Tag Archives: Cindy Ventrice.
Talent Management’s New Assignment – Building Confidence in Anxious and Uncertain Employees
Definition: Talent Management refers to the process of developing and integrating new workers, developing and retaining current workers, and attracting highly skilled workers to work for a company.
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Talent…Management. The two words say so much. One, that everyone who works with you/for you is “talent.” Next, somehow, the talent has to be managed.
But, as we all know, there is no magic formula. There are only guidelines – hints. And many of these are quite good, like:
• only hire people who can to the job at hand very well
• only hire people who can get along well with others
• make sure that each person is doing what he/she is best at
• give people the training and support they need to get better at their job
• recognize and reward excellent work
• praise in public; criticize in private
• if you’ve got the wrong person in place, make a change in the next 3 seconds – every second, every day, you delay, you drag down the morale of everyone. (This is a remarkably consistent theme in many books we’ve presented over our 12+ years).
In other words: hire well; train well; encourage well; recognize/reward well… and keep in touch with the current thinking of your “talent.” Know what their strengths are now, their weaknesses, and their concerns.
These are all wise suggestions/reminders, and we have presented a number of books at the First Friday Book Synopsis over the years to help you better “manage talent.” My favorite is still the classic Encouraging the Heart: A Leader’s Guide to Rewarding and Recognizing Others by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, which I presented more than a decade ago (hard to believe!), and recently Karl presented his synopsis of Make Their Day!: Employee Recognition That Works by Cindy Ventrice – a very fine, practical book.
But here is my latest thinking about talent management. We have to add an element right now that is crucial. People who manage talent have to read the current state/mood/thinking of the talent they manage.
Here is why. This is an era of great uncertainty and anxiety. We all read the news. Companies are reluctant to hire (even companies with plenty of cash available); and joblessness continues to be a pervasive problem. And though the unemployment rate for college graduates is still low (4.5%, much lower than the overall unemployment rate), a growing number of college graduates are “settling” for jobs that are not what they had hoped for/signed up for with their college and/or graduate school education. It really is an age of uncertainty and anxiety.
And an anxious employee is uncertain, tentative – not at his/her best. Uncertainty breeds loss of confidence, thus loss of competence.
Successful Talent Management is going to increasingly require leaders — all those who supervise others — to help people survive and successfully navigate such uncertain waters. People need to feel secure, and then confident in their abilites (and their company).
Talent Management, more than ever before, is going to have to add “confidence building” to its list of practices.
One Size Fits All; Right?! – Not Any More (Motivation 3.0 Has Arrived)
One Size Fits All; Right?! – Not Any More. This is true in so many ways. And one way is “motivation.” In the old days, the days that Daniel Pink calls Motivation 2.0, motivation was simple. Carrots and sticks. Going back to the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor:
You simply rewarded the behavior you sought and punished the behavior you discouraged. The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad. Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.
But we have now moved into the new era of Motivation 3.0. This is the premise of the book DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. For much of the working population, we still need to use the carrot & stick/rewards approach. In fact, Karl, my colleague at the First Friday Book Synopsis, presented a synopsis of the practical book, Make Their Day: Employee Recognition that Works by Cindy Ventrice. One key piece of advice is this: “recognize unique contributions with personalized recognition.” And the book has tangible ways to make this work to maximum effect. This is common, common-sense advice. (It is also a critical part of the plan recommended in the terrific book Encouraging the Heart by Kouzes and Posner).
But, for the newest “heuristic” workers (Pink’s term), there must be a new understanding of and approach to motivation. Here is my attempt to summarize the key findings in Pink’s book:
| The Three Elements
Of Motivation 3.0 |
What This Might Mean/
Might Look Like |
| Autonomy: a renaissance of self-direction | “ROWE” – Results Only Work Environment – everyone is/has to be/wants to be a self-starting, self-directing person |
| Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters (only engagement leads to mastery) (to learn, to create, to better the world) | Individuals always keep learning. With deliberate practice. (the 10,000 hour rule, with deliberate practice — deep, deepening abilities) |
| Purpose: very simply, doing something that matters because it should matter; something done in the service of something larger than ourselves | Either have a product/service that matters; or, provide “work time” to do something that matters… |
And here is Pink’s own “twitter length” summary of his book:
“Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery, & purpose.”
Who should read the Pink book? If you work alone, and you have to be your own self-starting, self-directed worker, you should read it. If the people you supervise are heuristic workers, you should read it.
And what is a heuristic job – any job that requires creativity, any job that creates something “new.” From the book:
Working as a grocery checkout clerk is mostly algorithmic. You do pretty much the same thing over and over in a certain way. Creating an ad campaign is mostly heuristic. You have to come up with something new…
Whatever your own job, you should read it. Because, more and more, you will have to rely on internal/intrinsic motivation. Because, in my opinion, “carrots and sticks” will slowly disappear from the scene. Because, to quote Pink again:
…in today’s environment, people have to be ever more self-directed. “If you need me to motivate you, I probably won’t hire you.”
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{To watch Dan Pink speaking on the key principles found in this book, from a recent Ted Conference, go here).
(I presented my synopsis of Drive this morning at the First Friday Book Synopsis. The two synopses from this morning will be available soon, with audio + handout, at our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com. And, Encouraging the Heart is available on the site now).
Coming in June for the First Friday Book Synopsis: Daniel Pink’s Drive, and Employee Engagement
For the June First Friday Book Synopsis, I will be presenting a synopsis of the best-selling Daniel Pink book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. This has been well-reviewed, Bob Morris and I have both blogged about it on this site a few times, and it will be a terrific choice to help you think about what motivates you and those around you.
Karl Krayer has chosen a practical book on employee engagement. All companies want their employees to be fully engaged, but attaining this elusive goal is tough. The book is Make Their Day!: Employee Recognition That Works by Cindy Ventrice.
Mark your calendars now for June 4, our June First Friday Book Synopsis.
(and note: our synopses from this morning — Linchpin by Seth Godin and ReWork by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson — should be up on our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com, in just a few days).
