5 - Leadership Management with Tucson Old Pueblo Credit Union's Marianne Scarzello

Masters Of Employee Development

Time and dedication are the biggest challenges faced by developing leaders. Being a leader requires you to balance your time between your leadership duties and your personal life. You need to ensure employee development and well-being, while also making sure that their individual goals align with the organization’s overall objectives.

In this episode, Mike is joined by Marianne Scarzello, an internationally recognized speaker on leadership, management, service and customer relations. She shares tips on employee development, interdepartmental communication, and valuable advice for new CEOs and HR representatives for developing a productive work culture.

EPISODE 5 SUMMARY & HIGHLIGHTS

What are some challenges to good leadership?

6:20

Time and dedication are the biggest challenges that we observe in developing leaders. Leaders should also make sure that the employees are given adequate time to attend training sessions and to learn new skills. Sometimes all the work can be overwhelming, so you need to break it into step by step. The leaders should also make sure that there is a proper two way communication between them and their employees.

What are some steps you can take to make sure that the employees

have adequate resources for their development?

8:02

I generally take a long walk around the office during which I interact with the employees. I ask them about their work and what work based challenges they are facing at the moment. Those conversations can go a long way when it comes to understanding the situation and getting a better idea of the current scenario.

What criteria do you look for when selecting someone for the team?

10:31

They need to have a drive to learn and grow. It’s important for them to prove that they need to make the current situation more efficient. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. The person needs to take the effort to improve and make the necessary changes. Another criterion to look at is interdepartmental communication. That’s a huge factor when it comes to smooth running of the organization. If you feel like your team is doing something that is not necessary, you need to intervene and make changes. So that extra communication and the willingness to go and talk with other teams is a big criteria for us.

How do you consistently train people?

12:34

In the case of supervisors, I constantly ask them to get feedback. I train them on getting feedback. We are not getting anywhere if we don’t get adequate feedback, especially when it comes to training employees. You've got to understand how to make your team be the best that they can be. It’s a challenge to train to ask feedback, because no entry level employee is going to give negative feedback voluntarily.

Every year we have a day dedicated to training where we go to another location. We work on communication and efficiency. The recent activity we did was where we had each team write down one of their drawback points, which they didn't know how to fix. Then we took that piece of paper and we gave it to the next team. They wrote down a potential solution from that point of view. We did that three more times. So by the end, we had full potential solutions that we could then discuss. I think that this actually brought people to look at the whole company as the team rather than the individual units.

What is some advice you would like to give a fresh HR director or a CEO?

19:00

You need to focus on the individuals rather than only the end results. You have company goals as well as

individual goals. You need to learn how to align those two.

According to Dr. Daniel Pink, the three elements of intrinsic motivation are: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Those three things create a system that helps employees be engaged.

KEY QUOTES:

07:08-07:20

“It's very important for us as leaders to make sure that our employees are given the time and told, this can wait, let's do this training first and then we'll go back to that work.”

11:03-11:11

“We’re not perfect, no one's perfect. We build things from scratch and then find out that we need to change certain things because it's not working very well.”

14:06-14:20

“You've got to understand how to make your team be the best that they can be. Sometimes that means receiving that feedback from the employees and saying, okay, this worked well and this did not work well.”

RESOURCES MENTIONED ON THE PODCAST

Dr. Daniel Pink

CONNECT WITH MARIANNE

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CONNECT WITH MIKE

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