Dave Mitchell uses his two-decade career in corporate HR to coach businesses on improving company cultures and reaching peak performance. And he says he’s not afraid to slay some dragons when it comes to tools many businesses may rely on, but don’t provide the service leaders are seeking.
“There are some things that we’ve adopted over the years that really aren’t particularly useful and I think in some cases even detrimental to our performance,” he says.
For example, he encourages leaders to stop using employee surveys.
“It’s just a waste of money. It’s offensive, and it does more harm than good,” Mitchell says. “Employee surveys don’t fix the problem. To be a great leader and reach peak performance, you have to get feedback in a more genuine and immediate way.”
He says today, leaders need to become more anticipatory managers—and identify and address problems much quicker.
“Leaders need to be plugged into what’s happening on a daily basis,” he says. “The people that have authority need to be better aware of what’s really happening and the people that know what’s happening have to have a conduit to educate those people that have the ability to make change.”
Mitchell has noticed a large trend of too much distance between managers and the work being done. This has created a dangerous gap for problems to linger, grow larger and cause major issues.
“As such, leaders must build in systems in their culture that reconciles that distance,” he says. “The fact that leaders don’t know what’s going on, doesn’t mean they don’t have plenty to do, so they often wait until they hear something.”
Mitchell uses “people preventative maintenance” a method to identify problems while they are still small—before they are exacerbated.
“We have a tendency just to wait until something becomes so obnoxious to the employee that they’re willing to storm into someone’s office and complain about it, and by that time, this is probably beyond the tipping point,” he says.
He says more and more organizations are using this method and building in the mechanisms to make problems known earlier.
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