PAUL’S BLOG – I COULD BE WRONG, BUT I’M NOT

Paul Glover‘s weekly newsletter presents lessons for ‘No B.S.’ Leadership. Subscribe Now, so you don’t miss an issue. Creating a high-performing work team, with increased employee engagement, productivity, profitability, and retention should be the primary goal of every Team Leaders. Yet, many Team Leaders make a critical mistake: they focus most of their time, energy and resources on underperformers and neglect their High Performers. According to Gallup’s 2024 Employee Engagement Survey, only 32% of the workforce qualifies as “high performers,” but these individuals drive an outsized share of productivity—often contributing 400% more than the average employee. Beyond their individual output, High Performers inspire and motivate those around them, creating a positive work environment that ripples effect across an organization. However, the very qualities that make High Performers so effective—self-sufficiency, commitment, independence, and motivation—leads Team Leaders to assume they need little attention. As a result, Team Leaders focus most of their efforts on the 67% of unengaged employees doing just productive enough to avoid termination and the 16% who are actively disengaged, creating toxic work environments and who should have been terminated yesterday. While autonomy is essential for High Performers, a hands-off approach will backfire. Feeling unsupported and unappreciated, these valuable

Paul Glover‘s weekly newsletter presents lessons for ‘No B.S.’ Leadership. Subscribe Now, so you don’t miss an issue. In last week’s edition, I revealed my first 2 predictions in the March 2022 interview with Authority Magazine about The Future of Work: · Automation & Artificial Intelligence will replace 70% of a manager’s duties. · Work will be done by Autonomous and Self-Managed Teams. Here are my other three predictions, and my assessment of the accuracy of those predictions: 3. Managers will be replaced by Subject Matter Experts: coaches, mentors, mediators and facilitators. The pandemic revealed the terrible state of management in most companies. According to Gallup, leadership fails to select a manager who can lead a high-performance team 82% of the time! Even worse, even those these unqualified managers are responsible for culture, retention, and employee performance, they don’t receive the training to have the skill sets necessary to interact successfully with their Information Age employees. This bizarre process of choosing the wrong people to be managers, then refusing to train them to do their jobs, creates managers as disengaged as the employees they manage. A Gallup survey found only 35% of managers are engaged, 51% are not engaged (caring

In March of 2022, I was interviewed by Authority Magazine about The Future Of Work. One of the questions I was asked was what I thought the Top 5 Trends Too Track In the Future of Work were: Here are my first 2 answers and my assessment of the accuracy of my answers: 1. Automation & Artificial Intelligence will replace 70% of a manager’s duties. Managers currently spend nearly 70% of their time doing repeatable “hard tasks”- filling in forms, updating information, approving workflows, managing tasks and time. Gartner, Inc. predicts, by 2024, artificial intelligence and automation will be able to do most or all of the hard tasks currently performed by managers. This will eliminate the traditional command and control managerial role and replace it with a redefined leadership role, focused on supporting and developing Team Members through coaching and mentoring, which requires using soft skills like empathy, judgment, curiosity, humor. Hilton is already using AI in its recruiting process and are expanding its use to giving Team Members feedback and performance reviews. My current assessment of the accuracy of this answer: Not bad!  The transition of “hard tasks” from managers to automation and AI is well underway.  The

You probably know the premise of the show, Undercover Boss: the owner or senior executive of a company goes to work, incognito, for a few days in an entry-level position within the organization. Their mission is to get candid feedback from the frontline employees about what is working and not working within the company. While this makes for interesting television, a real leader should never have to do this. Why? Because Undercover Boss is based on two disturbing concepts: 1.    Employees don’t know the top leaders of the organization and 2.    Those leaders are so out of touch with what is really going on in their organization they need to disguise themselves and pretend to be a frontline employee just to get the true picture of the company’s issues. A company leader, properly doing their job, should never be successful in infiltrating their organization unrecognized or have to rely on this deceptive tactic to find out what is really happening in their company. Truly effective leaders don’t have to resort to subterfuge and disguises because they already know what is going on in the company – the good, the bad and the ugly – because they have established a routine

A role model is a person whose character, positive behavior and achievements are emulated by others. In the work environment, role models provide a blueprint for others about how they should act and interact with others. Role Models inspire, motivate and encourage Team Members to realize and achieve their own potential. Even though anyone – a peer, a senior Team Member or a new Team Member – can be a role model, a Team Leader, because they have the daily interaction and influence to shape the Team’s work environment, are in a primary position to become a role model for their Team Members. To Achieve the Distinction of Becoming a Great Role Model, a Team Leader Needs These 9 Attributes: 1. Character: Integrity is the cornerstone of a role model’s character. Role models “walk the talk”, aligning their actions with their words and values. They operate with honesty and fairness, treating everyone with respect and dignity. 2. Vision: Role models manage the present, but also create a shared purpose by describing a clear and compelling view of the future, including where the Team is going and why it matters. 3. Communication: Role models are skilled communicators.  They clearly articulate their

Gallup’s latest employee engagement survey reveals employee engagement and trust in leadership are at historic lows. In the first quarter of 2024, only 30% of the workforce was engaged. Seventeen percent of employees were actively disengaged (this toxic group constitutes The Working Dead, employees who share their dissatisfaction with their job and dislike for their manager and the company they work for 8 hour of each work day. And, who should have been fired yesterday!). And 53% of employees are Quiet Quitters, doing just enough to not getting terminated. But even more disturbing, Gallup’s trust survey shows that a staggering 77% of employees don’t trust their employers to care about their well-being in the work environment! There is universal understanding that increasing employee engagement is essential for any Team’s success. Yet Team Leaders continue to ignore the fact that, before the post-pandemic workforce will begin to be more engaged, these “needs” must be continually met: I need your appreciation for the things I do on a daily basis.  And, no, the weekly paycheck is not adequate appreciation! I need feedback about whether I am meeting your expectations. I cannot get better if I don’t know how I’m doing! And, no,

This form is part of the process that enables Team Leaders to: 1.    Acknowledge their setbacks. 2.    Reflect on the actions they took, or did not take, that contributed to those setbacks and 3.    Periodically revisit the lessons they learned so they are less likely to repeat the behavior or actions that contributed to this setback. NAME: ____________________________ Date: ___________________ Identify the Setback: __________________________________________________________ 1.     Describe what caused the setback: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. Describe the negative impact the setback had on you and your Team: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. What steps did you take to analyze the situation that caused the setback? and your participation and responsibility for the setback?: ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 4. What, if any, was your responsibility for the setback? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 5. What have you and your Team learned from this setback?  ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 6. Did the setback reveal a skill set deficiency (i.e. lack of adaptability; lack of resilience; lack of tolerance; lack of empathy) you can improve through Professional Development (i.e. reading; a workshop; receiving mentoring; receiving coaching)?: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 7. How has this setback helped you grow as a Leader? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 8. How has this setback helped your Team grow? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Please contact me at paul@paulglovercoaching.com or text me at 630-913-6555

As a follow up to my earlier post about Deliberation vs Procrastination, here is how Colin Powell made decisions while serving in the White House: “We do not have the luxury of collecting information indefinitely. At some point, before we can have every possible fact in hand, we have to decide. The key is not to make quick decisions, but to make timely decisions. I have a timing formula, P = 40 to 70, in which P stands for probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. I don’t act if I have only enough information to give me less than a 40 percent chance of being right. And I don’t wait until I have enough facts to be 100 percent sure of being right, because by then it is almost always too late. I go with my gut feeling when I have acquired information somewhere in the range of 40 to 70 percent.” BTW: the ability to rely on your “gut feeling” is determined by your experience in the area in which you are making a decision. More experience you have in the area, the more you can rely on that experience and reduce your

This leadership style generates exceptional results by: 1. Cultivating a work environment of open communication and knowledge sharing by soliciting input and creating the psychological safety necessary for diverse opinions. This fosters a more engaged team, leading to better decision making and innovative approaches. 2. Making leaders master delegators. Leaders who “borrow brains” understand their own limitations of time, energy and knowledge. They empower Team Members by providing them with tasks that uses their expertise. This fosters a sense of ownership and allows the Team Members to develop into better decision makers and problem solvers. 3. Building a strong network of advisors. Leaders “borrow brains” by surrounding themselves with mentors, coaches and subject-matter experts. This diverse network offers valuable insights, challenges biases, and provides crucial guidance for the leader in complex situations. The question: “Whose brains are you going to borrow to produce a better outcome to a problem?”