8 Signs an Employee Is Exceptional (Which Never Appear on Performance Evaluations)

Many are good. Some are superior. And a few--just a few--are exceptional. Here's how to tell the difference. 

We can all spot a great employee: she's dependable, proactive, hardworking, a great leader, and a great follower. She brings a wide variety of easily defined--but hard to find--skills to the table.

Some employees, though, are exceptional. They have skills and qualities that aren't evaluated on performance appraisals but make a huge impact on that individual's performance, the performance of the people around her, and especially on the company's results.

Here are eight signs an employee is truly exceptional:

1. They think well beyond job descriptions.

The smaller the company, the more important it is that employees can think on their feet, adapt quickly to shifting priorities, and do whatever it takes, regardless of role or position, to get things done.

When a key customer's project is in jeopardy, exceptional employees know without being told there's a problem, and they jump in without being asked, even if--especially if--it's not their job.

2. They're quirky...

The best employees are often a little different: a little eccentric, sometimes irreverent, even delighted to be unusual. They seem slightly odd, but in a really good way. Unusual personalities shake things up, make work more fun, and transform a plain-vanilla group into a team with flair and flavor.

People who aren't afraid to be different naturally stretch boundaries and challenge the status quo, and they often come up with the best ideas.

3. And they know when to rein in their individuality.

An unusual personality is a lot of fun--right up until the moment it isn't. When a major challenge pops up or a situation gets stressful, the best employees stop expressing their individuality and fit seamlessly into the team.

Exceptional employees know when to play and when to be serious; when to be irreverent and when to conform; and when to challenge and when to back off.

It's a tough balance to strike, and a rare few can walk that fine line with ease.

4. They praise other people in public...

Praise from a boss feels good. Praise from a peer feels awesome, especially when you look up to that person.

Exceptional employees recognize the contributions of others, especially in group settings where the impact of their words is even greater.

5. And they disagree in private.

We all want employees to bring issues forward, but some problems are better handled in private. Great employees often get more latitude to bring up controversial subjects in a group setting because their performance allows greater freedom.

Exceptional employees come to you before or after a meeting to discuss a sensitive issue, knowing that bringing it up in a group setting could set off a firestorm.

6. They ask questions when others won't.

Some employees are hesitant to speak up in meetings. Some are even hesitant to speak up privately.

An employee once asked me a question about potential layoffs. After the meeting I said to him, "Why did you ask about that? You already know what's going on." He said, "I do, but a lot of other people don't, and they're afraid to ask. I thought it would help if they heard the answer from you."

Exceptional employees have an innate feel for the issues and concerns of those around them, and step up to ask questions or raise important issues when others hesitate.

7. They like to prove other people wrong.

Self-motivation often springs from a desire to show that doubters are wrong. The woman without a college degree or the man who was told he didn't have leadership potential often possesses a burning desire to prove other people wrong.

Education, intelligence, talent, and skill are important, but drive is critical. Exceptional employees are driven by something deeper and more personal than just the desire to do a good job.

8. They're constantly exploring.

Some people are rarely satisfied (I mean that in a good way) and are constantly tinkering with something: reworking a timeline, adjusting a process, tweaking a workflow.

Good employees follow processes. Great employees tweak processes. Exceptional employees find ways to reinvent processes, not just because they are expected to...but because they just can't help themselves

By Jeff Haden

What Makes An Employee Highly Engaged?

Six Essential Roles of the CEO

According to Dr. Lawrence King, legendary T.E.C. Canada speaker, the role of the CEO encompasses six essential functions:

1. Strategist. This function sets the future direction of your company. The process for creating effective strategy involves a team-centered strategic planning retreat, whereby you go off-site with your management team, look three years out into the future, and ask the most important strategic question: where will our future profit margins come from? Chances are they will not come from the same place as today.
2. Ambassador. Meet with your important customers and clients once or twice a year, not for a sales call but for an informal lunch or dinner. The idea is to get to know the customer and let them get to know you, so that you can increase their trust in you and establish your credibility.
3. Inventor. Success in business requires finding your customer’s pain and developing new products and services to relieve it. The inventor function ensures that the strategic direction of the company aligns around the customer’s pain.
4. Coach. Become a teacher, coach and mentor to your direct reports. Instill a culture of learning throughout all levels of the organization. Your direct reports do not have your big picture perspective, so find ways to teach it to them.
5. Investor. Treat your company as an investment. Know the market value of your business and strive to grow it. Improving market value should direct all decisions for the business and reward the clear focus and direction of the CEO.
6. Student. Stay active in some form of continued professional development — not just in your area of functional expertise but as a student of leadership.

Your strategy, culture, team, stage of company and personal strengths and weaknesses will factor in to how you divide your energy among these roles and projects you lead.  Our members have found that by being more intentional about their roles and the time and energy they devote to them, they are more focused and effective.  They also find that these six roles give them a useful framework to continuously and consciously learn and adapt to their roles as their business and influences change.

Each state's biggest export trading partner

21 Inspiring Quotes.....

What You Don't Know Will Hurt You: 3 Top Skills Leaders Need To Learn Today

By Marcel Schwantes

Principal and founder, Leadership From the Core@MarcelSchwantes

In my line of work, I will admit that not all leaders and owners have reached a visceral understanding of the potential of people. But those that do see it as their responsibility to help others grow towards their full potential.

Exceptional leaders shine the spotlight on their people by developing them -- a key retention strategy that will give you competitive advantage.

But how? I can think of no better way to developing your own tribe than implementing these simple strategies as soon as you can:

1. Provide opportunities for learning and growth.

What you'll find in most healthy organizations is a high commitment to growing their employees.

If you happen to work in such an environment, you'll probably notice a strong bond between top leadership, training and human resources functions working together to:

• Identify their employees' gifts, talents, and strengths for the best job fit so that they can reach their potential.
• Champion a "learning spirit" within the organization, sending a clear message that "growing our people is one of our highest priorities."
• Give meaning and purpose to the employees' work, adding further motivation.
• Provide ongoing training, coaching and mentoring opportunities that are aligned with job purpose, performance measures, best-in-class customer service, and fulfilling the organizational mission.

2. Build up others through encouragement and affirmation.

Gallup Organization researchers spent decades accurately measuring employee engagement, which resulted in their Q12 Engagement Survey. They have interviewed more than 25 million employees around the world to find the core of a great workplace.

The 12 questions are designed to be posed to employees. And from the perspective of the employee, many of the questions, I will submit to you, point to the principles of encouraging and affirming employees to be the best they can be.

The results can also be boiled down to 12 "look-in-the-mirror" questions that every leader can ask to understand how their companies measure up on the key elements needed to keep their most talented employees.

If you're a manager, and your employees were asked the following about you, how would you do?

• In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
• At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
• This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?

The research also makes a strong business case for growing leaders in management roles.

Employees who responded more positively to these questions worked in business units with higher levels of productivity, retention and customer satisfaction.

The opinions formed by employees pointed to their immediate manager as the critical player in building and maintaining a great workplace.

Once again, as the old saying goes, people leave managers, not companies.

3. Have honest conversations during the onboarding process.

First of all, if you're new to onboarding, we're not talking about an HR orientation during the first day or week of hire. Effective onboarding is a management responsibility that can extend three-to-nine months after a hire date, sometimes longer.

Research is saying that a typical employee's mind isn't made up about staying or leaving a new company until month six!

I want to bring out some key questions that every leader should ask to find out if you are doing the things that lead to a great new hire experience.

These questions are meant to trigger a response for you to be more intentional about having conversations that lead to high employee engagement during those crucial first few months.

• Do you as a leader/manager engage your new hires in "How can we/I help you with your professional development interests?" conversations in the first month?
• Do you as a leader/manager engage new hires in conversations about what motivates them within the first 1-2 weeks of employment?
• Do most of your employees have development plans? If so, do these plans get discussed periodically one-on-one?
• Are you, as leader/manager, actively helping employees to advance their plans by talking with them?

One of the Top Leadership Blogs on the web

Profit and Leadership 

has been selected by Feedspot as one of the Top 300 Leadership blogs on the web

(http://blog.feedspot.com/2016/03/31/leadership-blogs/)

"I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. This is the most comprehensive list of Top Leadership blogs on the internet and I’m honored to have you as part of this!"- Anuj Agarwal Founder, Feedspot

To P&L Readers - Thank you for following "Profit and Leadership"!

From:

 

Richard (Dick) Peters

Owner & Publisher - Profit and Leadership

Chair - The Executive Committee, T.E.C. Canada

(rpeters@tec-canada.com)

President, Leader Logic Ltd.

(richardpeters@leaderlogic.ca)

Slow Deciders Make Better Strategists

 

There are many ways to split people into two groups. Young and old. Rich and poor. Us and them. The 98% who can do arithmetic and the 3% who cannot. Those who split people into two groups and those who don’t. 

 

Then there’s the people who make good competitive-strategy decisions, and those who don’t. 

 

It’s not easy to split people into the good/bad strategy decision-makers. Track records are useful but they’re not unambiguous, and those getting started have no track records at all. General intelligence and business degrees seem to be good signs, but smart people with business degrees don’t agree on what works in strategy. Veterans with specific industry expertise look promising, but so do outsiders with new ideas. 

 

What about mindset? We know people put credence in confidence. However, it seems to me there’s a difference between someone who’s confident after laboring over a thoughtful decision and someone who’s confident with a snap judgment. It seems to me there’s a difference between someone who’s unsure after serious contemplation and someone who’s unsure about a quick pick. 

 

Imagine that we can record decision-makers’ solutions to a competitive-strategy problem. We also ask how confident they feel that they’ve found a good answer and how long it took them to find it. We can categorize them, then, like this:

I’ve got such a database of people, those who have entered the Top Pricer Tournament. The database includes business executives, consultants, professors, and students. I gave all of them the same unfamiliar but straightforward pricing-strategy problem.

Dozens of Tournament entrants said they were very confident in their strategies after making a fast decision, dozens said they were very confident after a slow decision, and so on. The phrases in the boxes are how I interpret the mindsets of the people in those boxes. In the analysis below I’ll leave out the respondents in the “I guessed” box because they seem unrepresentative of what happens in real life, where strategists work at strategy decisions until they’re confident in their answers or they’ve worked long enough to conclude they’re not going to make further progress.

In general, the I-already-knows, confident in their snap judgments, and the Now-I-knows, confident after pondering, tend to be older males. Male business students are also represented in the I-already-knows. The I-don’t-knows, unsure of their thoughtful decisions, tend to be somewhat younger. And females make up well over half of the I-don’t-knows, a much higher percentage than in the other mindsets.

Make your prediction: which of the three styles selected the best-performing Tournament strategies?

The best-performing group: the I-don’t-knows.

Perhaps it’s about age: we gain confidence over time, but maybe not skill. Perhaps it’s about gender: rather than the conventional wisdom that females don’t have enough confidence, maybe males have too much. I don’t have enough data yet to assess those hypotheses. And perhaps the results will change as the sample sizes grow.

Still, the I-don’t-knows’ success fits my business war-gaming experience.

In one case, the new vice president of a troubled business brought together about thirty managers, each with decades in the business. The managers considered the war game an amusing waste of time. They all knew the answer already, they said, and no other options were possible. Then, role-playing their business and its competitors, they discovered that their already-known answer simply would not work. The manag­ers suddenly found new options. We war-gamed one, and it worked, and they rolled it out in real life, and it worked.

The new VP got promoted.

It’s not that the managers didn’t care or were incompetent; it’s that they were overconfident. When you think you know the answer, you sincerely believe it’s a waste of time to keep looking for it. It feels like continuing to search for your keys after you’ve found them.

I think the essential lesson for competitive-strategy decision-makers is not so fast, in both senses of the phrase: take your time and don’t be so sure. That’s the mindset used by the new VP and the I-don’t-knows.

The willingness to apply that mindset is what separates the good decision-makers from the bad.

---

Mark Chussil is the Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc. He has conducted business war games, taught strategic thinking, and written strategy simulators for Fortune 500 companies around the world.

The enemies of adaptability

Never give up!

 

At age 5 his Father died.
At age 16 he quit school.
At age 17 he had already lost four jobs.
At age 18 he got married.
He joined the army and washed out there.
At age 20 his wife left him and took their baby.
He became a cook in a small cafe and convinced his wife to return home.
At age 65 he retired.
He felt like a failure & decided to commit suicide.
He sat writing his will, but instead, he wrote what he would have accomplished with his life & thought about how good of a cook he was.
So he borrowed $87 fried up some chicken using his recipe, went door to door to sell.
At age 88 Colonel Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Empire was a billionaire. 🙌