2021: The Year of "I Quit"

About this time, people are wrapping up Q1, performance reviews, and finally solidifying their goals. 

Now is when we get going. But before you push down on the gas pedal, you need to know some important data around the hot topic: retention & employee engagement.

According to a recent survey and featured in an article in Forbes, 2021 is going to be the year of decreased company loyalty and the employee break-up. 

After surviving 2020, a lot of companies believe that their employees are just grateful to have a job. While it might be true, that those who did not experience layoffs or furloughs, are thankful to have not gone through that—what we are hearing from employees is a completely different tune.

“I’ve never felt more disconnected from my team”

“I am extremely burnt out and don’t know how much more I can take”

“I am at the point of just quitting”

“Something has to change”

“I’m just waiting to see if anything changes, get my bonus, and then I’m out”

“I’m just keeping my head down and doing my work, but I’m already looking for something else”

I can guarantee you, 2021 is going to be the year of turnover. People went through hell and back during 2020 and many are struggling to stay positive. They understood we were all just trying to figure things out and survive last year, but now they are looking to their companies to see how they are going to intentionally fix the disengagement, increase resources & support, and redesign culture & the employee experience in a post-covid world. 

If this is not on the company’s agenda, they are going to find themselves with an expensive problem, regrettable turnover: 

• Backfilling their best employees

• Training new colleagues

• The cost of new employees ramping to full productivity

On average, it takes a new employee 8 months to reach full productivity. This means, you will spend the majority of 2021 hiring and training new colleagues it you don’t make the investment in keeping your most valuable asset: your people. 

Here are some best practices that are shaping the future of being a best place to work:

1. Embrace remote and flexible work: People are looking for options and if you are not talking about changing your previous expectations of being in an office 5 days a week, then I can promise you, most of your people are looking for a new job. Even with a vaccine and offices reopening things are not going back to pre-covid days. There are those with health issues or other reasons that they don’t feel comfortable coming back to an office or getting the vaccine. Their kid’s schooling may have changed or need to care for family members, the list goes on. One of the top priorities for people right now is the ability to have flexible work options. Flexibility of when to come to an office, able to work from a different location, or being able to work different hours than 9-5. Companies that can explore ways to do this efficiently and keep engagement high, will be the places people are begging to work for. If not, you can be sure that you will lose a significant portion of your workforce over the next year.

2. Find ways to cut down on meetings: People are tired of zoom and meeting after meeting. Look to implement tools and software that allows people to get glimpses into the work being done without having to go to another meeting. There are amazing tools out there like Slack, monday.com, Asana, and lots more. Look for ways to streamline and drive connection without needing to be on video all day.

3. Create ways for people to connect and engage that are meaningful: People miss the human connection. So find ways to create fun during the day and as you begin to open up, do it with the human approach before work productivity. Encourage colleagues in the same town to do socially distanced lunches, if they are comfortable. Host small gatherings or small group working sessions that can be socially distanced and make sure fun and connection is included. Host happy hours, that people can join virtually but with no other agenda but fun and getting to know each other.

4. Prioritize development: One of the best ways to keep employees is to show them they have a future there and a way to grow with the company. Many coaching clients have come to us saying they are wanting to look for a new job because their company doesn’t seem to have ways for them to get promoted any time soon and they feel they have reached their ceiling. Take the time to create truly transformational leadership development and career pathing programs, that show people you are serious about keeping them and making them part of the company’s future.

The future of work is shifting at the speed of light, but one thing is for certain, it doesn’t look like going back to pre-covid workplace culture. 

The future of workplace culture is exciting and probably has the ability to be more authentic than ever before, but we have to be willing to leave our previous ideas behind and create something new. 

If you need help on how you can practically implement any of these best practices, reach out.

Here at Brave Leaders Group, we have been helping fully remote and dispersed workforces design brave cultures & build engaged, high-performing teams for the last 6 years. We understand the unique challenges and create customized solutions for companies that are serious about growth and having strong cultures.

We’d love to learn more and help you design a place where people love to work and thrive. 

What is Courageous Leadership

What is courageous leadership?

This week in the United States, we hosted our first Presidential debate. For those who don’t pay attention to the media, I will just tell you that the majority of analyst and the American people agreed that no one won that debate—it was the equivalent of two 3-year olds fighting over a swing-set. I watched in disbelief that these were our candidates. These two men are the ones that the American people are going to have to choose from to lead the country. Both of these men felt that how they behaved is appropriate for someone in leadership. My, how our standards of leadership have fallen.

Someone messaged me and asked what brave culture and courageous leadership look like. “How does that show up in the workplace and how do you create it?”

There is a lot to unpack in those questions. Which is why it’s so rare to find. There is so much surface level aspects to leading that we typically focus on, that are useful skills but don’t require you to truly dig deep into what it takes to lead with courage.

In order to have brave culture, you have to have brave, courageous leaders. That’s because leaders are the largest contributing factor to culture. You can’t have great culture with terrible leaders—you just end up with good perks and benefits.

Culture is:

how people feel when they walk into the office

how open they feel to speak up in a meeting

who has a seat at the table

if inclusion is actually a reality in the teams or just a good slogan

how safe it is to bring your whole-self to work

how values are lived, expressed, and used in decision making

This is culture, and now with so much of the world working virtually, we’re realizing it. So many of the companies that depended on their casual Fridays, ping pong tables, and free snacks are discovering that they didn’t do the real culture work and their employee’s have taken off their rose colored glasses and don’t like what they see.

This is why leadership is crucial. Each one of these things are dependent on the leader to create the atmosphere for them and ensure they are upheld.

I’ve looked a lot at leadership and I’ve found it’s not how you lead when things are good, when you’re inspired and motivated, or when things are growing and energized that matters. It is

• When our opinions and ways of doing things are challenged

• When we are frustrated or our buttons are pushed

• When our resources are cut

• When you have a choice of taking the easy way out or doing what’s inconvenient for you

• When you have to choose between yourself, your own comfort, and your own way—or sacrificing it for those you lead

This is when your leadership is actually put to the test and you find out if you are truly leading or merely managing with influence.

I read an article in the midst of quarantine and it said that lots of companies were finding that their leaders were using Covid as an excuse to cut people they had issues working with (aka “low hanging fruit”) but couldn’t make a case for previously. I was appalled. What an example of how watered down and superficial our current leadership programs must be if these were the leaders we were creating—ones that would cause undue harm, at the worst possible time, just to make their jobs easier rather then doing the work of leading and developing those they lead. This is not leadership and it shows just how much we have stripped the humanity away from our culture.

There is not a simple step-by-step answer on how to create brave cultures, but I can tell you it starts with creating brave, courageous leaders.

How do we do this? You start with yourself. You must do the internal work to understand your own triggers, your breaking points, your limitations, where your selfishness kicks in, your insecurities, your fears, and learn how to dive into those places and do the internal work so that you can lead others well, even when the going gets tough and you’re in your low points.

Leadership is hard. You will have people you don’t like, and who might not like you, that you will have to lead. You will have people challenge you. You will be put in circumstances that will require you to choose between tremendous sacrifice, patience, and dying-to-self or choosing to make yourself more comfortable and your job easier.

You can’t have both. You can’t be self-serving and be a leader, they are fundamentally opposed to one another. Leadership, true leadership, is a life-long act of guiding while serving others above yourself.

The 80/20 Principle: How to hyper-focus and set priorities

Remember when the pandemic first hit and we all thought we’d spend a few months working from home and then things would go back to “normal?”  
Yes, I've also had to come to grips with the fact that this is our new normal: sharing workspaces with 4 other people in our house, being full-time stay-at-home working parents, and now if you have school-aged kids you may be adding full-time teacher to that list as well, yay...

This week I worked with four different clients who all are doing their best to figure out how to lead their teams who are facing the fact that now, with their kids having to do school at home, they will be responsible for both their work responsibilities and their kid’s education. As leaders, we absolutely have to face the reality that this year will be different. All those incredible goals you and your team set back in January, have to shift (if they haven’t already), but more than just goals, your expectations for your team and yourself have to shift as well. Realistic expectations are key for success, health, and maintaining good relationships with each other. 

But as leaders, we also know that we have a business to run. If we want to keep our jobs then we have to grow profits and deliver results. So how do we go this realistically- while maintaining our relational, mental, and physical health? We are going to have to get really clear on what is truly important and use the time we have to its full potential. 

I wanted to share a tool that has helped me tremendously with my focus and productivity:

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80:20 Rule. Simply put, the 80:20 rule is that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. Several studies have found that 80% of a company's revenue comes from only 20% of their customers. So if you have a project due, or there are sales numbers or KPIs you have to hit, then you have to determine what is the 20% of your activity that you need to hyper-focus on in order to get those results but also what is the 80% of distraction that is wasting your time.
To make this easy, I put together a simple process to follow, that I call the 3 D’s:

• Discover your top strengths - what you do best. Make a list of maybe 4 or 5 areas of strength.

• Determine your key responsibilities. You can do this by grouping your tasks to create a list of about 10 responsibilities and then narrowing it down to 2 or 3 (MAX) that only you can do. 

• Delegate. Now, using your list above, you can see the other 7 or 8 areas that you’ll need to delegate to your team. If you don’t have a team, then you’ll need to discover what items on that list can come off (because honestly, they aren’t helping you achieve results) or you’ll have to prioritize them based on the key indicators and results and how each activity most contributes to achieving those. If it doesn’t, then it either comes off the list or will have to wait. 

Help your team go through this practice as well. In your next team meeting, walk them through an exercise where they write down their strengths, group their activity into 10 responsibilities and help them narrow down the 2 or 3 that create the most impact. Then help them to know how to prioritize and focus on those key areas. 

The reality is, most people will not, and cannot, work 40 hours a week in the current environment. The good news is that we don’t need 40+ hours a week to get results. We just have to hyper-focus on the activity that really creates impact and produces results, this is called the vital few. The extra fluff, also known as the trivial many (aka distractions), has to be thrown out.

If you want to learn more about The Pareto Principle, I highly recommend this article on using the 80:20 principle to become a better leader.

What are you doing to juggle all the competing priorities, in the midst of limited resources, space, and limited ability to connect and interact? Comment and let me know! It's so important to be learning from each other.

Lastly, If you're looking to optimize your leadership to drive results, improve team effectiveness, lead change, achieve balance so you can show up well in every area of your life, determine your career goals and work from your purpose, and all the skills needed to lead in the midst of a pandemic go here to schedule a call to learn what executive and leadership coaching can provide for you.