Everywhere we look, ominous signs reveal a mushrooming stress epidemic.
Predictably, this stress epidemic is driving up costs to business from lost productivity and innovation. But recent research provides insights on how to counter these trends.
Here are four leadership keys to easing and even reversing the rising costs of stress in the workplace.
This second article in the “Ask Dave” series is based on a question posed by Dr. Amy Osmond Cook, CEO of Osmond Marketing.
“I recently had an employee quit suddenly. She said that she was happy … until the day she quit. I was surprised and felt bad that I couldn’t tell she had been struggling. How can I prevent this from happening in the future?”
When you shake a carbonated beverage and then open it, pressure gets released. It’ll be ugly and messy but eventually that messiness will be cleaned up and you can enjoy what you have — a nice tasty beverage.
Teams work the same way. Tensions build over time because that’s the nature of relationships. Conversations in teams often create emotional tolls — a “deposit” that positively resonates with people and a “withdrawal” that conflicts with others’ values and beliefs, therefore creating conflict. Neither one is bad. In fact, you need both deposits and withdrawals to keep that team’s bank account (i.e. performance) healthy and flowing. Conflict is healthy. It’s just not comfortable.
Corporate leaders bewildered by employee disengagement should try seeing workplace politics through their team’s eyes.
If you want your best people to stay, you need to think carefully about how you treat them.
As a leader in a company or organization, it’s important to make sure your team members are staying on track and doing the job to the best of their abilities, but this can sometimes be difficult to gauge unless you have a strategy in place to effectively measure the performance of your employees.
In some ways, the sales force is the most measured function in any company. All salespeople have a number (a quota) assigned to them, and progress toward that number is tracked maniacally. However, anyone who has ever tried to measure the ability of a sales team knows that this number is insufficient to determine whether a seller is actually good or bad at their job. But if you really want a challenge, try to measure the performance of the salesperson’s boss—the frontline sales manager.
The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer doesn’t mince words: “trust is in crisis.” Across the board and around the world, the general population’s trust in our biggest institutions – including business – is down.
So it’s no wonder that by far the top things organizations ask me to solve for when they seek my leadership expertise are trust and engagement.
Distrust is rampant. It’s worldwide. It’s pervasive across all types of organizations in the business world. Even though the trust of CEOs is at an all-time low, we can help heal the distrust that may exist in your organization and boost your trust-factor among your tribe.
Are you ready?
If you believe the research, only 55% of salespeople make quota. That means 45% of sales people don’t make their quota, and the reason is we’re flying blind. For years sales organizations have had to use quantitative metrics to determine if a sales person was effective. We’ve measured the number of calls, the number of touches, meetings set, closing percentages, average deal size, emails sent, conversion rates, quota attainment and more, to ascertain a salesperson effectiveness.
