One of the best things that can happen to a manager is having the opportunity to hire someone smarter, more talented and more accomplished than you.
Now, why does managing talented people seem so terrifying?
Successful leaders know – or should know – that hiring talented people is like winning the lottery. You gain an employee whose abilities could be that proverbial high tide, raising all boats, including yours.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
The only things Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music and what we do. – Keith Richards
Ha! So how is it, with all that dissent, that the Rolling Stones became one of the most popular and longest-surviving acts in rock music?
Disagreements are at the heart of destruction. But good people, and apparently even Keith Richards, know the value of handling disagreements favorably.
It’s true that people can disagree without being disagreeable.
With the intense turmoil on the national political landscape, this is a great time to review some of the most effective soft skills when it comes to handling real-life workplace disagreements.
But first, just a reminder that soft skills aren’t always about being soft.
Danes aren’t just happy at home. They love their jobs, too!
It a mostly different story in the U.S.
A Gallup poll found that 1 in 5 Americans feel emotionally disconnected from work and 70% said they were not reaching their full potential.
Home life? We won’t even get into that.
So, why do Danish workers love their jobs so much more than their American counterparts?
Is there one leadership quality that rises above the rest?
A fascinating examination of that very question, done by the Harvard Business Review, answers with an unequivocal “yes!”
Respect.
Or, to quote a phrase, R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
No other leadership quality had a bigger effect on employees than respect.
Being treated with respect was more important to employees than recognition and appreciation, communicating an inspiring vision, providing useful feedback — even opportunities for learning, growth, and development.
Hiring people may be the most important a manager does.
Every new hire changes an organization. If the new employee is better than – or has the potential to be better than – half the people already doing this job, your organization just got better.
Yet organizations repeatedly hire people who are in the bottom 50% of employees the minute they walk in the door.
That brings everything down.
A study by software company BambooHR found that one in three people have quit a job within the first six months.
The firm surveyed 1,005 U.S. employees over the age of 24 to learn if they’d quit a job, why they quit, and what which onboarding efforts might have kept them around longer.
Here are the top five reasons U.S. workers gave for leaving new jobs:
Few skills are more important in this age of info-overload than delivering a knock-out elevator speech – on demand.
You have got to have one. You have 30 seconds. Go!
Summing up the unique aspects of what it is that you do – in a way that excites others – is a fundamental skill, whether you are raising funds for the local soup kitchen, speculative capital for a risky start-up, or just selling yourself.
You can have a jaw-dropping logo, the perfect slogan, the most dazzling brochure and hottest Web site … even a great smile. But if your elevator pitch is out of date, you’ll swing and miss.
The tried-and-true elevator speech takes upfront practice to get it right, and ongoing work to keep it sharp.
Successful leaders have their own personality, their own style, their own approach. They can be as different as day and night.
Think Donald Trump. Then think Mother Teresa.
See what I mean?
Some leaders work smarter. Some work harder. But all of them work at it.
Leadership is there for the taking, to one degree or another, for anyone willing to make the effort.
But first, it helps to dispel some common myths of leadership.
You are probably familiar with the expression that people are only as good as the company they keep. Well, the reverse is also true. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.
And while the workplace has changed dramatically in the past 50 years, this hasn’t: Good employees don’t leave companies. Good employees leave bad managers.
And they probably leave them more than we care to admit, if results of one study are accurate. Here are some telling numbers on the gaps between employee expectations and reality:
Unfortunately, there are far too many ways for managers to make employees miserable.
So says researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — she’s a Harvard business professor, he’s a psychologist — who have been studying workplace dynamics for the past 15 years.
They outline their findings in a recent book, The Progress Principle.
Among the things they commonly found in the workplace is this four-step plan that’s sure to suck all the joy out of people’s work lives.
