Paul Phillips's Articles - Leadership Articles - A great resource for enhancing your leadership knowledge!

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Is Pay Important? - Yes If You Get It Wrong With many businesses pay is normally negotiated when someone is recruited and then doesn’t get another mention until there is a problem. There is a way of making sure this problem is fixed and stays fixed. How to Manage the Employee with Attitude Handling problem employees is every manager's nightmare. We say they have an attitude problem and we don't know how to change them. Read how to tackle these problems. Do They Know What You Want? - Job Descriptions and How to Make Them Work We often assume someone knows what you want them to do - research tells us otherwise. Having clear results agreed in advance is a simple process and will produce significant benefits. Effective Induction - More Than Showing Them the Lunch Room Having a new employee leave in the first week is not uncommon and is damaging for everyone. Getting them off to a good start is important for their perception of the organization and just plain good business. Don’t Waste That Bonus – Give Them a Reason to Stay, Well Designed Incentives Can Make a Difference Paying a bonus sounds easy and safer than giving a pay rise. But be careful. It can lead to problems or, at best, just be a waste of money. Learn how to spend your rewards money wisely. Who Comes First - The Customer or Employee? We often hear that the customer comes first! Is this really the right way around? Read why we think this is wrong. Being Competitive With Pay - Linking to the Market Deciding what to pay people is often difficult and often winds up with winners and losers instead of a sensible and fair agreement. Looking to the market in a systematic way along with a well designed salary system can ease the pain. Setting "Expectations of Success" For That New Employee Recruitment is expensive and challenging. Setting some standards early on will help you do a better job and also show how successful you are. Recruitment - Getting it Right More Often Recruiting is one of the most important tasks undertaken by managers yet very follow a consistent process. to get the best results there are some key steps to follow - everytime. Salaries: Bringing It All Together - Performance, Market And Job Building a salary system can bring many benefits to a business and prevent a lot of friction and wasted time. It is important to have the fundamentals in place and then design a system that meets your needs. It need not be complex. Asking the Right Questions and Getting the Right Person Getting recruitmentment wrong can be very expensive. They all say they can do the job - here is a process to find out if they can. Getting and Keeping Good People With the increasing competitiion for talent, businesses need to be working on strategies to attract and retain good people. It should not have to come down to just money. There are a number of actions you can take now. Succession Planning - Insurance For Your Business Succession planning is often talked about but rarely carried out. Sometimes we only think about replacements for a few key jobs. Often, not even that. Good succession planning can have big benefits. Are People Your Most Important Asset? - Not Necessarily! We often hear that people are our greatest asset. However we have probably all worked with some people who definitely were not. Learn how to sort out your assets you’re your liabilities. Getting the Right People - People Who Fit Getting the right people is every manager’s aim and yet very few plan it and go about it in a consistent way. Read how to increase your chances of getting someone who fits in. Providing Direction - Stop Your People Guessing What You Want Research has shown that most people are not exactly sure of what is required of them. What effect does this have on productivity – and stress levels? Learn how to fix it. Non Financial Measures - Making Them Meaningful Measuring performance is important but not always easy once we’ve got past the easy parts such as sales and budgets. The less quantifiable parts of a job also have to be measured. Knowing the Boundaries - and Keeping Staff Out of Trouble Avoiding claims by employees and staying on the right side of employment legislation is a constant concern for managers but it just takes a bit of planning to set the guidelines and avoid the worry. Give Your People a Reason to Stay - Providing Direction Most businesses are concerned about getting and keeping good people but they don’t do some of the things that are obvious. Read about a good place to start insuring your business for the future. Give People a Reason to Stay - Get Them Engaged With the looming shortage of talent we are facing smart companies are taking action now. Read about what you can do to engage your employees. Doing More Than the Numbers - How You Do Them is Important Someone once said "we often hire people for what they can do but fire them for how they do it." There is more to performance than just hitting the targets. Read how to put those other measures in place. Give People a Reason to Stay - Let Them Know What is Required Do your people know what is required of them? Do you know how to measure this? Do they go home everyday knowing they have contributed to the organization's objectives? Learn how to make this all happen. Give People a Reason to Stay - Help Them "Fit" Someone once said, quite wisely, "we hire people for what they can do and fire them for how they do it." Find out how to increase your chances of not having to fire someone for this. The Best Trainer May be Down The Corridor - Keeping and Using Corporate Expertise Why does the mention of training summon up thoughts of expensive courses, and consultants for many employers? Read about a better and less expensive way. Training and Development - Start With Where You Want to Finish Ad hoc training sometimes works but often the return on investment is low. Training is an investment. Plan it the same way - work out what result you want first. How To Get People to Do What They Are Supposed To - The Secrets of Performance Management When George took on the top job at a prestigious high profile company he thought it would run like clockwork, such was the public perception of this quality business. What he didn't realise was that the reputation was founded on a just a few brilliant people and the product they had developed. The rest were merely trying to manage the chaos. Learn what he did to fix this. Succession Planning - It's More Than Just Replacing People Who Leave We tend to think of succession planning as having a few plans in place for if a key person gets hit by a bus or someone retires. In practice it has to be more than this if you want to avoid continually trying to "catch up". Learn how to do it. Stress - Some Of It Is Good - Too Much Can Cost You A Lot Some of us thrive on a bit of pressure - it can improve our performance because that's the way we're designed. However, too much over an extended time can take its toll. Managers can reduce this - learn how. Why Don't Managers Manage? - Looking After Their People is Part of the Job For many managers, looking after their people is often seen as an extra chore that gets in the way of doing their functional job such as selling, accounting, marketing or manufacturing. This is the wrong approach. Read how to correct it. How Can They Meet Your Expectations If They Don't Know What They Are? Managing people can sometimes be very rewarding and sometimes frustrating. If we look back we may find the rewarding times were when people met, or exceeded, our expectations. Sometimes they did this without even knowing what they were! How can we make this happen more often? Why Will People Work For You? - If You Don't Have a Good Answer You Are At Risk These days many employees have choices and we need to know what we can offer them to have them work for us. Read about the practical things you can do. Having People Focus On The Things That Matter - Writing And Using Job Descriptions Why don't people do the things they should? Do they know what the priorities are? Do they know what the business needs? Getting those job descriptions right is a key step to answering these questions. Getting Your Peoples' Pay Right - Everything Else Is Difficult If You Don't Back in 1966 Frederick Herzberg found that pay was a key hygiene factor affecting peoples' motivation. It may not be the main motivator but, unless it was perceived as being fair, not much else was going to motivate people. Paying Incentives - Do You Need To? When clients ask about pay issues, quite often they jump straight to paying "bonuses" to reward performance. Not only is this often not necessary but it can lead to mixed messages and problems later on. Find out how to avoid the pifalls and design the program you need. Can Non-Financial Incentives Work? You're In Trouble If They Don't Non financial incentives often arise as an issue when we don't want to give financial incentives, either because we can't afford them or we think they will cause problems with people who don't receive them. We often take too narrow a view of what these are. What does provide an incentive? Feedback - Your People Need It Most people need feedback and as managers we need to be able to give it. The positive and the negative. This is important for business performance and employee development. Learn how to do it.