Many of us believe we are not judgmental people. Yet we must make judgments every day about everything from what to wear to work and eat for lunch to who is the best person to handle a project. These often-subjective decisions normally reflect biases that we may not be aware of (pants vs. dresses, sandwiches vs. salads—and our favorite go-to employee vs. our less-favorite employees).

It starts with each of us. As a boss, it’s important to become aware of and responsible for our unconscious biases, especially as they pertain to race, age, gender and culture. If we are not aware of them, these biases will influence our interactions with employees, how we make our decisions and how we manage our teams.

As bosses, we most frequently run up against our unconscious biases while hiring, coaching, managing and training employees. Whether we agree we have them or not, these biases are usually evident to others, especially when we hire and manage based solely on our guts. They will also show up when we communicate in an insensitive manner or make decisions without factual data. They determine the company’s culture.

Biases always impact the company’s ability to hire the right person for the job, coach each employee to succeed, train each team member to develop skills, and manage everyone to meet the customers’ needs in an effective and non-discriminatory manner. Failure to be responsible for our biases impacts our ability to create positive and productive workplaces for everyone.

How to Create a Responsible Workplace Culture:

• Provide communication and sensitivity training to boost awareness for everyone.
• Conduct mandatory bias-awareness training for all employees, including how to handle perceived biases, and repeat this training quarterly.
• Train bosses on techniques for coaching and managing all of their employees.
• Review job evaluations and stats on promotions, hires and pay to determine biases.
• Put together a strategic and tactical plan to correct inequities, and execute it.
• Pay attention to the words you use when interacting with employees.
• Stop trusting your gut when making hiring and promotion decisions–objective information will always improve these decisions.
• Become aware of stereotypes and how your brain will trick you into thinking jokes, comments or innuendos based on race, age, gender and culture are funny.
• Use qualified assessments to help you better hire, coach, manage and train your employees. These objective tools create awareness that each employee has unique skills, behaviors, interests and learning styles beyond your biased perception of who they are. Also, qualified assessments provide a foundation for employees to learn and appreciate each other in a positive manner.

If you want to build a positive and productive workplace culture, it’s critical to become aware of unconscious biases and be responsible for them.

©Jeannette Seibly, 2018

Jeannette Seibly  has been an executive coach, business advisor and management consultant for over 25 years. What coaching and guidance do you need to improve your managerial, executive and leadership styles? Are you ready to let go of what you’ve been doing to do something new? Contact Jeannette for a free confidential conversation.

In our current employment environment, it’s more important than ever for bosses to become coaches. Unemployment is at an all-time low, qualified candidates have become passive job seekers and bosses are still cited as the No. 1 reason employees leave. Instead of relying on performance improvement plans when the employee fails to meet expectations, it’s time to focus on developing employees’ soft skills, their ability to follow established systems and procedures, and a can-do attitude in the face of challenges throughout their employment.

For Success, Become Your Employees’ Job Coach

Coaching is needed at all levels within an organization. Being a boss who coaches employees is important. If you don’t have the interest, make sure to hire an experienced coach to help you and your team succeed.

Use Qualified Assessments. This is where you start. As the boss, understanding who your employees really are is required before you can coach for success. Without this, both you and your employee will feel frustrated. Qualified assessments provide coaching, team and managerial reports to clarify specific areas for coaching. For example, a top-level saleswoman had been achieving great results by opening up new markets for her company. In an effort to help broaden her skills, and improve her patience and diplomacy, her company reassigned her to work larger prospects with a much longer sales cycle. Because she was unable to close a sale quickly and change her personality (remember, you can’t fix and change a person), she left and joined a company where her skill set and job fit mattered.

Focus on Strengths. Focusing on weaknesses is a colossal waste of time. Instead, hire the right people for the right job. Build on their strengths to grow their effectiveness.  For example: A customer service rep was having a difficult time working with a system that did not have a procedural manual. To develop her strengths, her boss advised her work with a longtime employee, take notes and create a procedural manual.  Now, she’s the go-to person when something isn’t working and training is required.

Meet Weekly. It’s important to meet with your employees frequently. When someone is struggling, it’s even more important. Meeting weekly will help them fine-tune their skills and approach, and help you uncover any bad habits early. While habits can be transformed, first the employee must become aware of them and then you must customize an approach that works.

Hire Yourself a Coach. To become your employees’ job coach, it’s important for you to have your own coach to help you move forward. With your own coach, you will uncover your blind spots and improve your decision-making, project management and communication skills.

Hire a Team Facilitator. For those bosses who are not interested in being their employees’ job coach, hire a facilitator. A facilitator will help improve team meetings and communication skills, and keep your team focused on achieving success.

For those of you who doubt the importance of these techniques, one of my clients used all of the methods above, and each of his employees went from managing $750K to managing $1.25M.

©Jeannette Seibly, 2018

Jeannette Seibly has been called a catalyst. She is celebrating 25 years as a business coach, advisor and consultant who guides her clients to achieve unprecedented results. Remember, being your employees’ job coach will be effective, fun and rewarding!  Are you ready? Step up now! Check out her website, or contact Jeannette for a preliminary confidential, laser-focused conversation.

We all want to believe that key employees, leaders and executives get along with one another. However, when issues arise, so do people’s egos. Information silos, inappropriate comments and an inability to resolve differences often get in the way of supporting the company’s success. These conflicts can hurt the profitability, performance and productivity of any company.

While differing opinions and managed discussions can create better decisions, they require using high-level emotional intelligence, listening to understand and employing good business practices. And, when you put the collective success of the company’s management team first, great results can be achieved.

The Only Thing That Matters Is Being Responsible for the Team’s Success

There is no magic formula, and there are no quick answers. Get real and be responsible for your team’s success.

Hire a business advisor. Using the same thinking that created the problem will not provide the solution. I’ve seen companies rely on books, a team member’s strong personality and other non-contributing factors, and still they fail to resolve the true underlying issues. Hoping and waiting for everything to work out is a default strategy that rarely makes a positive difference. Instead, hire a business advisor who can uncover the real issues (not the surface issues) and guide team members to get everyone on the same page by making the required, and sometimes difficult, changes.

Use Qualified Assessments. When attempting to make positive changes, you cannot transform a team without first addressing the truth in a respectful manner. Objective data about the team’s personality can provide insight into how to move everyone forward together.  For example: If you have a team that primarily relies on their feelings to make decisions, interjecting factual information will help everyone move forward.

Listen to Understand.  I remember years ago a business owner stating, “This listening takes too much work.” He’s right. It can when you haven’t developed the necessary communication skills. Always remember when you are feeling impatient that if you take the time to address concerns now, you’ll save a lot of time, money and energy later.

Manage Conflict. Differing opinions, thoughts and feelings can make for better decisions. To make it easier for others to hear you, state your opinions, thoughts and feelings as your own:  “I believe …” “In my opinion …” When listening to others, repeat what you heard them say first and clarify before offering your opinion. You will be amazed at the results. When you see that you agree on some points and agree to disagree on others, you can build better win-win decisions.

Talk Straight When Apologizing. Instead of further upsetting the situation with excuses about why you said what you said, simply say, “I’m sorry.” Then, be quiet! While it’s important that leaders develop a thicker skin, it’s also important to be responsible for what you say and do.

Encourage Team Members to Work It Out Now. Another benefit to using a qualified assessment is that the results can be a starting point for difficult conversations. First, have team members review each other’s results, one-on-one. Second, talk about where you are similar and where there are differences. (Remember: Results are not good or bad, right or wrong). When two strong-willed executives started making negative comments about one another, their coach told them to sit down and work it out now. They used the assessment as their starting point. They learned why they were frustrated with each other’s different work and communication styles. They now have an amicable work relationship that they value.

Stop It Now! If you sense a problem brewing, don’t wait. It’s easier to understand the crux of the problem at its infancy then if you wait until it has become a full-blown problem and everyone has taken an inflexible position.

When the Problem Is You. Each person on a management team is responsible for its success. If you and others are not good facilitators, get the team trained now! Learn how to listen to one another’s points of view, value each person’s input, build on others’ ideas and acknowledge each and every person’s contributions. This will build a strong, successful team and company.

If you truly want to master turning around management team conflicts, use these tools for taking responsibility. When every team member takes responsibility, you will be able to build a successful company.

©Jeannette Seibly, 2018

Need a speaker or facilitator to successfully address company issues? As a leader, it’s very important for you to know how to facilitate a group, even if you are not the one leading it. Contact Jeannette Seibly. She will provide confidential, laser-focused coaching that works! 

Jeannette Seibly has been called a catalyst. She is celebrating 25 years as a business coach, advisor and consultant who guides her clients to achieve unprecedented results. Remember, meetings can be effective, fun and rewarding! And, they require everyone to become a meeting facilitator. Are you ready? Step up now! Check out her website, or contact Jeannette for a preliminary confidential conversation.

Note: For those readers with a title, I encourage you to share this article with future leaders.

No one is born a leader. It comes from practice, practice and more practice … until it becomes a natural part of who you are. Developing the right mindset, habits and skills now makes it easier to lead after you’ve received your promotion and title. However, waiting to develop the skills after you become a leader with the title will have you faltering to catch up, if you ever can.

The fastest and easiest way to step up and develop your leadership skills now is to hire a coach to guide you along the way.

8 Important Skills to Develop Now!

1.Listening. This cannot be said often enough! Listen and learn, then listen and learn some more. Fine-tuning this skill will help you hear what others are missing.

2.Decision-Making. Take time to get both sides of an issue–the facts and others’ opinions—before making decisions. Do not rely on tiny fragments of information or base your decisions on your feelings or other biases about the topic or people. Your goal is to develop win-win-win outcomes with those involved.

3.Resilience. Your ability to rally quickly after mistakes and learn from them helps you develop greater confidence. Remember, the key to developing resiliency is to work through the disappointment, embarrassment and other feelings you and your team may experience. Denying these feelings and their impact will come back to haunt you later.

4.Rallying Others. Even without the title, you can learn how to influence others by your actions and attitudes. It starts with supporting the company’s mission, your boss and your team members.

5.Initiatives and Resourcefulness. The mark of a good future leader is stepping up and making things happen, regardless of the budget, or your job title. Become a catalyst for exploring new ideas, creating solutions and understanding financial impacts by working with and through others.

6.Ethics. Be aware of your company’s policies and follow them. If they are not working, rather than ignoring them, recommend changes by communicating with your boss, co-workers and others. Honor your promises, contracts and other agreements, whether they are done verbally or in writing.

7.Developing the Team. To grow into being a savvy future leader, be supportive of others’ efforts. Get involved in the hiring, coaching, managing and training processes!

8.Building on Strengths. We all have inherent business strengths and weaknesses. It helps to clarify them by using qualified assessments and 360-degree feedback tools. The best way to build effective strategic and tactical skills is allowing your coach to be your guide when working on specific challenges.

By developing these skills, you will learn a lot about yourself and what it takes to become a great leader, with or without the title!

©Jeannette Seibly, 2018

Need a speaker or facilitator to successfully address company issues? As a future leader, are you ready to develop the key skills now? Contact Jeannette Seibly. She will provide confidential, laser-focused coaching that works! 

Jeannette Seibly has been called a catalyst. She is celebrating 25 years as a business coach, advisor and consultant who guides her clients to achieve unprecedented results. Remember, everyone can be a leader, with or without the title. First, you must step up! Check out her website, or contact Jeannette for a preliminary confidential conversation.