It’s hard to soar with eagles when you’re being pecked to death by ducks.
Many authors, yours truly included, have penned grand prose describing the challenges of leadership. From reading them you might think business executives have a powerful focus on grand purposes. You might think that’s why they’re where they are, and that you’re where you are because you don’t. And so, filled with grand visions of your own, you open the door to your office, ready to transform your organization, when an employee requests a few minutes of your time, only to ask:
“Why is it that Harry and June are able to take a half hour every day on smoking breaks? It isn’t fair to the rest of us who don’t smoke!”
Poof! There goes your grand vision, vaporized by the exigencies of day-to-day management.
The average manager deals with approximately 137 issues like this in a typical year: Smoking breaks; the employee who spends a half-hour futzing every morning before starting in on actual work; someone who resents being pressured to contribute to the birthday fund.
Issues, that is, that wouldn’t be worth your time, except that if you ignore them they’ll create friction in the workplace. As with friction in physics, they convert directed energy into heat while causing the machinery to grind to a halt.
Make no mistake: You are responsible for handling these distractions because you are responsible for employee motivation and team dynamics. The question is how to do so. There’s no single solution for all of them. There are, however, some basic dos and don’ts:
- Do acknowledge the issue. You don’t have to agree that it’s important. You don’t have to commit to doing anything about it. You do have to make it clear that you’ve listened and understood. If you don’t, you’ll lose the trust of the employee raising the issue. That will just compound the problem.
- Do make it clear that “fair” and “equal” aren’t the same. Different employees take on different assignments, have different personal goals and face different challenges. Just because you don’t treat two different employees identically doesn’t mean you’re being unfair to either.
- Don’t equate irritation and unimportance. If an issue irritates you, that just means you’d rather not have to deal with it, not that you shouldn’t. For example, if you have an employee who routinely arrives ten minutes late, has a half-hour get-ready-to-work routine, and leaves fifteen minutes early and you ignore it, you can be pretty sure that in a year five other employees will follow suit. Why wouldn’t they?
- Don’t equate irritation and importance, either. Sometimes, the employee whose arrival time is erratic works harder and longer than anyone else. Yes, she sometimes arrives at 9:30 am. When she does, though, she often works until 10 pm.
- Do discourage backseat driving. An issue being valid doesn’t mean reporting it is valid. Employees who are busy keeping their eyes on when another employee shows up for work aren’t busy doing their own work. Make it clear that paying attention to how well each employee performs is your role (and, if jobs aren’t shift-work, point out the difference between attendance and performance).
- Don’t try to be King Solomon. Presented with a problem, your instinct is probably to find a solution. That just encourages more of the same. Encourage employees to solve their own problems, and to recognize the difference between real problems and minor irritations.
- Don’t allow “third-party offense.” If someone helpfully lets you know that while he doesn’t mind what’s going on, it bothers other employees, helpfully let the informer know other employees are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.
- Foster a culture of adulthood. Many of these issues are variations on a single theme — “It isn’t fair!” That’s the battle cry of a six-year-old. Adults should shrug off the small stuff.
- Don’t solve problems with policies. Every policy is a self-imposed loss of flexibility. Leave yourself room to maneuver. Policies, by definition, apply to everyone — they enforce equality at the expense of fairness.
And finally –issues like these are warning signs. When employees express jealousy about each other, worry about minor perks and slights, or otherwise spend their time and energy on trivial issues unrelated to Getting the Job Done, you’re hearing symptoms of two linked problems. First, they’re losing the trust in each other they need to function as a team. And second, you need to spend more of your time and energy creating enthusiasm for and ownership of the organization’s mission and goals.
Which is to say, leading.