervise the person effectively?'" says Erdogan. A superior with less experience than the new hire might be concerned that the person will take her job, make her look bad, or be too challenging to manage. This is not reason enough to say no. Instead, focus on the future for that candidate. In cases where the boss is insecure, "you should not bring that new hire in without a plan to promote him in the near term," says Fernández-Aráoz.

Pay what they are worth
Although it's tempting in a bad job market to buy top talent on the cheap, Fernández-Aráoz disapproves of the strategy. "While my experience shows that you can get candidates for up to 25% less in the middle of a big recession, I would not recommend underpaying an overqualified candidate," he says. "We all have the expectation to be rewarded in a way which is reasonably proportional to our effort and contribution, and fair." And if the candidate is as strong as you think, you are likely competing with other employers for her. If you can't afford her, Fernández-Aráoz says it's better to pass than to underpay. If she wants the job anyway, simply have a frank conversation about her future prospects in terms of promotion and compensation so that she fully understands what she's getting into.

Principles to Remember

Do:

• Think broadly about your organization and its overall talent needs now and in the future
• Consider how you could accommodate a promising candidate's skill set by shaping the job
• Onboard carefully and be clear about your plans for the new employee

Don't:

• Narrowly define the hiring process as finding one person for one role
• Confuse education and experience with skills; a candidate with lots of experience still may not have the capabilities to do the job
• Try to pay an overqualified candidate less than he's worth

Case Study: The hiring risk pays off
In 2009 Lara Galinsky, senior vice president at Echoing Green, needed to hire a finance director for the young, but growing, global non-profit. She thought the ideal applicant would be someone relatively young but with a few years of non-profit finance experience. She was not expecting a candidate like John Walker.

John had most recently worked for a venture capital fund that was forced to lay people off because of the economy. Prior to that, he had spent over ten years in the defense industry in a variety of senior design and management roles. "I didn't have a background in social enterprise or non-profit. I didn't know anything about 501(c)(3)s," he says. But he did have deep experience in running, buying, and selling companies.

This was not an unusual situation for Echoing Green. "We get a lot of resumes from people who want to do a sector switch," Lara explains. They have a lot of work experience but not necessarily a lot of experience in the sector." She had previously ruled out candidates who were overqualified for certain positions or who didn't bring enough relevant experience.

But John had been referred by a friend of the organization, and since Echoing Green straddles the world of for-profit business and non-profit organizations, she thought his experience might be applicable.

Lara and her team talk about the risks and the opportunities of hiring each candidate. They knew that there were risks with John because he had never worked in the sector. But they saw many upsides too. "We didn't have anyone on staff with private equity experience and yet we work in that space. We knew we could use a for-profit lens," explains Lara.

In the end, Lara thought the benefits outweighed the risks. They had been impressed with John's willingness to learn what he didn't know. "Hunger and potential are the most important factors we look for in candidates," she explains. "We hire for talent, not necessarily for acumen. I look for people who can grow, mesh, and evolve."

John came on board in early 2009. Lara encouraged and incented him to network with finance directors from other organizations, so that he could gain insight from experts in the field. The learning curve was steep but he was able to come up to speed quickly and is now thriving in the position. As Echoing Green moves into impact investing they have also been able to tap directly into his previous VC experience. While John wasn't the person Lara initially envisioned hiring, she hadn't imagined what someone like him could do in the position. "We have evolved with him — and used his skills in ways we didn't anticipate."

Source: HBR

Take Back Your Attention

As I sit down to write this blog, I'm facing a blank page. I know it's going to be difficult, because it always is. Maybe I'll just check my email first, or update on Facebook or Twitter, or read the morning headlines on The New York Times, or sneak a peak at Google Analytics, or read the comments readers have left overnight on my earlier posts.

Something insidious has happened. The same device most of use to get our primary work accomplished — a computer, a smartphone, an iPad, or some combination of the above — is also now the repository of 1,000 distractions and every imaginable source of immediate gratification.

As we seek to work, just a keystroke or two away we also have access to Google and YouTube, books and blogs, TV shows and movies, music and video games, email and texting, newspapers and magazines, and countless web sites and apps. We're free to indulge our every whim, no matter how trivial, and that's exactly what we do.

The social critic Linda Stone has coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the fractured way we now focus. "With continuous partial attention," Stone explains, "we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges." Or something more alluring, reassuring, or simply less demanding.

Staying singly focused on a task in this digital era is like trying to resist eating while sitting in a bakery as cookies, pies, cakes and tarts emerge fresh and fragrant from the oven. There's a reason Cinnabon points its air vents out into the corridors at airports.

The easier it is to indulge our desires, the harder it is to exercise self-control.

Human beings weren't designed to manage the level of temptation to which we're exposed every day. That's why — irrational as it is — we take on more and more debt, grow fatter and fatter, continue to profligately spend down the earth's finite resources ,and struggle to pay attention to anything for very long.

I share this view with Daniel Akst, author of We Have Met the Enemy: Self Control in an Age of Excess. It's one of the most important books I've ever read — trenchant, compelling, elegantly written, and scary in its implications. It's also the sort of book most of us avoid because we don't want to engage with anything that makes us feel bad.

Instead, like children, we want what we want now. And in recent years, science has helped us to understand better just what we're up against when it comes to self-control.

We now know, for example, that it's more immediately exciting to flit from subject to subject than it is to stay concentrated on one thing at time. We're gluttons for novelty. That's because the thrill of the new activates dopamine, the neurotransmitter in our brains associated with pleasure.

Once we've experienced an initial rush, we're inclined to keep seeking it, even as the pleasure diminishes over time, and even when the consequences are ultimately self-defeating — as they are from overeating, or snorting cocaine, or shifting focus from one object of attention to another

Repugnant as I find Amy Chua, the so-called Tiger Mother, I share her conviction that the capacity to tolerate discomfort and delay gratification in the short term is the key to achieving any form of excellence in the long term.

Unfortunately, we each have an infinite capacity for self-deception. Even our prefrontal cortex — our reflective mind — can get co-opted by our most urgent and primitive desires. Rather than making thoughtful, reasoned choices, we often end up using the highest capacities of our brain to rationalize, justify and minimize our self-destructive behaviors.

So how do we stop kidding ourselves and take back control of our attention — and our lives? Here are six simple ways to start:

1. Let your deepest values become a more powerful guide to your behaviors. What do you truly stand for? How do you want to behave, no matter what? Keep those commitments front and center through your days, both as a source of energy and direction for your behaviors.

2. Slow down. The faster you're moving, the more likely you're reacting rather than reflecting. Set aside intentional times during the day — they can be as short as a minute or two — to check in with yourself. Think of them as "wake up" calls.

3. Build deliberate practices, ritualized behaviors you do at specific times until they become automatic. For example, begin by doing the most important thing first in the morning, uninterrupted, for 60 to 90 minutes. Make the start time and the stop time inviolable, so you know exactly how long you're going to have to stay the course.

4. Create "precommitments" to minimize temptation. Our capacity for self-control gets depleted every time we exercise it. Turn off your email entirely at certain times during the day. Consider working at times on a laptop that isn't hooked up to the Internet. Do this for the same reason you should remove alluring foods from your shelves (or avoid all-you-can-eat buffets) when you're on a diet.

5. Share your commitments. Tell others what it is you're intending to do, and ask them to hold you accountable. If you work in an office, get others to make the same commitment with you — and choose the most public way possible for everyone to share how they're doing.

6. Start small. Attention operates like a muscle. Subject it to stress — but not too much stress — and over time your attention will get stronger. What's your current limit for truly focused concentration? Build it up in increments. And don't go past 90 minutes without a break. That's the time to let your attention wander.

Source: HBR

Secrets of Positive Feedback

Have you ever noticed how a pat on the back makes you feel great for days? If the praise comes in handwritten or email form, maybe you frame the note and put it on your wall so it can lift you up on a tough day or help you feel more engaged at work. (Years of studies by Gallup and other research groups have shown that engaged employees are much more productive.)

Sadly, kudos from bosses are all too rare. Believe me, I know. Back in 1976, I was a 25-year old MBA when I took my first job as a marketing assistant at General Mills in Minneapolis. I had never held a job beyond teaching tennis and managing a tennis camp, and my starting salary was a whopping $10,500 a year. My co-workers tried to help me along, but the culture demanded crisp critical thinking skills that I had yet to fully develop. It seemed as if there was something wrong with everything I did. At my six-month performance review my boss said, "Doug, I like your determination, but to be honest, your performance has been very mediocre." And his boss's comment? "Doug should look for another job."

I was devastated, of course. I'd busted my young butt, and I knew that with a little time and encouragement I could master the work. But my boss's boss was not inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt, much less the time of day.

Ultimately, I went on to another division, where the general manager recognized my efforts and patted me on the back when I deserved it. Eventually, I mastered the job and received several promotions. Whew.

Over the years, I've worked on acknowledging others for their efforts. I've managed to marry tough-minded performance standards with tender-heartedness. As I've looked back over the more than 30 years that have passed since my career began, I have come to realize that there are three rules for building appreciation:

1. Make a personal connection early on. Your associates can tell when you are being direct, sincere and authentic. When you are, you establish trust. When you aren't, you don't. I have developed a practice that helps get things out in the open the moment a new hire meets me — I declare myself. I tell the person I'm meeting about my background, my values, my leadership philosophy, my expectations and even my favorite quotes. I then ask him or her to share something with me. My goal is to take the mystery out of our relationship as quickly as possible. This has proved to be a very powerful tool for relationship-building.
2. Look for opportunities to celebrate. My executive assistants and I spend a good 30 to 60 minutes a day scanning my mail and our internal website looking for news of people who have made a difference at Campbell's. For example, as of this writing I just learned about a woman named Patti who just got promoted in our customer service area, so I made a note to congratulate her.
3. Get out your pen. Believe it or not, I have sent roughly 30,000 handwritten notes to employees like Patti over the last decade, from maintenance people to senior executives. I let them know that I am personally paying attention and celebrating their accomplishments. (I send handwritten notes too because well over half of our associates don't use a computer). I also jump on any opportunities to write to people who partner with our company any time I meet with them. It's the least you can do for people who do things to help your company and industry. On the face of it, writing handwritten notes may seem like a waste of time. But in my experience, they build goodwill and lead to higher productivity.

I've also have found that what goes around truly does come around. After I was involved in a very serious automobile accident in July 2009, I was flooded with get-well notes from people all over the company and beyond. As my wife and I sat and read them in the hospital room, I could feel them helping to speed my recovery. The blessings of their notes reminded me that the more supportive feedback you give to others, the more you may very well receive in return.

What kind of difference has a bit of praise made to you?

Source: HBR