Getting Optimal Performance From Your Team:
What are we missing as managers when we look for solutions
to draw the optimal performance from our employees? I know the answer will not be a one size fits
all solution but I had to step back. I
was too close to the problem and I was stuck.
I did what somebody a long time ago told me to do when I’m
stuck. Walk away. Forget about it. Go walk around – go look at something green
in color because that will stimulate your brain to sweep out the cobwebs and
clear your mind. So I forgot about it
for a long time until one night I had
a dream about one of my mentors.
We were sitting around in a sales meeting and my mentor had
boxes of rubber bands in front of him.
He was stretching them to the point of breaking but he was doing it
slowly and the anticipation of the snap was bothering some of the others in the
meeting. He didn’t say a word but I knew
what he was trying to remind me of. A
long time ago he was travelling with me as my sales manager and he was talking
about growth – growing as a salesman and also as a leader; about being happier
and healthier and experiencing more from the world around us. He took out a rubber band for his analogy.
“Think of this band as your comfort zone. If you don’t leave your zone you’ll always
stay this shape – you’ll have no energy.
You won’t grow. You might as well
stay in the box with the rest of the bands.”
Then he snapped me in the forearm with that rubber
band. “That’s the tension you need in
your life. Rule #1 - Step out of your
zone until the tension stretches you to your limit. Leave a mark on people with your words and
actions. Don’t let them forget
you.”
I knew what he meant but I said it anyway. “I’m not going to go around making welts on
people with loops of elastic.” He went
to snap me again but pulled the rubber band too tight this time – it snapped
back in his hand. “Rule #2,” he said
after calling me a smart ass, “Don’t step too far out of your zone.”
I took this seriously.
I used to leave my comfort zone often especially when I was on stage
doing plays and musicals. But then I got
lazy. It started when I got my first
sales job and failed miserably (I talked about this experience in a previous
blog). I was bored and not feeling
challenged. The adage that you get out
of it exactly what you put into it is an adage for a reason. How true it is.
How do I as a manager take this principle and mold it to an
inbound technical support call center group? Ultimately I got quite a lot of
pleasure and satisfaction from applying this practice because it helped me
grow, meet new people, make more friends, and generate long term business
relationships. I remember the hardest
and scariest times when that rubber band was about to break as some of the best
most exciting times. I was still stuck on how to apply this to my group. Just like last time I demoted this problem to
the back of my brain and forgot about it for a while.
The next revelation didn’t come in a dream but by a Kindle
download. The e-book was from one of my
favorite social scientists Daniel Goleman – “The Brain and Emotional
Intelligence: New Insights”. I have read
every article, journal, and book he’s written because he is the king of the
emotional intelligence field. I talk
about Goleman as much as a 4 year old talks about Elmo.
Goleman is trying to understand the “flow concept” in
relation to optimal performance. He uses
the Yerkes-Dodson model as an example.
Basically it’s a point on a scale (or arc) where one reaches the zone of
optimal performance. Kind of like a
performance bell curve. There must be a
way to apply these principles to our management mantra.
The flow concept emerged from research where
people were asked to describe a time they outdid themselves and achieved their
personal best. People described moments from a wide range of domains of
expertise, from basketball and ballet to chess and brain surgery. And no matter
the specifics, the underlying state they described was one and the same.1
I’m theorizing that the basis for this would be to ask
somebody about a time they “stretched their rubber band” and went outside of
their comfort zone. It’s one way of prompting a response so a manager can
get a better idea on what stimulates their employees to perform at their
peak. The answers can shed quite a bit
of light on how we can challenge our employees – even ourselves.
There are three things that Goleman proposes to create this
environment in “The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights”. Armed with the feedback an employee has given
about their finest achievements you’ll have a better idea on how to
proceed. This is the core of creating a
motivating environment:
Adjust demands to fit the person’s skills.
If you manage people’s work, try to gauge their optimal level of challenge. If
they're under-engaged, increase the challenge in ways that make their work
more interesting – for instance by giving a stretch assignment. If they are
overwhelmed, reduce the demand and give them more support (whether emotional or
logistic)2
This may be
pushing an employee to continue back to school or giving them an opportunity to
advance in the company. Not just telling
them to apply for a promotion but actually creating steps for them to follow:
assigning a mentor, nesting with other managers, assisting peers who may
be struggling, helping the training department, etc. If you don’t have a mentorship or nesting program in place get one
immediately.
Practice
the relevant expertise to raise skills to meet a higher level of demand.3
You
should be creating the super agent.
Don’t be afraid to improve the work lives of your employees especially
the ones that want the challenge – the ability to reach their optimum performance. You can do this by uptraining or
re-training. If you demand a higher
level of customer service, for example, create a white belt/brown belt/black
belt system that people have
to train, study and prove their skills to attain each belt. You get your white belt by getting scored so
high on your quality scores for a 6 month period, for example. You can offer whatever compensation you feel will motivate your employees who
attain this ranking. You can also make
it worth something when it comes to promotions.
If it will give them an advantage
over somebody else who has applied for the same position without this
credential then it will be a coveted and meaningful
status.
Enhance
concentration abilities so you can pay more attention, because attention itself
is a pathway into the flow stage.4
Not
necessarily in the literal sense. Sometimes giving your agents time to spend
doing those things to raise their skills will be enough. Any mentoring and coaching should be done off
the call
center floor preferably in a quiet office or even off campus.
How far you push is up to you as a manager. Don’t be afraid to challenge your people to
stretch their rubber bands. If this
sounds like it’s too much to tackle then maybe you should make yourself step
out of your comfort zone.
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