Bovo-Tighe Articles

We are pleased to share a new article, recently accepted for posting on eZineArticles.com.

The title: The Cure for Bad Meetings: Pay Attention and Contribute

This topic started life as a blog topic, but nothing beats repetition for driving a point home; changing mindsets and improving behavior!

The Key Point to Remember and Internalize:

You control your own behavior in meetings, and that behavior is infectious.

Examine your own actions to see if you are part of the problem:

• Arriving with a bad attitude about any particular meeting, tuning out the speaker, “enduring it”

Or the solution:

• Arriving with energy and engagement, setting a standard for participation that others can emulate

Positive and negative attitudes are equally contagious! What sort of behavior are you promoting through your own actions? Make sure you err on the side of “positive” as often as possible. You will find meetings easier to take, and even find value in them nine times out of ten!

Think about how much more productive all your meetings will be if you relentlessly approach each with a positive mindset focused on the following personal objectives:

• Support the organizer to achieve the meeting objective
• Keep the momentum moving forward (volunteer to “keep the clock” and keep people focused on the task at hand)
• Ask forward thinking, action-oriented questions that are germane to the topic
• Never use the meeting to advance a tangential agenda, score points or make a fellow employee look bad.

For more, click through to the article.

At Bovo-Tighe, we place a big emphasis on moving leaders from “transactional” to “transformational”.

The distinction is critical, because a leader who is transactional gets stuff done, but does not inspire his or her followers to go above and beyond their assigned tasks to exceed expectations and sustainably improve productivity.

Our Co-Founder, David Tighe, recently had a article about our Transformational Leadership philosophy accepted for posting on eZineArticles.com. We recommend it as a great summary on why any organization should prioritize the creation of transformational leaders within its ranks, and how individual managers can transform themselves pretty quickly without waiting for the blessings of senior management.

What follows are a few highlights from the full article:

We emphasize “transformation” in an effort to distinguish “transactional leaders” from leaders who innovate, engage, encourage and motivate (the last two are not the same) their teams to perform at higher levels consistently. Not for a month, or a special project, but all the time.

• The verb “transact” implies getting a series of tasks done. Most leaders who show up get this far. Transactional leaders drive performance. They focus on results, and “accomplish what they can” with limited time and resources.
• The verb “transform” captures what a leader must do to create a fully engaged, highly productive and innovative workforce. Transformational leaders also focus on results, but solve the limited resource problem by unlocking extra productivity within their team, engaging fully with them to tap more of the capabilities, energy and desire inherent in each team member.

Moving from “transact” to “transform” is the hard part of leadership, and is the leap that so many assigned leaders (those in official leadership roles) fail to make.

This failure is not from a lack of desire to be the best. Most people want to succeed and earn recognition for what they achieve. But, if their organization does not provide the training, tools and permission to build a sustainably productive culture, team leaders will not make the transition from transactional to transformational.

If you want to become a transformational leader within your organization, start by adopting a more engaging communication style that is founded on personal responsibility and is action-oriented:

Eliminate the “Blame Game”:

• Take the lead in identifying and interceding in conversations that involve blame or adopt “victim status”. Teach your team members to drop the need to assign blame and adopt instead your forward-focused mindset.
• Redirect the energy in the group by asking “What can we do now?” We call this “keeping a next-action focus.” It is your job to train everyone to adopt that mindset permanently.
• Publicly accept personal responsibility for any results, good or bad. Challenge your people to do the same, and never stop leading by example.

Open up Communications:

• Stop directing, start listening and supporting. If you are always doing the talking, you will never hear about a problem, or a new idea.
• Expand your definition of “need to know.” Engaged employees need to know a lot about the company’s goals, its limitations, and the truth behind those energy-sapping rumors. Employees work harder if they know how their piece of the puzzle fits strategically.

Communicate with a “next-action focus”:

• In meetings, define desired outcomes for each discussion
• Turn every discussion you have about work from cause of problems to what to do next
• Finish each meeting with a summary of mutually agreed actions
• Follow up based on these actions. You must be reliable and predictable in applying these habits to all your co-worker interactions.

For more details, click through to the article.

You cannot be fully effective as a manager of people or projects unless you inject passion into your work, and instill that passion to those with which you work. Adopting a transformational leadership style allows you to more clearly communicate that you care about your people and their success, collaborate more effectively with them, and therefore transfer your passion to them. A win-win all around every time!

We have had a new article accepted by eZineArticles this week. It focuses on a core tenet of our Foundations of Excellence employee development model: The Pursuit of Truth.

Find the article here.

Most organizations waste the performance evaluation process, even though it is a great tool to improve performance. The best way to fix that is to evaluate continually rather than annually.

• Annual reviews should be the icing on the developmental cake: You review performance all year as a core managerial responsibility.
• Your goal must be retention, not elimination. Fix the skill sets and mindsets that inhibit productivity.

Read more in this month’s newsletter. Also in this issue:

• Do you hire the “best” person, or the right person?
• Leaders must drain fear from their organization to enable the pursuit of truth and maximize productivity.

 

Please share this newsletter with friends and co-workers who may find our insights productive in their own professional and personal lives.

Our most recent client newsletter focused on maintaining a real commitment to transparent and true acceptance of personal accountability (for both actions and results,) which proves time after time in all of our work with clients to be a highly productive mindset if adopted throughout your organization. Here is the topic list:

• Visible Personal Accountability is Critical to Business Success
• Do You Have What it Takes to Manage A Crisis?
  (Hint: It has a lot to do with accepting personal accountability!)
• Exceptional Leaders Foster Employee Engagement

Click here to open the newsletter. If you know people who could benefit from these insights, feel free to share the newsletter with them! And let us know what you think, too.

Our client newsletter for September focuses on TALENT:

• How companies attract it in the 21st Century
• How great leaders retain it

It all starts with your internal or “employee” brand:

• Are you known in the marketplace as a great place to work? If not, take steps to make that so.
• Do you walk the talk internally? Do you consistently deliver on your promise to “be a great place to work?”
• Are you “with it”? Do you fully leverage social media in your recruitment efforts?

This is the core of our work with clients: Creating a corporate culture of full engagement that naturally attracts and keeps the best talent available.

Also in this issue: A reminder that great coaching starts with a clear goal in mind. Bad coaching wanders all over the place (and often ends up in the same place it started.)

Click here to see the newsletter.

We are pleased to share with you the summer edition of our client newsletter for 2011.

In this issue we examine how much more profitable customer loyalty is than customer satisfaction. Everyone is familiar with the ideas that it costs six times as much to attract a new customer as it is to retain a current customer. A key insight is that the ratio gets even better the more loyalty you can engender.

As with customers, so with employees. Staff turnover is ruinously expensive, even with entry-level employees. You must be creative in how you build employee loyalty, because loyal employees are much more forgiving of occasional managerial lapses than merely satisfied ones, and may even contribute to fixing the problem constructively.

And, oh by the way, loyal employees work hard to transfer that loyalty to customers, a virtuous cycle if ever there was one!

Finally, this newsletter carries a reminder that leaders can foster or dampen innovation and creativity within their organizations merely by the manner in which they respond to new ideas that are presented. In short, think before responding, respond constructively and encourage it appropriately. Always value it instead of judging it!!! And make sure the credit goes to the right places, not just the closest places!

Bovo-Tighe Client Newsletter – July August 2011

• Thoughts on how toteach employees to better manage their emotions (and moods) in work settings. A real productivity raiser!
• Gen Y is going to work: How best to meld them into your corporate culture to benefit from their energy and willingness to commit to a worthwhile cause?
• Positive thinking keeps “coming back” as a critical success factor in effective leadership. How can you sustain and model that behavior?

Bovo-Tighe partners with many companies in the energy business. For years, part of that work has taken us to Alaska’s North Slope to work with these partners and their supporting organizations to run engagement activities that have had a significant positive impact on productivity in a challenging environment. The return-on-investment for our partners has consistently exceeded 500% by focusing on creating a cultural mindset that emphasizes collaboration, mutual benefit and valuing each individual contribution to the whole enterprise.

If the image link does not work, click here: Bovo-Tighe in Alaska 2011