Help your employees obtain FAME. What is FAME? FAME is an acronym for feedback, attitude, motivation, and engagement. Why did we create this acronym FAME? The reason we created it is every employee deserves the opportunity to be recognized and rewarded for their FAME and FAME can really come in the form of these four attributes.
Feedback is a loaded gun for many people. Often when a boss calls an employee into his or her office and states they need to see them, the employee's typical response is uh-oh what did I do wrong. Their relationship with the boss' office is usually one of I'm about to receive constructive feedback. Here's the challenge with providing feedback while working with any type of employee. We have not yet taught employees how to receive feedback, why feedback is valuable, why they should seek feedback. Typically, when a boss or somebody for that matter provides feedback, people often will analyze how the feedback was given versus what was actually said. The key business imperative is to teach employees how to receive feedback and, more importantly, why it's valuable to seek feedback.
Attitude is a choice, and is something that can be cultivated, but, sadly, in the business world this is often something that we need to correct as HR leaders or managers of employees. Rarely, if ever, will you hear about a manager bringing an employee into his or her office praising someone's positive attitude, when, in fact, they will spend 99% of their time dealing with attitude only when they're trying to correct a negative one. What if we taught specific skill sets and decision making sets that allowed employees to adopt a positive upbeat, energetic, engaging attitude. Attitude is one of those areas that tend to be dealt with only when it rears its ugly head. In this case, a negative attitude. What if we taught employees how to build their own positive attitude for career development?
Motivation is one of the most common areas that managers will struggle with is an employee's personal motivation. The key questions the manager needs to be aware of on an employee by employee basis is what motivates each and every employee. What is the thing they want to get out of the job? What do they want to get out of their career? What are their aspirations? What are they trying to achieve? Motivation can really be divided into two fundamental levels. In the book, "The Progress Principle" by Theresa Amabile she states there are two levels of motivation. First, there is an extrinsic motivation where somebody is motivated by the next step or climbing the corporate ladder. Second, somebody who is intrinsically motivated is more motivated by doing the job or the task at hand to a high performance level. The reason this is so important is if we coach someone who's intrinsically motivated with the opportunity to get promoted, we may be creating an emotional disconnect unnecessarily. Last, often we need to find out not only what motivates our employees, but give our employees a platform to share their motivations, so there's commonality and clarification of true employee wishes.
Engagement has many definitions. A high level definition of engagement is the following, engagement is an employee's willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty for the betterment of the organization using their discretionary effort. I realize there are many other definitions, but if you think about this definition and if you could literally help people receive feedback, improve their attitude, and ultimately become self-motivated, engagement really becomes a secondary issue.
In summary, if we provide managers with the skill sets to coach the FAME and provide opportunities to employees to obtain FAME, workplace cultures would be much better off. Understanding the target approaches necessary to work with employees, you'll have a plan that will allow you to create the type of workplace culture you've been dreaming of.
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