101: Getting their attention
How can we get employees or team members to be more cohesive as a group, more motivated, and improve on performance goals? It comes with getting their attention, yet that effort often gets overlooked with other supervisory concerns, such as delegating and decision-making. Here are three ways to make employees sit up, take notice and achieve more:
Stimulate curiosity. Don't always try and suggest answers to the issue at hand if you're trying to get a point across. Pose questions and prompt team members to investigate. In an article at Time.com, Annie Murphy Paul quotes Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia: “It's the question that piques people's interest. Being told an answer doesn't do anything for you.”
Limit your availability. This advice goes against the accessible-manager ideal. But John Hagel and John Seely Brown of Harvard Business Review believe that if you're skilled at exciting the imagination and connect with too many people, the message wears thin. “Be more selective in your availability — you will often provide even greater incentive to tackle the problems, rather than simply engaging in conversations,” they say.
Personalize the message. A great way to do this, says Stephen Denning at Monster.com, is to start by telling a story about your employees' problems. The theory is that if you start talking about the issues they're worrying about — describing them in stark detail — you'll have them hooked. “Suddenly, they're not just interested in what you have to say: they're riveted. Now you can press ahead with what you want to talk about, with a good chance that they will register it, remember it and execute on it.” Many managers, Denning says, make the mistake of starting a meeting with what's going on in the organization, which makes employees tune out, he says.
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