Weathering the storm — whether climate or business — requires us to do some things purposefully:
1. Be in charge. Lead, decide. The buck stops with you.
2. Lead now, panic later. Frazzled emotions are human, frazzled behaviors are not ok.
3. Nobody wins the blame game. Get past today, throw rocks later. Or not.
Is your performance management system identifying your organization’s best leaders or its best doers? Are they being rewarded for their individual performance, or are they being recognized for how successful they’re making their team?
Do they get ahead by being competitive and striving to be the best, or do you value and promote those who collaborate and strive to make the company its best?
I’ve got the stick for a minute.
Late in my military career, I was blessed to command a fantastic group of diverse, talented and motivated Airmen. The only part that wasn’t awesome was that we lacked sufficient personnel and resources to be fully capable of executing our assigned missions. Often, we found ourselves in a situation which pitted me against my peers in a competition for more – more people, more money, more equipment, and more priority.
I initially thought it was the perfect job for me, because I’d spent most of my career competing for more.
Unfortunately (for me), my boss cared more about getting along and expected me to play well with others. After a little attitude adjustment, I found that collaborating with the other leaders – cross-training and developing people, and sharing the recognition accolades when their folks were involved – made us all more effective and successful.
Collectively, our teams’ successes made the entire organization more mission capable and successful.
Why did I feel it necessary to be so competitive? Because I was developed under a performance management system that encouraged individuals to be the best of the best, not collaborative and supportive. After all, we only want the best to be the leaders of our military forces, right?
And you probably want the best in your company to lead your employees. Who doesn’t?
But, when a rewards system keeps people focused on what they do and not why they do it, they become more competitive than collaborative. They put a priority on individual accomplishments and technical competence and miss out on the people skills development that comes from succeeding – or failing – as part of a team. Ultimately, the business suffers when decisions are made without considering what’s best for the organization as a whole.
It gets worse when you promote the best doer to be an unprepared manager, but that’s a subject for a different day.
I’ve read a lot of management job descriptions with sentences that start “Leads this…” and “Leads that…” However, I have yet to see a single performance review process that actually grades people on their leadership. Not that those systems don’t exist; I just haven’t seen one in practice.
Instead, we give managers credit for what their teams accomplish without helping them understand how their accomplishments contribute to the success of their department, the company, and the clients. In my example above, I was focused on how successful we could be instead of how successful WE (get it, the royal WE?) could be.
When you unwittingly pit employees against each other – especially at executive levels – you end up with people who spend their time jockeying for position, competing for resources, and vying for attention and recognition.
They end up focused on themselves, not the organization and certainly not the people they’re charged to lead. Too many senior leadership “teams” pretend to get along, while everyone below them on the food chain knows it’s just contrived collegiality. They talk a good game, but what they’re really playing is “what’s in it for me,” and their people and the company are suffering for it.
What does your performance review process encourage? Is it about their contribution to the larger effort?
Can they tell that their performance is judged by how successful they’ve made others, or are they too concerned about how they’re doing compared to others?
Don’t wait for HR to change the system. Have the conversations now that set different expectations for 2018! Make it the Year of Collaboration and Success.
I was the King of Malicious Compliance, and I wore the crown proudly.
Not familiar with the term malicious compliance? It’s a kind of organizational sabotage where the goal is often to get the boss fired.
Thankfully, I’ve been deposed from my throne, but here are some examples:
I’ve been known to rigidly comply with an order from my boss in a way I knew would cause him embarrassment. (Ask me about my M&M watch sometime.)
Knowing I had the correct answer, I might deliberately withhold my contribution in a discussion unless asked a direct question.
I could strictly adhere to mandatory office hours – just the arrival and departure times, of course – while spending the intervening hours in decidedly unproductive ways.
I might even do something I knew was counterproductive, just so I could say, “But you told me to do it.”
And I was pretty effective, because malicious compliance is contagious.
At the time, I freely admitted I wasn’t the best follower, and I blamed it on poor leadership. After all, I deluded myself, if I had a decent leader instead of a marginal manager, I’d have been a better follower. Even so, I never understood why my bosses put up with my crap.
So, what do you do with a guy like me?
I know what you’re thinking: I’d have fired your ass in a heartbeat. And sometimes they tried.
Now, I won’t say all organizations have someone like that, but many do. We justify tolerating them for bizarre reasons like “he’s better than a vacancy,” or “she’s really good at what she does” (when she does it), or maybe “HR makes it so hard to get rid of people.” And we put up with their crap without noticing the negative effect they’re having on the organization.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Do not tolerate those kinds of behavior. Malicious compliance will spread through the organization like sick building syndrome!
I’ve got the stick for a minute.
Take it from me, there’s a much better way, and I’m grateful someone made the effort with me (thanks, Mike): be a leader.
Leaders learn what motivates people – and what demotivates them. Get to know your folks. Find out what they like and don’t like about their jobs and what their aspirations are. When I felt like I was being treated like a person instead of a part in a machine, I responded.
Leaders don’t tolerate harmful behaviors. What you tolerate, you endorse. Address the behavior every time it occurs. Force the miscreant to acknowledge the behavior and its harmful effects. It was a hard conversation, but when I had to confront my own bad behavior, I stopped it.
Leaders seek inputs. Whether implementing a change to a process or a procedure, or developing a solution to a problem, listen to the people who will be affected – especially those who push back. If possible, let the hard heads play a significant role in the implementation; you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how smoothly it goes. When others saw me get behind something I was originally against, it made a huge difference.
Leaders encourage intelligent disobedience. Your employees should feel empowered to speak up when they see something wrong instead of dogmatically adhering to the exact instruction. If they’re afraid to say something (or keep quiet out of spite), that’s on you, and you’re liable to be embarrassed by the result. Empowerment takes trust. I never set up someone who trusted me.
Leaders develop leaders. It’s one of your primary roles – and possibly your most important. Work to identify referent leadership on your staff, and put the effort into helping that person grow and improve, channeling their efforts to the benefit of the organization. I’m forever grateful to the mentors who saw something salvageable in me and made me a leader with a passion to pass the lessons along.
Look around for the royalty in your organization. Be intentional about your leadership, and give them a chance to respond. I never knew how heavy the crown was until I laid it down.
Is there a difference between giving feedback or giving criticism as a leader? What are the main differences?
Huge differences. Most have to do with intent and desired outcome.
Criticism, in its simplest form, is for the giver, not the recipient. To criticize is one of the easiest forms of ego defense, and is generally a display of defensiveness and lack of personal confidence. We criticize most when someone aspires to accomplish what we cannot (or will not), or when their accomplishment could somehow threaten ours.
It’s acting out hurtfully with negative thinking.
Feedback, on the other hand, is principally to help someone grow and improve. To positively change a behavior for the better. In other words, it’s more of what we recommend they do, and less of what they did wrong.
Further, if we include some self-reflection in our feedback — opening ourselves to others — we both grow. Our blind spots will be forever blind without effective feedback from others, and people are more inclined to be open with those who have been similarly open with them.
The Johari Window is a great tool for determining how public or “open” you are to receiving feedback, which is crucial for your feedback to be well received.
The more I increase my “public” or “open” window:
–The less I am blind.
–The less I have to worry about keeping things hidden.
–The more I may discover parts of me that I like, which are hidden.
I can’t reduce my Blind area without help from others (feedback).
If I am to help others, I must learn to give helpful feedback.
This mutual feedback process builds trust and strengthens relations among teams, groups and even individuals.
In short, criticism is selfish, feedback is helpful.
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.”
Not long ago, I received a request for comment about employee engagement being at a record high. That seemed like an odd request, since almost everything I’ve read in recent memory was lamenting dismal engagement survey results.
Poking around some, I found that employee engagement soared to its highest level in five years – a whopping 37% last October – rebounding again in February 2017 to 36.7%, only to fall back to 33% at the end of August. In other words, it sucks. If there are any managers or leaders out there that think having two-thirds of your workforce disengaged, I’d love to get paid for what you’re not doing.
Thanks, Gallup, for keeping it real.
I’ve got the sitck for a minute.
I’d been the boss for about six months and decided that we needed a climate survey to get to what was below the surface. It hadn’t been too long since the folks had endured that kind of survey, but it was under the last commander who had been gone a couple of months before I arrived. I’d just spent six months balancing listening to people and trying to address their concerns with getting the mission done. The biggest issue from the new survey was – wait for it – I was the only one who could use my reserved parking space. Yep, that was it. Who knows who was used to using the space when the commander was gone, but I sure as hell wasn’t giving up the one perk a commander gets on an Air Force base.
But I was listening. It’s possible there were some additional non-base commander approved parking spaces painted around the building just for the fun of it… obviously without my approval.
Anyway, we spend way too much time and effort trying to measure engagement, not to mention the money we throw at employee engagement programs. Based on the almost flatline chart above, we’re spending a lot of money without much results. I’m convinced it’s because we’re letting the wrong people lead – and take the blame for – our unsuccessful engagement efforts.
News flash: Low employee engagement is NOT an HR problem. It’s a leadership problem.
I’m not knocking HR–far from it. But much like with leadership development efforts, HR takes its cue from senior leadership. If there’s just lip service and no involvement at the top, employee engagement efforts are doomed.
If your company is hiring consultants to find out why your employees aren’t engaged, you’re wasting your money. I’ll give it to you for free: your employees aren’t engaged because they don’t feel valued doing worthy work, and that’s a leadership issue. If your latest employee engagement program is aimed at the employees, you’re missing the whole point. Your employees aren’t engaged because their bosses aren’t engaging them. Focus your efforts on providing your managers and leaders with the skills and tools to better engage their people every day.
But, you say, what about that annual engagement survey we take and the mandatory engagement reporting we have to do? Doesn’t that count for something?
No. Most employees would love to tell you exactly how they feel about the workplace but aren’t going to if they don’t believe you a) are listening to them, and b) will do anything about it. That’s a leadership issue, too.
How do you know what makes them feel valued? Ask them. And don’t do it with surveys and suggestion boxes. Actually talk to them. Effective leaders know how to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations with their employees and are okay with getting feedback from the people who work for them. Ask them what makes them feel valued, and listen to what they say.
What about the worthy work part? How do you know what would make them feel like they’re engaged in worthy work… like their efforts are part of something bigger than their paycheck?
Right… ask them. And not just once a year at performance evaluation time. They’ll say anything they think you want to hear to get their evaluation over as quickly as possible, and chances are it won’t change what you’re doing anyway.
When we develop leaders, we help them improve communication and feedback effectiveness, empowerment and delegation, conflict management and trust building… all skills that involve engaging the people who work for and with them. In other words, if you’re employees aren’t engaged, they’re not being led.
So when it’s time for your company’s next annual employee engagement survey, how about suggesting spending less time measuring employee engagement and more time engaging employees?
An old friend sent me a picture the other day of this blue ribbon that says, “I survived another meeting that should have been an email.” He obviously remembers how I feel about meetings.
Turns out you can actually buy the ribbons here, and I know a lot of bosses who should pass them out.
You leaders have got to get a handle on the endless parade of time-wasting, morale-draining meetings you expect your people to sit through!
Routine, regularly scheduled meetings – the ones that are on your calendar until the end of time – are the worst! They typically involve endless droning around a table about activities that only one or two people in the room care about. When the boss at the head of the table tolerates such time wasting, the expectation is that everyone has to say something, and we’ve all experienced the guy who’s a little too fond of his own voice.
Several years ago, everyone in my directorate went to a weekly staff meeting like the one I described above. I used to tuck a couple of Sudokus in my notebook to make it look like I was taking notes (I know, not setting a good example). One week, I asked the director if I could skip the meeting if I was too busy. He said, “Sure.” I never went again.
I’ve got the stick for a minute.
When I was talking the other day with a senior government leader about making meetings more productive, I got some pushback on my value judgement. He said, “It’s the only time we all get together. How else will everyone find out what the others are working on?” I remember one time a Deputy Under Secretary actually saying, “The daily meeting’s not for you; it’s for me to find out what everyone’s doing.”
Trust me, there are far better ways to connect the people who need information with the people who have information. If you’re the boss and doubt what I’m saying, give this to your people and ask for their thoughts.
Productive meetings don’t happen by accident. If you want to see a dramatic improvement in Return On Time Spent In Meetings (ROTSIM – a new metric?), try these proven steps:
Put someone (preferably someone who values efficient use of time) in charge of the agenda. Meetings without agendas usually end up being free-for-alls. If you absolutely have to have a routine meeting to update the boss, make it clear in advance that no one brings more than two or three of their most critical issues that a majority of people around the table really need to know about. Any issues that only the boss and the person speaking care about should be handled one-on-one or in an email.
Get rid of as many routine meetings as you can. I was once part of an organization (for a very short period of time) who actually tracked the number of meetings attended as a performance metric. Try only having meetings when there is something to decide. Have clear objectives, not open-ended ones like “Discuss employee engagement.” Send pre-work to the attendees so they can come to the table as an informed participants, not as sponges.
No marathon meetings! People lose focus and creativity when you hold them hostage for more than an hour or two, especially after lunch. If need be, break the agenda in half and have two shorter meetings appropriately spaced.
Finally, make sure someone’s keeping track of decisions and deferred issues. Make it a written record and include who is responsible for each along with a deadline. It can be part of the pre-work if you need a subsequent session.
What about the time you spend around the conference room table? Want to reduce it and make it more productive?
The more I increase my “public” or “open” window:
