New life for an old site?

Hello. Mi nombre es Dan Perryman. Io no capisco Espanol e Italianio, pero io capisco Birkman. I've been out of the limelight for about a year, and just getting back into socializing again. I'd love to hear from any of you, and start the conversation again.

I've opened my own little blog, which sometimes goes off the Birkman reservation so I'll keep it seperate. Come visit there, and I'll try to repost any relevant information here.

Yes, I was deliberately mixing Italian and Spanish in that first sentence (I think!). Ciao!

http://faqleadership.blogspot.com/

Not Dr. Demento, or even Mr. Demento. Just Dan

Employer Engagement

Employee Engagement:
Rebuilding Employer Brand from the Bottom Up

Although employee engagement is a builder of an employer brand, many organizations approach brand building the wrong way.

Over the past decade, employers have scrambled to find new ways to stand out in the eyes of the top talent who possess the most in-demand skills. Many organizations optimized their strategies and embraced employer branding and employee engagement to wage the so-called War for Talent, the struggle to find and retain the best employees as a catalyst for improved business performance.

Simply put, employer brand is “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers, and other key stakeholders).” The primary concerns are the attraction, engagement, and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.

1 Most often, employer branding is recognized as appearances on the “Best Places to Work” lists that appear in Fortune magazine or in local business journals around the country. Are employees proud to work at a company? Do candidates clamor to apply? If so, the company has a strong employer brand. A strong employer brand also has a significant bottom-line impact. Carol Parish at The Brand Union, a global branding organization, pointed out that companies that are most successful with employer brand also outperform the Standard & Poor index. “It’s a lesser known fact that companies with a high rating from both the consumers and their employees double that return. It’s extraordinary. If you can get the employees on board, what amazing business results you can have.”

2 Although employee engagement is a builder of an employer brand, many organizations approach brand building the wrong way. Most try to build their employer brand as they would a consumer brand – urging executives and managers to “live the brand.” However, branding can’t be exclusively a topdown initiative. In many ways, employee branding must start with employee engagement at the team level. For organizations rebuilding employer brands in the wake of the current economic slowdown, work should begin with repairing employee engagement. Improved employee engagement must begin at the team level.

Employer Branding Has Suffered in the Current Economy
The economic conditions over the past 18 months have dramatically changed the business landscape, and organizations have seen both their employer brands and employee morale erode as a result of layoffs, salary freezes, reduced benefits, lack of job security and increased anxiety.
This deterioration can in large part be attributed to a loss of employee engagement, simply defined as an employee’s emotional connection to an organization that inspires greater discretionary effort. Watching friends lose jobs, seeing pay and benefits reduced and worrying about keeping the job itself will diminish the effectiveness of even the most enthusiastic employee. Research from the Corporate Leadership Council, which has surveyed over 500,000 employees on their employee engagement levels since 2004, supports this. Before the downturn, roughly 1 in 10 employees was highly disengaged, that number increased to 1 in 5 at the end of 2008, and the preliminary data from the first quarter of 2009 shows that the number has increased to 1 in 3.3 . Businesses feel that loss of engagement in decreased earnings. Research shows that organizations with more than four engaged employees for every one actively disengaged employee saw 2.6 times more growth in earnings per share than organizations with a ratio of slightly less than one engaged worker for every one actively disengaged worker. In the past, Gallup estimated the cost of employee engagement on the U.S. workforce to be more than $300 billion.5 In the current economy, that figure could be much higher.

With this loss of engagement, employees are less able to find work stimulating or be the type of brand ambassador that would recommend the business to candidates or customers. What’s worse, former employees are hard-pressed to say anything nice about a company that let them go, no matter how much severance was paid or how well the offboarding process was completed.
To compound the problem, businesses that are letting people go are frequently hiring at the same time to bring in employees with key skills. The War for Talent has not abated in spite of the downturn, and many of the most in-demand workers are still hard to find. As the Aberdeen Group explained in its April 2009 report on Employer Branding, executives they surveyed believe that increasing competition for top talent and a shortage of key skills in the marketplace are the top two pressures they face today. Unfortunately, when organizations need a strong employment brands the most, most brands are suffering dramatically. Unfortunately, when organizations need a strong employment brands the most, most brands are suffering dramatically.

Trying to Fix the Problem, but Pursuing the Wrong Approach
In the words of advertising legend David Ogilvy, nothing will kill your reputation in the labor market faster than doing a great job advertising a work experience you don’t deliver. Organizations that promote themselves as a Best Place to Work when they’re anything but end up with an angry, cynical workforce that is only too happy to counteract their employer’s paid advertising with more credible word of mouth advertising.

In a world of social networking, this negative buzz can spread like wildfire over LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. The market response to deteriorated employer branding and weakened employee engagement has been led by organizations that offer programs that aim to rebuild what has been lost. Most employer branding programs follow a four-step process:

• Assess the current brand: Use a survey or questionnaire to understand how employees perceive the organization and how to focus the organization’s resources.

• Create a message: Develop a message platform that inspires employees and explains why you are a great company.

• Communicate the message repeatedly: Through every possible online and offline channel, reiterate branding messages as often as possible.

• Measure changes constantly for continuous improvement: Conduct more surveys and
assessments to see if messaging is having an impact.

The problem is that this top-down approach is based on traditional consumer branding that does Not take into account the different nature of the relationship between the employee and the employer. That relationship – the source of any employee engagement – is dramatically Different from the relationship a person has with a consumer product.

Research shows that the main driver of a good employer brand is employee engagement, but executives cannot legislate culture changes with mission or vision statements or through values clarification. Engagement must grow organically, one workgroup at a time. As two of the leading experts in employment engagement explained in 2007, “Too many organizations build anagement models on the assumption that managers and leaders have the power in the company/employee relationship, but that’s no longer always the case. The answer is employee ngagement or the ability to capture the heads, hearts, and souls of your employees to instill an ntrinsic desire and passion for excellence. Engaged employees want their organization to succeed ecause they feel connected emotionally, socially, and even spiritually to its mission, vision, and urpose.” However, many organizations still treat employee engagement as an employee ommunication issue or a management issue. Instead, most would be better served by pursuing a rassroots solution to the problem.

Many organizations still treat employee engagement as an employee communication issue or a anagement issue. Instead, most would be better served by pursuing a grassroots solution to the roblem.

Engagement Must Be Fixed at the Team Level
You know the saying, “Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Employees, and
particularly the newer generation of employees, care not only about opportunities for career
development and financial compensation, they also want good relationships with their team embers and supervisors. Employees want to be respected and treated as individuals with unique needs and desires. The only way to address these issues is at the team level. Employees are more likely to improve their performance when they are engaged not only with the work they do, but also with their co-workers, managers and any others that they interact with day in and day out. According to 2005 Towers Perrin research, 84 percent of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of their organization’s products, compared with only 31 percent of those who are disengaged. However, employers must get them to believe it. That belief must occur at the team level.

Improved relationships among peers and between supervisors and subordinates have a significant impact on employee engagement, which in turn affects performance. Work relationships thrive in an environment in which personal communication and work-style preferences are understood, accommodated and respected. Because engagement is built on trust, re-engagement must be built on overcoming mistrust. Awareness of behaviors that support employees’ feelings of trust can help overcome such dysfunctions as:
• Quiet resistance or passive-aggressive behaviors: Resentment can build among employees in
organizations that have experienced layoffs or salary reductions. Rebuilding open, honest and
productive communication allows teams to deal with bottled-up emotions in an up-front and non-personalized way.
• Feelings such as lack of belonging or solidarity: Employees who watch colleagues lose jobs and wonder if their job will be next may become detached from their co-workers and the larger organization. Organizations can’t pretend that nothing happened. Managers must find a way to
acknowledge the past and learn how to draw these employees out of their detachment.
• Low energy levels experienced in the workplace or in team activities: Resentment and detachment can leave employees indifferent and result in them “just going through the motions” each day. To reignite employees’ passion, managers must show some empathy and not pretend
that cuts and reductions never happened.

However, awareness of these behaviors is just a start. What’s needed is the organizational commitment to change behaviors that impede collaboration and productivity, change orientation and accountability, and encourage behaviors that support the positive elements of job performance. To overcome workplace dysfunctions and reignite employees’ passion of their work through effective collaboration with their employees, managers must:

• Reaffirm structures: Managers need to know how employees want to work and provide the
necessary structure. Do they need a very hands-on or hands-off work environment? Are teams
expected to deliver the same amount of work as before layoffs with fewer people?

• Reestablish accountability: After staff reductions, accountability gaps may exist. Are managers
and employees clear about who is accountable for what? Is everyone clear about who is accountable to customers?

• Rebuild relationships: After watching managers and colleagues laid off, many employees have
been reluctant to make the emotional investment in extra effort. As the economy improves,
managers will still need to rebuild trusting relationships with employees. Discussing issues in an
objective, non-politicized and respectful manner is one step toward rebuilding this trust.

To begin taking these steps, managers need a tool to provide insight into the workplace needs and personal communication and work-style preferences of their employees. The Birkman method is the tool they need. Improved relationships among peers and between supervisors and subordinates have a significant impact on employee engagement, which in turn affects performance. Work relationships thrive in an environment in which personal communication and work-style preferences are understood, accommodated and respected.

Conclusion: The Birkman Method® is the Engagement Solution
The implementation of The Birkman Method has proven to be an effective tool to improve team
performance. By analyzing and describing individual needs, The Birkman Method is a source of
initiatives to drive and motivate workplace behavior that increases employee engagement and
strengthens your employment brand. Employee needs are the expectations they have about how relationships and situations should occur. When needs are met, they drive behavior in positive and productive directions. Unmet needs, meanwhile, can create potentially negative and less-than-productive behavior. The Birkman Method integrates needs measurements to assess the occupational interests that can shape careers and improve the fit of a person’s job role. As a result, The Birkman Method does not describe an individual in a vacuum, but rather in the complex, dynamic reality of the workplace. The unique construction and comparative database of The Birkman Method provides powerful insight into the factors that specifically drive a person’s behavior, creating greater choice and more selfresponsibility.
It accurately measures social behaviors, underlying expectations of interpersonal
and task actions, potential stress reactions to unmet expectations, occupational preferences and
organizational strengths. For more information about The Birkman Method, contact sales@birkman.com or visit http://www.birkman.com/.

The Birkman Method integrates needs measurements to assess the occupational interests that can shape careers and improve the fit of a person’s job role. http://www.birkman.com/

About Birkman
Birkman International (www.birkman.com) is the provider of the industry-leading personality
assessment that facilitates team building, executive coaching, leadership development, career
management and interpersonal conflict resolution. For over 50 years, corporate human resources professionals, independent consultants, executive coaches, educational institutions and other not-for-profit organizations have used The Birkman Method® with over 2.5 million individuals. The Birkman Method® accurately measures productive behaviors, stress behaviors, underlying needs, motivations and organizational orientation. Visit www.birkman.com to learn how The Birkman Method® can help you maximize human potential and achieve results that are both superior and sustainable.

Often as I attend panel discussions, speak directly with senior leaders and track individual performance, the topic of “gut feel” in hiring crops up. Unfortunately in many cases their “gut feel” has let them down and lead to an organizational nightmare. It’s not to say instinct and gut feel are totally ineffective but consider the following interview with Jack Welch (former CEO of GE) in an interview with Business Week magazine.
“Relying on your gut during hiring isn’t always a great idea. The reason: Our gut often makes us “fall in love” with a candidate too quickly. We see prestigious schools and great experience on a sparkling resume. We see a likable candidate who says all the right things in the interview. And even though we don’t admit it, too often we see a person who can quickly make a problem go away-namely, a gaping position we need to fill fast. So we rush to seal the deal.”
“So when it comes to hiring decisions, doubt and double-check you gut. Go beyond the resume. Dig for extra data, and don’t just make reference calls; force yourself to listen, especially to mixed messages and unpleasant insights.”
Additionally the use of multi-dimensional assessment tools to formulate questions for the references calls can further validate behavior, performance, fit and organizational strength.
For additional information on hiring top talent and building high performing teams, contact Peter Capodice at peter@capodice.com or 941-906-1990.
Capodice & Associates is proud sponsor of the www.FranchiseExecutives.com website where we will be posting blogs and future Executive Job opportunities. We hope to see you there!

Greetings Everyone - Many coaching clients struggle with creating a definition of the "new behaviors" required to obtain the objectives they have set for themselves in their Coaching Development Plan. I am pleased to share with you a template that I use to assist my clients with this task. They receive this template when they are completing their Dev. Plan.

Some clients have more success than others with the template. Any comments? Thanks!
Follow these steps to help define new, productive behaviors required to obtain the objectives you set in your Development Plan (DP).

I. ISSUE – Describe it; identify the Trigger event and your undesired Reaction.

II. OBJECTIVE – What is your Desired State, what do you want instead of your reactive (undesired) state?

III. REACTIVE CONSTRUCT – current undesired state. Describe your:
a. Thoughts (images)
b. Behaviors (external, internal)
c. Feelings (emotions, body sensations [flush, weak, defensive, angry, etc])

IV. PROACTIVE CONSTRUCT – future desired state. Describe your:

a. Thoughts (images)
b. Behaviors (external, interior)
c. Feelings (emotions, body sensations [empowered, present, clear, calm, etc])

V. SOURCES – what is available to you for reference:

a. Birkman Advanced Report, Stress Pages, Guide Pages, Comparative reports (if provided) and feedback information. Use Behaviors, Needs and Stress descriptors (and Stress Reversals) b. Birkman 360 Report results and feedback notes. c. Recent Performance Reports (if available). Use rankings, scores and any trends identified by reviewers. d. Use input from others not surveyed in Birkman 360.

VI. RESOURCE WORK (Important). After creating your future desired state for each DP issue, Imagine (mental rehearsal):

a. The Direct experience of desired state. (OBJECTIVE)
b. What the future desired state would be like. (PROACTIVE CONSTRUCT) Live it – your desired new Thoughts, Behaviors and Feelings.
c. Incentives and positive outcomes from new, self-empowered behaviors.
d. A positive re-frame on how to use new motivation to convert old reactions into triggers for new desired behaviors.

VII. PROACTIVE REHEARSAL - Application

a. Role play desired state in-person with trusted associate or family member.
b. In Coaching Phase, practice new behaviors and chart outcomes from interactions for use in upcoming Coaching sessions.

THE LARSEN GROUP, Inc. Optimizing Individual and Organizational PerformanceCopyright © The Larsen Group, Inc. 1995-2009. All rights reserved. 904.819.1715 info@consultlarsen.com
roger.larsen@att.net

"Here is something Birkman publishes as a sort of guide for utilizing the
Components in targeted organizational (and relationship) issues.
We think it can be enhanced. Critique it from your point of view; indicate if
you think a particular Component reference may miss the mark (and what
should take it's place, if any); and also what Component(s) would you add to
particular issues and why?"

If you would like this in a word doc, pls let me know and I'll email one to you.

Jean Maslanka Kelley

COMPONENT LINKS WITH COACHING ISSUES

Giving feedback on performance – Esteem, Authority
Awareness of feelings and special needs of others – Esteem
Use of candor as a tool – Esteem
Dealing with sensitive or tough business issues – Esteem, Authority
Social enthusiasm – Acceptance
Participation in meetings – Acceptance, Authority
Open lines of communication – Acceptance, Esteem
Comfort in interacting with groups – Acceptance, Esteem
Spontaneous expression – Acceptance, Esteem, Freedom, Authority
Managing meetings effectively – Structure, Authority
Clarity of delegation – Structure
Project management – Structure
Time management – Structure, Activity
Sustaining systems and procedures – Structure
Cooperation/conflict – Authority, Freedom
Use of Authority – Authority
Listening Skills – Authority, Acceptance, Esteem
Openness to other’s ideas – Authority, Structure, Freedom
Risk taking vs. security – Advantage, Challenge, Thought
Materialistic winning vs. intangible values – Advantage
Comfort with bargaining vs. negotiating – Advantage, Authority
Competitiveness vs. long range benefits – Advantage, Empathy
Urgency in decision-making – Activity, Thought
Balance between thought and action – Activity, Thought
Patience with planning and pacing – Activity
Intensity in work commitments – Challenge
Approach to establish credibility – Challenge
Goal setting and achieving – Challenge
Practicality ideas vs. creative ideas – Empathy
Controlled vs. expressed enthusiasm – Empathy, Authority, Freedom
Comfort in shifting business priorities – Change
Patience with interruptions – Change
Flexibility in accepting externally imposed change – Change
Conforming and cooperating with team – Freedom, Acceptance
Willingness to take initiative – Freedom, Authority
Resistance to work/social demands – Freedom, Acceptance
Patience – Authority, Thought, Empathy
Consistency in positions taken - Thought

Personal Website List

Jacquelyn Wieland has added his website to our list. You can find our list in the right side bar of this blog.

Thank you Jacquelyn!

Personal Website List

Susan Ashley has added her website to our list. You can find our list in the right side bar of this blog.

Thank you Susan!