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Are You Rewarding Agency Employees the Right Way?

Pause for a few seconds and make a mental note of the five-to-ten most recent examples of how you are rewarding agency employees within your organization. In other words, who got a raise, a bonus, a promotion, an award or some other form of recognition for a job well done? In many organizations, perhaps even most, those honors go to people who achieved some tangible, measurable result. They hit their sales goals, signed a new client, or found some way to save the organization a few buckets of money. That’s all good, but it might not always connect in a positive way back to the organization’s stated values. When rewarding agency employees doesn't factor in the means that lead to the ends, they actually can become culture killers rather than culture builders. Tae Hea Hahm, the managing director of the venture capital firm Storm Ventures, once pointed out that “real culture” is defined by “compensation, promotions and terminations. Basically, people seeing who succeeds and fails in the company defines culture. The people who succeed become role models for what is valued in the organization, and that defines culture.” Performance is vital to success and growth, but values are foundational to organizational health. So, the challenge for Extreme Leaders is to increase the real value of things that are critical but hard to measure. Here are a few tips for doing that: ALIGN ON YOUR VALUES People often define their values based on their personal experiences and expectations. Your definition sustainability, for instance, might not be the same as someone else’s definition. So, it’s not enough to publish a list of things that are important to your leadership and your culture. Go a step further and [...]

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Four Ways Mentoring Employees Leads to Company Growth

Regardless of the type of business you own, your staff is your greatest asset. It’s crucial that you’re getting the most from your employees, and you do this by actively mentoring employees on your stellar team to produce growth for your company. This growth-centric mentorship isn’t casual or sporadic. In fact, at least 20% of your time should be devoted to mentoring employees. It’s a purposeful weekly meeting scheduled by, prepared for and owned by the employee. The meetings don’t have to be long, but they’re the best opportunity for employees to discuss their goals, get feedback and present their ideas. As their supervisor, it’s your opportunity to encourage and ask questions to push them to do their best work. Bestselling author and keynote speaker Mitch Matthews -- who’s worked with organizations like NASA, Walt Disney and Principal Financial Group -- is a big advocate of what he calls “project-specific mentoring.” He says, “Project-specific mentoring is where you identify someone in your organization that you really want to invest in. So you look for a specific project where you give them more autonomy, more ownership.” He also says mentoring allows for limited risk and fast learning: “At the same time, it also increases the sense of ownership and increases the loyalty, and it increases engagement.” Mentoring employees to ensure growth An increased sense of ownership, loyalty, and engagement leads to a successful mentorship program, which in turn ensures growth. You achieve this by making these one-on-one mentorship meetings, allowing you to ask the best questions, demonstrate how you think through business challenges, and show each employee that he or she is a priority. Because these meetings are individual, train midlevel managers and department heads to be mentors, too. Mentoring [...]

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Coaching and Mentoring Employees for Success in Your Agency

You look at your employees and you see what’s possible. They’re capable of even more. But what’s in the way of coaching and mentoring employees so that they can get there? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest one is you. You have to make the time for coaching and mentoring employees if you ever want them to reach their potential and serve you, your agency and your clients at the level you’re looking for. In a recent solocast, I walk you through some ideas that can help you find the time to become part of the solution, rather than contributing to the problem. The solution is actually pretty straightforward and is critical to not only the employees’ success but your agency’s as well. In this solocast, I help you explore: how to be a good mentor and teacher on a regular and consistent basis how to set priority or growth goals for your employees how to provide your employees a time and place to ask questions and relay important information how to give your employees the opportunity to toot their own horns or those of their co-workers how to identify obstacles for your employees before they become overwhelming By putting these ideas for coaching and mentoring employees into play, you will not only create an environment where the employees know they need to keep getting better but they’ll be hungry to do so.  It will also help you keep your best employees.  Drew McLellan is the Top Dog at Agency Management Institute. He has also owned and operated his own agency over the last 20-years. And all through the year, he straddles the fence of working in his agency and working with 250+ small- [...]

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5 Mistakes that cost agency owners money.

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