How do we keep people engaged and motivated?

"According to the U.S. Department of Labor, disengaged workers cost the U.S. economy more than $300 billion annually." And according to Gallup, only 29% of employees actually feel engaged, so what if the remaining 71% of your workforce would really care about the success of your company, how much better would your financial results be if everyone were engaged? The task of re-engaging those who "quit and stay" falls on the shoulders of the leadership and management team. While many managers know the importance of engaging this talent, the "how" is often left up to chance.

Coaching for engagement and retention reduces the risk and empowers leaders in any organization to tap into their employees' discretionary effort and bring that energy into the workplace. When the coaching relationship is directed at these issues, it helps managers find simple, yet meaningful, ways to engage this talent beyond everyday distractions.

A skilled engagement coach must begin by understanding the unique employee engagement and retention challenges of each manager." The above is quoted from an article in Business Coaching Worldwide ezine.

Finding out what motivates workers through a simple assessment will give you information (as a manager or coach) on WHAT each worker looks for from the workplace. Beyond monetary gains, we are all looking for slightly different things to feel engaged and motivated where we work. This can vary from being sent to a conference and learn about the new trends in the industry to matching volunteer hours or the possibility of bringing volunteering right into the organization or business. And then there are bonuses. However simply handing out bonuses may not be the ultimate reason for people to be motivated. In fact, hiring a coach to address this very issue could go to the core of it. What is the drive of each and every worker on your team or your business?

Dan Pink in his newly published book DRIVE argues that for simple tasks the carrot and stick approach may work, however for the more complex tasks that your workers are performing, .."that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver." Also compared to being in the flow.

Can YOU remember back to a moment when 'you were in the flow'? It is simply impossible to be in the flow and to be disengaged at the same time. So how do we coach people around being disengaged: Work with them, so they end up in the zone or the flow; fully engaged and full of intrinsic motivation!

Have you already read the Shriver report?

Here is a quick look:

"Now for the first time in our nation’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. This is a dramatic shift from just a generation ago (in 1967 women made up only one-third of all workers)."

The report is made up of a number of different essays looking at this from their perspectives. For example, women make up half of the talent that is that is available to corporate America. Brad Harrington and Jamie Ladge argue that "..women’s outstanding performance in educational institutions, especially in higher educational and professional schools, demands that employers create workplaces that attract, retain, develop, and exploit (in the best sense of the word) this tremendous resource. They detail, however, that the vast majority of employers need to let go of outdated models such as thinking that there is only one place that work gets done, one way to structure a workday, one model for the ideal career, and one leadership style that works in today’s workplace."

One of the findings is that Americans overwhelmingly want a better balance between life and work. "For starters, both men and women desperately want changes to their work structures. Presented with a list of possible things that would need to change in order to improve work and family life, 54 percent of women and 49 percent of men say that more flexible work hours and schedules would be their top choice. "

Read all about it here: The Shriver report.

Women a BIG force in Business

According to a study by the non profit center for Women Business Research and supported by, among others, Wal-Mart, the economic impact of women owned businesses is tremendous.

These businesses employ, are you sitting down, 23 million people- which is nearly double the number of the biggest 50 companies in the country combined, and is about 16% of the national workforce!!

And not only that: we generate over $3 trillion in revenue. This is where women are and where they go: they start and maintain businesses. They provide employment for others and they create revenue. These businesses ran the gamut of small operations to large multi million dollar affairs.

In fact if they were their own county, women-owned businesses would have the 5th largest world GDP.

Look around you: who do YOU know that runs a business? Pass on these statistics and BE proud of the economic and personal impact women owned businesses have on the United States.

link: http://www.wipp.org/news/30977/Walmart-Partners-Release-Unprecedented-Women-Economic-Impact-Study.htm#

Improve effectiveness and do NOT multi-task!

Research just published in the Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences of the USA suggests that ".. heavy ..multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/21/0903620106.abstract

So in short the study found that multitaskers were actually quite ineffective at managing information, maintaining attention, and getting results. Staying focused on some tasks and especially on the outcomes of the few tasks you are involved in, helps you to filter out non essential information and not lose precious energy by switching from one to another task constantly.

Women bump up against their own glass ceiling

Almost inevitably during our Women leadership workshops, the question of gender perception comes up and many illustrations are shared.
A new study just came out that gives another perspective on the gender leadership issues. Scott Taylor, assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, School of Management, asked 251 male and female managers from different industries nationwide to rate themselves and requested ratings from supervisors, peers and subordinates. Each subject also was asked to predict the ratings made by others.
The men slightly overestimated the ratings by their boss, and women underestimated the ratings by almost 11 %. Taylor suggested that male managers may need to learn other ways of communicating to women employees how valued they are. The learning for the women themselves is, to be more focused on all their good characteristics and less focused on shortcomings.
Let us at least not underestimate ourselves!!
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/aug/11/sp-gender-gap/news-money/

Discover Your Inner Strength: just published

CAN tm: Coach Approach Now= using coaching skills to build resilience! what really is resilience? Well one of the ways of describing it is the following:

To better help understand the enormous value that coaching can have to improve resilience, let me use a definition of resilience, one used for physical materials that will help illustrate my contention. In this context, Wikipedia defines resilience as the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered[1]. As an executive coach I love that definition, because it suggests an insertion (or investment) of energy that can be recovered after a change occurs. This is exactly what many of my clients are looking for: an investment in themselves that will provide them with the energy to deal with change in the future. In other words, the gains obtained through coaching provide them with the ability to recover from or adjust easily to change.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilience

You can read all about coaching and resilience and a LOT more in the new book Discover Your Inner Strength by Coppes,Covey, Blanchard,Tracy.

check it out: www.aeoluscoaching.com (lower left hand corner of home page)

Channel Your energy

Energy. It is like electricity and its outlets/lamps. You can have electricity everywhere,however it may dilute the focus of what you actually want illuminated if there is lights everywhere. How much more effective if there are a couple of floodlights illuminating those items that you want to particularly highlight. Think about the effect of a light on a picture or painting.
Same with your energy.

Where does your energy go? Is is all over the place, diffused? Scattered? And where are you losing most of your energy? Look at your hours, day, even your week critically and see where it "leaks" energy. Plug the holes. make sure your energy is channeled where you want it to go, so it highlights those things/actions that you want highlighted.

What is it that really warrants your energy? What do you want to illuminate with your energy floodlight? Where is the clarity most needed?