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    Engage Your Workforce: 10 key questions for successful managers
    Engage Your Workforce: 10 key questions for successful managers
    Engage Your Workforce: 10 key questions for successful managers
    Ebook184 pages1 hour

    Engage Your Workforce: 10 key questions for successful managers

    By Stéphane Simard

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    About this ebook

    Last year, the 100 highest-paid managers made, on average, 40 000 $ a day. Why should we work flat out for a manager who doesn't even know who we are, what we want and what we can do for the organisation?

    Managers, discover ten fundamental questions that your employees are asking themselves and that you should absolutely answer if you want to trigger a burning desire to excel.

    In a pragmatic style, the author suggests a series of best-practices adapted to the reality of small and medium-sized enterprises.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBadPress
    Release dateAug 12, 2017
    ISBN9781507140772
    Engage Your Workforce: 10 key questions for successful managers

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      Book preview

      Engage Your Workforce - Stéphane Simard

      Engage Your Workforce

      10 key questions for successful managers

      Stéphane Simard, B.A., B.A.A., CRHA, CSP

      Thank you, my family, for your love, my friends, for your presence, my partners, for your support and my clients, for your trust.

      Table of contents

      Prologue

      Introduction

      Question 1

      Are the manager's values in agreement with my values?

      Walk the talk

      The great seduction

      It's the intention that matters

      Question 2

      Is the manager really interested in who I am?

      The organisation at the service of human beings

      Having goals or making sense?

      The liberating work

      Question 3

      Are divergent opinions taken into account here?

      The masks come off

      The imperfect manager

      Hell is other people!

      Connecting with the others

      1 + 1 = 3

      Question 4

      Can people here trust each other or are they rather treated as if at daycare?

      Just like in day care!

      Question 5

      If I don't come back to work tomorrow, will that make a difference to somebody?

      A business that is meaningful

      Helping others: a source of happiness

      A drop in the ocean

      Question 6

      Will this job allow me to grow even more (to expand my horizons, develop new skills, face stimulating challenges...)?

      Always more!

      As if by magic

      Bringing the future into the present

      Question 7

      Is professional development possible here without ruining one's health or personal life?

      Four hats, one head only

      Planned absenteeism 

      Question 8

      To what extent is this organisation really concerned with people's well-being?

      Symbiosis and parasites

      Fair remuneration

      52 forms of recognition

      Paying it forward

      Question 9

      Would it be possible for me to benefit from better conditions or more challenges elsewhere?

      Adjusting one's glasses

      Never try to teach a pig to sing

      Nothing is ever cast in stone

      Making choices

      Taking responsibility for one's choices

      Question 10

      What can we do when dealing with a manager who lies?

      Doubting is a signal

      Mind + heart = happiness!

      Setting off

      Stop being afraid

      Conclusion

      Prologue

      June 2001

      I finally get my dream job: operations manager at an important commercial printing company with sales of about 70 million dollars. I am in charge of a group of fifty both non-unionized and unionized employees in three different departments.

      My journey there had been no easy ride at all and had required many sacrifices. Being recruited after graduating from École des Hautes études commerciales, Montreal's well-known Business School, within an internship program for university graduates, the idea was to become exposed to as many different challenges as possible so as to create a mid-term succession plan. There were about thirty people in the beginning but only four or five of us remained until the end.

      Joining the company as an intern with a magnificent annual salary of $ 23,000 without any of the usual employee benefits, I subsequently occupied six different positions in five factories scattered throughout the four corners of the province of Quebec, hence the need to relocate so often. All this required a lot of flexibility from my girlfriend as well as long moments of solitude.

      Back in Montreal after an exile of about three years, I find myself one step away from my goal to become an operations manager and I am informed that the position that I so very much desire will very soon be vacated and that I am the number one candidate. 

      Finally, a game of musical chairs generated by the upcoming closing down of a facility favours a more experienced manager who was thus expected to occupy the operations manager's position for a short period of time while waiting for his transfer. I have probably more experience than he does in operations but I understand this temporary situation. Meanwhile, I become more involved in the decision-making process so as to prepare myself to take over the job.

      Still candidate number one, I am invited, by our vice-president, to a face-to-face lunch during which, I believe, he will announce me that I will soon get the job. I instead find out that there are some reservations about my ability to fill the position (ouch...) I can't remember what I ate but I precisely remember the 10 minutes of silence in his car on our way back to the factory.

      The position is finally open and an external candidate, an older accountant without experience in operations is selected to fill the position. The guy is hopeless (let's just say that I am a bit biased but well...) After compensating for my former manager's lack of experience for several months, I find myself in an even worse situation. I tell myself that if management thinks that this guy has more potential than I do to fill this position, then they don't know me well enough. Unless it is me who knows too little about myself? After so many relocations, the 50 hours working weeks, the late night employee meetings, my pager and my mobile phone, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I deserve an employer who knows how to acknowledge my dedication and my talent. But what is then my real talent?

      Therefore, I free myself from this whirl of adrenaline of the printing company, feeling bitter but also sad to leave my colleagues, my employees and my friends. After a few months of managing projects in a bank division, I find myself terribly bored. The problem is that it's a new division and there are not many projects to manage... As someone who is used to constantly be on the front line putting out fires, I find myself confined to the barracks, surfing the Internet all day long, doing competitive monitoring.

      By some happy coincidence, I bump into one of my former managers, who is now the general manager of another printing company, and who finally offers me the job that I was dreaming about: operations manager.

      Beginnings are difficult: I lose about two thirds of my customer service representatives in the first year. I had become the turnover king. I do my best to support my employees but as in any other chain, we all depend on the weakest link. In this case, it was the production department: old-fashioned equipment, poorly trained employees and inexperienced managers. The challenge in operations is to make sure you can supply everything that the production needs so as to do its job well and to make sure you deliver what the customer requested. In our case, this was more to announce bad news: delays, quality related problems, errors...

      After a year marked by lay-offs, voluntary resignations, employees experiencing burnout or having drug addiction problems and even a suicide attempt by one of our supervisors, things seem to finally settle down. Our staff turnover rate is in decline: we all gain experience and we have better players in place. None of this makes me predict the announcement that my manager is about to make.

      After several years in this organisation, I had learnt that you had to be suspicious about Friday afternoon meetings behind closed doors, in your manager's office... Without too much introduction or too many explanations, my manager announces me that I will no longer be operations manager and that I will be replaced by the sales manager who was deemed incapable of delivering results in another factory owned by the group. I am in shock. Just when we were starting to get this factory out of trouble, after all efforts, the justified complaints of my spouse, who was now pregnant with our third child, concerning my time spent at work... I am being demoted and asked to think about it over the weekend. I return to my office feeling devastated. An hour later, my successor is already participating in a team meeting on a new project with me and one of my employees. I spent the weekend with a lump in my throat, feeling heartbroken and being under the impression that I had been betrayed.

      I spent the following week cleaning up my office, which generated several questions from my employees (as I was rather the messy type), but the official announcement of my replacement is not due until the following Friday (in the afternoon, of course: this allows enough time for things to calm down but it ruins a lot of people's weekend...)

      My employees were thus summoned in a meeting room where my successor had to make the announcement himself, my manager being busy with making a similar announcement in another department. I think he made this choice because he was afraid, and rightly so, of my employees' reaction. I vaguely remember the new operations manager's explanations to his new employees. He is a smooth talker, I believe he talked about the World Trade Center incident in New York and some other unrelated reason to justify the change. I only speak for a few moments. After two sentences, I have to stop so as to avoid bursting into tears (my ego does not often allow it...) Completely appalled, two employees leave the room in tears.

      During the following days, the employees take it in turns to come to my office and tell me how much they were sorry. Two recently promoted team leaders announce me that they are giving up their promotion in sign of protest.

      In the short term, the future looks grim

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