Evaluating Staff Engagement

Recently some of the world's most promising entrepreneurs were asked for their favorite tools for evaluating overall employee happiness and engagement. Their suggestions included:

• Taking regular walks with staff.
• Reaching out individually to staff members. 
• Watching staff candidly work. 
• Encouraging constant feedback. 
• Asking and then really listening. 
• Checking in more often. 
• Sharing highs and lows. 
• Asking what can be changed.  
• Using an idea box. 

How do you evaluate the happiness and engagement of your staff?  Do you have a sense of the "pulse" of your staff? Getting staff to give discretionary effort beyond the minimum necessary to do the job is critical to creating a positive culture that translates into a great experiences for campers. That only happens when staff are happy and fully engaged. Think about how you could regularly use several of these strategies to understand your campground from your staff's perspective.

Where's Your Leadership Spot?

Max Levchin who cofounded what became PayPal takes an interesting approach to leading his current organization. Like most of us who lead organizations he spends several hours a day in his office doing very focused work. Each day, however, he also tries to spend several hours sitting on a bench across from the bathrooms his staff use. Why this location?

Levchin believes his job as CEO is to "get other people to do their best work in service of a shared goal." In order to do this he needs to connect with people, not just through e-mails and in meetings, but on-on-one. From his bench outside the restroom, Levchin can connect with virtually of of his staff who at some point in time pass by. For some it is a quick "how are you doing" while in other cases there are longer conversations with a staff member who joins him on the bench. By being on the bench, Levchin makes himself accessible to everyone regardless of position. Anyone who works in his company can have a "I wanted to tell you" or "I wanted to ask you" moment with the CEO.

Is there a place at your campground that can be your leadership spot? Where can you hangout where you're accessible to everyone, both guests and staff?  How can you set up our schedule to spend some time each day in this spot connecting with those that pass by?

Leadership Quote of the Week

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be.           

Rosalynn Carter, former first lady

Two Types of Staff Problems

When you run into problems with a staff member an effective first step is to identify what type of problem you have on your hands. Ken Blanchard, author of several best selling books on leadership, suggests there are two types of employee problems; "Can't Do" and "Won't Do." These two types of problems have very different causes.

Can't Do Problems
1. Lack of knowledge, skills and/or experience.
2. Lack of clarity in expectations and responsibilities.
3. Lack of understanding of what the standard for good performance looks like.
4. Lack of unclear rules and procedures.
5. Lack of feedback.

For "can't do" problems the solution is to give the staff member what they lack. If they don't have knowledge, give them training. If they are unclear on what's expected, explain it to them. If the procedures are unclear, clarify them. Often times once we look into them, staff issues are simple "can't do" problems that can quickly be resolved.

Won't Do Problems
1. The staff member has lost (or never had) motivation.
2. The staff member is seeking revenge or to even a score.
3. The staff member no longer (or never did) support the mission and values of the organization
.
4. The staff member perceives there is no reward for good performance and/or no consequences for poor performance.
5. The staff member is experiencing a personal problem.

"Won't do" problems are far more difficult to deal with than "can't do" problems. These problems require engagement with the staff member to explore the root cause and determine if the issue causing the problem can be solved.

Next time you're faced with a staff issue, start by trying to determine whether you have a "can't do" or "won't do" problem. This first step will hopefully give you insight into where to go next to resolve the issue.

Silence = Agreement

Have you had the experience of having someone not speak up in a meeting when decisions are made and then after the meeting express their disagreement? Such behavior can be divisive and undermines the effectiveness of the team that made the decision. This type of passive-aggressive behavior can also be toxic to your campground's culture.

One way to help avoid this situation is to set one straightforward ground rule for all of your meetings... silence equals agreement. Staff members need to know that silence does not mean "I don't agree" or "I want to think about it." If someone decides not to participate as a decision is made, they need to know the opportunity to continue debating the issue is over when the meeting ends.

This ground rule when made clear to your team and consistently applied, goes a long way in helping your team understand the need to speak up when important decisions are being discussed.

Improving Staff Recognition

As leaders we know that recognizing the positive efforts of our staff are important. Unfortunately too often our attempts at recognition go unappreciated and have limited impact. Scott Mautz, author of Make It Matter: How Managers Can Motivate by Creating Meaning offers the following suggestions for making recognition more meaningful:

Personalize recognition so that you don't trivialize it. Adapt the recognition the the needs and preferences of the individual staff member. 

Get everyone involved. Recognition doesn't have to be from just you as the leader. Recognition from other staff members and guests can be powerful. 

Be frequent but not frivolous. Take regular opportunities for recognition but make sure what you're recognizing really matters. 

Celebrate both the first downs and touchdowns. Certainly celebrate the big accomplishments, but don't forget the little victories along the way. 

Deliberate the delivery. How you deliver recognition can be just as important as the recognition itself. 

Leadership Quote of the Week

“To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.” ~Unknown

Consistency Matters Most

Recent research published on-line by the Academy of Management Journal indicates that consistency is a key trait employees are looking for.  Employees were asked if they preferred a manager who is sometimes fair and sometimes unfair or someone is consistently unfair. The majority of employees preferred the consistent manager, even if they were unfair.

"Intuitively, you would think the more fairness you get, the better," said Fadel Matta, a researcher at Michigan State University and the lead author of the paper, said in an interview. "But that's not what we demonstrated. It's better if supervisors are a consistent jerk than if they're fair sometimes and not fair other times. People want to know what they can expect when they come into work. A lot of it centers around this issue of uncertainty," Matta said. "This notion of knowing what to expect -- even if it's bad -- is better than not knowing what to expect at work."

How consistent are you as a leader? Does your staff know what to expect from you, in both good times and bad?  Is there a predictability to your leadership that they can adapt to?

Five Habits of Disruptive Leaders

There is a great deal of discussion these days about disruption. There is talk about disruptive technology, disruptive ideas and disruptive products. What is disruption? In the context of today's organizations, disruption is a concept or idea that fundamentally changes the status quo. They are ideas that not just challenge, but shatter long held assumptions.

Think about what Amazon did for selling books or what Uber has done for local transportation. Both companies completely changed the market by challenging the assumptions of how things are done.
Faisal Hoque author of Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability suggests five attributes of organizations that disrupt the status quo.

1. They relentlessly pursue the truth
2. They guide others through chaos
3. They're decisive
4. They break the rules and write new ones - but always explain why
5. They thrive on uncertainty

What are some of the unwritten assumptions you and your organization hold to be true? Have you ever explored what would happen if they weren't true? Are there things you could do to challenge the status quo? Could you be disruptive?

When Criticism Isn't Constructive

Honest, open feedback is important in helping staff members grow and develop. Most staff members want to know how they are doing and where they need to improve. For feedback to be effective, however, it must be constructive. To ensure you're giving constructive rather than destructive feedback, it's crucial to understand your motive in offering criticism.

Unfortunately, at times leaders can be driven to give feedback by motives other than helping staff members grow. Next time you're tempted to criticize a staff member,
pause for a moment and make sure you're not doing it to:

• hurt someone else.
• get even for something done to you.
• vent your frustration.
• make yourself look good to others.
• boost your own ego.  

Leadership Quote of the Week

There is only one way to avoid criticism;

do nothing, 

say nothing, 

and be nothing. 

Aristotle

Culture Trumps Strategy

"Culture trumps strategy" has become a popular axiom in today's management literature. The belief is that having a strong, intentional organizational culture is more important to success than pursuing the right strategy.  The best organizations are not those who always make the right strategic decisions. The best organizations are those that are made up of staff who share a commitment to a common set of goals and embrace the same core values.

How do you create a strong organizational culture?

1. Identify and articulate what your organizations believes. Have a clear, written mission and core values.

2. Hire staff who buy into your mission and embrace your core values. Make values are important component of your selection process. If one of your values is putting the needs of guests first, hire staff members who value serving others and are willing to put the needs of others before their own.

3. Integrate teaching your mission and values into every aspect of staff training. Every topic in staff training should be linked to your mission and values. Teach not only what to do, but why it's done a particular way at your campground.

4. Lead by modeling your mission and values. If you want it to be part of your organizational culture, it must be part of how you and your leadership team lead your staff.

If You Have to Tell Them Rethink Your Leadership

Recently a colleague asked how to go about telling a staff member they would not be rehired at campground the next season. As I reflected on their question it struck me that while the immediate issue was this difficult conversation, there was a bigger issue that needed to be addressed. How does a staff member make it through a season and not know they didn't live up to expectations?

Staff members want, need and deserve regular honest feedback. We need to be regularly observing their performance and giving them feedback, both positive and negative. If ongoing performance issues exist we should be doing ongoing coaching to try to resolve the issue. At the end of the season they deserve an honest evaluation of how they did, both the good and the not so good.

If we get to fall or winter and staff members don't know where they stand on how they performed last season we need to take a hard look at how we're leading our staff.