#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

The world's top companies are starting to manage employee energy like a strategic asset. They know that ever-increasingly pace of change requires more and more human energy.Any entrepreneur will tell you that it take a tonne of energy to grow a business. The key is to manage it; sometimes you have to exert energy, other times you need to conserve it to go the distance, and after a sprint you need to replenish it.

A group of senior executives from companies like Facebook, Alibaba, IBM and Johnson & Johnson got together to come up with strategies to better manage collective human energy in their companies. Here are their top five hacks to maximise human energy:

One of the key roles any leader plays is finding ways to motivate your team to reach your organization's goals. But the secret to motivating people is, wait for it .....that you can't do it. I have studied this issue by talking to and working with thousands of people over many years and the one thing everyone can agree on is that you can't motivate someone to do what they don't want to do.

What you need to do instead is find out what people want and then show them how they can get it. Motivation is intrinsic. People get excited about pursuing a goal when it's in their own self-interest. As a leader, the trick is to see if you can find an alignment between what your people want and what will help grow the organization. The upside is that if you can tap into the underlying desires people have, you will get amazing performances in return from them.

These characteristics are what shape a great leader, according to the experts.

Want a team that says “Thank God It’s Monday”? Here’s how…

One of the most important and core elements a company of people can be aligned on is their mission, vision and values about the company. These components are essential and powerful drivers for the exec team to efficiently achieve the success they want. They are also the key to having a highly engaged culture of team members who say ‘Thank God It’s Monday!’

Many companies don’t really think this is important to have these or have them nailed down. But that’s primarily because of one major flaw in the use of these terms. That one flaw is the integrity that runs behind the concepts of the Mission, Vision and Values Statements.

Often there is a lot of misunderstanding about these words, mission, vision and values. And there are a lot of definitions out there.

I have never heard of anyone who has had a bad customer experience with Amazon, Apple, Costco, or Salesforce. The aforementioned companies are incredibly successful due, in large part, to a material focus on the customer experience. Not surprisingly, the stock market has handsomely rewarded these four companies over the past decade. 

Amazon is so customer focused that it will literally send you a replacement for a lost package immediately without ever implying that the customer is at fault. The result is a consumer experience that is so optimal that Amazon is the only place where many consumers decide to shop online. 

The same can be said for Apple when it comes to the in-store experience. Apple employees are so passionate about the products that I feel like I am talking to a polite tech enthusiast in the Apple stores and not Apple employees. The result is incredibly brand-loyal customers.

At VaynerMedia, we like to say, "Family first, agency second." Your employees are important, because it is their skills that keep your machine running. I started VaynerMedia in 2009 with my brother, AJ; a handful of his closest friends became our earliest employees. Having taken two businesses from $3 million to $60 million in revenue, each in less than five years, I've learned that employee happiness and well-being come before everything else--including signing on new clients. This emphasis has allowed me to scale up the businesses and build committed teams as we continue to innovate.

But as much as you care for them, don't expect your staff to be as committed to your business as you are. Too many entrepreneurs complain that staff members don't work as hard as they do. It's a ludicrous expectation: Why should they be concerned about a business that's not theirs?

Yet almost everything Google does, it does in teams.

The group started thinking, "How could HR be different if we reoriented at least some of our services toward the level of the team?" said Brian Welle, Google's director of people analytics, addressing an audience last week at Wharton's People Analytics Conference in Philadelphia. The goal it came up with was characteristically big, hairy and audacious.

The group imagined a future in which People Operations could advise leaders starting projects on exactly what kind of teams they should assemble: both the number and type of people. The advice might go: "You are going to want one extrovert to keep the team excited and motivated," said Welle. "You want two conscientious people to make sure details are attended to. You want three women and two men so you have that diversity represented. You want to be co-located in the first six months, and then you want them distributed in the next six months."

The current business environment, and the world in general, is moving faster than it ever has before. Organizations across the globe are faced with more change than most can handle – in order to compete and dominate their segment they are required to grow faster often giving them less time to focus on managing all of their financial goals. They are forced to grow quickly with fewer resource - to do more with less. Managers have to learn to excel in managing themselves, their teams and meeting organizational goals simultaneously.

It is a common understanding of a vast majority of leaders that the employees are a company’s most important asset. But in reality, that is only true when the majority of the workforce is fully engaged in their work. If not, they are either adding minimal value or actively working against the organization.

There are three types of employees in any organization:

ow can leaders help employees find meaning at work?

Organizations spend considerable resources on corporate values and mission statements, but even the most inspiring of these — from Volvo’s commitment to safety to Facebook’s desire to connect people — tend to fade into the background during the daily bustle of the work day.

What workers really need, to feel engaged in and satisfied by their jobs, is an inner sense of purpose. As Deloitte found in a 2016 study, people feel loyal to companies that support their own career and life ambitions — in other words, what’s meaningful to them. And, although that research focused on millennials, in the decade I’ve spent coaching seasoned executives, I’ve found that it’s a common attitude across generations. No matter one’s level, industry or career, we all need to find a personal sense of meaning in what we do.

Raise your hand--who likes to discipline an employee? I hear crickets chirping in the background. Yet discipline is a cornerstone of highly productive companies. Without it, employee performance is at risk.

But don't see it as a negative. If conducted with a constructive, future focus, it provides consistency, guidance, and valuable feedback both to and from the problem employee.

The best managers employ a face-to-face discussion to deal with low performers, and employees with attitude problems in general. This conversation is best handled on the manager's end when they're well prepared and have a game plan. Here's how they do it:

If you bring more value to your job the boss is going to see that you are worth more money.

A good resume can blow you away. Impressive universities and company histories may be exactly what you are looking for. A job applicant might say all the right things in the interview, at which they're wearing a perfectly pressed suit and spit-shined shoes. This is the new hire, right?

Except, at your company, t-shirts and jeans aren't just for casual Fridays. Where you went to school isn't as important as the passions you pursue on a daily basis. Every project is a cross-discipline team effort, and everybody shares credit. That's your company culture, and it's made your business successful. So no, that candidate, as impressive as they are, is not your new hire.

The "best fit" candidate is in the eyes of the beholder, which means you can define your ideal applicant however you want to make sure you make the best decision for your job requirement and your culture.

The state of the modern workplace is evolving, perhaps more quickly than ever. Increases in diversity, the flexibility and scalability that technology provides, the nature of benefits and work environment that employees are willing to demand—all contribute to an ever-changing dynamic that’s exciting for workers and, to a certain extent, a challenge for employers.

To get a sense of the state of the modern workplace – and a hint at where it may be heading – international professional services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), conducted focus groups in New York City and online surveys this past May, with 1,385 workers of all types. PwC also surveyed 200 C-Level executives of small to large companies to get an employers’ perspective.

The study yielded some interesting results, showing how employees in the modern workplace are feeling, what motivates them, what they feel is important and how they see their futures. Justin Sturrock, People & Organization leader at PwC, admitted that his organization’s survey merely grazes the surface of complex issues facing employers and companies today and in the near future.

It's a problem that hits all of us. We all like to think of ourselves as fantastic bosses: authoritative, decisive, inspiring, and respected. But we really can't know how the people we manage actually see us. In fact, a survey of 1,214 leaders by the Hay Group found that the more senior a manager is in an organization, the more the person tends to overrate him- or herself.

The survey that the group uses to assess managers is based on work by Harvard researchers George Litwin and Robert Stringer. The psychologists identified what they saw as the six most effective styles of leadership:

Gains immediate compliance from employees. Bosses with this style give orders and take no refusals.

And then there was Bill Campbell, who died of cancer on Monday at 75. He was one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, yet was outside the norm in just about every way. Even though he was CEO of Intuit and was chairman of its board until his death, "Coach," as everyone called him, could not write a line of code. He grew up in the Rust Belt of Pennsylvania and attended Columbia only because his father knew the football coach there and he wanted to play. He got a degree in education and headed into a career as a college football coach. But somewhere along the way he took a left turn and wound up at Apple (where, among other things, he kept the company from chickening out and canceling its famous "1984" Super Bowl ad).

His death is a sad, sad loss. But we can all still benefit from his wisdom.