How to Engage Millennials in the Workplace with Direction and Autonomy

Balancing direction and autonomy: the high performance way to engage your team and increase accountability 

Engagement is one of the most overused words in the modern business lexicon. It isn’t the answer to everything, but it remains powerful. For people to perform at anywhere near their best, they need to be ‘engaged’. This is particularly true of millennials, the generation born from 1980 to 2000, who will comprise 50 percent of the global workforce by 2020.

Millennials, the generation born from 1980 to 2000, who will comprise 50 percent of the global workforce by 2020

To engage millennials, and in our view anyone else, you need to be both direct and empowering.  And a good place to start is the planning process. Let me explain how.

 

There is no waffle in a solid plan. The whole point of it is for each individual to know exactly what they need to achieve by when, for every task in the plan. The mission objective must be clear, measurable and achievable and the enabling courses of action must be direct, personal, and concise.

So How Does any of that Empower Anyone?

In the 1980s, several studies showed that people worked harder, were more satisfied, and trusted their employers more if their management supported their autonomy: respecting perspectives, giving choices, and encouraging self-initiation rather than specifying how they should do things. For the millennial generation, support for autonomy is even more important. Millennials will be more energized and productive if they have greater autonomy over where, when, and how they work.

Millennials will be more energized and productive if they have greater autonomy over where, when, and how they work

There is a balance to be reached between the directness of a plan, and the need for team members to have control of their own missions. That balance is found in the team’s situational awareness. The more awareness the team has of the context for the mission, the state of the industry, its players and history, the less direction they will need.

 

 

Create the Best Plans for Engagement

The best plans are created by the teams who are responsible for executing them. In being part of their team, in taking part in their planning, people are signing up to the team’s plan. They are making commitments to their team, and for high performance teams that follow a disciplined execution framework, those commitments will hold.

In The Upside of Turbulence, MIT Professor Donald Sull suggests that ‘The best promises share five characteristics: they are public, active, voluntary, explicit, and they include a clear rationale for why they matter.’ Each of these characteristics should be shared by the commitments made in high performance planning. When a team works together to set its mission plan for a worthwhile, aligned objective, the team members have no problem buying in to the plan or being responsible to take on the needed tasks. If anything, the team needs to watch for people who overload themselves with tasks. But, as we know, there are ways to manage that risk.

Features of a High Performance Plan

A high performance plan does not go into the detail of how its tasks are to be done, nor state the obvious, nor restate standards. Just like the strategy it is pursuing, the mission is defined only by its intended effect: the what. Similarly, each task in the mission plan is defined only by its intended effect: what by when by who; clear, measurable, achievable. How that result occurs is up to the team (for the mission) or the individual (for the task).

Tina the Millennial & Breathing Steps

So if your plan calls for Tina to have a car outside 1135 North Street at 11 p.m., it’s Tina’s task to get it there. You don’t want to get into the route taken, the speed driven, the need to obey traffic laws, the need for fuel. You don’t want to worry about the way Tina drives. Your team will have standard operating procedures (SOPs). It’s obvious the car needs fuel in the tank and air in the tires. These are ‘breathing’ steps: steps so obvious it’s like telling people to remember to breathe. Beyond that, leave it to Tina to drive the car her way, using whatever techniques and preferences she likes—and that are consistent with the SOPs. If you go into too much detail, if you labor the obvious, it’s an insult to people.

They’re on the team to do these things—let them work it out, or ask for support.

As Charles Duhigg said in The Power of Habit: ‘Giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have a genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.’ Or, as General Patton put it: ‘Don’t tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and let them surprise you with the results.’

Christian “Boo” Boucousis is an author, entrepreneur, ex RAAF fighter pilot and the CEO of Afterburner Australia, high performance corporate training and team building. Email Christian directly boo at afterburner.com.au

The post How to Engage Millennials in the Workplace with Direction and Autonomy appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/engage-millennials-workforce/

Working with FLEXibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business

Working with FLEXibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business

 

Whatever business we’re in, we face more disruptive technologies, more regulations, and more competition. No one person can keep on top of all that. People are by nature anxious, curious, easily distracted and more often than not overconfident. Given the speed of change and the complexity of our environment, there are more ideas, possibilities, initiatives, and challenges coming at us all the time.

Some people are better than others at keeping focus. So now more than ever we need to open up our thinking to a broader awareness. But we need to do so in a simple, disciplined way, so that the focus is on the substance and not the process. 

Flexibility (or “Flex” for short) is the key. “Flex” is a label for a high performance way of thinking and a framework for action. Its DNA stems from the disciplines and mindsets of special military teams: U.S. Navy SEALs, Australian SAS, U.S. Army Rangers and, of course, jet fighter pilots in army, navy, marine, and air force squadrons. These teams are geared to act as tight, effective units in hostile, complex, and dynamic environments. All of these teams would recognize and use the principles of Flex, though they may have their own terms for them. Any fighter pilot on the planet would recognize these principles, and be able to work together using them. It’s how fighter pilots think and act.

 

The very same principles can be applied to business. Let me explain.

What just happened? What are we aiming for? How can we get there? Can we do it better? If any of these questions are on your mind, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s take stock of your situation.

Say you know what you’re trying to achieve, but things aren’t quite going to plan. There may be any number of reasons for that, but mostly it’s because of one of these: there are fundamental (repairable) issues within the organisation, the plan wasn’t so good (assuming there was one), people didn’t know their plan well enough, or they didn’t execute it as planned.

If you met with your team and talked about it honestly, you’d be able to work out what fell short: the plan, the communication, or the execution. It can’t really be anything else. You can point the finger at something else, but was that something you could have foreseen? And, if so, could you have dealt with it as part of your plan?

 

 

That conversation—‘What just happened? or How are we doing?’—is where we usually start

It’s a review of an action, or a check-in on your progress. Someone, somewhere wants to have that conversation. We can’t call it a debrief because, as we’ll see, a debrief assumes there are a few things in place to begin with. But having that conversation will help make sure that next time you do something, you’ll plan it better, brief it better, and execute it better.

Getting things done these days is rarely easy. Sure we have more opportunities, but with them come greater expectations, responsibilities, and risks. We have more people to keep happy—all those ‘stakeholders’—with more demands. We face more uncertainty, because the changes we face are more frequent, and bring with them things we’ve never encountered before. We need to build for the future, at the same time as delivering today. So it’s harder to do the things that really matter to us, personally and professionally, and do them well.

Let’s imagine you’re a medical products unit or an investment team that’s been operating for a decade, and you’re pretty good at it. You’re a good team, a few quirks and quirky personalities, but you know each other and how to work together. You’ve made a decent return and your bosses and investors have stuck by you. You have a good pipeline of opportunities, you know how to assess them, you know how to execute transactions to protect your interests, and you know how to manage assets and people for the long term. It’s what you do.

 

So you just need to keep doing it, right?

Maybe. Maybe you’ve just lost your best researcher or lead-maker. Maybe tax policies have changed, or you need a greater gross return to generate the same income. Or your investors are now tempted by better returns elsewhere, and want higher returns from your own unit. Maybe someone else has turned up in your neck of the woods, snapping up the last three opportunities you had your eyes on. Your world has changed in some way, just enough for you to have to perform better—or it’s a little more urgent than that.

Flex will help you. The Flex framework for action is deliberately simple. But as you work with it, you’ll find it sharpens your team’s awareness, its bias to action, and its accountabilities. Each part of the Flex process instills a belief that the mission is on track, that each person has a clear and critical role, and that they will fulfill it.

 

 

We use the term Flex because it is true to what it is: a way of working with the flexibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business, and still deliver what you need to. It helps us quickly assess our situation, make a decision, get things done, and keep doing them better. Do you have the flexibility to keep you ahead of your game, at that high performance level?

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Christian “Boo” Boucousis works with individuals, teams and organizations to achieve their business objectives through the use of a high performance framework.

He is a former Air Force Fighter Pilot and the founder of one of the world’s largest humanitarian support companies. He is currently the CEO of Afterburner Australia and Mode Modular Developments, who recently developed Australia’s tallest prefabricated modular hotel – Peppers King Square in the Perth CBD.

Boo is a leadership and high performance expert and the co-author of “On Time, On Target: How Teams and Companies Can Cut Through Complexity and Get Things Done….The Fighter Pilot Way”.

The post Working with FLEXibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/working-with-flex-modern-business/