Author: Sheri Mazurek

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What I Learned about Leadership from the Blue and Gold

Leadership Text on Black Background

My career started a long time ago. A combination of luck, timing, and a few connections helped get started in a career I didn’t even know I would like at the time. It turned out to be a career that I loved and stayed with for over a decade. Along the way, I had successes and I made mistakes (some of them more than once.) And in that time, I learned so much. So much more than one could ever learn by hearing a lecture or reading a book.

It was during that period of my life that I learned a few very valuable lessons in business. One of the most valuable was a true understanding of the power and influence of a good leader on the success of the business. There were many lessons of this throughout those early years, but the most impactful was the moment I realized that my leadership style was the biggest obstacle to consistent success of my business.

For me, this realization didn’t come in one swift epiphany moment. Instead it was little episodes of learning that came from the frustrations of failure. Many of those failures came with inconsistencies in performance and results. Some financial, some operational, and some customer focused. But the one or two that really made me stop and self-reflect were the failures with people.

It was through those that I realized the issues weren’t because of them, they were because of me. At the time, I had a great leader of my own and was blessed with an organization that was committed to leadership development. And as luck would have it, my self-reflection coincided with a two-day leadership retreat where we spent hours discussing how to build results through others. I had heard much of this before, but that day I listened more intently and I took notes and I generated ideas.

When I got back to the store, I implemented a couple of those ideas. And I noticed a change. A change in my people and as a result changes in my results. On all levels. My store had always been a high performing store, but now we were the top performing store in a district of high performers. Then we started seeing regional and national rankings where we were at the top consistently.

And we celebrated. We as a team shared in this success. It was my behavior that needed to change so that their success could be realized. The success of that store wasn’t about me, it was about me getting out of their way.

So leaders, get out of their way. It’s not about you.

 

This blog is dedicated to all those people who were part of my early career at the gold and blue. Hopefully you had as much fun as I did and learned as much as well.

 

Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. You can contact her via email smazurek0615@gmail.com

Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.

 

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Keeping Employees Motivated & Slick as Ice in the Summer

Keeping-Employees-Motivated

Working OutdoorKeeping Employees Motivated & Slick as Ice in the Summer

Aiming high for productivity during the summer can be difficult when everyone is making plans for vacation and time to visit with family and loved ones. Beyond maintaining productivity in the workplace, it’s hard to keep employees in the office in the summer.

In many ways, it takes a team player who is also a leader to round up the office during the summer. Make sure employees stay on track, even when they have vacations on the brain:

Plan Ahead

Ask employees to give you their summer schedules as soon as possible so you can plan accordingly for times people in key roles are gone, and make summer vacation availability and procedures clear to employees when they’re hired. Alert them if certain times will be limited, or if employees are restricted to requesting off a certain number of days, and encourage them to make requests early. Once requests are in, project managers can use resource management software to effectively organize tasks and projects and allocate the appropriate resources to complete the job, as well as alerts companies to when they should hire temporary employees to fill voids. Consider making the summer schedule transparent to everyone on your team, so team members are kept in the loop for project needs, as well. And make sure communication during the summer season is strong, writes Peg Cummings of Return Customer, so all team members are on the same page as to who will step into roles and take over tasks.

Tie Up Loose Ends

Tell employees to try not to leave any strings hanging before their vacations. Before they leave, make sure employees set up voicemail and email forwarding to other colleagues if they are unable to address the needs of clients. Encourage employees to finish whatever projects they are able to before they leave. Make sure employees communicate vacation plans to clients who might need to reach them. And have employees coordinate with each other on what tasks may be delegated in their absences.

Give Employees Specific Goals

Use productivity benchmarks from earlier months to set goals for employees to attain during summer months. If there are specific guidelines in place with expectations, employees will be able to work towards those goals instead of slacking off. If possible, offer incentives for employees to complete additional projects before they leave to help alleviate the work burden while they are gone.

Use Positive Reinforcement

If you sense employees are having a harder time staying focused this time of year, make examples out of the ones who go above and beyond by publicly reinforcing positive behavior. Consider implementing a rewards system for exemplary work. The more employees are praised for a job well done, the more likely they will repeat their great work, according to Monika Jansen of GROUPON Works.

Bring the Vacation Inside

Allow and encourage employees to bring summery touches into the work environment; they don’t need to leave the office to have fun. Allow employees to dress more casually than normal one day a week, conduct weekly team-building activities or allow more flexible schedules to accommodate for those employees who have visitors in town. Make the work environment more conducive to your employees, writes Spark Hire CEO Josh Tolan on huffingtonpost.com, and they’ll be more likely to turn in great work for you.

How has your business motivated employees to do great work during the summer season? Share your thoughts in the comments.

 

Please enjoy this GUEST Post from David Lennon

David is a devoted father from Boston with a penchant for writing about anything that strikes his interest. His main interest is writing about business management on business blogs.

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From a fuzzy idea to a survey to actionable intelligence: How to plan an employee survey to encourage organizational change.

employee survey


From a fuzzy idea to a survey to actionable intelligence: How to plan an employee survey to encourage organizational change.

Guest Post

Written By David Chaudron, PHD

David shares his 11 pointers that allow movement from the “Yeah, we need to find out what our employees are thinking” to specific actions based upon the data collected.

  • Create and communicate clear, specific actions from the employee survey data.
    Suggesting that “management communicate more” or “we need team spirit” doesn’t do much. What really needs to change? It is also very easy to throw some communication training at supervision, hoping this will paper-over management’s unwillingness to tell hard truths. Training someone implies that lack of skill is the cause of your problems. What if the cause is a systemic issue instead?

 

  • Include the survey process into the normal business planning cycle.
    Syncing the schedule of the survey with the normal budgeting cycle increases the chances that recommendations will be funded. For example, if budgets are due in November, and next-year’s objectives are due in October, develop recommendations in September, and conduct your survey in the Summer.

 

  • Don’t try to “game” timing of the survey. I’ve had clients suggest that they don’t want to do a survey now, because they want to announce something “good” right before employees take it.

 

  • First use numerical surveys, then follow with focus groups.
    Using focus groups first allows “squeaky wheels” to have too much influence. Allow input from all employees to prioritize issues, then use focus groups to gather richer detail.

 

  • Avoid using agree-disagree scales.
    Agree-disagree scales, while commonly used, have response-bias issues, and most importantly, are difficult to interpret, even with norms. To give a quick example: How can you prioritize survey items where one shows 37% agree, but 42% disagree, with another item that is 22% strongly agree and 17% agree?

 

  • Don’t look for what you already see.
    Conducting a training needs survey assumes lack of skill is the cause of company problems. Conducting a wide-ranging survey at the start will help avoid agreeing with what you already believe.

 

  • Use multiple survey methods.
    No one method (numerical surveys, open-ended questions, focus groups, etc.) is the gold standard of data collection. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

 

  • Keep the data anonymous, but communicate the actions.
    Some employees may be to paranoid about tracing their data back to their computers, we’ve had to revert to paper surveys for some of our clients.

 

  • Decide how to analyze data before you gather it.
    How will your graphs and reports look? If they look a certain way, how will you interpret them?

 

  • Decide on your sampling plan, and how to “break out” the data.
    Deciding whether to do a 100% sample of employees, or a random sample, is an important statistical (and buy-in) question to ask. Asking too many questions, like gender, location, job title etc. can violate anonymity or the perception of it.

 

  • Involve influential employees in the survey effort.
    We involve key employees in the planning effort of the survey. They can become mighty advocates of survey recommendations.

 

  • Never survey without acting.
    Even if management decides they cannot (or will not) solve a problem employees raise, it is still important to acknowledge the problem and state clearly why management is not taking action at this time.

 

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Resume Fail

White x on a red paper

In a recent article, Forbes lists three things that will get your resume “thrown in the trash.” The list includes three resume mistakes that will most likely get candidates overlooked. The article provides good advice. I would recommend giving it a read.
The Forbes list includes the following:
• You don’t meet the basic requirements
• You are not a culture fit
• You don’t pay attention to detail

 

In addition, be mindful of the following:
• The resume doesn’t highlight the qualifications to the specific job for which you are applying. Look at the ad or description that is posted. It will most likely not only tell you the qualifications, but many times it will start with what is most needed or required. If you learned about the job from someone in the company or a recruiter, be sure to find out what skills are required and what are most important. Your resume will be scanned quickly, be sure your can show how your qualifications will fit this position.
• The resume includes an objective statement that refers to another industry, position or company. This is in line with Forbes advice to pay attention to detail. I would recommend removing the objective statement all together. Use that space for a headline statement that highlights your skills and background.
• The resume makes claims about your abilities or skills without communicating results. Be sure you can show what results you have achieved by using those skills. You have very limited space to display your qualifications and sell yourself to a recruiter. Use that space wisely.
• Do not use creative fonts and formatting for your resume. The resume is often uploaded into an applicant tracking system. Those systems do not always display special fonts accurately. If it doesn’t convert well, the recruiter will not be able to read it and it will be skipped.

 

What other advise can you share?
Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.

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Words of Wisdom

An-employer-thinking-while-working-in-his-office.

During my career, I have been given a few nuggets of wisdom from people with whom I have made contact. Upon truly understanding their meaning, those words shaped a paradigm shift in my thinking that transformed the way in which I did my work or lived my life. Other pieces of wisdom I heard simply reaffirmed what I already knew, but perhaps provided a unique way in which to describe or communicate the concept. One of those concepts seems to be rarer today than when my career started and I thought I would share it with you.

During my last year of undergraduate work, a guest speaker came to speak to my leadership class. Her message was inspiring and spoke to the good that can be done when only one person takes a stand to make a difference. Upon concluding her talk, she suggested that we always remember who we represent. In our daily interactions with the world around us we are representing the groups in which belong. Those groups include our family, our educational institutions, our religious organizations, our communities, our workplaces and yes even our sport teams. And whether or not we want the responsibility, our actions send a message to those with whom we interact about the people that make up our group.

What does your message send about you, your family or even the field of HR? If you are in HR, you most likely understand the negative perceptions that may exist about our ability to really contribute to the business or make a financial impact. But what are you doing today to change those? How are you leading change in your organizations? How are you modeling the core values you represent?
Think about the following:

. You are a recruiter for a company. In your personal time, you spend hours to complaining to everyone who will listen about how bad your company is. (This goes beyond the very tight inner circle of people with whom you have developed a deep relationship of trust and may even include those postings we have all heard about on all those social networking sites.) When you come to work, you spend hours wondering why you can’t get your network to send you any referrals.

. You completed your degree and are very quick to point out to others this new credential you earned. (Go ahead; you deserve to brag a little). But then at every opportunity, you bash the school and the curriculum. And talk about how it was a huge waste of time. Or you use your 10 years of experience working at a company as a credential on your resume, but during an interview with a potential employer, you spend 15 minutes bashing the company and everything they did wrong.

. You volunteer with a charity. You are put in charge of a project that requires the recruitment of volunteers. You schedule a meeting with those who may be interested in volunteering. While you are waiting to start the meeting, you friend who came to help out walks over and you spend ten minutes venting to her about how frustrating it is working with the leaders of the organization.

On the days when emotions take over and I start to resemble the examples above, I check myself. I take a moment and I think about who I am representing. The next step is to ask, “what can I do to make it better?”
Where will you start?

Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.

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Protect Them

A-man-sitting-infront-of-colleagues-during-a-meeting-session

In Wally Bock’s Three Start Leadership Blog, I saw this boss’s tip of the Day:

Boss’s Tip of the Day: Protect your people

So often we forget this. So often we worry too much about our own career and our own protection. We forget that our success is determined by their success.

This was a lesson I learned early in my career. Someone told me that as a manager, my success could only be measured by the success of my weakest team member. That took a little while to set in, but once it did and once I really understood its meaning, my team became much more successful. With that came my success.

Leadership has nothing to do with you and your title. Leadership requires that someone is following you and leaders who don’t protect lose followers. Protection builds trust and loyalty, things that also drive discretionary effort. If you want your people to put in the extra time or effort when needed, protect them. If you want them to stand up for you, protect them. If you want them to value your opinion or direction, protect them. If you want candor, protect them.

 

What advice for boss’s can you add?

heri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz

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Are You Ready for the Talent Management Storm?

A-talent-manager-with-his-goals

The 2013 talent management predictions indicate that we have a storm ahead. Finding and keeping the right talent is going to continue to prove a challenge for organizations. It is further predicted that the old antiquated systems of talent management do not work.

If you are working in an organization with talent in almost in any role, you are mostly like already aware that these systems do not work. And with the increase in talent management software solutions flooding the market, it is also likely that you have lived through a revision in your talent management practices in recent years.

So is it working? Are we moving fast enough?

The predictions and the survey’s are indicating a no. So why are we failing? Below are a few of my ideas. What can you add?

  • We throw technology at the problem. There are number of really good talent management platforms available. The “review forms” are electronic and increase the ease of completing the forms. Many will even provide guidance in the proper words to use. There are colorful graphics and charts available to show our talent in a more pleasing way.

So why the fail? The process moved; it didn’t change. We have the same people doing the same thing. They just get better tools to do it with.

  • We fail to do the research with the right people. If you are working in an environment where you know something is broken, you want it fixed. You need it fixed and the business wants you to fix it quickly. So you move forward with the latest and greatest buzz word philosophy or technology. You listen to all the vendors tell you how to do talent management. You buy the sales pitch.

But who is the best person to tell you how to do talent management? The talent. Talk to them. Hear them. Use them to vet the process and give you feedback along the way.

  • We try to fix it all overnight. We all know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Deep cultural changes are a process. And when it’s broken we try to fix all it as soon as possible. Instead of focusing on the most critical changes or even the easy wins, we go out with a mission to change it all. It doesn’t work. Lasting impactful change requires a process. Focus on the right things and do them really well. And when you are successful, market your success within the organization. Highlight the wins that moving you in the right direction and continue to ask the talent to assist. They might just stick around to see if you can pull it off.

What can you add?

For more resources, See the Human Resources library.

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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz

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2013 Predictions are In

An-office-team-having-a-group-handshake

The predictions are in. Josh Bersin, Principal and Founder Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP has published Predictions for 2013: Corporate Talent, Leadership and HR-Nexus of Global Forces Drives New Models for Talent. You can view the entire report here.

The findings of the research reported confirm that we are experiencing a skills gap. The research further finds that leaders recognize a need to develop their leadership pipeline and cite this as a critical obstacle to growth. Additionally, the findings show that organizations have struggled to attract and engage those in their 20s and early 30s. So the prediction is a need for HR to focus on Learning, Leadership and Planning.

More specifically, some of the things identified as having high importance according to research with senior leaders are the following:

  • Retaining Key Employees
  • Leadership Bench Strength
  • Identifying Talent Gaps
  • Manager Capabilities to Develop Employees
  • Filling Talent Gaps
  • Promoting Career Development
  • Building a High Impact Learning Organization

The critical needs according to the prediction are in talent management and development. How do these line up with your current skill set within your HR team? Is your team ready for this? Or do you have a skill gap in the very team that should be championing this within the organization? If the answer is no, now might be the time to adjust your goals for 2013. HR needs talent management too!

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For more resources, See the Human Resources library.

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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz

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Happy New Year

happy-new-year-beside-mandarins

I have always loved the coming of the new year. This time of year has always reminded me to take time to reflect on what has happened and prepare for the what is to come. This is an often missed step along our busy paths to and quest to accomplish so much during a year. However, reflection should be a regular habit in our days. Our busy lives and ever connectedness to everyone and everything often stifle our ability for this.

However, reflection is necessary for adult learning and growth. Many adults would agree with the research that suggests we learn through our experiences. A critical step in this learning process is the ability to analyze and reflect on the experiences. Failure to take adequate time to do this can result in quick reactions that may be driven by emotions that were brought on by the experience.

So in the new year, build reflection into your schedule. Set time to review what has happened and what is expected to happen. Allow time for flexibility and readjustment. And allow time to just de-compress and relax.

Best wishes to you in the new year!

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For more resources, See the Human Resources library.

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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz

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My Holiday Wishes for You

Man-on-a-beach-during-a-vacation-period

The holiday season is in full bloom. All the sounds and sights of the holidays are all around. Holiday music is playing and car horns are blaring at the increased traffic around the grocery and toy stores.

In this season of peace, love, family, and a little madness, I have a list of holiday wishes for you.

  1. May all your projects close on time and on budget.
  2. May your employees treat each other with dignity and respect.
  3. May all your candidates have wonderful experience.
  4. May all Performance Improvement Plans result in improved performance.
  5. May there be no layoffs or terminations.
  6. May the employee survey show an engaged workforce.
  7. May there be no injuries.
  8. May your managers show appreciation for the work of their teams.
  9. May the holiday bonuses not get cut.
  10. May you actually do no work during all those PTO days you planned.
  11. May you start next year with a clear head and a new enthusiasm to bring any changes that need to happen in your life whether work or personal.

Happy Holidays readers.

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For more resources, See the Human Resources library.

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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.