Investing in Employees: Why and How to do it.

How often do you say, “I am the only person that can do this.”? It is a common thought of many small business owners and managers. I hear a bit of pain and exasperation whenever leaders say those words. You know your business would be better served with more infrastructure and better-trained employees. Still, the gravitational pull of day-to-day activities prevents you from dedicating the time needed to train your employees properly.

Why are you not investing in your employees?

It is important to acknowledge why you need to make time to train employees properly. You may believe it is better to do things yourself or that you do not have enough time in your schedule to train employees. This is short-term thinking and limits your growth. It is critical to assess how you are currently spending your time and identify tasks that you can defer or eliminate to allocate time for training and developing your employees.

Benefits of investing in your employees

Carla A. Harris’s book Lead to Win cites that taking the time to understand your team’s developmental needs and designing opportunities and projects that allow them to learn and develop expertise is vital to driving employee engagement and motivation. You want highly productive and loyal employees. To get this, you must invest in their development.

• Better performance: Properly training employees will equip them with the skills and knowledge they need to do their jobs well. This leads to higher productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction.

• Happier employees: Investing in your employees shows them you care about their growth and development. This boosts their morale, motivation, and loyalty. They also feel more valued and respected, which reduces stress and conflict.

• Improved comfort delegating: The more confidence you have in your employees’ abilities, the easier it will be for you to delegate tasks to them. This will free up your time and energy so you can be more strategic and focus on the things you do best. You also empower them to take more ownership and responsibility for their work.

• Better employee retention: When your employees know that you care about their development and provide them with growth opportunities, you are more likely to be loyal to your organization. All employees want to be valued, and there are few better ways to show someone you value them than helping them pursue their professional goals.

How to train your employees

Now that you know why investing in your employees is important, let's consider how to do it effectively. In Morey Stettner’s book Skills for New Managers, he highlights the importance of delegating assignments to employees in the right way. He emphasizes that it is essential for managers to outline tasks, communicate why they are important, provide room for employees to ask questions, and provide ongoing support.

Here are some steps to ensure you are putting in sufficient pre-work before delegating takes to employees.

• Tell them what you want to be done: Before you start training your employees, make sure they understand what the goal of the training is, what the expected outcomes are, and how they will be evaluated. This will help them focus on the right things and avoid confusion or frustration.

• Show them how to do it: Once you have explained what you want done, demonstrate how to do it yourself or use an expert or a peer. Use clear instructions, examples, and feedback to guide them. Ensure they can see and understand the critical aspects of completing the task.

• Let them do it: After showing them how to do it, give them a chance to practice independently or with a partner. Observe them closely and provide constructive feedback and encouragement. Correct any mistakes or misunderstandings as soon as possible.

• Have them teach others: The final step of training your employees is to have them teach others what they have learned. This will help them reinforce their learning, identify gaps or errors, and boost their confidence and communication skills.

Supporting Employees During Learning Process

You will find that some people you work with need to gain skills in taking instruction and retaining information provided during training. As the teacher, you can increase the likelihood of your lessons being retained by influencing your employees to:

• Take notes: Taking notes can help your employees remember what they have learned better and refer to it later. Please encourage them to write down the training session's key points, steps, tips, and questions. If you still need training material on the topic you are coaching on, give the employee the responsibility of creating a training document to train future employees.

• Brief back what they have learned at each step: Briefing back is a technique where you ask your employees to summarize or repeat what they have learned. This will help you check their understanding, clarify questions or misconceptions, and reinforce their retention.

• Encourage them to ask questions along the way: Asking questions is a sign of curiosity and engagement. Encourage your employees to ask questions whenever they are unsure or confused about something during the training session. This will help them learn more effectively and avoid mistakes or misunderstandings later.

• Commitment to executing tasks at a high level: At the end of the training session, ask your employees what commitments they are willing to make around the task. The act of giving their word can reinforce the importance of the tasks they are being assigned.

Summary

Developing people can be one of the most rewarding parts of your work. You benefit from watching someone build new skills, gain confidence, and establish new competency. You free up your time, energy, and mindshare to complete other tasks. And you build value for your organization by generating a better return on everyone’s time. Prioritizing people’s development can be challenging but worth the effort. I challenge you to identify one task you can delegate to an employee this week. Identify an employee that has potential, allocate time to train them, and see what happens. My guess is that you will enjoy the benefits of seeing your employees grow while also creating space for yourself to lead at a higher level.

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Thank you for reading this blog

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Coach and Business Consultant with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He is a former retail executive with over 20 years of experience in the retail industry. He is a Co-Active coach who focuses on helping professionals, and small business owners overcome insecurities, knowledge gaps, and lack of direction. He does this by assisting clients to tap into their values, recognize their strengths, and develop actionable strategies for growth.

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The Umbrella Principle: How to influence employees to execute company strategy

A company’s success is dependent on two things. One, the company’s strategy. Two the company’s execution. When it comes to the latter, many times companies struggle because they are unable to get their employees to align and commit to the strategy. When it comes to leadership, one of your key roles is to define the company’s strategy and to gain buy-in around executing of that strategy. Over the last 15 years I have taught business leaders the umbrella principle which provides employees with a metaphor that demonstrates the benefits of executing within the company's strategy.

The umbrella represents the company strategy. If you stay under the umbrella, meaning inside of the company’s strategy you will have a different experience than you would by going out from under the umbrella. The umbrella provides both shade and protection. By being under the umbrella your movements might be more restricted, but you know rain or shine that you have something between you and the elements. If you decide to venture beyond the parameters of the umbrella, you may enjoy the benefits of sunshine (positive results) but you also open yourself up for the risk of being rained on (failure). When the weather is good, the need for an umbrella is lower. Delivering great results can provide its own layer of protection which will afford you some forgiveness if you are not strictly adhering to the strategy. But if your results no longer are meeting expectations, you are going to be in a lot better situation if you are under the umbrella of the company's strategy when question start raining in.

What I love about this analogy is the visualization of risk and reward. Going a little outside of the umbrella carries some risk, but not as much risk as leaving the umbrella at home. In addition, having a little sprinkle of rain fall on your head (having a small failure) is significantly different than a major down pouring (a big failure). In reality, there are scenarios that are similar to hurricanes where your adherence to the strategy will matter little because of the severity of the event. Things can be so bad that being under the umbrella (executing the company's strategy) will not make a difference to how you are treated. But in most cases if you are executing the company's strategy, and results are not coming, you will be in a better situation than if you had poor results and are also off strategy. By exploring this analogy with employees, you can help them to think more globally about the benefits and risk associated with going off strategy.

If your employees have never been in a board room, they likely are not aware of how much time and energy goes into debating a company’s strategy. Literally hours are spent by CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, senior executives and their direct reports, reviewing data, analyzing trends, and studying marketing conditions all with the goal of defining what is the “right” path for the company to pursue. Because so much time is spent developing strategy, those involved are typically deeply invested. For this reason, the company’s strategy is worth being followed provided that it is ethical and legal. It is important to help employees to understand that they were specifically hired with the purpose of executing the plans that leadership has developed. Everyone

within an organization has a role. Leadership generally defines what needs to be done, and they expect managers and employees to figure out the how to do it. If employees have significant objections to the company's strategy, they should voice their concerns. Great organizations excel at listening to the voices that are closest to the customer and leveraging their insights to inform strategy. But once a decision is made around what needs to be done, it is expected for employees to execute the strategy. If your employees are unable or unwilling to do so, they should consider finding a company to work for that has a strategy they can get behind. People do their best work when their values and principles align with their employer. Many times, employees stay in a job they do not enjoy out of comfort or fear of the unknown, not realizing that their life would improve if they found a place to work that better aligned with the work that they want to do. If they are consistently at odds with the company's leadership, they should ask whether their time and energy would be better served someplace else.

When an employee decides to pursue an action that does not align with the company strategy, they dilute the organizations focus and resources. Most companies hire highly compensated executives, MBAs and consultants to help them to identify ways to get the most out of the company’s resources. When your employees deviate from the strategy, they are basically telling leadership that they know better than leadership what should be done. In some situations, they are correct, but they should evaluate how to manage these situations. Leadership is not always right, and being highly compensated or highly educated does not automatically mean that you have all of the answers. But what it does mean is that a lot of money and trust has been invested into you, and the expectation is that you set the direction for the company and take responsibility for any successes or failure. It is important for employees to consider the different roles and responsibilities within the organization. The role of leadership is to define the strategy, and the role of the workforce is to execute the strategy. This is similar to the relationship between a head coach and a team. One is responsible for drawling up the plays, the other is responsible for executing the plays. Once the play is called, members of the team have the ability to innovate and do what they need to do to be successful, but the expectation is that the play that is called is run. Organizations work best when each member plays their role. It is important to help employees to understand that there can be multiple correct answers to the same question, but organizations are stronger when everyone is aligned and pursuing the same answer.

Early in my career I struggled with professional maturity. I frequently struggled with aligning myself around company strategy. I ran stores within an urban environment, and frequently pushed back on the company strategy because I believed that individuals within headquarters did not under the complexities of running stores in the inner city and asked us to do things that would result in lower operating earnings. For example, we were required to keep items on the sales floor that were frequently stolen such as health and beauty aid products. Instead of working with leadership to find creative solutions to the theft issues, I would direct stores to keep these items behind the counter. Keeping products like these behind the counter is inconvenient for customers and generally leads to lower sales. The impact of my decision to go against strategy resulted in lower sales within those categories.

In my mind, what I was doing was the right thing because my actions were leading to overall increase in profitability because fewer items were being stolen. From leadership’s vantage point, I was taking actions that reduced sales. This was especially troublesome to leadership because part of our strategy was to be a convenient alternative to pharmacies and grocery stores that also sold these products. What felt right to me, and the stores I supported was not what was right for the organization at large. When the topic of lower sales came up, because I was not executing the strategy, I was rained on. The organization had called a play, and they needed me to run it. My failure to execute the strategy left leadership with uncertainty around the type of sales that would be generated if I had just done what they asked.

How could I have handled the situation differently? First, I could have recognized that growing center of store sales was a key part of our company’s strategy. That revenue goals were set based off all stores following the recommended merchandising schematics. Leadership understood that some stores would have elevated theft as a result of this strategy and that they were taking a calculated risk that there was more benefit to having everyone execute the same strategy versus having a different approach in every store.

In fact, by individuals like me not following the recommended strategy an illusion was being created. Stores in urban areas did not experience elevated theft because they were not putting products on the sales floor. As a result, there was no data to confirm our statements that putting those items on the sales floor would result in higher theft. My failure to ask the right questions resulted in me taking action at the store level, that was ultimately hurt the company's ability to collect good information, and make informed decisions based off of facts. My thinking was short-term and local, while leadership was thinking long-term and global. In the end I was the loser because I was delivering the desired result that leadership wanted. The good thing is that I learned from the experience and got better about following strategy.

Fast forward five years. Through hard won wisdom, I learned that sticking to the company’s strategy gave me the opportunity to increase my level of influence within the organization. When employees execute the company's strategy at a high level, leadership pays attention. With this attention, employees can gain greater access which they can leverage to influence future strategic initiatives. It is a big counter intuitive, but the best way to fight against a strategy you disagree with is to execute it at a high level, and then to provide feedback on how it could be improved. This is because leaders tend to care more about facts than feelings. When employees say they feel that something might not work, there is always room for leadership say they are wrong. When an employee can present facts that a strategy does not work, they are in a better place to champion for change. One key call out here is that employees must execute the strategy to the best of their ability. Halfhearted execution will not give you the creditability needed to influence leadership.

The purpose of an organization is to bring a group of people together to accomplish a shared goal. There are multiple paths to accomplish any goal. Organizations function best when there is alignment around their strategies. The higher you are within an organization, the more influence you have on the organization's strategy. During the early stages of employee's careers, it is important to help them to understand that their primary role within the organization is to execute the task that they are asked to do, and to provide feedback

on what they learned from executing those tasks. As they move up the career ladder, and prove their ability to execute, they will gain more influence on the overall strategy. Over the course of this journey, they will learn how important it is as to a leader to have employees that they can trust to execute strategies. They will learn about the burden of leadership. How no one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and that good intentions sometimes lead to bad result. When results are weak, it is a lot easier to learn, grow and course correct if there is clarity on what is causing the poor performance. Employee adherence to executing a company's strategy helps leaders to have clarity. With this clarity, leaders are better positioned to execute their role which is to set direction and ensure that the organization is moving closer to its overall vision.

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The Art of Making Decisions That You Can Live With

As a leader within your organization, you are accountable to various stakeholders. Depending on your role, you are accountable to your supervisor, board of directors, or investors. You are also accountable to your peers, direct reports, and customers. If you think even more broadly, you are accountable to your vendors, community, and society at large. With so many people you are accountable to, it can be difficult to know what action you should take when dealing with a complex and important decision. Having a framework can make the decision-making process easier. As you tackle complex problems, I encourage you to define the decision you need to make, explore different perspectives, make values-based decisions, and stick to your commitments.

Define the Decision

Taking the time to explore the different perspectives of those impacted by your decision is a great way identify potential actions you can pursue. Before you can explore different perspectives, you must clarify the decision that you are looking to make. In doing this, you want to define the decision in one sentence with no judgement. By clearly define the decision that is under consideration with no judgement, you open yourself up to see thing more clearly.

Gain Perspective

Once you have identified the decision, you can begin to explore the perspective of different people that will be impacted. Talking with individuals that represent different perspectives is ideal. When you are short on time an alternative approach is to imagine yourself from the perspective of different stakeholders. By doing this, you can explore how your opinion on what should be done changes based on those perspectives. For example, if you are trying to determine whether to offer better health benefits to employees, you could start by imagining yourself as a middle-aged employee with children. What would they want the company to offer in benefits? Would their opinion be different than a single young professional within the organization? How about your customers? Would they care about the quality of benefits you provide employees? Now consider your Chief Financial Officer or your company’s investors. Would they have a different point of view on what the company should do? By pausing and considering each stakeholders perception on the topic, you expand your thinking, and are better able to see all the potential risks and benefits of your purposed actions.

Make Value-Based Decisions

Once you have taken the time to consider the various perspectives related to your topic, it is time to consider what values you will use to guide your decision making. Leveraging your values when making decisions is crucial. It helps to ensure there is alignment between who you say you are, and the actions you take. People follow leaders that they trust. Being inauthentic is one of the quickest ways to erode trust. When you clearly communicate your values, and use them to guide your actions, people can rely on you being consistent. This consistency promotes psychological safety and encourages trust.

After defining the values, you will use in making your decision, it is time to start brainstorming. As you brainstorm, you want to develop solutions based on the different perspectives that you have identified. Going back to the earlier example, from a middle-aged employee perspective, you might see value in adjusting the benefits package to be the best in the industry, because retirement and health care benefits are more important to you than base salary. From a young professional’s perspective, you may keep things the same, since you see more value in a higher salary than better benefits. From a customer perspective, you may be in favor of better benefits provided it does not lead to increment product or service cost. From the chief financial officer or investor perspective, you may be in favor of improving the benefits if you can reduce other cost, or past the expense on to customers. As you consider these perspectives, you want to bounce the purposed actions, and anticipate impact off your guiding values. This will help you to determine if the actions you are considering resonate with who you want to be as a leader.

For some leaders, making money is a core value, and they will allow this to guide all their actions. For other leaders, fairness is a core value, and they will sacrifice earning in pursuit of this end. Regardless of what your guiding values are, you will only find peace in your decision if the actions you take align with your values. Taking the time to define your values upfront, and then sticking to them through the decision-making process will help you to be at peace with the decisions that you make.

Commit to Action

Once you have aligned on your course of action, it is important to make a commitment to execute your plan. During the brainstorming period, it is great to take in as much information as possible. You should talk to different stakeholders if you can, and get their thoughts on potential solutions, but once a decision is made, you must commit to it. Trust in organization wavers when leaders do not honor their commitments. There is a time for fact and opinion gathering, a time for commitment, and a time for action. As a leader, it is important that you are clear with our organization when each of those time periods start, and when they end. This will give your organization comfort in knowing that you allow for debate but once a decision is made, it is final.

To rise into a leadership role, you must demonstrate to people that you are trustworthy, and that you will take care of their interests. As you move higher within organizations, the number and diversity of the people that you serve increases. This creates both the satisfaction of being able to provide value to more people, the challenge of competing priorities and the burden of making decisions that will result in some people being winners, and other people being losers. When faced with complex problems, it is easy to give in to the loudest voice, or to the stakeholder with the most power. When leaders do this, they typically make decisions that do not align with their values. Non-value-based decision-making leads to inauthenticity, inconsistencies in actions, and an erosion of trust. As a leader you must fight the impulse to move quickly. Being purposeful in defining the decision you need to make, seeking out different perspectives, making value-based decisions, and committing to decisions once they are made, will help you to build a culture that aligns with who you want to be as a leader.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771