If you are a people leader, I need you to know what you will always have employee challenges. The types of challenges depend on you as a leader. Jada shares the leadership techniques to have the best kind of people problems.
How do you make the right decisions, if you don’t know where you are going? Work with me, and I will get your on the right path. https://jadawillis.com/work-with-me/
Follow Jada and the B2B Podcast: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_ceo_mentor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theceomentor/
If you are a people leader, I need you to know what you will always have employee challenges. The types of challenges depend on you as a leader. Jada shares the leadership techniques to have the best kind of people problems.
How do you make the right decisions, if you don’t know where you are going? Work with me, and I will get your on the right path. https://jadawillis.com/work-with-me/
Follow Jada and the B2B Podcast: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_ceo_mentor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theceomentor/
I'm Jada Willis and this is the Back to Business podcast made for business owners, CEOs and high achievers that are ready to leave their BS excuses behind, get more out of life and see business growth like never before. Let's take the road less traveled and tackle the hard. Are you ready to get back to business? Welcome back B2Bers. I hope you're ready to get back to business. I want you to reclaim your time, recharge your team and refocus your business. Let's do it. Today, I really want to talk to you about an issue that's been coming up with not just my clients, but it feels like every people leader that I'm talking to, they're exhausted. And it's January, they're exhausted and somewhat surprised by the people issues, the people problems that they're handling right now. And if you know much about this show or my background, I've been in human resources for over 18 years and HR is my jam and has been, but I've definitely learned a thing or two, not just in being in HR, but in running my consulting practice, previously Willis HR, now I run Jada Willis Consulting, and I will tell you, I have chosen to be in 100% people business. And so I've learned a lot from managing people to obviously managing hundreds of clients to, I mean, really what I do is all surrounded and interacting with people. And as I'm talking to a few of my clients, you know, my clients in particular recently, they've actually come to me surprised. You're like, I just, I just didn't realize that I was going to have these types of issues with my employees. And it's not necessarily employees that are new enrolled, it's employees that have been with the organization for a few years. And then I'm talking to another CEO and she's like dreading going into work because, yeah, she has to have multiple difficult conversations and difficult because they're just uncomfortable, right? If you are not, if you haven't perfected your seek to understand as a people leader, you haven't perfected, you know, those then they are difficult, they are awkward. And, you know, sometimes you don't necessarily want to approach your day knowing that you have multiple conversations where you can't control the other person's response. You can't control whether they're going to be receptive to that feedback or see your intentions or what's really going to happen, right? But I'll tell you this, there are definitely ways to mitigate the employee issues that you're experiencing. And a leadership style that is one of running towards coaching, feedback, accountability conversations. Not shying away from them, I mean, that is the first mistake. If you, I'll tell you this, if you continue to ignore a people issue, it will only grow and possibly impact other areas of your business and your team. So that is the underline and bold of this podcast episode is that you have to address head on whenever there is a concern with an employee. But I'm here to tell you that your employee issues, employee problems, employee coaching conversations are not going away. As long as you manage people, there are going to be people problems. I don't care if you have best employees in the world. I don't care if you have employees that have been with you for 20 plus years. I don't I don't care if they're new enroll. It's 30 days. They're excited. You are going to have people issues, right? And that's, if you're in a leadership role, I need you to understand and kind of wrap your mind around the mindset of, there is going to be this constant ebb and flow of managing, engaging, rewarding, celebrating, monitoring, pushing, challenging your employees. Like there's a long list, right? Of what you need to do and your responsibility when it comes to influencing, coaching, inspiring, and uplifting the employees that are looking up to you as their leader. It is a big weight. It is a big responsibility. But one that you have to know comes with the territory of being in a leadership role. So, I don't want to be a Debbie Downer today. This wasn't intended to drag you down. It really is to readjust your expectations on the fact that you somewhat should be prepared, somewhat on an every day, definitely every, you know, weekly basis. Right? How can you mitigate, how can you manage these people issues? I want to give you a few tips just from my experience and of course from the experiences of the leaders that I serve as my clients. So the first thing is you really need to understand and hone in, lean in to your leadership style because once you know what your leadership style is, you need to be consistent with that. And how that influences your employees is the fact that they're going to know what to expect and not be surprised whenever they're having consistent meetings with you, talking about their performance, talking about their input, and talking about what you expect of them in the coming weeks, months, that's not going to be a surprise. And so whenever you start honing in and developing your leadership style, it develops a certain cadence, and hopefully one in which there is two-way communication. You're asking for feedback. You're also giving feedback. You're focused on the specifics of how does their position or actions impact the team, the organization, the client. So you're really already setting the stage for maybe preventing an employee behavior issue or preventing some kind of burnout or lack of productivity from the employee because you can already spot that these issues are coming. You can already have more of a proactive stance whenever you're in that cadence of meeting regularly with your employees. And you already have gotten to know more about your employees' threshold capacity and normal output from a work perspective. So you can identify trends very quickly. And honestly, if someone's, if an employee is just acting different that day, it's okay to, you know, pull them in and say, hey, I just want to check on you. You just don't seem like yourself today. Or you're having these conversations and maybe you notice that there's a slip in their productivity or their performance these last couple of weeks, and you want to do a check-in and say, hey, this is what I've noticed. I've seen you have very high performance output. I've seen you do really well. And then I'm noticing these last couple of weeks that it's not going all that well. And be specific about what's not going all that well. Be specific about what you are noticing, the patterns that you're noticing. Because maybe that employee needs you to care and needs you to notice. So it's not just about having this difficult and strange conversation. It's really an investment in that employee and also that employee may feel seen and heard because you've taken the initiative to approach. Now, I'm not saying that it's just on the leader to obviously initiate those conversations. And, you know, I would love for all employees to have the emotional maturity and be able to cultivate just that relationship of, hey, this is what I have going on, just a heads up. That's just it's unfortunately not reality. And, you know, and I was talking to another leader the other day and someone has worked with them for a year. And I mean like this is a high performer. It's like everything that you give her turns into gold, right? But this leader has noticed that this particular employee is kind of slipping, right? Slipping a little bit. And how it's showing up for this particular employee is that, um, they're coming in a little later, their turnaround time with certain projects is a lot slower, communication is just not as regular. Like you're starting to see. So what does that also indicate to you? That indicates that there may be a conversation needed, but also it's re-engagement that this employee feels invested, understands their role and their expectations, understands for this current moment, because they may have gotten complacent, right? They may have. So with that being the case, it's an opportunity to focus on re-energizing, re-engaging that particular employee and finding out maybe there's another project. It sounds silly, but sometimes whenever employees are slipping, they're actually bored and need more work or need different kinds of work to help stimulate. Those are the high performers, the A players. That's sometimes needed. So we've talked about having the leadership mindset and understanding that you're going to have to approach this differently. You're going to have employee problems, concerns, plan for those. And we kind of talked about your leadership cadence and also how you're scheduling those regular check-ins, those regular meetings. But it's really thinking through how you also want your team culture to be forward. And by focusing on the formation of your culture, even though it's an established organization, means that I guess I'm putting a lot of the burden back on you as the leader of making sure that you're leading from a place of role modeling behavior, being consistent in your approach, and also just making sure it's crystal clear what the expectations are for your employees and expectations of policies and what are the non-negotiables for your organization and what do we celebrate? So that is, and with this, I'm talking again, a lot about you as a leader, what is in your realm of control to help mitigate these people problems? Because it's more and more than I'm finding, that leaders are so surprised. There is going to be this ebb and flow of, sometimes you're gonna be surprised that this particular high performer is causing an issue or involved in drama that you wouldn't have expected of them. The biggest thing that you can do as a leader is to know your team, know your employees, make sure you set up your cadence of communication, make sure that they feel valued, and they have an outlet. They have an outlet to provide feedback. They have an outlet to share their concerns and their complaints. And also, again, you're listening to your employees and then readjusting not your policies and not even your expectations, but you're readjusting to making sure that you meet them where they are. And feeling valued is number one from an employee perspective. So I'm sorry to say, you are going to have to manage people issues, people problems, but leadership is not for the faint of heart and I guarantee you, the more you practice managing difficult conversations to difficult people, the better you are at it. My number one piece of advice, operate with good intent, be clear in your expectations and communication, and then make sure you're staying consistent, holding your employee accountable, giving the feedback, you're not being mean, clarity is kindness. Thank you for tuning in. I'm gonna end this podcast just like I end almost every other podcast. And I want you to choose your heart because everything that you want is on the other side of hard. And if you think that your team is ready for growth and you as a leader are ramped up and ready, then how about you go to my website and take the Is Your Team Ready for Growth assessment. That's jadawillis.com. Go to Work With Me page and I will see. Is your team ready for growth? You'll get the assessment results and bare minimum, you're gonna have everything you need to get your team ready for that next level. See you next time.