Four Tips to Becoming World Class
The Ritz Carlton serves the top 1% of travelers. Their guests are paying top dollar and they expect the best. Year after year the Ritz Carlton is able to live up to the expectations of their patrons. How do they do that? When it comes down to it, it is just a hotel. Sure, they might have nicer amenities, but the amenities don’t provide any service to the guests. It all comes down to the people. If you want to have world class results, you have to employ world class people, and developing a team of world class people might be easier than you think!
Build the Right Team
Gallup puts out a “State of the Workforce” report every year. This report is a culmination of data collected from companies across multiple industries. In this report there are some interesting statistics:
- 32% of employees are energized and committed to their work.
- 51% of employees are neutral – they show up and do good work, but little more.
- 17% of employees are disengaged.
You want a team that fall into the top two categories. That bottom 17% can end up bringing others with them, or discouraging great employees that you have. As a leader, you cannot let that happen. By eliminating the dead weight in your workforce, you will immediately start to accelerate your performance. Warning – this means you’ll have to show courage, and not shy away from conflict. In the end your team will respect you more for it.
Keep Your Top Performers
Humans have an instinctual desire to learn and grow. When people are learning they are automatically more engaged. The conscious mind, and the subconscious mind (emotional mind) stay engaged when they are growing and learning. This allows people to become not just rationally connected to their job (I need the pay check), but they connect emotionally to their job (I can’t imagine working anywhere else). Companies that continuously invest in their people will see a more engaged workforce. Invest money in all your employees, especially if you’ve dropped the dead weight, but focus on those that are actively engaged. These are likely to be your top performers. Keeping them engaged will keep them from looking elsewhere. Warning – if you completely ignore the neutral employees they could turn disengaged. Don’t take that risk.
Communicate Clear Expectations
It sounds so simple, when you are leading people. Make sure you have communicated a clear message of what is expected. However, I have found that it is commonly overlooked. Sure, people might have expectations, but they are often time vague. If you look at your business like a game, or a sport, there are rules of the game. By structuring your organization in much the same way, people know what is expected, what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It simply gives them a framework to improve their skills and improve their results helping you grow your business. Most people appreciate the structure, and want understand what you’re looking for.
Empower Your People
Empower everyone in your company to improve the business and help your clients. Good ideas can come from anywhere, from the new hire to the CEO. When you’ve set expectations, and people understand the rules, you have to trust them to operate within the rules. Empowering people gives them a sense of ownership of the company results. If everyone feels they have ownership – skin in the game – it makes sense that they’ll be looking out for the best results of the company. It’s the ultimate engagement!
This Week’s Challenge
This week’s challenge is to build your business, starting with your employees. Devote some time this week to this. When your employees are happy, they will be more productive, you’ll have less turnover, and your customers will have a better experience. A better customer experience leads to customer satisfaction, and ultimately customer loyalty and referrals.
Are you serious about creating a world class organization?
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Quote of the week
“Employee engagement is the investment we make for the privilege of staying in business.”
Ian Hutchinson