Still pondering this epic story that I want to tell with my work, I spent some time with a couple of external colleagues from the leadership development arena yesterday. I don’t know about you, but I find it so useful to talk to people outside of work about what I am working on. Especially since I work from home, on my own, so this is a good chance for me to say stuff out loud that I’ve been thinking about. And yesterday, just like every time I meet with these people, I got clearer about my story, simply by talking it out loud. We rarely have a structure to our discussions; they meander here, there and everywhere, both personal and professional. And every time I start to think to myself “I should be back at my computer doing some real work”, that little nougat of learning comes along. Low and behold, near the end of our time together, it all came tumbling out.
So if you are interested, here’s what I am now thinking the story looks and sounds like. You see how iterative this process is, working out the story that inspires you to want to get on and start making it happen. I have to admit that I am getting impatient now, for the story to be ultra-clear, and I’ve only been working on it for a few days. Note to self (in many areas of my life): must be more patient.
And if you have any feedback on this story –please drop me a line in the comments.
So the story as it’s unfolding…
People leave companies because of their supervisor. It’s not that our supervisors are bad people, but it’s the sins of omission. For example, not saying thank you (so small and yet so powerful); not holding 1-1 status meetings; not challenging their people enough. (recognise any of this, in yourself or in your own supervisor?)
Historically, no-one has “owned” the supervisor role. There’s no definitive expectation of what a supervisor should be held accountable for when it comes to their people (or is there, and I am missing that?). And I don’t believe they ARE held accountable.
What if… the Talent Development Center of Expertise worked with the business to make it clearer to supervisors what they are accountable for, and held them to that? Might that lead us to a Single Climactic Scene where value creation starts with developing people. Lots of smiley faces, engagement up, attrition down. More smiley faces as our performance goes up and our shares increase in price.
But making expectations clear is not just about writing things down in a website that never gets read. It’s about connecting with our supervisors’ hearts and minds. Inspiring them to do the right thing for our people. How do we inspire them to become Sunbeams?
Here are some possible ideas that I’m mulling over. Feedback welcomed.
· Continue to build our digital tribe of champions (that’s you guys), through the blog, and encourage more sharing of ideas (maybe a community like this)
· Tell real-life digital stories, that highlight the ethics and philosophy of developing our people, without having to spell it out (maybe even have a mass story creation hackathon)
· Encourage even more story-telling, through the Narrative Lens (developed with Don Miller, author of A Million Miles in a Thousand Days)
· Apps that act as Conversation starters – using video and a short script to demo what great conversations look like between supervisor and supervisee, at each stage of the talent development lifecycle. You can click onto these just before you are due to have, for example, a transition conversation, so you are reminded of what to say to handle both the task and the emotion as your supervisee moves to a new role – simple things like saying thank you for their contribution while they were in the role.
· Comic books (about the conversations?)
· Conversations Gap app – what is the one conversation you need to have with your boss? (too often we wait for our boss to do the right thing, and they don’t…so instead of moaning that they are a rubbish supervisor, what do we need to do to initiate the conversation?)
· “Future Company” Super Hero. If any of you play Guitar Hero, this is a play on that. My colleagues are currently looking into creating a “game” that encourages us all to become high performance learners, giving us points for doing the things that lead to us becoming that “Future Company” Hero. I’m thinking that we build on that to create the “Future Company” Super Hero game, for supervisors.
The second piece of this is then holding supervisors accountable for these expectations. That has to come from the business. We’d need to address that through a culture of performance coaching, where every layer of leadership held the next layer accountable for the good supervision practices.
Now, of course, there are obstacles to overcome in this story, and plenty of characters to weave in and work with. I’ll think more about those in the coming days. In the meantime, I would REALLY welcome your thoughts on the above, in the comments section below. Please build on it with any new ideas that will meet our supervisors’ needs.
