Extract from my book, The CEO Secret Guide to Managing and Motivating Employees
As a business leader, you have a tremendous amount of power: you hold in your hands your employees’ prosperity and wellbeing. We spend so much of our time at work that satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s job has a profound impact on our quality of life – both perceived and actual. Being a great business leader is not just about ensuring that your business enjoys solid financial results; it’s also about being aware of the enormous impact you have on the lives of your employees, and about motivating and managing employees in ways that reflect that knowledge. You have the power to dramatically influence the quality of your employees’ and your customers’ lives (and this extends to their families and loved ones as well). Your legacy as a business leader is far reaching.
In researching my book, The CEO Secret Guide to Managing and Motivating Employees, I conducted interviews with award-winning leaders. These are the best workplace business leaders who have been recognised over and over again for their best practice approaches to leadership and employee management. For many of these business leaders, their organisation’s appearance on the Business Review Weekly’s Best Employers list or their accreditation as an Aon Hewitt Best Employer has been the reward at the end of a long journey of trial, error and improvement. This means that these business leaders have valuable insight to share about what works and what doesn’t, and they have strategies to impart that have taken them from being a good employer to being a great one.
The secret I want to share with you is that there are proven steps you can take as a business leader to increase the rewards you enjoy in both quality and degree. The business leaders of the world’s best workplaces all understand this secret and put it into practice every day. What follows is the six-part Best Workplace Method, which will help you better lead and manage your employees, improve bottom line results of your organisation, and provide you and your employees (and your customers too) with the kind of satisfaction that will make you the envy of your competitors.
The Best Workplace Method is made up of the following six parts:
Leader
- Be brave in your approach to business and life.
- Be authentic in your communication.
- Love what you do and have fun doing it.
Culture
- Inspire with your vision and live your values.
- Grow, train and develop your people.
- Recognise and reward the right things
Appointment
- Attract amazing people to you.
- Select superstars for the job and organisation.
- Promote from within.
Performance
- Focus on business deliverables.
- Expect high performance.
- Give feedback in the moment.
Recognition
- Know what you need to reward.
- Recognise the personal and professional.
- Encourage people to achieve great things.
Wellness
- Care for your people and their families.
- Embrace differences in your team.
- Nurture your employees mentally and physically.
Following the Best Workplace Method will lead to a great place to work, one that has superstar employees helping happy customers and achieving substantially better overall financial results. But wait, there’s more: it will also be a workplace where you feel happy and want to come to work each day because you have such an awesome group of people to spend time with who are doing meaningful work.
I wish you all the best on your journey to becoming the leader of a happy and productive workplace.
For more information about our Best Workplace Method, you are invited to attend our half-day Best Workplace Accelerator. Next one is in Brisbane on 21 June 2016.
