Leaders, Great Employee Attitude is Essential, Not Negotiable | #Leadership
by Kate Nasser | 8 Comments »
Leaders, great employee attitude is essential for business success. Of course there is much you must do to attract the skills and talents your organization needs. Yet, it is also critical to attract and hire great employee attitude as well. To do that, you and your teams must first define what is a great attitude.
Great Employee Attitude is Essential! Image by Antefixus21 via Flickr.
A great employee attitude is …
- Giving
- Helpful
- Contributory
- Positive
- Realistic
- Reasonable
- Resilient
A great attitude isn’t …
- Disinterested
- Drowsy & lethargic
- Pessimistic
- Head in the sand
- Extreme rose colored view
- Entitled and demanding
- Greedy and self-absorbed
Leaders often ask me: What if the organization is going through difficulty? Is it still appropriate to expect great employee attitude? Yes as long as you are respecting employees, inspiring and engaging them, and removing obstacles they cannot.
An employee who uses difficult times to justify a bad attitude is taking you, the team, and the organization down. How does it help to allow this attitude to burden everyone? Success is tough enough to achieve; it’s impossible without great employee attitude.
What Must You Do to Model a Great Attitude
- Empower them — for real. A great employee attitude needs to be used for something great.
- Breed accountability not blame
- Inspire them everyday. Be a buoy — not the buoy!
- Listen when they have problems. Ask what resources they have and/or need to resolve the trouble. This empathizes without approving of a bad attitude.
It isn’t cold and heartless to expect great attitude as long as you have one too. Consider what bad attitudes do in …
- Teamwork, bad attitudes can destroy good ones.
- Customer service delivery, bad attitudes destroy revenue, customer loyalty, and sometimes the brand.
- Leadership, bad attitudes create a toxic culture that can take years to undo even after a leadership change.
Your organization can achieve greatness, productivity, and profit — even in the toughest times — when you lead, model, and expect positive can-do attitudes.
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™
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Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.
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I would add, Passion, and Compassion, Loving what you do makes all the difference, and being able to help others succeed, even co-workers should be praised. Because a competitive work environment can turn bad. Employees should show compassion for others instead of trying to rise above them at no costs, which many do. And Employers should promote compassion in teamwork and not set the stage for hostility amongst their workers.
Kimb,
You have added a great dimension to this list. When compassion and support among team members is modeled and supported in the leadership and culture, it’s much easier for everyone to maintain a great attitude!
Many thanks. I see your work experience & emotional intelligence shining through.
Kate
I would say Empathy and Forgiveness for coworkers when they make mistakes and for external customers when things go wrong or when they are having a bad time with a service or product offering. So often it’s easy for us to make judgements of our customers, especially when they are irate or treat us undeservedly. Sometimes it’s just a case of walking a mile in their shoes and trying to understand and empathize with why they may be upset about something. Often times you find out that it had nothing to do with the product or service at all. It may have been something that happened to them before they came to your business. And as for the coworkers, it pays to forgive if they make a mistake and not hold it against them or rehash the issue again and again in a totally different situation. After all we are all continuously learning and making mistakes is a vital part of the curve.
Empathy for customers is essential Charmaine. I very much agree. If a coworker is having a bad day, team members can help out. If however it is a consistently bad attitude, it’s time for that person to find a job where they won’t inflict pain on customers.
Many people change careers and live much happier lives. Protecting and rewarding an employee that has a bad attitude toward the job doesn’t help that person nor the team nor the customers.
In my mind there is not such thing as “bad service”. If it’s bad, it’s not really service. Customers don’t call up to be and give money to deal with someone who has a bad attitude. 🙂
Kate
Supervisors who have demonstrated a reciprocal interest in me and my work demonstrated they care. When leaders show a sincere interest in the employee is a huge motivation for the employee to produce more, rather than just focusing on what is produced.
Dear Gary,
There is great impact of human interest. I agree that team leaders who get to know their team members can influence behavior — in most cases. I wish it were 100% true.
Through so many years of consulting, I have seen team leaders believe that they can turn around any attitude and in the process bring the entire organization down.
Team leaders (supervisors) must also focus on end results and consider the effect of a truly bad attitude on the organization. There are even leaders who believe that a basic positive attitude is what they hire. Why should they pay someone who is habitually late, constantly pessimistic, self-absorbed, and unhelpful?
I’m all for initial discussions to truly understand what is going on with a team member. Meanwhile, the team member must understand what attitude is expected and essential for the team to succeed.
Let’s care about everyone not just one person who chooses a bad attitude.
Kate
What I have learned over many years is that Customer Service is not a department. It is, in and of itself, an attitude and it is the way you do business. Just as employers set requirements regarding distinct industry experience, they must also set requirements regarding attitude. The latter is more often than not, considerably more important. You can teach most people, most industry skills. The attitude must be innate. Your business depends on it.
With that said, when a good employee with a good attitude has a bad day, it is imperative and worthwhile to address it with the employee, and work together to resolve the issue. The right employee with benefit from this and go back to his/her positive manner. The wrong employee will not. Furthermore, most areas of any business need to be staffed with employees who understand the importance of customer service and positive attitude.
Anything less will infect the rest of the team and eventually will impact customers and the bottom line. Lastly, customer service and positive attitude are imperative skills that must be nurtured and developed like any other skill. Just like we take Excel classes to keep up with the latest versions, we must take time to fine tune our service skills and attitude as changing environments will affect even the best employees.
Moral of the story: Do not reward bad attitude with the privilege of employment at your place of business.
Thanks Kate.
Many thanks Michele. So well said. Don’t reward a bad attitude. Customer service is an attitude not a function or a department.
I have said for years, if you are delivering a bad attitude to customers, you are not delivering customer service!
Best wishes, regards, and thanks,
Kate