Yearly Archives: 2021

resolving conflicts

Resolving Conflicts Between Employees

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Conflicts between employees arise from time to time in the workplace and is difficult to avoid. Ideally people will develop the skills to resolve conflicts on their own without management having to intervene. In fact, conflicts are likely to happen at the leadership level and in this case if third party help is needed, it will land on the doorstep of the boss or HR department if there is one.


Skills

But even if people learn the skills to manage conflicts it may go unresolved if both parties are not able to function at the responsible level. I covered the levels of growth in other articles and videos. People may function much of the time at the responsible level but slip down to the self-protective level in an instant when a potential conflict arises with another employee. And this can happen at all levels in the company from front line workers to top leadership.


resolving conflicts

Situation

One of my clients was telling me of a conflict she has with a co-worker that has been going on for over 20 years. Both have been through training on communication and how to use active listening to resolve disagreements and move forward with an action plan.


But it seems that one party is being self-protective and does not want to collaborate to end this conflict. Usually there is something that happened in the past that the person hangs on to, or it could be their personalities clash and one party just wants to take revenge on the other.


Action

Conflicts like these zap energies, impedes collaboration and ultimately affects performance and productivity. So even if skills training is provided for conflict resolution, people need to work on their own issues to be willing to act at the responsible level and take the action required to resolve the conflict.


Leaders need to identify conflicts in the workplace and exercise zero tolerance. They need to get the parties to the table to talk it out and commit to responsible action.


Prevention Preferably prevention is being practiced in the form of personal development along with skill development so people can self-manage handling of conflicts as they are sure to arise at one time or another.


hard and soft skills

Consider both Hard and soft Skills when Hiring Employees!

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Employees need both hard and soft skills to do their job and perform well. Hard skills are the technical skills needed to do the work such as programming, operating machines and software, and knowledge-based skills such as scientific, legal and health.


Soft skills are interpersonal skills such as communicating, listening, collaborating, negotiation, giving feedback, conflict resolution, etc. These skills have always been important but are even more in demand now that a lot of emphasis is placed on teamwork. They are also essential skills for leadership and the more they are developed the better the quality of leadership.


Assessing Hard Skills

When hiring employees, you are essentially assessing how well their skills meet the requirements for the job. People can claim they have a specific skill set and the best proof would be past performance. You can validate the past to a certain extent through the resume, interviews, and reference checking. Adding skill testing can give you immediate insight into how deep they possess the skills.


I remember helping a small business owner hire an executive assistant and one key task was to draft letters to clients and suppliers. I had the candidate sit at the computer and open Word to draft a letter according to instructions I provided. Even though she had written highly proficient in Word on her resume it quickly became clear that her skill level was below par.


You can create your own testing method for the skills you need. This should not be too difficult and is highly recommended specially to verify critical skill levels.


Assessing Soft Skills

For many companies soft sills can be more difficult to assess. This is because we tend to focus more on the hard skills especially as the workplace becomes more dependent on evolving technologies.


But as I mentioned earlier, soft skills are seen today as important as hard skills, as if you cannot collaborate with others, it can hinder teamwork, collaboration, and innovation.


Testing for soft skills is best done in the interview and using behavioural type interview techniques to have the person demonstrate certain basis skills such as active listening.


I use a psychometric assessment when helping my clients hire new employees as this will give me an indication how well suited is their personality to developing soft skills. For example, of someone is higher on the scale of Sociability, I know that they like interacting with others and tend to be friendly and outgoing. If they are exceptionally low on this scale, they would prefer working alone and this could affect collaboration if group discussions need to happen often.


Using this type of psychometric assessment is more about knowing how well a person fits the job and then developing their skill set that is most crucial for performing well. You do not want to try and turn a highly introverted person who prefers working alone into a friendly outgoing person. This never works and is counterproductive and a waste of time and money.


Fit for the Job

The best approach for hiring the right person is fit for the job. This should be skills fit, company fit and job fit. The job fit part is where you use testing to see how well their personality fits the job and this should be to measure their fit to a performance model for the job as in the graph below.


The more you use well-developed resources to test for both hard and soft skills, the better your chance will be to hire the right person for the job.


retaining your best performers

Retaining Your Best Performers Should Be a Top Priority for Every Business Owner and Leader

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Just recently I was speaking with the employee of a client company. She has been there for more than 20 years and she told me that she almost left the company. In fact, she had handed in her resignation and the boss convinced her to stay.


It seemed that she had become dissatisfied with her pay structure and vacation time that were both frozen because she had reached the maximum for her job function. She felt she was not progressing, and the job had become less interesting.


She was head hunted and offered a better position with superior pay. The boss convinced her to stay but it cost the company more than it should have if they had practiced the preventative approach I recommend.


Practice Prevention

The best way to prevent this happening to you and your company is to meet regularly with your employees and have a conversation about their job experience and satisfaction. Now of course you do this with people that report directly to you.


I call this a coaching conversation as you want to get the pulse of your employees and find out how they are feeling about the job. So, it’s not a time to really talk about what they’re working on or how they’re doing even though that might enter into the conversation. But you want to talk about them as a person and ask how they are feeling about their job.


I usually start these conversations with questions like; tell me about what is going well in the job and then what’s going not so well? It is really about their experience at work. What are they happy with, what are they not so happy with so I can get a feeling of how they see their work, how they feel about their satisfaction with the company, with the job, their engagement and work relationships. Then if there are issues that come up that I feel need to be addressed, we can discuss them. This way, the employee feels that you care about them, that you are taking interest in their career and in their job satisfaction.


Coaching Conversations versus Surveys

Many companies use surveys to get the pulse of people’s perception of their job satisfaction but taking the time to have a face-to-face conversation is a much richer and human approach.


Having that one-on-one conversation will make people feel that they are valued that you care about them, that you’re treating them as a human. It will create a bond and build trust with them.


This way if they get approached by a recruiter, they will have more of a tendency to come and see you and let you know that they are being offered something better.


When an employee values their relationships at work both with their boss and coworkers, that is something they would be reluctant to leave. There is a risk that they may lose that when moving to another firm where they do not know what things are like.


In the example I gave the company decided to offer a promotion to a team leader role that provides more pay and benefits. But this was done more as a reaction than a planned approach.


Giving a promotion just to retain a good performing employee is not always feasible and suggested. There are other ways to increase an employee’s engagement such as providing more interesting work and paying a bonus based on performance.


Cost of Hiring

After speaking with this employee, I also spoke to a HR manager of another company about the cost of turnover. She said finding qualified skilled people is exceedingly difficult these days and it takes a lot of time and money to go through the process. Furthermore, training new staff to adapt to your way of functioning also can be awfully expensive.


The Bottom Line

You can either put out fires or practice prevention, meaning start having regular conversations with employees about their work experience. Keep these conversations focused on them and look for signs that might tell you their satisfaction and engagement with the job is faltering. Speak to them about it and find ways to help them stay engaged.


responsible versus accountable employees

Responsible versus Accountable Employees, which is Better?

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As businesses grow from start-up to mature organizations, they institute systems and structures to make sure that things are well managed. This also means hiring experienced managers to run departments.


I had a client who was the director of finance and HR and she often saw that people were not held accountable by the managers. She would often use the expression that people needed to be taken to task. This may be an outdated expression but there are still managers who think and function that way.


I remembered this when I was thinking about the relationship between responsibility and accountability. This is because I am working on a new online training program on performance  management and thinking of how to explain what the benefits of the program are.


I realized that leaders do not want to supervise their employees and be checking to see if they are doing the work properly and timely. What they want is for people to take full responsibility and hold themselves accountable.


To get to that level where everyone is taking full responsibility and being accountable takes work. And the work needs to be done by everyone, not just the leader and managers.


When I say have employees be fully responsible I mean that they function at the highest level that a human being can reach. I covered this in a recent article and video about the levels of growth and how fear plays a big part in how we function.


To perform most of the time at the responsible level requires self-awareness and personal development. An important role of the leader is to continuously provide the means for people to grow and develop themselves to function at the responsible level. Below is a list of qualities of people who function at the responsible level in the various dimensions of life. You can download the complete form and worksheet from my website.


responsible versus accountable employees