Leaders Fire Up the Troops
Employees start their jobs on fire. Nobody takes a job they hate – every single person working for you today was excited in the beginning. (If you are hiring people who aren’t excited in the interview – STOP! A positive attitude and lots of fire should be at the top of your list of required attributes.) Assuming you’re hiring positive people, what’s happening to them?
They receive inadequate training.
Ever try to learn how to hit a golf ball? Remember how many different ways your instructor (or your well-meaning associates) had to tell you how to it before you understood? Do winning coaches EVER explain something once then disappear from the sidelines? Take a good look at training in your company.
They are not inspired.
Forget managing, think leading.
Do your employees have big, audacious goals they are excited about achieving for themselves and the company? It’s up to their immediate supervisor to provide these inspiring goals. Example – a 10% increase in sales is boring. Building the best company in the southeast is inspiring!
They don’t know what you expect.
Managers can be terrible at defining their expectations. Often people are put in jobs and left to their own devices. For example, a new bank teller is hired. She receives some training and begins conducting transactions for customers. She is very friendly and engages many of the customers in brief conversations. At the end of the day she thinks she has done well. However, her supervisor is looking at the number of transactions she processed and thinks it is low. If the supervisor is judging the new teller on speed of processing, while the new teller thinks she is doing well by giving excellent customer service – you can see the forthcoming impact on the new teller’s enthusiasm. Especially if the supervisor waits to take action or assumes our new teller just can’t cut it. Leaders define their expectations – they tell their people EXACTLY how to succeed.
Work isn’t fun.
Guess what? Leaders know how to celebrate, how to laugh, and how to keep things fun and challenging for their people. It doesn’t have to be silly or expensive, but when you spend at least 60% of your time at work, you should have some fun.
They are afraid.
Afraid you don’t like them, afraid they are going to be fired, afraid to ask questions, afraid to make suggestions, afraid of what kind of mood you are in today – leaders understand this and work hard to empower their people. Where there is fear, there can be no enthusiasm.
This list is just the beginning. Employees come to your company on fire and you douse the flames without even knowing it. FireStar helps organizations build leaders. Leaders know how to keep the fires of enthusiasm burning to get the most from their people.
