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High performing teams

4 Questions for Team Leaders as 2023 Ends

As 2023 draws to a close, you might find yourself in a whirlwind of year-end tasks, deadlines and holiday preparations. In the middle of all that, you might not have had the chance to take a step back and assess the broader picture of how your team is faring. But as we approach the new year, it's crucial to set aside time to reflect. Taking a pause to evaluate the collective journey of your team over the past year can provide invaluable insights on the path you should take going forward. Use these questions to help you take the pulse of your team and identify what they might need from you.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

What does your team’s stress level look like? As a leader, it’s crucial to recognize the symptoms of burnout on your team and to address them quickly. The effects of long-term stress (which we’ve all been experiencing!) can show up in different ways. For example, you may have noticed that your team members don’t seem as focused as they used to, or that communication feels strained. If your team members are showing signs of burnout, affirm your commitment to their well-being and look for ways to address the situation. Do you need to adjust workloads, deadlines, or the pace of work? Do team members need more support to navigate any changes or uncertainty? 

How can you help team members manage their energy? To address stress and burnout, you can also ensure that team members have the resources they need to maintain balance and sustain high performance. Leaders play a pivotal role in fostering a supportive environment that encourages overall well-being. Encourage healthy habits like regular breaks, setting boundaries between work and personal time, and actually using vacation days. And don’t forget to lead by example: If you work around the clock or don’t take breaks or vacations, your team members will assume that’s what you expect of them (no matter what you say).

How clear is your team on what success looks like? Since the beginning of 2023, a lot may have changed in your organization. Priorities and expectations have shifted; new challenges and opportunities have emerged. You may assume that your team knows what’s most important now. But, in times of rapid change, sometimes key messages about priorities get lost in the busyness of our day-to-day work. So, take some time with your team before year-end to talk about priorities going into 2024. Connect the dots for your team members about how their roles fit in and affect those priorities. Make sure each team member knows the top areas where they should focus to have the biggest impact on the business and empower them to focus on those “big three.”

Is there a need to upskill your team? If you have observed performance issues in your team in 2023, ask yourself whether they have the skills and training necessary to succeed. Over the past few years, so many organizations have gone through resignations, layoffs and restructuring, leaving their employees grappling with new roles or evolving responsibilities. Beyond that, if staffing is lean and workloads are heavy, your newer team members may have received little to no onboarding. But even your seasoned employees may need additional training if they’re taking on different types of projects. We’ve definitely seen these struggles and created the New Lens® app to address them while making it easy to fit development into busy schedules and tight budgets.

This week, I challenge you to identify one area to focus on with your team in 2024, and one or two initial steps you will take. This small investment of time will yield big payoffs in the coming year.

12 Key Takeaways from the New Lens Micro Summit

What an amazing event we had last week! Of course, that's thanks to our wonderful speakers and to all of you, our engaged New Lens® Micro Summit: 4 Core Strategies for Success attendees. I’m still soaking in all the insights that were shared and am so grateful to each of you who joined us.

Reflecting on the summit, it's clear that each speaker brought a unique perspective, shedding light on critical areas of leadership, teamwork, networking, and resilience. I've taken a moment to recap a few of the takeaways that stood out to me. Whether you attended the summit or are catching up now, I believe these insights will resonate and offer actionable strategies for your own leadership journey. Let's dive in.

Michol Ecklund

Michol, Chief Sustainability Officer and General Counsel at Callon Petroleum, has navigated change throughout her career. So who better to speak on the topic “Focus on the Right Work: The Great Resignation Compounded Workloads”?

In her comments, Michol highlighted the emerging challenges post-pandemic where workers are increasingly unhappy, burnt out, and seeking new job opportunities, often attributed to amplified workloads from organizational restructuring. Here are some highlight from the advice she shared:

  • Create space to connect in a genuine way. Remember, everyone has a life outside work. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable with your team. “By checking in with others and sharing more about your own situation, I think you ultimately build deeper relationships,” Michol said. “You build even more motivated employees and even more committed employees that want to be part of your organization.”  

  • Balance your personal productivity with that of the team. You may be more productive working from home, but your team may be more productive if everyone spends more time at the office. Find an approach that considers both sets of needs.

  • Get back to the basics to avoid burnout. Getting enough sleep is critical. It affects how you show up personally and professionally, your energy, and your ability to be productive.

Mark Benton

Mark, Vice President of HR Corporate Functions at McKesson, also talked about navigating the shift to hybrid work when tackling his topic, “Develop a High Performing Team: How Unprepared Leaders Impact the Workplace.” I so admire Mark's ability to surface important topics that need attention. 

One theme that stood out was the challenge of staying connected when working remotely. In this context, building trust and understanding your own strengths and weaknesses are vital for good leadership. Other highlights:

  • Empathy is more important than ever in the world of hybrid work. Your team members want to know that you care about them as people, that you recognize what they are contributing and that you are willing to help them.

  • Managers today have to help distributed teams stay connected. One way to do this: be very intentional about checking in with each other.

  • Be more of an "ask person" than a "tell person". You can help your team members grow by asking coaching questions.

Hilda Galvan

Hilda, Partner-in-Charge at Jones Day Dallas, spoke on the topic “Build a Powerful Network: How Remote Work Affects Relationships & Productivity.” Hilda is gifted at cultivating relationships both professionally and in her community involvement, so I was thrilled that she could share her advice with us. 

She advised leaders not to favor in-office workers over remote ones and to communicate clearly. Building relationships, even when remote, is key to good leadership. A few key takeaways:

  • To get people back to the office, talk about why it’s so important. For example, remind veteran team members how much they learned by being around colleagues who were senior to them. Today, they can do the same thing for younger employees. By broadening their perspective,

  • Engaging with issues you care about will energize you and can help counteract any feelings of loneliness from remote work. Connecting with others who share your passion can also lead to meaningful relationships.

  • Treat small pockets of time in your day as opportunities to maintain relationships. For example, call an old friend while you’re driving to a meeting across town.

Tina Bigalke

As Global Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at PepsiCo and someone with a wealth of leadership experience in business and HR, Tina was the perfect speaker to talk about the topic “Build Leadership Courage & Resilience: Strategies to Navigate Uncertainty”. 

She also gave us insight into how PepsiCo has been a training ground for so many Fortune 500 CEOs and shared PepsiCo’s holistic resilence model which has helped its staff navigate these challenging times.

Some key insights:

  • Identify the capabilities and skills your organization will need for the future (not just for today) and assess your employees against those skills.

  • Don’t be afraid to have honest conversations with employees about how they’re doing and their path forward in your organization. 

  • Have a variety of development tools in place for employees, especially younger ones, who truly want to gain new skills.

More Micro Learning

A huge thanks to Michol, Mark, Hilda and Tina for packing so much valuable information into just a couple of hours. It was so important to us that this event fit into busy schedules and deliver a powerful payoff for just a short investment of time. That’s the same philosophy that drives Newberry Solutions’ award-winning New Lens® app. With “snack size” lessons combined with collaborative learning, New Lens makes leadership development affordable and scalable. I invite you to learn more and schedule a demo for your organization.

Don’t Miss Out on This Leadership Event

We’re counting down the hours now! Newberry Solutions’ Micro Summit: 4 Core Leadership Strategies for Success happens on Wednesday, October 25. If you haven’t registered yet, please take a moment and do so now, because I don’t want you to miss this unique opportunity.

During the Micro Summit, I’ll be talking about vital leadership strategies for today’s world with four incredible business and HR leaders:

  • ​Focus on the Right Work: The Great Resignation Compounded Workloads | With Michol Ecklund, Chief Sustainability Officer and General Counsel, Callon Petroleum.

  • ​Develop a High Performing Team: How Unprepared Leaders Impact the Workplace | With Mark Benton, Vice President, HR Corporate Functions, McKesson.

  • ​Build a Powerful Network: How Remote Work Affects Relationships & Productivity | With Hilda Galvan, Partner-In-Charge, Jones Day Dallas.

  • ​Build Leadership Courage & Resilience: Strategies to Navigate Uncertainty | With Tina Bigalke, Global Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer, PepsiCo.

I’m so excited that Michol, Mark, Hilda and Tina will be joining us. They have been successful in their own right, but each of them also does so much to give back to the community and elevate others. Having just one of them on our program would be amazing, but the fact that all four have agreed to share their expertise fills me with gratitude.

Can you take a couple of hours out of your day on Wednesday to make a powerful investment in yourself? Then register here. Know a leader you want to encourage? Share the link with them, too. I’ll see you there on the 25th!

What Does It Mean to Coach Your Team?

Over the past year, we have been delivering a coaching workshop globally to help leaders build critical thinking skills of their teams. We’re seeing a huge demand for this topic, and it’s no mystery why. A survey by the Association for Talent Development found that 90% of organizations expect managers to coach direct reports. At the same time, though, more than half said that a lack of coaching skills stood in the way of their goals.

To become a better coach to your team members, the first step is understanding what coaching really is — and isn’t. And that’s what I want to explore with you today.

Coaching ISN’T Advice or Feedback

I’ve found that many leaders think they’re coaching when they are actually advising or giving feedback. Developing your team members involves all of these activities at one time or another. But they aren’t the same thing.

Advising is defining or directing the action an employee should take to solve a particular problem or issue. Advising is the best option sometimes — for example, in a high-stakes or crisis situation under a tight deadline. But it’s also easy to overuse, since solving an issue for your team member is often the quickest way to get it off your plate.

Delivering feedback is describing past performance with a focus on acknowledging strengths and ways to improve. Meaningful feedback is crucial to keeping your team members engaged. Like coaching, delivering feedback can fall by the wayside when things get busy. But it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Get in the habit of sharing what you noticed a team member doing as soon as possible after you observe it. Even a couple of minutes after a meeting to point out what worked well and what would have been more effective can go a long way.

Coaching involves listening, asking thought-provoking questions and acknowledging the employee’s perspective, which empowers them to problem-solve and take action. Each part of that definition is important:

  • Active listening helps you understand what’s really happening with your team member and the situation.

  • Asking questions helps your team member develop their own solutions. A common mistake here is asking leading questions that nudge the employee toward what you would do. Leading questions negate the benefits of coaching.

  • Empowering your team member means that you are laying the groundwork for them to handle situations on their own in the future instead of coming to you for answers.

Empowerment is at the heart of why coaching is so important. Your team members will never develop to their full potential without coaching that challenges their thinking, broadens their perspective and helps them get unstuck. Learning and growth enhance performance and engagement, which is good for employees themselves and for the organization.

But coaching also benefits you. As we touched on earlier, giving employees solutions when they come to you with a question or issue might save time in the short run. But, in the long run, you’re setting yourself up for spending yet more time “putting out fires.”

This week, think about how often you are taking advantage of coaching moments with your team members and start looking for more opportunities. I also invite you to check out our New Lens® app, which we designed to arm your team members with high-impact strategies and facilitate manager coaching. Bimonthly one-on-one meetings between managers and participants are part of the program, and we make it easy by providing a discussion guide for managers to use.

Free Leadership Development Event

Since we’re talking about ways to develop your team members, I wanted to remind you about our upcoming Micro Summit: 4 Core Leadership Strategies for Success. This is a rare opportunity to get insights from four dynamic and accomplished business and HR leaders, all in just a couple of hours and for free. The Micro Summit happens 11 a.m.-1 p.m. CST on Wednesday, October 25. Please sign up while we still have open spots. You can register here and share this link with your team members and other colleagues. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

Are You Using These 3 Types of Coaching?

Coaching is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the job for leaders. As someone who is all about helping companies and leaders achieve high performance, it’s exciting to see in Harvard Business Review that employees want more coaching, and organizations want managers to spend more time providing it. 

As a Master Certified Coach and creator of a leadership development app, I’ve seen the powerful benefits of different types of coaching. That’s why we integrated three types into our New Lens® app. Read on to learn about the different forms that coaching can take, and how each one can benefit you and your team.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Individually Working with a Certified Coach 

This is what many people picture when they hear the word coaching. If you are looking for a coach, whether for yourself or for others in your organization, research candidates carefully. Look for a coach who has formal training and certifications. The International Coach Federation advances the coaching profession by setting high professional standards, providing independent certifications and building a network of credentialed coaches. There are three levels of ICF certifications: Associate Certified Coach (ACC), Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and Master Certified Coach (MCC).

I also recommend asking a coach these types of questions before engaging them:

  • What is their coaching philosophy and approach?

  • What types of clients do they work best with? 

  • What kind of results can you expect?

  • What examples of success do they have from past clients?

To learn more about our approach, check out the executive coaching page of our website.

While one-on-one coaching delivers powerful benefits, it may not be affordable or accessible to all the employees in an organization who want or need it. New Lens addresses this by providing targeted coaching within the app that focuses on some of the most impactful tools, exercises and strategies to drive high performance. 

Peer Coaching

Even if working one-on-one with a coach isn’t within reach right now, there are other ways you or your team can experience the benefits of coaching. One of those ways is peer coaching. Through our work with client companies that have used New Lens and our other programs, I’ve seen firsthand how effective peer coaching can be.

Peer coaching can take many forms. For example, in the New Lens Program, participants meet monthly with a cohort. The experience is designed to strengthen relationships, create a safe place to share challenges, amplify the power of the content, and promote sharing of best practices. Recent research by Rob Cross shows that peer relationships have a bigger impact on inclusion, advancement, and retention than relationships with managers.

Remember that you can also create your own methods to take advantage of peer coaching — for example, setting up coaching partnerships or small groups.

Peer coaching has its own set of advantages. It’s less expensive than working with an executive coach, so more people in your organization can benefit. Peer coaching is also usually easy to implement. 

Manager Coaching

Of course, your team members also need coaching from you. This can feel difficult sometimes. I don’t have to tell you how busy leaders’ schedules are these days. On top of that, many leaders have not been trained on how to coach effectively.

However, giving your team more coaching is probably easier than you might think. A great first step is looking for coachable moments as they arise during your day. When you identify good opportunities for coaching, remember to practice active listening. Pay attention to what your direct report is really communicating and don’t just wait for your chance to talk. By listening deeply, you can identify questions that can help employees develop their own solutions.

We designed New Lens to facilitate manager coaching. Bimonthly one-on-one meetings between managers and participants are part of the program, and we make it easy by providing a discussion guide for managers to use.

A Powerful (and Free) Event to Share with Your Team

At Newberry Solutions, we’re always looking for new ways we can help you steer your team’s growth and development. That’s why I’m so excited about our upcoming Micro Summit: 4 Core Leadership Strategies for Success. This virtual event is easy to fit into busy schedules. In just a couple of hours, you’ll gain valuable, actionable strategies for success from four incredible business and HR leaders. It all happens 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. CST on Wednesday, October 25. Please join us while we still have open seats. You can register here and share this link with your team members and other colleagues.

How to Develop Your Team When Time, Budgets Are Tight

As a leader, one of your most important responsibilities is helping your team members develop to their full potential. But that raises a big question: How are you supposed to accomplish this when all of you are busy and your training budget is small? Today I want to give you some quick, affordable and easy ideas to encourage your team members’ learning and growth. Be sure to read to the end of the article, where I’ll tell you about a free leadership development event you can share with your team.

Leverage What You Already Have

It’s easy to forget about the existing learning and development opportunities at your organization, especially when your schedule is full. But this is a great place to start when you’re looking for ways to develop your team. For example, does your workplace have a cross-training program? Are there affinity groups? What about tuition reimbursement? If you’re drawing a blank, get together with other leaders so you can pool your knowledge about current resources.

Help Team Members Learn from Each Other

So what’s your #1 existing resource? Your people themselves. Take a moment to think about the strengths of each of your team members. You’ll probably be impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience on your team! Now consider how you can tap into each person’s expertise. Some options include lunch-and-learn events and peer-to-peer coaching.

Build Learning into Every Day

All too often, we think of learning as something that happens in addition to our regular jobs. But some of the most powerful learning actually happens through our work experiences.  Leadership expert Josh Bersin calls this “growth in the flow of work,” and research has shown it delivers real results. According to Camille Preston, a business psychologist and leadership expert: “The most innovative leaders and organizations are seeking ways to integrate leadership development into everything they do.” You can help your direct reports grow by helping them join a cross-functional team, present in front of senior leaders or take on a special project, just to name a few examples.

Coach and Give Feedback

I get it: You’re really busy. But you can provide more coaching and feedback without taking too much time out of your day. Get in the habit of sharing what you noticed about your team members’ behavior right after you observe it. Even a couple of minutes after a meeting to point out what worked well and what would have been more effective can go a long way. If you want to start coaching more but aren’t sure how to begin, I contributed to an article for Forbes Coaches Council that provides some “baby steps.”

Our Free Leadership Development Event

I hope the ideas in this article will help you create more development opportunities for your team members. Making learning more accessible is one of our key values at Newberry Solutions. That’s why we created our award-winning New Lens® app. And it’s why I’m so excited about our upcoming Micro Summit: 4 Core Leadership Strategies for Success. Like New Lens, this virtual event is easy to fit into busy schedules. In just a couple of hours, you’ll gain valuable, actionable strategies for success from four incredible business and HR leaders. It all happens 11 a.m.-1 p.m. CDT on Wednesday, October 25. I invite you to register here, and to share this link with your team members and other colleagues. 

Coach to Build Critical Thinking Skills [One Thing Video Series]

Want to gain more time in your day AND unleash your team members’ full potential? Here’s the secret: Build your coaching skills. When you take a moment to coach a team member through a problem instead of solving it for them, you’re building their capabilities and confidence. That empowers them to work more independently — and frees up time for you. In my latest One Thing You Can Do video, I explain the first step to effective coaching.

Want more practical leadership strategies you can start using immediately? Reach out to me about New Lens®.

Transcript

Hi. I am Neena Newberry. Today I'm excited to share another One Thing You Can Do video. These are videos that are just a couple of minutes long. They're modeled after the New Lens app, which is all about helping you get leadership strategies and tools in bite-sized chunks. Today I want to talk to you about coaching. Coaching is such an important skill set, and I'm not just saying that because I am an executive coach. I'm saying this because as managers, leaders, even as team members, we always have that opportunity to decide: Are we going to just hand over the solution to somebody when a problem comes up? Or are we going to actually help them think through it in a different way and perhaps use coaching skills? It's a fantastic way to actually build critical-thinking skills in others.

Sometimes we forget to do that. We're in a rush, or we have limited time. We're stressed out, whatever it may be, or we're not necessarily even thinking about the fact that we should be pausing and let the other person think through this, even if they came to us for help. When I talk about coaching skills, one of the most critical pieces is to really understand what on earth is it that they truly need help with. Then, asking them some thought-provoking questions to help them think through it. Leverage your expertise that way vs. solving it for them. That typically involves asking some pretty good open-ended questions, meaning questions that you can't answer with just a yes or a no. Next time someone comes to you with an issue or problem, something they want to talk through, or even a goal, think about leveraging your coaching skills, and it can make a huge, huge difference. For other tools, resources, and strategies, please visit our website at newberrysolutions.com and check out our New Lens app.

3 Questions to Shape the Rest of the Year

It’s hard to believe, but we’re halfway through 2023. This is a good time to catch your breath, reflect on the year so far, and make any necessary tweaks. Use these three simple questions to guide you. You could also talk about these questions with your team.

1. How has the first half of the year unfolded for you? Has your organization experienced layoffs, resignations or both? Is there any tension about staff returning to the office, whether full or part time? These are both common issues that companies are grappling with in 2023. For more insights on both, and how they affect both you and your team, check out our most recent white paper, “Managers Under Pressure.”

2. What's working — and what's not? Especially in stressful times like these, we tend to focus on the negative. But don’t skip ahead to the second half of this question! Celebrate the positive results you and your team members are creating. And then think about what really helped you get those results. Acknowledging what’s going well will give everyone a psychological boost and proactively put your team’s strengths into play more fully.

3. Based on your answers to the first two questions, what's one shift you want to make in the second half of 2023?

One idea to consider here is investing in development opportunities for you or your team for the rest of the year. Remember that staff development can amplify strategies that are working well or help you make course corrections. Our award-winning New Lens® app can help you do both. Contact us for demo.

All of us here are at Newberry Solutions are always in your corner cheering you on and sharing valuable resources to help you be productive and successful, in the second half of 2023 and beyond. Please let us know how we can help.

How to Deal with Challenging Team Members

As a leader, you probably have at least one team member who has a knack for pushing your buttons. Your challenging team members may be high performers in many ways. But their negative behaviors still make life harder for you and the rest of your team. Today I want to share some ideas on how to address a difficult team member, as well as some specific responses you can use in the moment to redirect them.

Give Timely Feedback

It’s easy to delay giving feedback, especially when you’re busy. But the cost is high — for you, for the rest of your team and even for the challenging team member — if you put off addressing the issue. Remind yourself that you are offering feedback out of genuine concern for everyone involved. Remember also that your team member probably wants the feedback because they know it’s important for their career development.

Focus on Impact

Once you’ve decided to offer feedback about a team member’s challenging behavior, the next step is thinking about how to present that feedback effectively. Help the employee understand their behavior by identifying it, providing information on when and where you’ve noticed it occurring, and sharing its impact. For example, maybe their habit of shooting down ideas surfaces primarily in meetings with a key stakeholder group. Talk about the effect, from what you see or what you’ve heard from others. “I know this isn’t what you intend, but I’ve heard others say that your communication style leaves them with the impression that you are resistant to their ideas.”

Next, offer ideas about what your team member should do more often or less often. Sometimes it can be very powerful to ask the employee to focus on how they want to show up in interactions with others. In other words, by helping them identify what they do want others to notice about them (for example, openness to ideas), they may stop engaging in the other limiting behavior.

You can supplement your own coaching and advice by connecting your team member with development resources like our award-winning New Lens® app. An assessment within the app helps them identify their developmental needs.

What to Say in 5 Challenging Situations

In addition to making a plan for giving feedback and providing development opportunities, you can also think about what to say when your team member engages in the problem behavior in a setting like a meeting. When others are present, it’s not appropriate to deliver the same kind of feedback you would one on one. But you can make statements that help your employee course correct and that keep the larger conversation on track. Here are a few examples.

  • Challenging behavior: Naysaying. Your team member always seems to focus on why ideas will not work.

How to respond: "I understand your concerns and appreciate your perspective. What could we do to make this idea succeed?"

  • Challenging behavior: Complaining. Your team member has a knack for seeing the glass as half empty and griping instead of resolving the problem.

How to respond: "Let’s take a few minutes to vent and then shift to finding a solution." 

  • Challenging behavior: Derailing. Your team member distracts others from the core issue at hand.

How to respond: "I appreciate your comment. Just so I’m clear, please help me understand how it ties to what we’re trying to accomplish?"

  • Challenging behavior: Taking on too much. Your team member has a habit of volunteering for tasks during a meeting, but then getting overwhelmed and creating a bottleneck.

How to respond: "If you take on this work, how much time will it entail? How does that fit in with other priorities you already have? What support might you need?"

  • Challenging behavior: Getting lost in the weeds. Your team member gets bogged down in details and loses sight of what's really important.

How to respond: "Let's take a look at the bigger picture to make sure we’re considering the 'what' before we get into the 'how,’ and that we’re meeting our objectives."

This week, pay attention to your team members’ habitual behaviors and how they affect you and the rest of your team. Are there opportunities for feedback and coaching? And how do you want to respond when these behaviors surface?

How to Ease Your Team’s Stress (and Your Own)

Has the cumulative stress of the past few years taken a toll on you and your team? You aren’t alone. I’m hearing the same thing from many leaders I work with. As we created Newberry Solutions’ latest white paper, “Managers Under Pressure,” we learned that research backs up what we’ve all observed firsthand:

  • Employee engagement is at a seven-year low, which Gallup calls “one of the biggest threats to organizations and entire economies” in 2023. 

  • On top of that, more than 40% of professionals report feeling burned out at work.

  • For managers, the situation is even more dire. Their burnout rate is 43%. 

If you lead a team, it’s crucial right now to both prioritize your own wellbeing and support the people who report to you. You can make a big difference for them. A survey by The Workforce Institute at UKG found that managers impact people’s mental health just as much as their spouses do. 

I understand, though, that helping your team deal with stress (and managing your own) might feel like just one more thing to do when your schedule is already packed. So today I want to make this a little easier by passing along some unique, impactful tools that can supplement more traditional approaches to stress management. You can use these tools yourself and share them with your team members.

  • The Living in Green Project. The website for the Living in Green Project provides information about stress management that’s great for sharing with your team. One valuable tool is the “Which State Is Your Nervous System In?” infographic, which can help you understand your stress levels. Be sure to check out their blog for more simple but powerful strategies grounded in neuroscience. 

  • The Chopra App. If you are interested in meditation, but not sure how to get started, this app from wellness pioneer Deepak Chopra makes the practice more accessible. It includes meditations designed for a variety of situations. You can also find meditations as short as five minutes so that you can always fit a mindful pause into your day.

  • Tapping. This is one of the quickest ways I know to reduce negative emotions and get your energy back to a calm and balanced state. Tapping is also easy to learn, affordable and can be used almost anytime. Think of it as a form of acupressure as a way to identify and release roadblocks. It is backed by science, and I can tell you from my own experience that it really works — and works fast.

Resources from Newberry Solutions

Our passion is creating solutions that address the challenges we see leaders experiencing. Earlier, I mentioned our white paper, “Managers Under Pressure,” which will help you learn more about both the magnitude of workplace stress in 2023 and how you can empower your managers to deal with their own stress and support their teams. We’re also thrilled to hear from users of our award-winning New Lens® app that they feel better equipped to handle any stressful situation. Schedule your demo today.

How to Strengthen Team Relationships with Collaborative Learning

As a firm that helps top organizations develop their leaders, we get a firsthand look at emerging trends in learning and development. Three years ago, the coronavirus pandemic caused a sudden and massive shift to remote learning options. But, in recent months, we’ve been seeing the pendulum swing the other way.

In-person learning programs are on the rise again. One reason? Remote work has decreased the sense of connection among employees. Two-thirds of remote workers report feeling isolated or lonely at least part of the time. More than half of hybrid and remote workers also report having fewer work friendships.

We’re seeing especially strong interest in collaborative learning. This article will help you better understand collaborative learning, its benefits and how you can implement it in your organization.

What Is Collaborative Learning?

Collaborative learning is centered on employees sharing their knowledge and expertise with each other. It can take many forms. For example, if your organization has a program that pairs employees for mutual mentoring, that’s collaborative learning. Affinity groups or employee resource groups can also create opportunities for employees to learn together.

Embracing collaborative learning doesn’t mean that you solely rely on your employees’ expertise, though. For example, our New Lens® app delivers bite-sized lessons on key leadership skills and gives options for learning with a cohort. Our WOW! Program℠ also utilizes the power of collaborative learning by combining audio lessons with in-person meetings.

What Are the Benefits?

At Newberry Solutions, we’ve seen organizations that provide collaborative learning reap a number of benefits:

  • First, relationships among employees get stronger, which is especially important in this new era of remote work. Even before the pandemic, I frequently advised clients to pay more attention to their peer relationships (not just relationships with their bosses or direct reports).

  • Feelings of isolation decrease. Instead of feeling alone in dealing with an issue, employees feel like their challenges are shared and that they can lean on each other.

  • Collaborative learning can feel more relevant. Both employees and employers are tired of training programs that fail to address what they experience at work. Whether you are using outside content (such as the New Lens® app) or not (as with an internal mentoring program), collaborative learning focuses on effective solutions for your organization,

  • Learning becomes more accessible. With how busy everyone is, it can be hard to get away for a conference, offsite or other event. Collaborative learning sets the stage for what The Josh Bersin Company calls “growth in the flow of work.” This kind of learning can happen every single workday.

Put Collaborative Learning into Action

This week, I want to challenge you to look for ways to drive collaborative learning for your team. Could you put them together in small groups to share their expertise? Or perhaps you could team up with other department heads to help your teams get to know each other and learn about each other’s work. We’re also happy to tell you more about our New Lens® app or WOW! Program℠. Just reach out for more info.

Are You Leveraging Your Coaching Skills?

In the past few years, we’ve seen a big shift in expectations for leaders. Previously, leadership largely followed a “command and control” model. Leaders figured out what to do and told others to do it. But today we value a new kind of leader — one who’s skilled at coaching employees to find their own solutions.

“Increasingly, coaching is becoming integral to the fabric of a learning culture—a skill that good managers at all levels need to develop and deploy,” Herminia Ibarra of London Business School and leadership trainer Anne Scoular wrote in Harvard Business Review.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Honing your coaching skills benefits your team members and the organization as a whole, as well as your own career path. (In fact, we believe so strongly in the power of coaching that we created the New Lens app to make coaching easier for leaders and more accessible to employees at all levels.) In today’s article, I’ll help you assess where you are now with your coaching skills and how you can coach more frequently and more effectively.

How Coaching Pays Off

As an executive coach myself, I can tell you that coaching delivers real results, including:

But providing regular coaching can be a challenge for managers. With recent workforce cuts at many companies, schedules are tight. Furthermore, according to Chief Learning Officer, managers may lack the skills to be effective coaches: “Most managers are hired or promoted based on their tenure with the organization or past experience in non-managerial roles. They’re chosen based on legacy rather than skills. They may have what it takes to run the business, but they often lack the ability to support, motivate and empower a team.”

The Definition of Coaching

To strengthen your coaching skills, let’s take a look at how often you’re currently coaching. To do that, we have to first understand what coaching is — and isn’t.

The International Coaching Foundation defines coaching others as “a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

This definition of coaching from tennis coach Timothy Gallwey also applies to coaching in the workplace: “"Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them."

Many of the common interactions we have with our reports do not qualify as coaching, including:

  • Telling someone exactly what to do.

  • Giving them advice on what to do.

  • Offering them performance feedback.

Instead, coaching is more about listening and asking powerful open-ended questions to help someone else challenge their thinking, broaden their perspective and get unstuck.

Based on these definitions, how are you doing as a coach to your direct reports? How often are you asking coaching questions vs. giving directions or providing feedback?

Listen and Ask Questions

Now let’s think about how you can coach more frequently. A good starting point is to keep an eye out for coachable moments as they arise during your day. You don’t have to coach constantly. It’s not the right solution in every situation. For example, in a high-risk, high-visibility scenario, it’s probably safer to give direct instructions in the moment and then coach later.

When you identify good opportunities for coaching, remember to practice active listening. Pay attention to what your direct report is really communicating and don’t just wait for your chance to talk. By listening deeply, you can identify questions that can help employees develop their own solutions. A common mistake here is to ask leading questions that are more about nudging the person to the solution you would choose. Instead, your questions should sound more like these:

  • “What’s most important to you about this issue?”

  • “What problem are you really trying to solve?”

  • “What have you tried already, and what did you learn from that?”

A New Way to Coach

In addition to the coaching you provide, you can also look for other ways to offer your team members more coaching. Technology now makes the benefits of coaching more accessible than ever. Our New Lens app, for example, can supplement your own coaching with content that’s targeted to common situations we’ve seen our clients face. Schedule a demo now.

What Leadership Skills Should Training Address?

As you continue to navigate a lean work environment full of change, are you looking ahead to next year to see how to develop your team’s leadership skills? Choosing a leadership training solution can feel like “one more thing” to tackle, so I’m sharing a series of articles to help make the process a little easier.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In the first article, I shared some questions you can use to uncover what your team needs from leadership development training. This week, I’ll focus on helping you clarify the outcomes for your training solution. Remember, the program you choose doesn’t have to solve everything that’s going on with your team, but it should address your top two or three concerns. Below are common leadership challenges we hear about. Which ones affect your team?

Reducing Stress

I don’t have to tell you that everyone is busier than ever these days. Perhaps your team, like many others, is stretched thin because of staffing cuts or hiring freezes. According to findings of the Future Forum Pulse survey released in October, burnout is still on the rise, and 43% of professionals feel burned out. As a coach and facilitator who specializes in working with high-performing women, I was especially struck that the survey found 32% more burnout among women compared with men.

To be effective, leadership development solutions must address stress and burnout. Reducing your team’s stress burden will make it easier for all of you to deal with any other ongoing issues.

Prioritizing the Right Work

In a survey by Paychex Inc., 43% of respondents said a lack of time management skills is holding back their career advancement. As we navigate through uncertainty and change with lean teams, it’s no wonder that time management is difficult for many professionals.

To quickly gauge whether your team uses time effectively, ask yourself whether each member spends most of their time on their “Big 3”: the top three areas where they can have the biggest impact on the business. If not, aligning their capacity with what drives results should be a focal point in your leadership training program.

Improving Communication

Surveys consistently reinforce the importance of their employees’ communication skills, and leaders themselves say it is one of the most important leadership competencies. 

But, for many teams, the rise of remote work has introduced new communication challenges. Issues range from miscommunication over email and chat to overcommunication by managers who keep tight reins on remote workers to not knowing how to manage the volume of communication. The leadership training solution you select should reflect the new realities of workplace communication.

Developing Stronger Relationships

Closely related to communication is the ability to nurture productive relationships at work. Even before the pandemic, many high performers fell into the trap of keeping their heads down to focus on results at the expense of relationships.

Today, we have to be even more deliberate about relationship building. Research shows that employees find it harder to form a sense of connection with their colleagues in a hybrid workplace. And that impacts everything from collaboration to employee well-being. An effective leadership training solution should guide employees in how to build relationships with remote employees. If a training program involves peer learning or affinity groups, that in itself can strengthen relationships.

Engaging and Retaining Employees

One of the most important outcomes of a leadership development program isn’t necessarily part of the curriculum. Simply offering training and development is a big step toward keeping your employees engaged and retaining them at your company. In a 2019 survey, 94% of employees said they would stay at their company longer if it invested in helping them learn. A study that year by Sitel Group found that 92% of U.S. employees said that learning increases their engagement and motivation at work. 

What’s Ahead in This Series

As you consider the outcomes I’ve mentioned today, what is most important for your organization? With this in hand, you’ll be one step closer to selecting the leadership development solution that’s right for your team. In the final article of this series, I’ll talk about what effective leadership training looks like. In the meantime, I invite you to explore one of our newest leadership development solutions, the award-winning app New Lens. New Lens is designed to teach your team members how to manage their capacity, focus on the right work, communicate with impact - in a way that fosters connection and fits into their busy schedules. We would love to see if it can help you. Schedule your demo now.

Where to Start When Choosing a Leadership Training Program

As this year winds down, you’re probably starting to think about what 2023 will bring and how you can help your team meet the challenges ahead. As a leader, you play an important role in ensuring that your team is ready to tackle current and future challenges. You may also have heard from your team members that they want more training and development opportunities. But with so many options available, how can you identify the right leadership development solutions? Today I’m kicking off a series of articles about how to do just that.

This week, we’ll focus on understanding what your team needs. With so many fires to put out every day, it may have been a while since you holistically assessed how your team is doing. By pausing to do so now you, you can make a more informed choice when it comes time to select leadership development training. Give yourself some time to think through these seven questions.

  1. What has your team been through in the past year? What are they going through right now? Changes and challenges have been coming so rapidly that you may have lost track of everything that has happened. How have economic changes, technological disruptions and societal disruptions affected your organization and your team?

  2. Are you seeing signs of stress and burnout? If you notice that your team members are making more mistakes or missing deadlines, you may assume that some are underperformers or that they’re “quiet quitting.” But such behaviors can also be a sign that they’re overwhelmed with stress and fatigue. Burnout rates just keep rising, so it’s essential for all leaders to recognize the signs and symptoms of burnout on their team.

  3. How are your team members showing up? Observe your team members in different situations. Every interaction either elevates or diminishes their individual leadership brands. Are they sending messages that align with who they want to be?

  4. How are your team’s relationships? To succeed, your team members need strong networks. But, for many people, relationship building suffers when they get busy or when they work remotely. Is everyone just keeping their head down to get things done? Or are they cultivating relationships with each other, with colleagues in other departments and with leaders at different levels?

  5. How are your team members communicating? One of the most important leadership skills for your team members to develop is the ability to communicate with influence and impact. How would you describe each person’s communication style and approach? Do you see any common themes? Pay special attention to whether your team members become less-effective communicators when they are stressed out.

  6. Are your team members focused on the right work? With everyone so busy, knowing how to manage your energy and capacity is an essential skill. Do your team members prioritize the work that will have the most impact? Or do they seem distracted and scattered?

  7. Beyond what we have already covered, what other themes do you notice?

What’s Ahead in This Series

I hope that this exercise has given you a clearer picture of what’s going on with your team now and the biggest needs a leadership program should address. In upcoming articles, I’ll talk more about defining the outcomes you want from leadership training and what effective leadership training looks like. In the meantime, explore one of our newest leadership development solutions, the award-winning app New Lens. It focuses on areas where people get stuck and strategies that drive high performance, and is designed to fit into tight schedules and build relationships in the process. Schedule a demo now.

Five Things Employees Want from Their Leaders

Have you heard the old saying that “employees leave managers, not companies”? As turnover rates remain elevated (one in five employees said they were extremely or very likely to leave their companies this year), the stakes are high for developing the kind of leaders that employees don’t want to leave. But what do employees actually want from their leaders? This list will give you some insight and aligns with what I see as an executive coach time and again.

Appreciation

According to a survey by McKinsey & Company, employers underestimate how much employees want to feel valued by both their manager and their organization. They also underestimate how much feeling valued affects whether employees stay with the company. Providing the appreciation that employees crave doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. Here’s one idea you can start using right away: Start your next team meeting by asking people to share their recent successes or what’s been going well so that you can all celebrate your wins together. This doesn’t take long, and it makes people feel good as they start noticing what they’re actually getting done. Bonus: Besides giving your team members a lift, this appreciation exercise also gives you more information and insight about what is working well with your team.

Clarity

A survey of 1,000 U.S. workers about communication issues that hamper leadership found something striking: 57% of respondents complained that their leaders do not give clear directions. That was the second-most-cited issue in the whole survey. As an executive coach, I have also personally observed this. I frequently hear from employees who get frustrated because their bosses don’t set clear expectations for their work or define what success looks like for their roles. In addition to sharing this information, it also important to “connect the dots”: Explain the reasons behind your actions, questions, or decisions so that others understand what you are thinking. As Brene Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

Feedback

Employees want to know how they are doing and expect their leaders to tell them. Even if it might be hard to hear in the moment, most of us value getting practical, actionable feedback. However, a Gallup survey found that only about one in four employees strongly agrees that the feedback they get helps them be better at their job. If you always dread offering performance feedback, it can help to reframe how you think about it. Approach feedback with a spirit of generosity. You're not being the "bad guy" by criticizing. Instead, you're giving the employee valuable information to help them be successful. Wouldn't you be grateful if someone took the time to tell you what you should know?

Learning and Growth

Employees want leaders to care about their growth and development. Providing feedback is part of that, but so are recommending employees for training opportunities, delegating with growth in mind and exploring new ways your organization can promote ongoing learning. These efforts will pay off in engagement and retention. In a 2019 survey, 94% of employees said they would stay at their company longer if it invested in helping them learn. A study that year by Sitel Group found that 92% of U.S. employees said that learning increases their engagement and motivation at work.

Respect

There’s one critical factor that trumps everything else: respect. If you remember just one thing from this article, remember that employees want their leaders’ respect. In her research, Christine Porath, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, found that treating employees with respect outweighs all else when it comes to making a leader successful. “No other leadership behavior had a bigger effect on employees across the outcomes we measured,” she wrote in Harvard Business Review.

What Can You Do?

As a leader, how are you doing across these areas? How is your organization’s leadership doing as a whole? What are the top one or two biggest opportunities to improve? Remember that Newberry Solutions has resources that can help you, including the award-winning New Lens app, our program to develop effective leaders at all levels in a way that is affordable and scalable. We would love to help you determine if it’s a fit. Schedule a demo now.

5 Reasons Team Members Underperform

It’s an issue every leader deals with at one time or another: You’re working to cultivate a high-performing team, but not everyone is delivering at the level you need them to. One way this has shown up recently is the phenomenon of “quiet quitting,” or doing only the bare minimum to get by.

The first step to address underperformance is determining why it’s happening. You can use the five questions below as a diagnostic tool to figure out what’s really at the root of their underperformance. 

1. Is Burnout Causing Underperformance?

Burnout was already a big problem before the pandemic. But over the past couple of years, the burnout crisis has gotten even worse. If a team member’s work isn’t measuring up, the first question you should consider as a leader is whether the employee is experiencing burnout. Besides declining work quality, other signs of burnout include fatigue and low energy, seeming “checked out” or saying negative or cynical things about their job. Can you identify what might be causing the employee’s burnout? For example, maybe they haven’t taken time off this year, or they’ve had more and more duties added to their plate. Whatever the cause, a burnt-out employee can’t become more effective until the two of you address their fatigue and stress. Check out my article “Five Ways to Reduce Burnout in Your Team” for more ideas.

2. Are You Setting Clear Expectations?

Another common reason why employees don’t succeed is that they don’t understand what success looks like. Have you given them a clear picture of how you define high performance? Help your team members understand what their top priorities are, how they should spend their time and energy and how they can work successfully with you.

3. Is There a Learning Curve?

An employee might be underperforming simply because they are new on the job and are still mastering everything it entails. This is especially true if the onboarding process at your company has suffered due to lean staffing, heavier workloads or hybrid work. Even veteran employees who are taking on new responsibilities might experience a learning curve.

4. Do Employees Lack Skills or Expertise?

Your employee might be underperforming because their strengths don’t align with their current project or the way that their job has evolved. As technology accelerates change, that’s understandable. Our careers today require ongoing training and learning. But there’s a gap between what employees want and what companies are offering. (You can read more about this in Newberry Solutions’ free white paper, “Leadership Development for a Changing World.”)

5. Is the Employee the Wrong Fit?

This is probably one of the most painful causes of underperformance, but also one of the most important to address. Sometimes an employee just isn’t aligned with what’s important to your team or organization. As a leader, you can help the employee understand your workplace culture and priorities and find ways they can adapt their style or approach. But for employees who can’t or don’t want to change, everyone might be happier with a parting of the ways.

This week, identify one of these areas to explore as you work with an underperforming employee. As you develop your team members, our award-winning app New Lens can be a valuable tool. New Lens can teach your team members how to manage their capacity, focus on the right work, align with you as their manager and build their skills in a way that works with their schedule. Schedule your free demo now.

How to Create ‘Growth in the Flow of Work’

For a long time, there’s been a gap between the development opportunities that employees want and what companies actually offer. Amid the Great Resignation, closing that gap has taken on greater urgency. Employees are more likely to stick with an organization that helps them grow. But with so many development options and strategies to choose from, which approaches actually get results? That’s an important question for everyone from company executives and HR departments to team leaders and individual contributors.

And a recent report from analyst Josh Bersin has a clear answer. “A New Strategy For Corporate Learning: Growth In The Flow Of Work” has insights that will help you whether you are thinking about learning strategies for your organization, team, or your own development. Here’s what stood out to me from the Bersin report and some ideas for how to put these findings into action.

What Kind of Development Drives Results?

According to “Growth in the Flow of Work,” these are the learning and development areas that have the biggest impact on business results:

  • Career growth programs

  • Leadership development 

  • A culture of learning

  • L&D innovation

With my focus on leadership development, I want to share a few of Bersin’s insights in that area:

Developing leaders at all levels. As an executive coach, I’ve seen that, all too often, organizations invest in leadership training for senior leaders and high potentials, but overlook other employees. That damages an organization’s leadership pipeline. Research has revealed new managers felt unprepared for leadership roles. In fact, more than 60% failed within their first couple of years on the job. “This is because many first-time supervisors are thrown into the deep end of the pool, with little guidance or direction, and with little or no formal training in leadership skills,” leadership coach and facilitator Steven Howard writes. 

Teaching leaders to develop others. One of leaders’ most important jobs is helping others achieve their full potential — in other words, developing future leaders. When leaders are skilled at teaching and coaching, it makes development accessible to more employees. It also makes development more effective because it’s relevant to each employee’s work. As the report puts it: “Yes, we each need granular skills to do our jobs. But we can’t really use these skills, hone them, or apply them unless we have context, experiences, mentoring, and wisdom.” To learn more about how leaders can develop team members, check out my articles “How to Stop Fixing and Start Coaching” and “Put Your Coaching Skills to Work.”

Giving leaders ‘Power Skills.’ Bersin defines Power Skills as behavioral skills such as adaptability, time management and communication. Power Skills are the most important skills for driving business results, but they are also more complex to teach than technical skills. I have some articles that can help you with this area, too, whether you are helping others develop their Power Skills or cultivating your own:

I encourage you to read the full “Growth in the Flow of Work” report and think about how its findings apply to your career and your organization. How can you start weaving more learning and development into daily work experiences? 

It’s exciting to see that our learning platform, New Lens, is aligned with the ideas in the Bersin report. News Lens allows you to deliver the coaching and connection that employees crave, and seamlessly fits into the workday with bite-size lessons and practical action steps. We would love to support your company. Schedule a New Lens demo now.

Five Ways to Reduce Burnout in Your Team

Burnout has become an even bigger issue in the workplace in recent years. 

In a survey of over 1000 respondents by Deloitte, 77% say they have experienced burnout at their current job.  Though the term is often used casually, burnout is a real, serious condition that can impact an individual's physical and mental health, job performance, and personal relationships. 

Let’s discuss strategies to reduce burnout. Here are five things you can do:

1. Prioritize your team's well-being. 

Make sure your team members have the resources they need to stay healthy and balanced. This includes things like mental health support, adequate rest and breaks, and ways to escalate their concerns to you or others on the team.

2. Set clear expectations. 

Your team should know what is expected of them and how their work fits into the big picture. Make sure roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, and that everyone understands the company's goals and objectives, and your biggest priorities.

3. Look at workloads. 

Are your team members being asked to do too much? Take a close look at workloads to see if there are any areas where you can lighten the load. This might involve redistributing work, hiring additional staff, or establishing more realistic deadlines.

4. Look at how people are working.

Are your team members working in a way that is sustainable? Encourage and help them to adopt healthy work habits, such as taking regular breaks, setting boundaries between work and personal time, and using vacation days. You also have to role model what you expect. Otherwise, your team will follow your lead.

5. Invest in leadership development. 

Help your team members develop core leadership skills so they can work smarter, not harder. It will help them take on their work without feeling as overwhelmed. If you haven’t seen New Lens®, our holistic solution for leadership development, it was designed for this exact need.

By taking these steps, you can help reduce burnout in your team and create a more positive, productive work environment.

Retain Women Amid ‘the Great Resignation’

I’ve written before about “the Great Resignation” — the record number of people who have been leaving their jobs this year. Now we’re seeing more and more headlines that women are driving this phenomenon.

The Women in the Workplace 2021 report from McKinsey & Company and Lean In highlighted the growing crisis:

One in three women says that they have considered downshifting their career or leaving the workforce this year, compared with one in four who said this a few months into the pandemic. Additionally, four in ten women have considered leaving their company or switching jobs—and high employee turnover in recent months suggests that many of them are following through. … The risk to women, and to the companies that depend on their contributions, remains very real.

As we look toward the new year, I wanted to share some ideas about how organizations can turn this situation around in 2022. Hopefully, you’ll find at least one strategy on this list that you can bring to your own workplace.

Offer More Flexibility

Remote work and flexible schedules skyrocketed during the pandemic. Now some companies, including tech giants, are making those changes permanent. For example, Microsoft now allows employees to work from anywhere for half of their work week, and even 100% remotely with manager approval.

Flexibility is especially important to women. That makes sense, considering that women make up 75% of caregivers. However, simply offering remote or hybrid work options is not a cure-all when it comes to retaining women. Such changes must be implemented thoughtfully to ensure that women who are working remotely are not penalized for being less visible at the office

Promote Mentorship and Sponsorship

Understandably, women are leaving their jobs when they don’t see opportunities for advancement. And one reason that women don’t move up the ladder at the same rate as men do is that men are sponsored more often. 

What’s the difference between a mentor and a sponsor? While both provide valuable career advice, sponsors also connect you to opportunities and advocate for you.

A program that connects women to mentors and sponsors sends a powerful message. That’s what companies like HERE Technologies have found.

Emphasize Wellbeing

During the pandemic, more organizations began to embrace the idea that employee wellbeing isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s essential for sustainable success. Because women are more stressed and burned out than men are, wellbeing initiatives are a powerful tool for retaining women employees. 

Your company can support employees by offering wellness subsidies, as Deloitte and DocuSign do. Or you could help employees access mental health services, as Starbucks and Target do.

Resources You Can Use

At Newberry Executive Solutions, our focus is providing resources that organizations can use to engage and retain the women leaders that are so crucial to their future. As your company makes plans for 2022, I invite you to explore our programs, books, New Lens app and other offerings that can help you invest in women.

The Great Resignation: How Leaders Can Respond

The headlines just keep coming about a phenomenon that’s being called “the Great Resignation.” A record number of Americans have been quitting their jobs. In August alone, the number was 4.3 million. With this trend showing no signs of reversing anytime soon, what can you do as a leader to retain employees in your organization?

Girl typing on apple computer

Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels

Why Are So Many People Quitting?

First, it’s important to understand what’s driving this wave of resignations. The reasons vary across different fields. But there are a few common themes among professionals:

  • Necessity. Childcare has long been expensive and, in some regions, scarce. But now the field is experiencing its own labor shortage, which makes it even harder for families to find workable options. As a result, some moms are forced out of the job market.

  • Burnout. According to the Women in the Workplace 2021 report from McKinsey & Company and Lean In, 42% of women often or almost always feel burned out. 

  • Flexibility. Many of us got used to working from home and having more autonomy to control our own schedules during the pandemic. Now some professionals would rather quit than return to the office full time.

  • Changing values. The pandemic has made us take a new look at what’s really important to us. That’s led some people to shift their focus away from work and seek new careers that offer them more balance and meaning.

How to Improve Retention

So what should leaders do to retain employees amid these rapid changes in the work environment?

  • Adapt and evolve. We aren’t going “back to normal.” The pandemic-driven changes in how we work are here to stay. To retain employees (and recruit new ones), organizations must embrace this new reality and update their policies on things like flexible schedules and working from home. 

  • Focus on results. As a leader, as much as you have autonomy to, emphasize outcomes instead of processes. In other words, evaluate your team members on what they accomplish vs. when or where they do their work.

  • Prioritize well-being. This was one of the three key recommendations from the Women in the Workplace report. Promoting well-being goes beyond offering flexible schedules. It also involves understanding what else employees really need to honor both their professional and personal priorities, whether that’s a childcare stipend or quarterly mental health days.

  • Collaborate, align and adjust. The solutions that will most improve retention are those that you develop with your employees to address both their needs and your organization’s. This isn’t a situation you can address once and then consider everything solved for good. Instead, check in with your team members regularly to see what’s changed for them and how their work arrangements need to change in response.

As you lead during these challenging times, products and services from Newberry Executive Solutions are a great way to support yourself and others. You can learn how to bring out the best in your team and stay centered yourself, even amid constant change.

Share Your Ideas

“One in three women says that they have considered downshifting their career or leaving the workforce this year, compared with one in four who said this a few months into the pandemic. Additionally, four in ten women have considered leaving their company or switching jobs—and high employee turnover in recent months suggests that many of them are following through. … The risk to women, and to the companies that depend on their contributions, remains very real.”

-Women in the Workplace 2021

How can companies hold on to their female employees? In an upcoming article, I’ll be sharing examples of strategies that work. And I’d love to hear from you about what’s happening at your organization. Drop by my LinkedIn page to share your ideas and join the discussion.