“Leadership is about influence and inspiration.” – Everyone Who Knows Anything
Who has the most influence on the mood in your workplace?
If you’re part of the leadership – formal or informal – you do.
Especially if your mood reveals your anxieties about the organization or job security, or your lack of compassion for those struggling to meet your expectations.
Around the mid-point of my Air Force career, a mentor remarked one day, “You’re just not prone to happiness, are you?” After he had my 8-year-old daughter explain what a Marsh-wiggle was, we talked about the effect it was having on my Airmen. I got his point, and I’d like to think I’m remembered differently by those who served with me in my later years.
Like leading by example, you don’t have a choice about impacting the office climate with the mood you’re emoting. You may not be aware that you’re doing it, but that’s a matter of your emotional intelligence, not reality on the ground.
No, I’m not trying to resurrect the old myth about leaders having to be charismatic – there’s plenty to evidence to debunk that; but from the C-suites to the referent leader far down in the organization, others are taking their positive and negative emotional cues from you. This is anything but new information, and yet we could all benefit from the occasional friendly reminder.
A huge part of a leader’s job is inspiring others to follow in pursuit of a vision. You make it really hard for them to be inspired if they don’t think you’re inspired yourself. Reflect for a minute on a couple of the best leaders you’ve known – were they positive and encouraging in a way that made you want to do more and better, or did their interactions feel perfunctory and their tone and manner show worn places in the veneer covering their anxiety?
Okay, here’s a test: we all come to work at less than our best once in a while. On the rare occasion you do – regardless of whether you’re bothered by something work-related or something that happened outside the office – do people ask you what’s wrong? If not, you should be worried. It means they’re either used to you being in a bad mood, or you’re not as approachable as you should be.
If that strikes too close to home, stop it. Get your fire back… people need to believe that you like being their leader.
I can’t guarantee your motivation and authentic positive outlook will fill your workplace with unicorns, butterflies, and rainbows. But it won’t hurt. On the other hand, I can assure you that your dour mood directly affects your employees’ morale and engagement.
Your folks deserve your best. Are you giving it to them?
Another Monday morning and I’m looking at the list of things that had to be done last week but aren’t.
I guess they didn’t have to be done.
Some of us have boundary-setting challenges that make our lives more difficult when we start babysitting monkeys from other people’s circuses. And then some of us have deadline-setting challenges that make those around us stop taking our sense of urgency seriously.
If you’ve ever made it to the end of a day without getting your ‘to do’ list done, it may not be an expectation problem as many would insist; you might just be eligible to claim membership in the Artificial Deadline club.
Welcome to the club. My name’s Kevin and I set artificial deadlines.
The number one reason people (including ourselves) don’t meet the deadlines we set is there are no consequences for non-compliance. We tend to think we’re being blown off when, in reality, no one but us suffers when we get information just after the nick of time.
My girls grew up believing that if you wait til the last minute, it only takes a minute. We may claim we do our best work under pressure, but we can’t ignore the anxiety of having a deadline looming over our heads. As they got older, we added the Ross caveat: some tasks take more than a minute so you’re going to be late. That’s when the excuse making starts.
Here are some common artificial deadline practices I’ve seen – and used unsuccessfully – over the years and suggestions to stop using them:
I have to do it today. If it really has to be done today, it better be the first thing we do or else be a scheduled event on our calendar. Otherwise, it’s aspirational and will get overcome by events of the day. We’ll see it again on our list for tomorrow’s have-to list.
I need this before my 2:00 meeting. And here it comes sliding into home just before we leave for the meeting. Sure hope it wasn’t something we needed for the meeting; otherwise it’s just reading material for when we stopped paying attention to whoever is droning on during the boring meeting. If we need it for a meeting, we have to suspense it with enough time to review and ask questions before we take it with us.
I need this by the end of the day. Who’s end of the day… ours or theirs? Why then? Do we plan on working on it at the dinner table? After dinner? If we’re not going to look at it until tomorrow, why do we care when it’s finished as long as it’s there when we need it and of expected quality. I’ve found that “I want to review this first thing tomorrow morning because…” sets a clearer expectation for the preparer, and I’m happier with the product.
I need this by the end of the week. See above. Are we going to spend our weekend looking at something while the preparer celebrates not having to think about it anymore? I doubt it. Don’t forget to explain why it’s important to have it Monday morning.
And finally…
Let’s try to have this done by blah, blah, blah. Good luck with that. In my experience, no deadline means no results. That’s like my wife asking, “do you think we could trim the hedges sometime soon?”
Not only do we bring this frustration on ourselves, but setting Artificial Deadlines erodes our credibility with others. If it hasn’t already, the practice is likely to leak over into our “I’ll have it to you by…” promises, and the next thing we know we’re leaders without integrity.
Speaking of which, I better wrap this up. It’s Monday morning and this piece is due last Friday.
How about you? Are you challenged with setting Artificial Deadlines? It’s a club membership you could do without in 2022.
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The coronavirus has really wreaked havoc in the workplace and the labor market, hasn’t it?
No wonder almost all of the respondents to this year’s Triangle Performance Survey of Senior Leadership ranked leading in VUCA as the top leadership challenge in 2022. Today’s job market is about the best example of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity I’ve seen off the battlefield.
That makes it easy to blame COVID-19 for our talent management challenges. (By the way, your talent doesn’t want to be managed.) We can just write our attrition problems off to the Great Resignation, right?
Not so fast, leaders! Most attrition is our own fault.
There’s plenty of research that shows most people say they leave their job because of the pay, limited opportunities for advancement, and their boss. We may have limited influence on the first, but the last two are absolutely leadership issues… and fixing those two is free.
Interviewing external job candidates last week, I wasn’t surprised to hear all of them say the reason they’re looking for another job is directly related to the environment in their current company.
And guess whose fault that is.
Now guess how many of them admitted to their companies that they’re quitting because their boss is a jerk. In round numbers, zero.
James Rickwood, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I would suggest that it’s not all that important why someone quits, because short of an opportunity dropping into their lap or winning a BIG lottery, they decided to quit long before giving notice. Like in a relationship that’s gone sour, once our partner decides it’s time to break up, it’s only a matter of time. They might be lured into staying a little longer, but if we don’t fix what they’re unhappy about, they’re headed to greener pasture.
No, what’s important is why they started looking elsewhere in the first place. That’s where we find a common thread: the boss. The leader who’s supposed to helping them feel valued doing worthy work. Sometimes, that’s actually us.
I asked all the candidates I interviewed what makes them feel valued – apart from the financial compensation, of course. (I also asked them what criteria they used to decide if a job was a good fit, but that’s a topic for a future newsletter.) Their answers weren’t particularly complex, and it made me wonder if their current boss ever took the time to find out. If they had, they might not be looking to fill an unexpected vacancy.
And it’s not the Quiet Quitters that are looking for better leadership. We wish! They seem pretty content to put up with shoddy leadership and give the minimum effort required to keep their jobs as long as we’ll keep paying them.
Unfortunately, it’s the good employees that tire of being treated badly at work and start looking elsewhere. Again, if we don’t URGENTLY fix what they’re unhappy about, they’re leaving us as soon as their criteria for a good fit is met.
Case in point: my daughter left a healthcare position she had been very happy in for a couple of years after a significant leadership change… not a change for the better, I might add. It didn’t take very long for her to realize the relationship was going to end, so she started looking around for an organization and position she believed would allow her to again feel valued doing worthy work.
When she eventually let the company know she’d be leaving and they asked why, she gave them all of stock answers: limited opportunities in her current role, wanting to explore other areas of healthcare, flexibility, benefits, PTO, etc. What she didn’t tell them was that she was unhappy with the leadership and didn’t believe they particularly cared whether she felt valued or not.
I’m not suggesting we hit the PANIC button every time someone leaves the organization, but I do believe that if we don’t make an honest effort to learn why they started looking for a new job in the first place, we’re not doing our jobs as engaged leaders.
Wow! Where the hell did 2021 go, and why did it leave us with so many work environment leadership challenges that none of us saw coming at the beginning of 2020? We’re struggling how to manage a blended (at home / at the office) workforce and either losing workers as part of the Great Resignation (yeah, that was predictable) or trying to attract the talent we let go during the pandemic back to our company.
That’s what’s facing most of us in 2022. What worked in 2019 didn’t work in 2020. What worked in 2020 didn’t work in 2021. And this being the first newsletter of the year, let’s talk about what will work in 2022?
The basics. That’s right, let’s get back to the leadership basics in 2022. If you haven’t read the phrase ‘leadership hasn’t changed much in a couple thousand years’ in one of our newsletters or heard it in our coaching, you must be new to Triangle Performance.
Why do I believe in the basics? When’s the last time you heard a service industry employee say unsolicited, “I have the best boss ever!”
It had been so long for me that I was stunned when I heard it.
I was simply picking up my dry cleaning near closing time one evening when I expressed my appreciation that this small, local dry cleaners was able to stay open through the long period when none of us were getting our business clothes dirty. She nonchalantly replied, “That’s because I have the best boss I’ve ever had.”
To be honest, I was so surprised I didn’t even ask her why… until the next day. I went back and asked what made her boss the best.
“He talks to us, not at us.”
“He has a large workforce but makes an effort to know each one of us individually.”
“He made sure each of us was okay with reduced hours during the pandemic but never had to let anyone go.”
“If we make a mistake, he helps us learn how to learn from it and not repeat it.”
“If there’s conflict in the workplace, he addresses it immediately and helps us resolve it so we can all work together cooperatively.”
“He takes time to talk to me as a person and really listen; I feel like he genuinely cares how I’m doing.”
HOLY LEADERSHIP SKILLS, BATMAN!
You can accuse me of making this stuff up for the sake of our business or because I ran out of things to write about, but that would be your loss. This is the unadulterated result of real-life leadership, and it’s so basic that we should be embarrassed if our team doesn’t already feel like this person does.
Think of those bullets as a to do list for 2022.
So I’m going to call this boss Karl, because I want you to think of him as a real person and not just the boss. That, and the only guy I actually know named Karl couldn’t possibly be confused with the boss.
I wanted to find out where Karl got his secret leadership sauce, so I called him. Surprised and with humility, he quickly told me he didn’t do anything special… which was true. None of the statements above reveal anything special, except maybe not letting anyone go because of COVID.
Karl succinctly summed up his leadership philosophy’s source: “I had a great boss when I was younger.”
From watching his boss, Karl came to believe it’s not all about making money but also about helping others. Karl asked, “Who else is going to help those who work hard catch a break if not us bosses?” Good question.
Because Karl knows all his employees individually, he can tell when someone’s a little off and looks for little things he can do to make a difference. I dare say that while some of us may notice when our folks are having a bad day, very few of us would take the next step like Karl.
How about that last bullet up there? Really Listens and Genuinely Cares!!! Not nearly enough of that in the workplace – or in the home or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Karl tries to live out his motto “If you care, I care” with his people, and it shows.
One of a leader’s top responsibilities is developing new leaders. I’m glad Karl’s boss took that responsibility to heart… and so are his employees.
So what can we do that we know will work in 2022? Leadership basics. Let’s dust off our basic leadership skills and start the new year off on the right foot, shall we?
Leaders need to engage periodically in some serious introspection and decide whether or not their decision-making style or the culture they’ve created is mortally wounding organizational performance.
I learned that lesson as a by-product of a traumatic experience over three decades ago. Early in my flying career, in close proximity to another airplane also traveling at 400+ mph, I heard a magical phrase from my instructor that’s stuck with me ever since: indecision kills.
First, though, he said, “I have the stick.”
That meant he was going be in control of the airplane for a few minutes while giving me instruction and advice, and in this case, saving my life. It was clear to him (but not to me) that if I didn’t hurry and decide which course correction to make, my indecision would result in a catastrophic mid-air collision.
While not normally fatal in the corporate world, leadership and management indecision still kills. Among other things, it kills employee morale and motivation, productivity and project momentum, and causes our customers to lose confidence that we can be responsive to their needs.
Indecisiveness is caused by a number of factors, primarily fear of failure. Much has been written about decision-making processes and steps that those who have trouble being decisive can take. But I’ve yet to find a magic pill that managers can take that makes them less hesitant to make a “good enough” decision in an environment where imperfect decisions are frowned upon.
I have the stick for a minute.
Several years ago, our director called his senior managers together and boldly announced, “We take too long to make decisions. We’re going to start making decisions faster so we can make more decisions, and if we make a bad decision, at least we’ll have time to make a better one.” Heresy in a bureaucratic institution with an entrenched, hierarchical decision making process. But he was a leader, and we did start making better decisions without getting bogged down in staff morass.
I’m not suggesting all decisions need to be made quickly and neither was he. What I am suggesting is that leaders need to continually evaluate the effect their decision-making style is having on the organization, and the decision-making culture they’ve created for their managers. When leaders create an environment where employees feel empowered and decision-making has been appropriately delegated, managers are more willing to make timely, good decisions without waiting for perfect information.
And that reduces the mortality rate for employee morale, keeps promising projects from getting bogged down, and increases customer responsiveness.
Leadership is an activity, not a position. That activity includes making sure you foster an environment where the decision-making process doesn’t paralyze the organization and mistakes aren’t always professionally fatal.
