7 Leadership Steps to Create High Performance in Your Organization

1. Stakeholder surveys – You must determine a baseline for your employees. You need to conduct a series of surveys designed to find out what your employees know, don’t know, and think they know. First, do they understand the true mission of your organization? If you think that, think again, because making money is not the mission. The mission is to provide a product or service that customers will buy. Do they know the vision or the mantra of the owners? These questions will require careful thought before distributing a survey of any kind. I recommend that this first survey be done anonymously online, through a service like (Survey Monkey, Constant Contact, etc.) You should know your employees, no matter how many you have. (1-1000).

2. Development of communication – We believe that communication is easy. We talk and they listen. No, they can listen, but are they really listening? Also, what are they listening to? What you think they hear and what is actually received are often not even close to the same thing. Studies indicate that communication is the number one problem in any organization. It is also the number one solvable problem in organizations. Communication is simple, but it is not easy to improve communication. Communication is hard work. Communication is the hardest job. We have the spoken word. We have the intention or philosophy behind our words and we have the unspoken or non-verbal communication that occurs. There is also an organizational culture that defines what it all means. Sometimes due to lack of follow through or follow through, our words lose their meaning. Have you ever heard another coworker say “Just wait until you do that, the boss will forget about everything in a day or two.” You probably said this about your parents. It has communication by email, memos, manuals of policies and customs. Do you really expect your staff to analyze this data? There is no chance of this happening. Simpler is better. Dig into the core values ​​you want to transfer and have all your communications validate it.

3. Development of positive attitudes – You may be wondering how you can develop someone’s attitude to be more positive. Well, you can do this by training, coaching, and rewarding the types of behavior that reveal the attitude you want from your employees. Stop rewarding bad attitudes. How can I do this, you ask? Good attitude is revealed by behavior and job performance. It’s true that you can’t criticize someone for their attitude, but you can effectively deal with unwanted behavior that reflects their attitude. Bad behavior must be unacceptable in your organization. First, if an employee has had such a bad day, week, month, or even life, they should be prepared to put on a “happy face” and play the part they’ve been hired and paid to play. . Consider for a moment a visit to Disney World. They don’t hire employees, they hire actors. They have casting calls. Cast members must be willing to take on a role and play their part at all times. “Mickey Mouse” never has a bad day. If he does, he’s likely to get fired. You see, we’ve been wrongly taught that when “OLD JOE” has a bad day, we have to accept it. This is wrong, and you no longer have to accept this bad behavior. I’m not saying you can’t empathize. with an employee who may be going through a difficult time, we all have or will go through it at some point in our lives and careers, but we don’t get paid to have these bad days at work and if they are that bad we can’t do our part , we must ask to take the day off and come back ready to play the role we are paid to play.

4.Career development – 50 percent of career opportunity preparation and advancement is the responsibility of the employee. 50 percent of the preparation is the responsibility of the employer. If one of these parts is not up to its part, who will suffer? If you said that both will suffer, you are right. But ultimately, your life and your career are your responsibility. Have you ever heard someone make the statement “If they want you to get that training, will they send you and pay for it?” Of course you do, in fact you may have said so yourself. Is a lie. Don’t let someone else or even their organization decide your future. They can choose a more popular person to send to the training and where you will be. You must be prepared to obtain any desired or necessary training on your own, and often on your own if necessary. I’ve done this all my life and my career and until a few years ago I never gave it much thought. This was one of the best decisions I have ever made for myself. Often, you are preparing for a career or role change that does not currently exist. This happened to a former employee and close friend of mine. He had volunteered to write grants, inventory control tasks (boring), and other projects most wouldn’t volunteer for. A short number of years later I found a position that would be a perfect fit for him; that he not only didn’t know he was available, but he wouldn’t have been looking. He agreed to apply for the position. He was selected out of all the candidates and now he has almost doubled his salary. He is the director of a growing non-profit organization. He is heralded by the board of directors as an excellent Executive Director. By the way, this organization had 7 seven directors in 7 seven years. He is the first male director and the first director to last more than 12 months. Let me give you this disclaimer; I’m not saying anything negative about female directors, I’m just pointing out that he was the first male director, that’s all. So always keep in mind that volunteering to take on NEW roles can pay dividends down the road. A future not yet visible to you now. I myself know this very well because after twenty years as a police officer I became Police Chief, Chief of Field Operations, and later Vice President of Sales and Marketing and eventually now owning my own Business Consulting Company and Employee Training. Several of these roles didn’t even appear on my radar beforehand.

5. Leadership development – It has a positive connotation to be called a leader, right? But always keep in mind that there are two types of leaders. GOOD LEADERS and BAD LEADERS. David Koresh, Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein were all leaders, but they were not the kind of leaders you should follow if you want to be successful in the long run. First, leadership requires reciprocal trust from you to others and from others to you. Think of leadership as building a “Trust Bank,” one deposit at a time. If you opened a bank account today with $100.00 and wrote a check for $500.00 tomorrow, you would overdraw your account and be seen as fraud. But let’s say you had this bank account for several years, and then one day you wrote a check on the cash you had on deposit. The bank would accept that you are a legitimate customer and that you simply made a mistake. You had gained trust with them over time. Trust is not something you buy, acquire, or even own permanently. You need to build trust day in and day out with family, friends, co-workers, and sometimes even strangers. So get started today and show that you can be trusted.

6. Process Improvement – As soon as you think your organization’s processes can’t be improved, you’re outdated. Processes can always be modified. Even if you don’t see a way to improve them at the time, not always looking for improvement is a big mistake. Processes can always be improved. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes looking at a problem can help. You may even need to let someone outside the department, or even outside the organization, ask questions of people close to the problems. These questions might even spark more ideas. Some processes may even be determined to be obsolete. We found once, for example, in an organization that we were doing 3 forms when only one form was needed. Wow, a huge reduction in workload just by someone asking the right questions. We often do what we do because that’s what we’ve always done. Does this sound familiar? Consider this scenario and I’ll move on; a daughter asked her mother why they always cut off the ends of ham before cooking it. Her mother responded; that’s what my mother did. Then she asked her grandmother why she cut off the ends of the ham. Her grandmother said; I don’t know why your mom does it, but I did it because my oven was too small to fit all the ham, so I had to cut off the ends to make it fit. It seems to me that a lot of ham has been wasted because no one asked the right questions or was afraid to ask any questions. What do you think?

7. Coaching and support – Coaching and support require monitoring and follow-up. There are some questions you should ask yourself about each and every one of your employees. FirstIs the employee a good person? SecondDoes the employee usually do a good job? If the answer to both questions is yes and the employee currently has a performance problem, then he has a training concern, not a discipline problem. If the answer to one of the questions is no, then he has a discipline problem. If the answer to both questions is no, then you have a disciplinary problem that may include resignation or termination. Let me also say that in order to determine these answers you must have spent some time with your employees. You wouldn’t be able to successfully answer these questions if you didn’t have personal knowledge of your employees.

Here are some final thoughts; If you are the CEO, you are the “head coach” in your organization, whether you like it or not. If you don’t like it, find someone else to train you. Coaching will have to happen if you want to take your organization from the “status quo” (survival) to “high performance” (thriving). Over 90 percent of organizations are in status quo or survival mode. They may be surviving, but they will never thrive through High Performance without following these 7 tips. Now train your employees or find someone to do it.