Recently, I had the privilege to be interviewed by the one and only Jack Canfield. Jack holds a Guinness World Record for having seven books on the New York Times best-seller list at the same time. He is best known for his Chicken Soup for the Soul series. We talked about leadership, culture of Empowerment, USC and Coaching.
We also discussed the 5 steps to attract and engage talent:
- Invest in developping your employees. Talented people want to be developed and invested in so that they can grow and contribute significantly to their team and their organization. Make it a priority at all levels in your organization.
- Don’t fall in the expertise gap. Emphasize on context-driven leadership where managers are valued for their strategic input and their ability to bring out collective intelligence rather than their operational expertise and ability to have all the answers. Define your Unique Strategic Contribution (USC).
- Create the opportunity for real conversations. Have the courage to discuss sensitive issues with empathy, constructively and put them on the agenda of your meetings. You will thus spare the subsequent corridor conversations, conflict avoidance, harmful to your climate. And you will build trust.
- Train your leadership muscles, especially those of the Leader-coach. The leader-coach asks questions rather than giving the answers and leads people to find their own answers, solutions and ideas to solve their challenges. This will encourage the empowerment and commitment of your employees.
- Have a « roadmap », what I call your Team Contract. In defining your team destination, your goals, your measures of success and most importantly, the behaviors that you commit to having among yourselves to reach your destination, you will create a lot of alignment and motivation within your troops!