You can shine a bright light on soft skills in every aspect of your human capital management practices:
But you simply cannot hire your way around the soft skills gap.
There are many sectors of the labor market in which significant education and credentials are not required threshold criteria for employment—these include many service or quasi-service jobs in retail, restaurant, cleaning, warehousing, moving, mining, agriculture, and so forth. The young talent pool available to these sectors offers many “diamonds in the rough,” but few fully refined, when it comes to soft skills. Yes, you can (and should) poach the most polite cashier, waiter, janitor, or other person from your competition across the street, but that strategy only goes so far. Even your best hires in this sector will require significant on-boarding and up-to-speed training—not just in the basic tasks of the job—but also in your high priority soft skills.
At the next tier of the skill spectrum is the sector of the labor market in which substantial technical training may be required, but may be done in less than a year. Sometimes this training is provided by a public or private vocational education program, often affiliated with local employers. In other cases, employers provide pre-employment training or extensive on-the-job training. These jobs range from construction and assembly and mechanical repair work to book-keeping to food preparation to sales. These programs are intended to provide “job-ready” employees. What always amazes me about the training for these roles is how they focus almost exclusively on the hard skills and pay only lip service to soft skills training. Then they complain bitterly about the soft skills of these new employees, especially the youngest among them.
At the highest end of the labor market, the very threshold criteria for employment include years of education and formal training. If you are hiring engineers, doctors, nurses, medical technicians, accountants, actuaries, financial advisers, law enforcement officers, teachers, data analysts, code makers, code breakers, enterprise level management, and so many other roles for which the supply is far below demand, then you are squarely in the middle of the technical skill gap that captures so much of the attention in the media. It takes so much time, energy and money—so much personal investment on the part of the individual employee—to acquire these in-demand skills that employers are in fierce competition for them. Employers often have so few candidates with the requisite hard skills that they simply cannot rule people out because of seeming gaps in their soft skills. Of course, no matter how highly trained they may be in the hard skills, new employees still require on-boarding and up-to-speed training in the systems, policies, and practices of their new employer. Again, I am always amazed at how little attention is given to soft skills training in the on-boarding and up-to-speed training process.
The bad news punch-line in this quick lesson on contemporary labor market dynamics is that you cannot hire your way around the soft skills gap and, therefore, you simply must plan to address it in every aspect of your human capital management. The good news corollary is that you can hire smarter and give yourself a competitive advantage by making some slight adjustments in your staffing strategy, recruiting, and selection of new employees.
Yes, you need to hire people who have or can learn the required technical skills. Yes, if you are hiring at the high end, you have no choice but to hire those who have acquired the necessary education and training. Yes, there is a limited supply. No, that doesn't mean you can ignore soft skills in your hiring.
Nowadays, all the attention in the talent wars is going to the technical skill gap. Yet, every day in our work, the stories managers tell us about good hires gone bad, and bad hires gone worse, are about failures in the soft skills, not the hard skills. That's true in every sector. It is rare that managers tell us a new hire failed because of a lack of technical skills. Nine times out ten, an unsuccessful hire fails due to soft skills, not hard.
Never forget, one very good hire is much better than three or four or five mediocre hires. No matter where you are on the skill spectrum, build in soft skills criteria systematically in every aspect of your staffing strategy and hiring process:
For every single position, build a profile and job description that includes not just the key hard skills for that role, but also the key soft skills. Use our competency model to start your brainstorming, but make them your own. Once you identify the high priority soft skill behaviors for each position, name them yourself. Describe them in detail. Build those criteria into the basic job requirements in no uncertain terms from the very outset. Be prepared to turn away candidates who do not meet these soft skill criteria, just as you would turn away candidates without the necessary hard skills. Or, if you are forced to hire people without the required soft skills, make sure you have a plan in place to address those soft skill gaps from the first day of employment, just as you would have a plan in place if you hired an employee without the necessary technical skills.
Look for talent from sources well known for the strong soft skills you need. If you are hiring out of schools and training programs, definitely find out which ones include soft skills in their standard curriculum. If you are poaching talent from other employers, poach from employers known for their strong soft skills training. This is why so many employers want to hire those who have served in the military: You can be sure that most people who have served successfully in the military will display respect for authority, willingness to wear a uniform, excellent manners, timeliness, consistency, follow-through, teamwork, and initiative. The same goes for anybody who makes it to Eagle Scout. Maybe it is the Peace Corps, or an NGO, a club or a church or an athletic team; maybe you are looking for someone who has run a marathon or been a camp counselor or a school teacher or volunteered in a soup kitchen. What schools, employers, or organizations do you know where members or alumni are likely to have stronger soft skills in the areas that matter the most to you? Create a shorthand list of “clearinghouse” talent sources, successful participation in which is an indicator that job candidates are likely to have stronger soft skills. Then pay special attention to candidates with those soft skills “credentials” on top of their hard skills credentials. But don't wait for them to come to you. Be proactive about seeking candidates from those sources. Look for candidates If you can build relationships with key influencers in those sources—teachers, career counselors, leaders, active members of organizations, military outplacement personnel, and so forth. They can help you identify good candidates, which also gives them a positive reputation for helping good people find good jobs.
Include your high priority soft skills behaviors in your employer branding and recruitment campaign messaging. That's why it's so important to name your high priority soft skills—to have meaningful slogans to capture them. Of course, there is always the iconic “the few, the proud, the Marines” as an example. That message is a signal to applicants that this job is going to be very demanding of them on a very deep level. Your recruitment message says a lot about how you see yourself as an employer. If you advertise for automobile mechanics by saying, “hiring qualified automobile mechanics,” you are not really saying much. If your message is “looking for very smart automobile mechanics who are great team players,” that says a lot more. Remember, the goal of any recruiting campaign is to deliver a compelling message in order to draw a sufficiently large applicant pool so that you can be very selective. Your goal is not necessarily to draw applicants who are all “very smart” and “great team players” but, at the very least, you want to draw applicants who aspire to be very smart and aspire to be great team players. You want to draw applicants who are looking for a job in which they can learn and grow and build themselves up. We call it a “self-building” job. You want to draw applicants for whom the idea of “self-building” is a big turn-on, not a turn-off.
Start with a bias against hiring: Look for red flags. The biggest mistake hiring managers make—especially when hiring for low-supply high-demand technical skills—is continuing the “attraction campaign” until the job candidate has accepted the job, and sometimes until the new employee is already at work. We call this “selling candidates all the way in the door.” In a tight labor market, the pressure to hire leads to hard-selling a job to a candidate, even if that person is not ideal for the job. In fact, so many employers are so starved for young talent that they just can't bear to turn potential employees away, even in the face of huge red flags. If someone comes late for the interview or falls asleep during the interview or has typos in his résumé—and timeliness, good health, or attention to detail are important soft skills for this job—then those red flags are telling you, “DON'T HIRE THIS PERSON!”
Build a selection process that places a heavy emphasis on high priority soft skills. Here's a short-cut: Scare away young job candidates who only think they are serious by shining a bright light on all the downsides of the job. If you need to hire nurses with especially high levels of grit and patience, make sure to tell them early in the selection process that they will sometimes be expected to help orderlies change bedpans. If you need to hire engineers with especially high levels of diligence, make sure to tell them right away there will be plenty of late nights and weekends coming very soon. Whatever the worst, most difficult aspects of the job may be, start your selection process with vivid descriptions of those downsides. Then see which candidates are still interested in the job. They are the ones worth testing and interviewing.
We recommend using research-validated testing whenever possible to get a quick baseline reading of an applicant's aptitude in key areas of the job, including high priority soft skills. Whatever test you settle on, just make sure you can implement and evaluate it with relative speed. And make sure you know in advance exactly what you are looking for. What are you testing for? If you need an employee who can write well, simply hand the applicant a piece of paper and ask him to write something. If you need an employee who can speak well, ask her to prepare a brief presentation and then present it. If you need an employee who can solve problems in spatial relations, give her a puzzle. If you need an employee who can solve math problems, give him some math problems to solve. If you need an employee who can be on time, schedule three interviews, at three different times. And so on. Of course, some soft skills are harder to test for than others.
Then comes the job interview, the one employment selection process almost every manager does, but very few do well. When it comes to interviewing, the best practice is still the simple model of behavioral interviewing. Although there are entire courses taught in behavioral interviewing, I often teach it to managers in my seminars in three minutes. Behavioral interviewing simply means asking applicants to tell you a story and then listening carefully to the story. When you are doing behavioral interviewing, make sure to ask applicants, not only about their use of hard skills, but also their use of soft skills: “Tell me a story about a time you solved a problem at work” or “Tell me a story about a conflict you had with another employee at work. How did you solve it?”
Finally, consider one last stage of selection, we call “the realistic job preview.” This might be a probationary hiring period, or a pre-real job internship, during which you can try out the employee and the employee can try out the job for a while. Make sure to assign the person real tasks that mirror the actual tasks, responsibilities, and projects he or she will be asked to do if he or she accepts the job. Make sure to include the grunt work. Another option is a period of “job shadowing” or “tagging along” with another person in your organization who is doing the same job this person will be doing if hired. This approach is sometimes used in hospitals. Make sure that the would-be health care workers get to see sick patients, bedpans being emptied, and some of the other tough tasks they'll have to handle. By tagging along for several days, a week or more, your applicant will obtain a good picture of what the job entails.
You will also get the double bonus of having the existing employee who is shadowed spend a lot of time with the applicant in the job setting. This often leads to existing employees coming in and saying, “Hey, I hope we are going to hire this person!” or “Hey, we are not going to hire this person, are we?” Such feedback will tell you a lot. If applicants can't job-shadow, perhaps you can give them an opportunity to watch people doing the actual job—either in person or on video. Sometimes on factory floors or in restaurant kitchens, the best thing you can do is let a prospective employee watch people actually doing the work for a little while and make sure he knows what he is getting into.
If there is any lag time between the time an offer is made and accepted and day one of the actual job, take advantage of that time. Perhaps the employee needs to finish school or the employer must complete a security screening. Use the delay to keep sending the message about your high priority soft skill behaviors: Send books or videos or other targeted learning materials. In every way you can, keep sending the message that those soft skill behaviors really matter.
Ask yourself: What happens when your new young employees walk through the door on day one? How do you leverage those first days and weeks?
You won't be surprised that my platinum standard for on- boarding and up-to-speed training is the Marine's Boot Camp. For thirteen solid weeks, they provide an all-encompassing 24/7 experience in which they take an ordinary human being and transform that person into a Marine—a person with a unique set of self-management skills, problem-solving skills, and people skills—a person so connected to the Marine Corps and its mission and every other Marine that this person is now ready to walk into the line of fire, literally, and win battles.
You don't need obstacle courses and firing ranges. You don't need to make your newly hired employees do push-ups in the sand in the middle of the night. But take the lesson: What message are you sending about standards and expectations for high priority behaviors from day one?
First, make sure you know exactly what happens with your new hires in the formal orientation, on-boarding, and up-to-speed training. Most employers have only a minimal process for welcoming new employees and getting them on-board and up-to-speed. Obviously, some employers are better at this than others. Typically, employers provide a basic introduction to the mission and history of the organization (or not), they give the basic facts and figures (or not), have new employees meet some of the key players (or not), receive a primer in the policies and paperwork (or not), and maybe some of the rules and traditions (or not).
Second, consider the inevitable hand-off to the hiring manager (maybe that is you), once the official orientation program is complete. That's where so much of the real on-boarding action is going to happen, and that's exactly where the ball is so often dropped. Don't drop that ball.
If you want to send the message that those behaviors are truly a high priority, then you have to pay more than lip service. How much of your on-boarding and up-to-speed training is dedicated to spelling out performance standards and expectations for those high priority soft skill behaviors? How much time is dedicated to championing those behaviors and teaching them?
Here's a pretty simple rule: It should be about half.
As one savvy leader in a very successful retail chain put it to me: “For every hour we spend teaching a cashier how to operate the register, we spend at least an hour teaching her customer service skills—how to interact with customers and how to solve their problems.”
Of course, it doesn't have to be half and half. Maybe the best approach is to have a dynamic integrated approach to on-boarding and up-to-speed training that is designed in every way to send a powerful message about high standards and expectations for employees’ attitudes and behavior in relation to work.
One of my favorite companies is a rental car company that prides itself on hiring only college graduates for every position, no matter how entry level. They also pride themselves on an on-boarding process that not only teaches every new hire the business, but also makes it 1,000 percent clear to new hires exactly what kind of workplace citizenship is expected of every single employee. On top of hours upon hours of training, with computer based tools and hands-on coaches, new hires can expect to find themselves out in the parking lot washing cars. Everybody—from the top to the bottom—in this organization is expected to wash cars. Nobody is too important to wash cars. In between washing cars, new hires are expected to study. And study they do, because each week they must demonstrate proficiency in a range of subjects, including the company's computer system, details about the company's fleet, insurance, reservations, sales, marketing, customer service, billing, administration, decision making with everyday situations, corporate philosophy, and on and on.
The training materials spell out everything new hires must learn from week to week. And they study every night because—from day one—they are expected to be working, helping out in any way they can, during the day. There are also weekly coaching sessions with a fellow employee; each new hire is assigned a coach. There are tests at the thirty-day mark, at sixty days, and at ninety days. This incredibly impressive program, which the company runs on the job in thousands of rental car shops all over the world, teaches new hires not just how to run the business, but also inculcates a powerful sense of the kind of work ethic and commitment the company requires. The results can be seen in every corner of this world-class organization. Their on-boarding program is not exactly the Marine Corps Boot Camp, but it is truly profound in its impact.
Of course, on-boarding and up-to-speed training needn't be profound. Let me give you a more mundane example. In one large company that hires a lot of new young engineers, managers and more experienced engineers were increasingly frustrated with some of the work habits of many of their new young engineers, including their email communication habits. A senior director of engineering in this company told me: “When it came to email, they did a bunch of things that drove everybody crazy: They would do every email ‘no no’: red flag emails indiscriminately, cc too many people on emails, or reply all to the wrong things, fail to change subject lines. But in particular they would send lots of very short email messages from their hand-held devices instead of composing a proper email. We developed a list of do's and don'ts for email communication and we built in a thirty-minute module in orientation.” How did that work? “Problem solved.”
I have a very similar story from a top accounting firm. Managers in this firm had noticed a growing pattern of “poor meeting manners” among new young staff accountants. What are “poor meeting manners”? According to one senior partner: “Poor attendance, late arrival, constantly looking at their devices, lack of preparation, interrupting, going way off topic, making inappropriate comments . . . I could go on.” The solution was very similar: The firm began explicitly teaching new hires how to prepare for and conduct themselves in meetings. It was so successful that the firm leadership decided to overhaul everybody's “meeting manners.” As it turned out, it wasn't just the new associates whose meeting manners were not so great. After they developed the “meeting manners” program, the leadership realized that everybody in the firm could benefit from learning and observing these best practices for meetings. As a result, said the senior partner, “We had a real change in our culture around meetings. People in this firm became religious about following the rules of conduct. Our meetings got much better, and they remain so. It's a centerpiece of our culture now.”
Gee, maybe that's mundane and profound at the same time.
Most large organizations have some sort of formalized performance management system, and nowadays more and more are extending those systems to also take a more structured approach to talent development. The essence of performance management and talent development is simple. It's all about continuous improvement:
Organizations with formalized systems typically start with annual or quarterly corporate goals and then cascade those larger goals down the chain of command to each division, department, team, and individual. This is to create alignment from the top to the bottom so that everybody is moving in the same direction at the same time. In any case, at the individual level, employees typically spell out goals for themselves—annual goals and quarterly goals, and if they are smart, then they take the process further to monthly and weekly and maybe even daily goals. Usually, these goals are primarily focused on key performance indicators—revenue or profitability, maybe, or else productivity (output) or quality (negative error rate)—related to the individual employee's specific tasks, responsibilities, and projects. While soft skill behaviors have a huge impact on any individual's performance when it comes to key performance indicators, the specific behaviors may not be spelled out explicitly or identified as specific goals in a performance management system.
Usually, when soft skill behaviors are spelled out—if at all—in a formal performance management system would be in one of two cases:
As a seasoned leader in a top financial services firm told me: “Your people can tell whether you really take this stuff seriously and they can tell if you don't. If you measure it, they pay attention. If there are consequences for failure, they pay attention. If there are rewards for success, they pay attention. When you identify top performers, the smart ones look and see, ‘What makes that person successful?’ If that person is rewarded and promoted despite their failures on those soft skills, people pay attention to that. They say, ‘Oh, if you make your numbers, that's what really matters.’ But if you hold people back when they fail on those soft skills, despite making the numbers, then people pay attention to that, too. What you measure and what has consequences and what gets rewarded, that's what your people are going to focus on.”
Your employees can only focus on so many things at once. And you can only focus on so many things at once. If high priority behaviors are truly high priorities, then you must make that clear with real stakes in your performance management and talent development. Whether you have a formalized system or not, remember, whatever you measure and what has consequences and what gets rewarded, that is what they are going to focus on.
If you want your employees to really focus on high priority soft skill behaviors, then you need to:
Your employees need to know exactly what is expected and required of them when it comes to high priority soft skills behaviors—every step of the way. They also need to know that their performance will be measured and that the score will have real consequences for failure and real rewards for success.
Now I should say, “I have good news and bad news”: If you succeed in getting your employees focused on building up their performance on high priority soft skills, then the next questions they are going to ask is: “Exactly what training resources can you provide me for improving in these areas?” That is both the good news and the bad news.
Why is it bad news?
One health care executive captured the explanation in simple terms: “We invest so much in education and training for our new young professionals that we have gotten a reputation among our competitors as a great place from which to poach talent. We invest in them through internal programs and also tuition reimbursement for everything from a one-day seminar to pursuing an advanced degree. It is a great tool for recruiting and morale. But it also paints a target on our back. The other hospitals in the region actively recruit our two-year employees. Of course, they are thinking, ‘You’ve been working there for two years? Perfect. Come work for us and we'll get the return on their education and training investment. It's very frustrating!”
We call this the “development investment paradox.” You invest in developing your new young talent only to make them more valuable in the free market, where they are in danger of selling your development investment to the highest bidder. This is problematic when it comes to hard skills training as well as soft skills training: But it is especially maddening with soft skills training because soft skills are broad, transferable skills that never become obsolete and will make your employees more valuable anywhere they go in any job. Plus, if you think of soft skills training as “extra” rather than “mission critical,” then it seems like a foolish investment to make altogether.
What are the answers to this paradox?
Does this all mean that you shouldn't be so generous when it comes to less targeted investments in soft skills? You have to do the math for yourself, but I will say this: Whatever investments you make, the key to protecting your investment is making your young employees full partners—co-investors—in the learning process. As long as they are actively learning skills they value (with your support) they are much less likely to think about leaving.
The general manager of a restaurant from a well-known chain recently shared this with me: “When we teach our team members customer service skills, obviously it's all about taking care of our customers. But a huge part of our emphasis is on the value to our employees as well. Sometimes, they don't realize at first that customer service skills are extremely valuable in any role in any organization. So we hammer away at the fact that every minute they spend learning and practicing customer service skills is not just an investment in this job but also an investment they are making in themselves. We need them to buy in, so we really sell it to them.” How does it work? “It really works because we really help the team members own it: Every day there is a quick team huddle, and in every meeting a different team member takes a turn leading a quick customer service lesson. They can take a lesson from our curriculum or they are free to create their own lessons. They find cool videos and articles and quotes, and some of them really get into it. We take this very seriously, so we recognize and reward team members when they go above and beyond, financially and otherwise. We often add the lessons they create to our curriculum, and we give them full credit as content creators. It creates a virtuous cycle: Some of them really get into it, and they make a point of actively practicing the techniques on the job and really showing off what they are learning. Of course, they are usually the ones who stay and become assistant managers and start moving up through the company.”
Lessons learned:
Remember that Gen Zers are highly accustomed to self-directed learning. If they are eager to learn something, you cannot hold them back in today's information environment. They will go out into the endless sea of information and people online and navigate their own course of links and sources. Before you know it, they will be surprising you with their thoughtfulness, originality, and engagement in the learning.
Whether you are hiring people to wait tables in a restaurant, dig ditches, or engage in high-level sales, if you can help them to own the learning process, they are going to be thinking more and more about how they do whatever it is they do. Remember, knowledge work is not about what you do but about how you do whatever it is you do. If you help them make whatever they are doing knowledge work by constantly trying to leverage soft skills in their work, they are going to become more and more invested in that work; more and more engaged; and better and better at their jobs.
“As soon as they join my team, I have new team members develop their own individualized learning plan for targeted technical and non-technical learning,” said one very smart manager in a large pharmaceutical company. “They need to learn our product line with all the technical specifications. But it's every bit as important that they learn how to show up very professional in their look and demeanor. They need to know how to get a doctor's attention and hold the doctor's attention. I want my reps to seem intelligent and sophisticated, not just knowledgeable about our products.”
The pharma manager continued, “The funny thing is that, with the technical stuff, I can drill that into their heads. But with the soft skills, that's more like getting in shape. I can't go running and do push-ups for you. You need to go to the gym if you are going to get in shape. So the individualized learning plans are really great when it comes to the soft skills. I have them map out their learning goals in detail. For every goal, I have them go out and do research and create a list of learning resources. Those resources can be books, videos, people in real life or in their online social networks, article links, websites, or really anything else. That process alone—of doing that research—has quite an impact. They learn so much just going out and researching the learning resources. Then I have them make a learning plan with concrete learning goals and specific lessons related to the goals. They keep a learning log of the lessons they've done, the work product involved, if any, the learning goals they've accomplished, and how the learning is making a real impact on their actual work. This also becomes a regular part of our team meetings—sharing learning resources and sharing lessons.”
What is the best part about this approach? “The best thing about this is that they do so much of the work of their own training. Plus, they are mining the Internet for learning resources, and usually the bulk of the resources they find are basically free. On top of that, they end up doing such a good job harnessing those resources, organizing them, and sharing them, that they are actually building up a great training library at practically no cost to the company. Some of the stuff they come up with is so good and so well targeted to what we need because they are motivated to find the right material to help them on the job. And they do most of it on their own time.”
This last section comes last, not because it is the least important, but rather because it is the most important. Whether you are in a large, complex organization with lots of resources or a tiny business where you are the chief cook and bottle washer, the most important element in bridging the soft skills gap is the human element.
If you are not an active champion of high priority soft skills behaviors in your sphere of influence and authority, then you can be sure that the young talent in your midst will not buy in. If key leaders are not walking the talk—and talking the walk—Gen Zers will simply roll their eyes at the best slogans and logos. No matter how vividly clear the messaging and training has been throughout the hiring and on-boarding process—even if key soft skill behaviors are part of their individual performance plans—if their leaders do not emulate the high priority behaviors themselves and emphasize them in their day-to-day management, Gen Zers will not believe the organization is serious. As much as they may seem to take their cues from peers or online sources, you can be sure that they will take their cues about what aspects of performance really matter from the authority figures with whom they interact most.
Sure, you need to get your young employees to own their soft skills learning process and make available lots of easy-to-use online resources so they can pursue their own self-directed learning. But that doesn't let you off the hook. You have to spend time with them—in person whenever possible—to lead them to the purposeful self-directed learning, and you have to spend time with them during the intervals between their self-directed learning sessions.
Remember: Gen Zers love grown-ups. They prefer to have a real person in the real world who is investing in their learning and growth—a real-life grown-up who is engaging with them, holding them accountable, and recognizing their success every step of the way. More important, the very nature of soft skills is such that they are very hard to develop without the help of another human being who can serve as an objective third-party observer and source of candid feedback. Ideally, that human being would be one who is a bit older and more experienced, perhaps one with greater influence and authority—one who can provide guidance, direction, and support.
What role are you—and other leaders in your organization—going to play in bridging the soft skills gap?
If you are leading, managing, or supervising any person on any project for any period of time, you have an obligation to provide regular guidance, direction, support, and coaching to that person on every aspect of that person's performance, including that person's performance on high priority soft skills behaviors. The problem is that it's so easy—in the day-to-day grind of work—to put these issues on the back burner. Most managers don't spend much time talking with their employees about their soft skills development, unless they are dealing with a specific instance of failure. Right? When do managers most often talk with their direct reports about matters of professionalism or critical thinking or followership? When an employee is late or dressed inappropriately or loses something or fails to follow through or makes a “stupid” mistake or curses at the wrong time or has a conflict with a customer or a co-worker . . . or something else that is a petty failure.
That's why managers often say things like, “Do I really have to talk to my employees about these things? They are adults. They should already know how to manage themselves and solve problems and play well with others.” Sorry. You really have no choice. If you are in charge of anybody, then it is part of your job.
At the very least, you must build it into your regular management routine. Talk about the high priority soft skills in team meetings and talk about them in your ongoing one-on-one dialogue with every single person you manage. Focus on the high priority behaviors in your organization, your team, in each role, or those that are particular focal points for particular individuals. Trumpet the broad performance standards regularly. Just like every other aspect of performance: Require it. Measure it. Reward people when they do it. Hold people to account when they don't.
Managers often ask me: “At what point can I back off on giving them so much attention?” My answer: “Whenever you want to start losing that employee's best efforts.”
Surely some Gen Zers need more attention than others. But they all need your attention. The superstars want to be recognized and rewarded, but they also want managers who are in a position to help them do more, better, and faster and earn more for their hard work. Low performers are the only ones who don't want their managers’ attention, but they need it more than anyone. And mediocre performers—the vast majority of employees who are somewhere in the middle of the performance spectrum— often don't know what they want from a manager. But the fastest way to turn a mediocre performer into a low performer is to leave that person alone without any guidance, direction, support, or coaching. Your job is to lift up all those employees and help them do more work—faster and better every step of the way. Not just because that's good for business, but also because continuous improvement is the key to keeping Gen Zers focused and motivated.
Gen Zers want managers who know who they are, know what they are doing, and are in a position to help. They want managers who spend enough time with them to teach them the tricks and the shortcuts, warn them of pitfalls, and help them solve problems. They want managers who are strong enough to support them through bad days and counsel them through difficult judgment calls. They want to know you are keeping track of their successes and helping them get better and better every day. That's what I call a “teaching style manager.”
Being a “teaching style manager” means:
Teaching-style management is also how you can help your most ambitious Gen Zers who are so eager to take on more and more challenges and responsibilities. Gen Zers often tell us, “I can do so much more than I am doing. I want to do so much more than I am doing. But I don't want to do more of the same. I want to do something new and different.” While this desire is a valuable impulse on the part of self-starting Gen Zers, it also poses two significant challenges to their immediate managers:
Don't fall for the myth that Gen Zers only want to learn from computers. That's nonsense. Remember, they love grown-ups. They want to learn from people. They want to learn from you. You will never really take the place of a parent, but if you can truly become a trusted teaching style manager, that is about as close as you can get.
If you want to take it the next level, go beyond regular performance coaching. Become a true champion of soft skills by becoming a teaching style leader. Make teaching/learning the soft skills basics an explicit part of your mission and goals for your team going forward.
I know this seems like way too much to take on for some managers. Maybe you are thinking: “I am not a teacher or trainer. And I certainly don't have the time—nor do my employees—to spend a bunch of time in soft skills training.” Beware of this thinking. If you are reading this book, you are probably struggling with the soft skills gap in your organization or on your team.
The second half of this book is dedicated to helping you teach the missing basics—complete with step-by-step lesson plans. Imagine the impact you could have if you dedicated just one or two hours per week to building up the soft skills of your team. In just one or two hours per week, you can make them aware, make them care, and help them learn the missing basics one by one—one step at a time. You can build them up and make them so much better.