Usefulness as an Employee Satisfaction Tool

Our little boy loves Thomas the Train.  Although it can be mind numbing to listen to Thomas and his friends over and over again,  listening to it enough has led me to pick up on the fact that the underlying theme is that all the engines' purpose is to be useful.  Not happy, not successful, not prosperous, not even efficient, but useful.  The usefulness theme is embedded in the videos, the songs, the website, in all things Thomas.

What if the workplace was embedded with the theme of making you and your employees useful?  How would this shape employee satifaction efforts and organizational commitment and how would it shape how you handle leadership? What would be useful for you to do for your employees?

While I sometimes tire of the constant requests for "Choo Choo" (aka Thomas and his friends), I am pleased that the usefulness the lesson is being taught through one of my child's favorite things to watch and do.  He not only sees that hard work is valuable, but that each train is different and, therefore, has a different way to go about being useful.   The "steamies" have a different purpose than the "diesels" and that's okay.  Taking it even further, each individual engine is especially good at something.  One is obsessed with being on time (which you could see serving to be useful in certain situations), one is strong and hauls the heavy loads, while another is nice and clean and is responsible for carrying passengers on the island of Sodor where they all live to be useful.

While you might think that useful could be, well boring,  it turns out that all the engines on Sodor are happy and satisfied.  The only time they aren't is when they aren't serving their intended purpose.   The end state of being useful actually leads to a greater end state of job satisfaction and commitment.

Research show that a key component in creating job satisfaction is the nature of the work or the characteristics of the job.  Matching people with the right work helps create a sense of satisfaction that leads to motivation and success.  Why? Because being useful means meeting a need, and deep down we all want to meet needs, whether it be our own needs or others. You want every employee to feel a sense of meeting a need that maximizes your company's success. Here are some tips for helping you emphasize usefulness which will help lead to job satisfaction:

1.  Place people in assignments that allow them to feel as though they are important and competent (perceived competence) based on their strengths and personality.
2.  Allow competent people the opportunity to make decisions about how they do their work or how they get it done  (see Task-Purpose-Endstate as an example of this) (participative decision making).
3.  Related to number two, leave those that are competent alone to do their job (job autonomy).
4.  With the right training and leadership from you, allow people to expand their job role within their scope of usefulness so they can learn and grow with your organization (job scope).*

When have you felt most useful?


*Source Jex, S.M. & Britt, T.W.,  Organizational Psychology, A Scientist-Practioner Approach. 2008. pp 137&155.

Leadership How-To: Team Communications

One of my favorite companies, Red Sage Communications, Inc.,  who did my website and marketing materials, asked me to write a blog on team communication a few months ago.

You can check it out here on their blog: Communication and Team Work on Red Sage's blog

There are five tips, or how-tos in improving team communication.   Happy Reading!

Task- Purpose- Endstate

This posting comes from guest blogger, Captain Davis Ozier of the United States Army.   

Within an organization, developing our personnel is a critical task that receives a lot of talk but never much attention.  Managers generally think, hope, and assume that subordinates will be developed by simply observing those around them or that merely teaching them a task is sufficient to be considered as developing them in their position.  It doesn’t.  People are at the center of our organizations and the successful execution of our daily business falls on their shoulders.  It is therefore imperative that leaders spend time developing their people to grow and succeed, and empowering our subordinates is a great first step.

The US Army has historically trained a topic or subject on a model of Task – Conditions – Standard, which defines the task, the conditions under which the task will be completed, and the standard that must be reached to be considered a successful execution of said task.  What if, as leaders, we adopt a slightly different approach, and modify our format to Task – Purpose – Endstate?  Define the task at hand, the reason for doing it, and what it should look like at the end.  Doing so empowers the individual or team while affording them maximum creativity and flexibility.  And who do you want to rise within your organization – those that can only execute tasks that are described in detail to them or those that have the ingenuity and agility to develop creative solutions on their own?

Adopting the Task – Purpose – Endstate model has its drawbacks, though.  There will be a learning curve where the subordinate might, and probably will, fail.  This failure is not only acceptable, it is encouraged!  Ask yourself the simple question, have you learned more from your failures or your successes?  As long as leaders can identify the critical tasks ahead of time that are no-fail missions and ensure they are appropriately resourced, there is no reason to worry about potential failures.

Leaders must prioritize development of our team members.  However, it won’t happen on its own – it must be a deliberate and planned effort.  Take a moment and reflect on how your bosses have developed you?  

How do you currently develop your subordinates?  

November Leadership Carnival is up!

Another one of our blog postings is featured in this month's Leadership Carnival.  Check it out here:

November Leadership Carnival

Leadership How-Tos: Firefighting and 80/20 Rule

For those of you that were a part of the leadership classes, several previous blog posts highlight how-tos in the firefighting and dealing with "slackers" conversations.

Check them out: 

80/20 Rule   The how-tos are numbered in the middle of the page.

Are you a firefighter: Part 1   The how-tos are bulleted towards the bottom of the page under the heading "How to put away your fire hose" 

Are you a firefighter: Part 2:  This one is linked to our discussion on being an empowering leader.  The how-tos are numbered in the middle of the page.   The best how-to in this lesson, I think, is another two-birder:
Do you need to assign a task to a team member to get something done?  Then: 

 Bird 1:  Assign the task to someone who is not the expert in this field.   This gives them the opportunity to learn and helps build confidence and empowerment.
Bird 2:  Get your "expert" this task area to mentor and coach the new person in this area.  This shows your expert you trust them to train others, which builds confidence and empowerment too.

You've got two people now who are competent in an area, and hopefully two people who are empowered by following this how-to.

Your Horizon Part 2: Match Yourself

Last week,  I talked about the first step in discovering your career horizon: Know Yourself.   The next step is matching yourself with jobs that fit align with your talents, passions and values.  In considering your matches, you also have to consider the job market where you live or where your willing to relocate.

1.  Take assessments that match yourself to jobs that fit you: 

For free tools, check out O*NET's Career Exploration Tools.  Some of these assessments require you to print out an manually score the assessment while others let you download the application to your computer.  The easiest tool to use is the Career Interest Profiler that can be found at mynextmove.org  which will provide you with a list of careers that match you based on your assessment results and how much education and training you have or are willing to pursue.

If you are willing to pay a little for an assessment, you can take some more comprehensive tools found at:

Self Directed Search
Strong Interest Inventory  This includes an in-person or over the phone interpretation from me.

2.  Learn more about your matches:

First, explore online to learn more about your matches.  I like to use careerinfonet.org   You can enter occupations in the search field in the top right-hand corner of the screen and watch a career video about the job, learn more about what's needed to be successful on the job, daily tasks and activities of the job as well as salary and job growth data. 

Speaking of job growth data,  You can't be a marine biologist in the middle of Nebraska......

This is where it is important to consider the horizon of the job market as to whether or not you can get a job that aligns with your talents, passions and values in the area where you live or where you are willing to live. 

Finally,  talk to people who are in the occupations that interest you.  This Job Shadowing Questionnaire may help. 

Leadership How-Tos

I recently finished teaching two sessions of a two-day leadership training class.   As always, I asked for feedback at the end of the course to find out what would make the instruction and content better.   In one class,  many participants noted the need for more "how-tos", meaning they wanted more ways to apply what they had learned on the job.

I thought a list of how-tos might be helpful to share not only with them, but those of you who read this blog.  While this blog is always an effort to provide leadership how-tos, I'll have several installments of "how-tos" over the next few weeks related to topics from this particular course.

The purpose of any training, and the way to measure if it was effective, is to see if behaviors change on the job.  Here are some behavioral-based "how-tos" based on the topics of this particular course.

Leaders' roles of planning, organizing, directing, and monitoring: 

Planning how-to:  "Reverse-engineer". One of the class participants came up with this phrase and I love it!    It really emphasizes that you can't plan without knowing where you want to be; you have to know your end or desired state to plan for it.

Sit down with your team and have a planning session.  If you can do it off-site away from distractions, that is great.    Review the company mission and vision and any other strategic planning information.  Then "reverse engineer" your way into plans that meet those strategic objectives that your team is responsible for doing. This can be done on a smaller scale, say for example sitting down each week to plan for how your team is going to meet the production goal for the week.  Put the plan in writing and in a place where everyone can refer to it.


Organizing how-to:  Get some type of organizing mechanism (planner, computer based calendar tool and/or task list, white board in your office, etc.) and use it consistently to record work schedules of all of your team, meetings, dates goals needs to be reached, etc.  Use one tool, not ten and make it public.  Find a mechanism where everyone can assess this information.  I like google calendar as well as google's other tools for sharing documents and information.

 Kill two birds with one stone! Direct and Monitor with one how-to!  Schedule a time to manage by walking around.  You monitor more effectively if you do it regularly, but not at the same time each week.  People will come to know the boss walks around and monitors every Tuesday at 2:00 pm and they will definitely be working hard if you know that's when you are making rounds!

Walk your work area speaking to team members, talking about what they are working on, how things are going and asking if they need help with anything.  You may only have to observe what they are doing; it depends on the type of environment you work in. This will help you monitor what they are doing, and direct them if help is needed.