Leading in the Best Workplace

How often do we ask ourselves, “How do I create the best possible workplace where people wake up in the middle of the night disappointed it is not time to go to work yet?”…

Now that you have finished laughing consider the ramifications of the question. For most of us the answer starts with environmental satisfiers – the tangibles. The actual answer however lies with motivators – the intangibles – specifically, and most importantly, individual leader behaviour, and then, the level of individual engagement, and next, the ability of people to manage stress, frustration, and conflict in the workplace.

As reflected by Dr. Henry Cloud, leadership expert and New York Times bestselling author of “Boundaries”, leaders are ridiculously in charge. The results they get from the people on their teams is exactly what they create or allow. Once we embrace that idea, we can start to tackle the tough issues that are preventing leaders from creating lasting performance and success in their organizations.

One of the greatest hurdles to success in the workplace is dysfunctional employees. A sad fact for whatever reason, every work office has someone or a group of ‘some-ones’ that hamper the productivity of the work environment. Try as we may, even the best screening procedures don’t catch the people that will be disruptive, and we often don’t see this behaviour until after we hire them. Here is a great adage to remember – hire to interpersonal value not to technical skill. Be slow to hire and fast to fire.

As a leader, your inability to directly deal with disruptive, inappropriate behaviour will be a major obstacle in creating the ‘best’ workplace. You get what you create or what you allow in performance of your team members. If you allow a proverbial “jerk at work” to mess with the brains of their team members, they will undoubtedly mess with performance too.

Productive workplace behaviour must be top-of-mind and an accountable performance metric at a cultural level. Equipping employees at all levels to deal properly with the proverbial “jerk at work” is essential. The surest way to do this is to introduce the skill of Positive Presence and the Positive Presence Behavioural Competencies as an organizational strategy. It is an unequivocal solution that organically leads to self-awareness and the link between a person’s mindset and workplace behaviour. It is an affordable, time-efficient and neuroscience-based methodology to people development and culture change.