The Connector Manager: Why Some Leaders Build Exceptional Talent - And Others Don't by Jaime Roca & Sari Wilde

Author:Jaime Roca & Sari Wilde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Business, Management, Leadership
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

What could we do better as a company?

How can we increase our innovation?

The reaction to the session was astounding. She received thousands of responses from employees about their motivations as well as perspectives on how to make the business better. As the feedback streamed in, Karlsson-Dion went to work, staffing a team to help her analyze the data. She looked for themes, quick wins, and problem segments, and she responded with a set of solutions that incorporated her employees’ input.

The result was that employees felt they had been heard. They’d been able to share their perspectives and see that their leader made changes based on what mattered to them. For instance, some of the employees in Karlsson-Dion’s group felt that they were not respected by their counterparts on the client teams. With this in mind, Karlsson-Dion launched a program she called PALS (People, Awareness, Listening, Small Steps), as an intervention between IBM employees and their client partners. As part of the PALS program, both sides spent two days in a safe environment getting to know one another, learning how to work better together, and collaborating to find ways to adjust the processes to create an improved situation for everyone.

Another quick win for Karlsson-Dion was identifying physical workspace issues that were barriers to everyday motivation. In one office, she learned that the coffee machine had been out of service for some time, and employees were really unhappy about it. (If you’re anything like us, you can relate to the frustration these employees felt without their daily doses of caffeine.) Karlsson-Dion promptly installed a working coffee machine. In another office, employees felt unsafe due to a broken door lock. She quickly arranged for it to be repaired. Not all of the issues that surfaced were fixed quite so easily, but Karlsson-Dion was nonetheless able to make headway to address motivational challenges that many of her predecessors weren’t even aware of.

Connector managers have a head start in understanding employee motivations based on the work they do to make one-to-one employee connections. (You can see how the tactics for diagnosis, discussed in the previous chapter, apply here.) Yet, as we saw with Karlsson-Dion, Connector managers scale their individual diagnoses and apply them across the team. She found a way to make both the individual and team connection by gathering data from thousands of employees at IBM. She worked to understand their perspectives and motivations, and used that knowledge to tailor the environment to increase employee motivation across teams. And most important, she achieved her goal of improving retention on her team to an attrition level that was best in its class in the BPO industry.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.