When it's time to get managers prepared for a new or challenging role, I have often suggested using tip sheets, discussion guides, and decision guides. FAQs, another suggestion, are familiar to everyone, but the other tools may not be familiar, so I thought I'd do a quick overview to help you develop your own manager tools.
TIP SHEETS -- These are written to highlight actions managers need to take. The introduction should be brief: three or four introductory sentences of rationale, in one or two paragraphs, to give a reason why the manager should take the steps you are highlighting. The wording should be as concise as possible.
Here is an illustrative excerpt from a manager tip sheet for a career development program:
Developing our people ensures we have the workforce we need to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Making development a priority is great for our employees and it’s great for our business. You are your employees' first resource for career discussions. Here are tips to support employee development in your department.
- Make development a priority -- Provide ongoing feedback and help employees find development opportunities that match their goals and interests. Commit to action plans.
- Mark your calendar -- Meet with your employees once per quarter to discuss their career development goals and progress. Build time to have these discussions and to serve as an overall career resource for your team.
and so on . . .
DISCUSSION GUIDES -- Normally, a discussion guide gives managers the suggested spoken word to encourage consistent terminology and explanations. Provide these scripts to managers when you think they feel resistance to certain discussions. The script can help them prepare, which can put them at ease. Plus they can look down at the script while they are speaking if they freeze at any point. A discussion guide is also useful if you are asking managers to cover a lot of detail -- they can use it as a checklist.
Here's a Sales Comp excerpt:
- I’m glad we can all get together today because we have a number of important things to talk about. I’m sure you’re eager to find out how the new Sales Plan will work for you.
- We’re here to go over the Plan in detail, and give you some additional communications materials so you can continue to be briefed after this meeting.
- Your Manager has been involved with finalizing the plan and preparing for the rollout. S/he will act as your local expert after this meeting and s/he will be sure that, in this meeting, we are covering all the bases that are important to you and your market.
- Let’s kick this off by talking about your new base salary, your new two-tier commission rates and your target billing revenue number.
- The purpose of the meeting is to make sure you know how the new plan applies to you, so be sure to ask questions along the way, as they come to you.
and so on . . .
Here's another style with a Sales Comp purpose. You can see that it doesn't provide exact wording, but it can be used to guide each detail of the conversation. Take a look:
- Reinforce that the compensation study has confirmed that our compensation is competitive, and the new compensation plan practices are common in companies of our size, client relationships and sales objectives.
- Explain how the new plan supports our Company's Vision to set the standard of excellence for our industry.
- Encourage salespeople to see the value of the new aspects of their compensation: having base salary, a Growth Commission and key sales targets.
and so on . . .
Recognize that you are not emphasizing consistent terminology or even consistent definitions in this model. That can be a problem with compensation communications as people tend to make up their own, sometimes misguided, explanations for how compensation works. But you know best which version would be most likely adapted by your managers.
DECISION GUIDES -- We are often asking managers to stop, change gears, and make complex decisions in the midst of demanding business pressures. When we ask them to go "off-line," it can be helpful to give them a guide for thinking through the pros and cons of key employee decisions especially if you are introducing changes to your programs. Developing a decision guide is time consuming because you are gathering all the resources you can share.
The standard content for a decision guide either guides the manager through the ideas and scripting for issues like the following, or walks the manager through her/his own answers to them:
- Set the objectives for the discussion.
- Identify what success will look like when the discussion is complete.
- Identify what the person will feel positive about.
- Determine where you will meet resistance.
- Outline approach you will take in the meeting.
and so on . . .
Managers may actually thank you for these resources. I'm not promising, but it's happened to me.
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.
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