All Posts in Policies and Procedures

|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.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

In high school one of my poorer bits of judgment was an attempt to win the admiration of an exceptionally attractive young lady. My strategy was to tell her a very funny joke. The joke I chose was, had the vocabulary existed back then, politically incorrect and then some — its punchline was a pun on a derogatory name for an ethnic group.

Her ethnic group.

After my head stopped ringing — her response was instantaneous and surprisingly muscular for someone that slender — my chances of her going out with me, never very high, dropped to numbers smaller than mathematicians had yet invented.

It was a painful lesson. Literally.

The phrase “politically correct” is overused these days but what it means, exactly, isn’t clear. It might mean “a ridiculous attempt to euphemize plain facts,” but it often seems more like “I want to tell Polish jokes in public without peeving the Poles.”

Faced with a phrase that means little, the best course of action is to not use it. So I don’t.

Which brings us to the question, raised last week, of how to handle an employee who belongs to the Jehovah’s Witnesses — and who, as a consequence, doesn’t celebrate birthdays — if your staff habitually celebrates all birthdays as they come around on the calendar.

Unsurprisingly, I received a flood of responses (many are chronicled as comments on Advice Line if you’re interested in the details). Many were from Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom expressed their appreciation for my raising the issue. When invited, it appears, the average Jehovah’s Witness politely explains the situation, wishes everyone well, and offers to answer the phone during the party.

I also heard from a few folks asserting that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult, should be treated as such, and that perhaps as a manager you should encourage them to seek your help to escape.

Before continuing: Neither KJR nor Advice Line are forums for discussing what is a religion, what is a cult, or for that matter what the difference is between the two. If the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult, that hasn’t been obvious to me in my dealings with any — that’s as far as I’ll take the subject.

To continue: Your role as a manager isn’t to discuss what is a religion, what is a cult, the difference between the two, or your opinion that one or some religions are superior to others. As a manager (at least in a publicly held corporation), you are secular. Here’s why:

Publicly held U.S. corporations are, by definition, secular entities. Their ownership is diffuse and largely anonymous; any religious affiliation of the owners is unknown and almost certainly not uniform. Beyond that, the laws currently governing the chartering of a publicly held corporation limit them to a single goal: Increasing value to shareholders.

When you act as a manager for a publicly held corporation, you are its agent. That confers an obligation to be secular when in that role. Any other course of action goes beyond your scope of authority and responsibility. Worse, it creates an environment in which some religious groups have an expectation of preferred treatment and others have the expectation of the opposite.

It’s a very clear principle, which collides with a very messy reality: The people who work for you are diverse and human. In order to work together effectively they can’t be automata — they have to get to know and trust each other as human beings. Inevitably that means finding out who was born when, where their ancestors came from, family history, how many children they have, whether they like dogs or cats, and all the other bits of information that you, in your official capacity as manager, aren’t supposed to know or take into account as you assess who is performing how well and what to do about it.

Don’t let the impossible balance you’re supposed to maintain paralyze you. You can get through most of these challenges by following one of the simplest and most basic rules of courtesy: Be interested in them but don’t ask them to be interested in you. That Schwartz is Moslem, Achmed is Presbyterian, Andersen is Jewish and Chelsea used to be Sheldon isn’t your business. If they tell you anyway, because you’re a good listener and they like to schmooze, it will help you facilitate the sometimes-awkward group dynamics that can result when even the best-intentioned people make assumptions about each other.

And the group dynamics definitely are your business.

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