Clay Staires: Today on Clay Staires Leadership Tulsa podcast, I’m going to be talking about the second half of the 4 Es from Jack Welch on how to evaluate on a daily basis. How to evaluate your employees. Again from my experience as head of Clay Staires Leadership Tulsa, what I’m finding is it can be really difficult if I don’t meet with my employees if I don’t have the touch points on a consistent basis to keep them on pace and to keep them on course. Not getting a lot of leaders come to me when I’m traveling across the country, and its Clay Staires Leadership Tulsa’s. I’m traveling across the country and doing different workshops and trainings. Clay, how do we get people to do the stuff? How do we get them to keep going? How do we keep doing — the thing is guys, they’re not going to do it. They will not do it on their own. People as a whole are going to need motivation. They are going to need inspiration in their life. You, since you accepted the leadership position, this is now your job. “But Claire I don’t know how to motivate.” Then you shouldn’t have accepted the job. Now things are going to be extremely pressurized for you. Business Speaker Tulsa
I want to give a tool because I had one of my clients talk to me just earlier this week about a situation that they have going on at work where they got this one employee. It’s a sales employee and each month they’ve been talking. They get together once a month, and they have the team meeting and they look at everybody’s numbers. They found this leader has been so frustrated with this one person, this one employee, because they’re always just under the mark, just under the mark. They’re not way under the mark. They’re just under the mark, so it’s not quite enough to fire them. It sure isn’t enough to make them feel good about giving them money every single month. Her question to me was, “Clay, how do I keep them on pace? How do I keep them moving and hitting certain goals?” My response to her was, “How often are you meeting with them?” “Well, we do once a month.””Okay, you’ve got to change that.” What I want to do is, and what we’re talking about here with the 4 Es, is I want to give you this tool to help you on a daily basis have these touch points and these connection points to help keep your employees in the lines as we were talking about in the last podcast. Keep them in the line, because if you don’t just naturally left to themselves they will veer off to the left and get into oncoming traffic, or they will veer off to the right and find themselves in a ditch. They are going to need your assistance in staying in the lane.
“Clay, I don’t have time. I’ve got so many things.” I’m not talking about time to time. I want to give you a tool that makes this very simple and very quick to evaluate your employees. We talked about the first E which is energy. We grade everybody on a A, B, C, D, E, F scale. The second one was energize. The ability to energize the environment or energize other people. The number three E that Jack Welch talks about is the execution. The number three E that Jack Welch talks about is execution. Execution is simply doing the job that you have been paid to do. It’s hitting your goals, hitting your numbers, hitting the mark, achieving, producing what you have been told to produce. Are you achieving? Are you going beyond the mark? Or are you always just under the mark? How we use this execution, this third E on a daily basis is when we are in a meeting when somebody accomplishes a task, when you are seeing your workers working. It’s a simple drive-by. It’s a simple walk by. It’s a simple, hey, I noticed what you’re doing. Fantastic job man what you’re doing right here. This is good work. I really like what you have written here. I like what you have designed here. I like the numbers that you’re putting up. Whatever they are producing, you are looking at it and you’re saying, “This is good. I’m going to give you an A on this. This is exactly what we’re looking for.” Business Speaker Tulsa
Now you might have noticed that I don’t give a lot of A pluses. A pluses are for when people go beyond. Again, even as a schoolteacher, I was never one of those, “I only give two As. No one will get an A in my class, ha ha.” I didn’t go there. If you deserve an A, you get an A. What I was very careful with was giving people the exact specifications of what they needed to accomplish. Communicating the expectations. If you go here, this is what an A looks like. If you go here, this is what a B looks like. I communicate as a leader to my entire staff, this is what the level of execution is going to look like for us to hit the A, for us to hit the B. This is what we’re going to have to do. Then on a daily basis while I’m interacting with while I’m talking with, while I’m eating lunch with, while I’m working with my employees, I use the third E of execution. I use that language of execution to say, “Fantastic. You are executing well,” or I use the same E the execution of, “Man I’m going to give you a C on execution. You can do better than this. Remember a couple weeks ago when you were just knocking out of the park and I was giving you As like every day. There was even that one day remember I gave you an A plus. I know you’re capable of doing this, but this isn’t going to pass. I need you to pick it up. Can you do that for me?” “Yes, I can.” “Good deal. I’m going to hold you accountable to that. I’m looking for A workout of you.” Business Speaker Tulsa
I move on again. A nice 5, 10, 15-second encouraging talk. This is where I see your work. This is where I see your execution. This is where I need to see your execution. Once again as you are giving them these daily touch points. Again it is not a formal meeting. You could do this two, three, four times a day with a certain person if you want it. It’s that slight adjustment just like we’re driving down the road the slide adjustments that we make with the wheel to keep us in the lane, to keep us out of oncoming traffic where things just get crazy, and overwhelming, and now we’re trying to perform in the midst of oncoming traffic and it’s crazy. I’m trying to drive good but everybody’s coming at me. I know that we have those days at work sometimes. Also being over in the ditch. When the car is down in a ditch and you’re stuck. I’m trying to get some place but I can’t move the car. That’s because we have gotten outside the lanes. We’re having these daily touch points. Again can be multiple every single day. Also want to let you know that it’s not like you’ve got to sit and talk about all 4 Es in each of these little short conversations. Just take one of them. Again if you go into all for now, we’re talking about a longer talk but it’s just one of the Es. Let’s go ahead and move.
Again this has been my experience as the head of Clay Staires Leadership tall. This has been my experience with keeping my employees energized, keeping my employees focused on the task and keeping them going at pace. There’s nothing more frustrating than an employee workforce that is sluggish. Again if your workforce is sluggish my first thing is to think that’s a leadership issue. “It can’t be the leaders. It’s all the workers.” No. The workers are following the leader. The workers are getting away with what the leader allows them to get away with. If you’re a leader and you’re holding them accountable to the 4 E’s, they will not be able to get away with this stuff. If you’re holding them accountable to the 4 E’s on a consistent daily basis, then you’re not going to have these weeks where things go way down, and then they come way up, and go way down, and way up. We want to limit those times of being down, of energy being down, of execution being down. Business Speaker Tulsa
This takes us to the fourth E which is edge. It’s one of my favorites. This edge. I identify this as simply being able to work through struggle. Being able to overcome pressure. Being able to overcome difficulty. “I don’t really feel good today.” That’s fine. I get that. Do you have the edge to still produce or do you crater to your emotions? Do you crater to your feelings? “Clay, you don’t understand what weekend I had. It was just difficult for me to– I don’t even know if I can talk about it.” I get that, but do you have the edge to be able to press through difficulty and continue to produce at work? Also, be able to produce in life as a parent? Yes, I understand that you’re not feeling really good but you’re still a parent. I understand that you’ve got the hurt foot or you’ve got the headache or something like that. You are still a part of a family. You still need to produce for the family just like you need to do at work. This fourth E of execution becomes vital. Once again, it’s very important that we communicate of what the edge is, what we are looking for. Now when somebody is coming up and they’re saying they’re having a difficult time, we can simply go to the language that we have integrated into our culture and simply say, “I still expect the edge today. I still expect you to be able to perform. You don’t have to go into a long conversation because just saying the word edge. Business Speaker Tulsa
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Clay Staires: They get it. They know what your expectation is. Even though things are difficult, they’re able to continue to perform. Then, once I know that they are pressing through something, I can encourage them throughout the day numerous times if possible throughout the day, I can encourage them on, “Great job with the edge, and I know you’re not feeling good, but you’re doing a great job. Continue to press through. I’m giving you an A or I’m giving you an A+.” When it comes time to encourage that person, “Oh, I’ll get to that in a second.” We are just continuing to use, on a consistent basis, the four Es to evaluate our employees on a daily consistent basis. This will keep your employees moving forward. This will keep your employees moving at pace without getting off into “la la land” and beginning to ruin the culture, beginning to slow the momentum and beginning to actually poison the minds of your star employees. Business Speaker Tulsa
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