We humans often think of ourselves as superior beings; the only beings capable of rational thought and invention. So I was intrigued to read in Times recently that far from being bird brains, crows are actually quite bright.

The environment around us is changing. But imagine what it must be like for our feathered friends! There they are minding their own business, picking up worms and insects, when suddenly a bunch of mammals come along and start building motorway service stations and chasing all the worms away. But crows are smart and innovative.

Crows eat a wide variety of food including insects, worms and nuts. As roads covered many of the areas that crows frequent, they soon realised that these gave them a new opportunity. Crows in Japan have learned, through a process of trial and error, that they can drop nuts onto a road and have cars do the hard work of cracking the nuts for them! It must have taken a lot of experimentation to discover that dropping the nuts at a traffic intersection meant they could retrieve the nuts while the cars were stationary, without risking death.

So what can we learn from their approach?

Experiment and be Persistent (even when you fail)

Crows eventually discovered that nuts dropped at traffic lights were more safely retrieved. But they must have tried a variety of different places before this, and probably risked their lives in trying to remove nuts from moving traffic.

We too need to test our ideas through a process of trial and error before we discover an effective solution. Crows had no way of knowing that they would ever succeed in retrieving a nut safely, but kept going anyway. We should too. Don’t assume that because it has always been done ‘that way’ that it can’t be improved on. One way to do this is to look at something you assume can’t be changed, and explore what the impact would be if it did.

Collaborate

In addition to crushing nuts with cars, crows have learned to extract tasty morsels of food we’ve thrown away in rubbish bins. Inside a rubbish bin is not a nice place, even for a Crow. Instead, they have learned how to collaborate to pull up the bin liner and toss out the contents to a waiting pal.

We too can collaborate to both find ideas and to implement them. we can collaborate with other businesses to see how we might share skills and experience to to benefit of both.

Use Tools

Crows eat all sorts of nuts, but use cars as tools to crush walnuts. Walnuts were eaten by crows long before cars were available, but was hard work. So they found using a tool made it easier. In another example, they use discarded cigarette butts as an insect repellant!

Using tools for creative thinking makes innovating less effort and easier for us too.

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Mentoring is a powerful personal development and empowerment tool. It is:

• An effective way of helping people to progress their business or careers
• A partnership between two people (Mentor and Mentee) where the Mentor has relevant and useful experience to the Mentee
• A helpful relationship based upon mutual trust and respect

Benefits to the Mentee

Having a Mentor gives you someone to help you think about your options, set goals and support you to stay focused in the pursuit of those goals. You can discuss issues in confidence with an independent person who can provide a different perspective and build your confidence.

A Mentor provides inspiration and support, enabling you to believe in yourself and achieve your goals and objectives.

Good Mentors

• Have broad experience of  a business area similar to yours
• Check for any conflict of interest
• Have Empathy: the ability to see the world through your eyes
• Ask questions: open questions, probing questions, but not leading questions
• Listen Actively
• Suggest not tell
• Manage your expectations about what they can and can’t do
• Agree goals and objectives
• Boost your confidence

Bear in mind

• Mentoring does not guarantee success. But it will certainly help towards achieving it.
• A mentor will not have exactly the same experiences as you. They will have different experiences, which will give you more options.
• Mentee drives the partnership. You set the pace.
• Mentee takes responsibility for actions. You make the decisions.
• Mentors don’t find customers! They can however, suggest strategies for attracting them.
• Mentoring partnerships should last for a finite time

A Mentor can help

• You get an outside/different perspective on a difficult  business problem
• Talk you through the different options and help you to decide which is the best one
• Give you a broader perspective on your business options
• Give you a sounding board for new ideas
• Bring your knowledge of key business related areas up to date
• Develop your skills and knowledge
• Help you learn from someone else’s successes and mistakes.

I’ve been mentoring business owners and high value individuals for over 10 years, mostly in technology and engineering.  They all tell me how worthwhile it is to have a mentor!

Why do you need rewards?

Surely having a job and being paid is enough?! Well no, it doesn’t quite work like that.

According to HRmagazine.co.uk & Hyphen:

• A third of employees would take a pay-cut in favour of more annual leave
• Career prospects are more important than money for graduate jobseekers
• A quarter (25%) of 16-24 year olds chose their employer based on number of holidays
• Nearly three quarters (70%) of more than 1,000 employees polled feel their employer either takes their efforts for granted or expects them to feel grateful for having a job

An effective compensation & benefits strategy is an opportunity for an organisation to differentiate itself from its competitors, and will make a significant positive difference to an organisation’s success.

Continuing the theme of  motivating people without having to spend too much money, here are 5 key ways you as a Manager can motivate YOUR team:

• When individuals, or the team, do something well i.e. something beyond their normal responsibitlities, find a way to congratulate them. This doesn’t have to be in the form of extra cash – it could be a public thankyou, a letter of thanks, a day off or even a voucher for a dinner etc. It does have to be immediate however, so that, psychologically, they connect the reward with the postive behaviour you want to encourage.
• Get to know everyone in your team, and get to know, and respect, one special strength they each have. It may not be immediately obvious, but it will help you get to know them in a positive way, that will come over as an afirmation and encouragement. It will also make them feel appreciated as a person.
• Involve your team in planning. This will help them understand the purpose of what they individually do, and the connection between their success and the busisiness’s success. You may also get great ideas that you hadn’t thought of.
• Be enthusiastic and excitied about your business. If you aren’t, then your team won’t be either.
• Be flexible. As long as the work gets done on time, it may not matter if they have to work slightly different hours to suit their personal circumstances or work from home. Try to focus on the results, not on hours worked too.

What do YOU do to motivate YOUR team?

Or perhaps it isn’t going well and you are now looking for someone to blame.

Stop!

Effective Managers take time to review what is going well and what could be improved going forward without assigning blame. They know that assigning blame kills motivation and shuts down the improvement process. They also know that a simple and sincere ‘thankyou’ to individuals in the team makes all the difference.

Effective Managers also know that if the team really isn’t performing as they should, then the responsibility lies with them. By asking the team for suggestions about what to do differently next time, they know they personally will learn valuable lessons.

An effective Manager needs to:

• Review with your team what is working and what isn’t
• Be prepared to change
• Focus on long term success

People work faster and smarter if they feel that they are really part of a team.

Although I’ve been a manager for many years, it took a little while to realise that my team knew stuff I didn’t, and could do stuff I couldn’t. Strangely, while they were also techies, they didn’t always see the world the way I did either. I’m generally an extrovert, so like to meet with people and chew over ideas. Most of my team were introverts and liked to pore over detailed options and didn’t get the point of my open ‘workshop’ meetings. So I had to find a way that worked for all of us. First though, I had to have a 121 meeting with each person to find out about what motivated them. This helped enormously with agreeing objectives. Note, I said ‘agreeing’ not ‘defining’! I was very surprised just how thoughtful and creative many of them were, outside of a workshop.

An effective Manager needs to:

• Understand what motivates each individual member of their team
• Value diversity and creativity
• Focus on creating a whole that is greater than the individual parts

A manager’s listening skills are key to team building, motivation, creating enthusiasm and mutual respect. It’s very easy for a manager to assume that they know everything, and that everyone understands what they mean.

As some of you may know, I’m a member of Toastmasters International where we learn not only to speak well, but also to give feedback.We do this by writing down our feedback and standing up for 2-3 minutes and giving a precis of what went well and ideas for improvement. This truly focusses the mind on effective listening! Getting feedback from a great listener is incredibly motivating and confidence building.

An effective Manager needs to:

• Actively listen
• Put themselves in the other person’s shoes
• Focus on mutual understanding

But thinking win-win does NOT mean being being super nice NOR does it mean folding at the first sign of conflict. Win-win is about cooperation and sharing.

A few years ago, I was promoted to manage 2  merged teams. The only problen was that one of the teams already had a manager who would now report to me. To say he was unhappy is an understatement! After almost 2 weeks, he had managed to excuse himself from every meeting I  attended; in fact he didn’t speak to me beyond hello in the entire 2 weeks. Eventually I cornered him and told him we needed to discuss how we would work together. I chose the office cafe when I knew no-one else would be there and let him rant and rave for about 20 minutes, only nodding and saying that I understood his ire and frustration. Once he’d let off steam I asked him whether HE had any ideas for how we could make this work. After 2 hours we came up with a joint plan, which included me giving up some of my responsibility to him, but not so it would undermine my position and him pledging his support for me as his manager. When we eventually went our separate ways over a year later, he was my greatest advocate.

Effective Managers seek not just to deliver the defined objectives at any cost, but to gain the maximum mutual benefit to all involved. They know that in always keeping the desire for a mutually satisfactory solution in mind, they have a much greater chance of being successful. They know that this may mean sacrifices, but also that they must stand up for important issues too. They know that this means striking a balance between courage and consideration for others.

An effective Manager needs to:

• Build relationships
• Collaborate rather than compete
• Focus on maximum success for ALL participants

This really brought home to me the importance of distinguishing between important and urgent, and the impact of NOT doing it. Effective Managers will know what the wider business priorities are, and will be able to judge whether an ‘urgent’ request is actually important, or whether it can wait. And be able to manage those who can’t tell the difference.

An effective Manager needs to:

• Understand what’s important
• Delegate appropriately
• Focus the team on what’s important

I wasn’t especially fit, but having been brought up on a steady diet of Bruce Lee films, I had the romantic vision of being able to defend myself against all possible physical threats. Well, I did work at Waterloo at the time.I set myself the target of achieving this goal by the time I was 3o. Which gave me just over 3 years. It seemed an impossible goal at the time but, by telling people it became real an,d amazingly I achieved it with 3  months to spare. It wasn’t easy, and I failed my black belt exam the first time. But by keeping the goal clear in my mind, and my mind on my plan, I did finally reached my goal on a cold February day in Bristol.

This made me realise that you can achieve anything, provided you set yourself a goal that you truly believe in, create a viable plan and work hard to achieve it. Afterall, if you don’t have a goal, how will you know when you’ve got there?

Managers are responsible for the achievements of  other people – their team. You are not there to DO, but to produce results via your team.  This also means you need to involve your team in agreeing the goals at the detailed level, but it is your job to create the mission and ensure that you have a stretching, existing and relevant goal.

As far as possible, define the goals in terms that can be measured. Then, as changes are proposed (and they will be!), you have a set of well understood and defined criteria against which to measure the impact and relevance of changes. And there will be changes!

An effective Manager needs to:

• Know the priorities
• Create defined and measurable golas and objectives
• Focus on the desired outcomes