Thank you for listening to The Champion Forum Podcast with Jeff Hancher! What do you do when your team is leaving for higher-paying jobs? Is the only answer increasing your labor costs? And how do you handle the financial challenges you're already facing? In today's episode of Hanch's How-To's, we'll talk about how inspirational leadership can help you increase your employee retention and how to build resilience to overcome any challenge.
Inspirational Leadership
The problem: An executive recently told me that one of his company's biggest problems is employee engagement and turnover. He was struggling because he was losing his employees to higher-paying jobs and didn't know how to keep the staff necessary to support customer demands.
No matter how much you pay someone, another company will pay them more. Good pay is important, but there are other tools you can use to drive employee engagement, including becoming a more inspirational leader.
Inspirational leaders know how to help others find a greater purpose in their work. Mission-driven people are always more productive than task-driven people. Take time to connect with your team members and highlight the importance of their work and how it ties into the bigger mission. Understand why success in their position is important to them. When you know what motivates your employees personally and professionally, you can help them achieve these milestones.
Q: How has salary impacted your engagement in your work? What other factors have contributed? Which factors have been the most important to you? How do you keep yourself motivated?
Leadership Resilience
The problem: What can you do to keep moving forward when you are under enormous pressure and want to give up?
You can't always control what happens, but you can always control how you respond. When you're feeling pressure and want to quit, fight for the proper perspective and reframe your thoughts. We call this leadership resilience. Here are four ways to improve your leadership resilience.
1. Start Seeing Your Obstacles as Challenges
When confronted with challenges, many leaders will see an obstacle as an insurmountable problem. This mindset will hinder progress, stifle growth, and weaken your resilience. Viewing obstacles as challenges will build curiosity, inspiring you to find a solution to your problem and move beyond it. By viewing the pressure as potential, leaders can use their strengths to overcome obstacles, build resilience, and develop self-awareness.
2. Fight For Perspective
The world isn't going to stop being challenging and uncomfortable, but you can handle it! A great way to find a healthy perspective is to reach out to a mentor or leadership coach that has been there. Sometimes just getting another set of eyes on it with someone that has been there and isn't emotionally attached can add tremendous perspective.
3. Reflect On The Past
Reflecting on your past successes will build your confidence and help clear your mind. If you have won before, you can win again!
4. Prepare for battle
Never wait for the battle to begin to start training. Resilience isn't something you either have or don't. Like any skill, resilience is developed. By viewing resilience as a muscle that can be made stronger by practicing it regularly, leaders can learn to approach challenges more positively, bounce back from adversity faster, and see that they can come out the other side stronger.
Q: On a scale of 1-10, how resilient do you think you are? What types of situations challenge your resilience the most? Describe a time when you pushed through a challenge and found success. How did it feel? What helped you find the motivation to keep going?
Application Activities:
1. You have won battles in the past! Take some time to answer these questions as specifically as possible. Then, when you feel challenged, use the answers to help paint a clear picture of your past success to encourage you and remind you that you can succeed again! What did you think and feel at the time?
What actions did you take to overcome?
How did you get through it?
What did you learn from it?
2. Go over an employee development plan with everyone on your team at their next one-on-one. A good plan will identify an employee's career goals, strengths, and weaknesses and 3-5 ways to work toward their goals. Make sure you put this at the front of their file and review it with them frequently, especially when they feel challenged.
3. Take some time to think about what you are working toward over the next five years and write a few sentences about them. You can even add a few pictures representing your goals and put them in the front of your planner, beside your bed, or on the wall of your cubicle. Keeping your goals and a clear vision of the future will help you keep moving forward when things feel hard.