All Posts in Leadership

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

“We had an employee job satisfaction survey that was done every quarter for a year or two back in the early 1990’s,” reports a regular correspondent. “One question was ‘How satisfied are you that your management team is giving you the support you need to do your job?’ For two or three surveys running, the answer came back as absolutely NOT satisfied. Following that, the question disappeared. When asked about it, our VP said ‘We removed that question — it was skewing the survey results.’ ”

The decision to remove the survey question suggests one of two possibilities. Either the company’s executives consider the company’s employees to be their antagonists, or … come to think of it, no alternative come to mind. Too many executives share this mindset — some unconsciously, some overtly: “If it weren’t for all these lazy, hard-to-manage, ignorant employees we’d have a great company.” It’s why employee surveys are often nothing more than window-dressing, designed to convince those lazy, hard-to-manage, ignorant employees that they really love working for the executives who treat them with such respect. It also might explain why outsourcing is such a popular strategy: Entrusting the success of your business to some other company’s lazy, hard-to-manage, ignorant employees is a much safer bet than entrusting it to your own.

Here’s how every business is supposed to work: Leaders set direction and create buy-in. Managers make sure the work of the company gets done properly. Staff do the work of the company, creating its products and services. Customers show up, pay for the products and services, allowing the company to pay its leaders, managers and staff.

Sounds like a simple collaboration, doesn’t it? It should be. Unfortunately, a false equivalency — thinking that not failing is the same as succeeding — often gets in the way, driving exactly the wrong behavior throughout the organization. Executives and managers who accept this false equivalency figure that left to their own devices, employees will mess up. So they focus their efforts on preventing that from happening — through close supervision, by “holding people accountable,” or both. It’s a very short step from there to concluding that when staff don’t fail, management deserves the credit.

That leaves the staff, who are on the receiving end of this attitude, to figure out their safest course of action. It’s easily predicted: They keep their heads down, take no initiative, and hide away from anything that looks like a risk. And the company becomes a dysfunctional organization — afraid to make a mistake. On a good day it aspires to blandness.

It seems like such a simple inference, too: Failure is the condition of not succeeding, so if we prevent failure we will have succeeded. It’s one of those ideas that looks good on the PowerPoint but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

To clarify the difference between preventing failure and achieving success, consider two different batting coaches with two different styles.

The first works hard to prevent failure. The batter is in the box, faces the pitch, swings, and misses. “We don’t pay people to miss!” yells the batting coach. “When you swing at the ball we expect you to hit it!”

Not wanting to miss the next pitch, the batter doesn’t swing. “We don’t pay you to stand there with the bat on your shoulder!” explodes the batting coach. “You’re supposed to make contact with the ball! If you don’t on the next pitch, I’ll bench you!”

On the third pitch the batter makes contact the surest way possible — he bunts.

The second coach waits until batting practice. “You’re batting 230,” he says. “You can do a lot better. Try changing one thing. Don’t swing so hard. When you do, your muscles fight each other. That takes power away from the hit. It also pulls the bat out of line. So stop trying to hit so hard — stroke the ball instead.”

The first coach tries to prevent failure. His method is the obvious one: Fear of consequences. The second coach tries to foster success. To do that he increases confidence and improves technique.

These are your alternatives, too. You can hold employees accountable, or increase their confidence and improve their technique. This isn’t particularly complicated. The better choice is, unfortunately, less common than it should be.

Listen to your managers talk among themselves — do they talk about their staff as allies or antagonists? Do they spend their time making sure nobody messes up? Is “zero defects” their highest aspiration? If so, you’re leading the land of the bland.

I’m confident you can do better.

Comments

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

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.

Comments