What is a Best Boss?

In our December newsletter we announced that we would be discussing the characteristics of a “Best Boss” throughout 2012. Our data comes from 30 years of asking course participants to tell us about the best boss they ever had. A picture of an individual who facilitates rather than dictates and builds lasting relationships emerged as a best boss. Beginning in this edition of The RAD Group Newsletter and continuing in upcoming editions, we will look at the skills and characteristics of this type of boss. Let’s begin by listing the top 20 characteristics of a best boss. 1. Excellent communicator (Sends clear messages and listens effectively) 2. Holds himself and others accountable for results 3. Enables success 4. Motivates others 5. Cares about the success of others 6. Honest and trustworthy 7. Shows trust by delegating effectively 8. Fair and consistent 9. Competent and knowledgeable 10. Rewards/recognizes success 11. Leads by example 12. Loyal to employees 13. Friendly 14. Good problem solver 15. Team builder 16. Flexible and willing to change when necessary 17. Good planner/organizer 18. Good decision maker 19. Shows respect to others 20. Deals effectively with conflict

While these characteristics are not in any rank order, all are viewed as important and the first four are seen as critical to successful leadership. For this reason in our next four newsletters we will focus on each of the first four characteristics individually. But for now, we recommend that you do an evaluation of yourself. You can do this by evaluating how you think other people that you work with (direct reports, coworkers, etc.) would rate you on each item. You can use a 10-point scale where “1” means “doesn’t describe you at all” and “10” means “describes you very accurately”. Items on which you score 5 or below indicate areas that could be impacting the results that you get as a supervisor. If you are not already a supervisor, then these would be areas that you might want to focus on in case you do get the opportunity to become someones “boss”. Our hope this that this ongoing discussion of best boss characteristics will help you as you attempt to get results through the efforts of other people.

Managing From a Distance

Have you ever called a direct report on the phone and given him precise instructions, only to find later that he did not follow through on what you requested? Or have you endured a “30-minute” video conference meeting that lasted two hours, only to close with no resolution? If so, then welcome to the exciting world of remote communication and management. Virtually anywhere you can find people communicating and managing from a distance.  You can also find missed information, poor accountability, a lack of follow-through and a good deal of frustration.

Advances in communication technologies over the past decade have had a significant impact on the oil and gas industry. To date, however, most of us have been slow to acknowledge that effective remote management requires not only communication technologies but also a special set of skills and an understanding of how communication works when it is conducted through teleconferencing, videoconferencing, e-mail and the like.

The oil and gas industry is trying to resolve this problem by training employees to recognize and respond to the challenges of communicating and managing remotely.

Remote communication carries many inherent challenges, not the least of which is the challenge of accurately conveying the intent of your message. The little ways that you communicate your intent in face-to-face communication are often so subtle and habitual that you are not even aware of them. A slight twist of the lip transforms a harmless comment into a sarcastic criticism. A momentary glance in one direction indicates the object to which you are referring. But when communication takes place over telephone or e-mail, these critical expressions aren’t there.

All too often, we go about our business communicating as normal, unaware that an essential part of our message will never reach our audience. And we wonder why that direct report failed to do exactly what we told him over the phone.

Are we doomed to sacrifice the clarity of our messages for the operational benefits of managing from a distance? Fortunately, the answer is no, but it will require specialized training, which can pass on lessons learned by observing some of the best remote communicators and identifying best practices. For example, when the best communicators need to clarify the intent of their words while communicating from a distance, they take care to state in sufficient detail why they are saying what they are saying.

The value of this best practice was made apparent during a classroom exercise to teach participants how to communicate effectively using e-mail. Each participant was given one piece of a larger problem, then told to communicate with one another to solve the whole problem. The catch, however, was that they could not speak; rather, they had to use pens and sticky notes to communicate.

One participant, after finishing her portion of the problem, approached her co-worker and scribbled the note, “What’s your problem?” to which the co-worker responded with an offended expression on his face.

“Nothing! What’s your problem!” Obviously, the intent of the original message was not conveyed. If she had written instead, “What’s your problem? I would like to see how it fits with the one I’m working on,” the co-worker would have understood her intent. Explaining why you are saying what you are saying is one of many things that the “best” do when communicating remotely.

Clearly, there are many other challenges and best practices that must be addressed during training to bring about the desired results. In general, a three-part solution is recommended when training people to handle the challenges of remote communication: (1) provide personnel with a clear understanding of the way that face-to-face communication works so that they can (2) identify the specific barriers posed by the remote communication media that they use daily, which sets the stage for them to (3) acquire the appropriate skills that will allow them to overcome those barriers.

This approach not only enables employees to diagnose problems that arise in their daily communications, it also equips them with skills to overcome those problems quickly and effectively.

Complexity and Local Rationality

Why do people - like employees and children - decide to break the rules?  Do it their way?  Resist change?  It doesn’t make any sense!  Or does it? It can be frustrating and often perplexing when employees fail to adhere to company policies and procedures, especially when those policies and procedures are in the employees’ best interest. Filing a required document can legally protect managers, but they don’t file it.  Locking out a machine that is being serviced can keep a technician safe from pain, injury and even death, but he regularly services the machine without locking it out.  Your children “know” the rules, but sometimes break them anyway. There is a useful way to think about this issue:  What employees and children do makes sense...to them.

We live, work, play and make decisions in complex environments. It helps to think of our environments as systems with overlapping and interacting components - including people, things, rules, values, knowledge, etc. - which are, in turn, complex sub-systems. One of the principles of complex systems is that the “people” component tends to be driven by the limited information that is available to and impressed upon those people within their local contexts. We make decisions based on our knowledge of what makes sense at the local level, at any given moment.  We call this the principle of “local rationality.”  In other words, our decisions are rational to us because they are based on the information available within the local context (which includes knowledge residing in our brains) at a particular point in time.

As supervisors and parents, we observe behavior that is driven by the principle of local rationality, but we only have limited information about what factors the individual is using to make their decision.  Why did it make sense to the employee to do such a dangerous thing?  Why did it make sense to the child to break the curfew rule?  After all, they know the rules and we have rules to make it clear how they should behave, don’t we?

Rules are only one component of the complex environments that we live and work in.  There are also pressures from other people - including superiors, peers and even you - to make a decision to act in a certain way.  Knowledge of past successes and failures, availability of resources needed to be successful, time pressures, workplace layout and numerous other kinds of factors make it ‘make sense’ for the person. Consider for a moment the last thing you saw a person do that “irked” you.  What kinds of factors could have led the person to do what he or she did?  Why would it have made sense...or did you assume it was because the person was lazy, rude, selfish, or in some other way had poor personal motivation?

As humans, we have a tendency to assume that people do what they do because of personal motivation , and then we treat their “failures” as an opportunity to motivate them to change and make better decisions in the future.  Research shows, however, that actions are often the result of the person’s evaluation of complex input from the environment and may have nothing to do with personal motivation.  For example, we tell employees to work safely, but at the same time push them for productivity, sometimes beyond their ability. The trade-off for the employee is to “cut corners” to be productive because he thinks in the moment that safety is really not at risk and showing you how productive he can be is what is really important.  Your teenager decides to come home late because her date had a couple of drinks and she didn’t trust him to drive safely...and her cell phone was dead, so she didn’t call. It makes sense in the moment, given the information that she had at her disposal.  It doesn’t make sense to you while you sit at home worried sick and imagining all kinds of terrible things.  It doesn’t make sense because you aren’t making decisions in her context!

As parents and supervisors, we need to ask a simple question before we punish undesired behavior: “Why did making that decision make sense to the person making it?”  Why was the decision “locally rational”? If we find out it was motivation, then we can deal with that; but if it is some other factor or combination of factors, then simply motivating won’t work. Look for which contextual factors actually are at play in the decision before you try to change the person’s behavior, and you will be much more successful at creating sustained change.

The Anti-Undercover Boss

By now you’ve probably heard about the hit reality TV show, Undercover Boss. If you haven’t, the concept involves a Chief Officer of a company infiltrating a few locations within the organization, disguised as a newly hired employee. The objective is to find out “what’s really going on out there”. During the 1-hour show, real problems that are inherent in the organization and the effect those problems have on employees, are discovered. At the end of the show, the executive brings in the people that he/she interacted with and pulls back the veil, so to speak. They then talk about some key strategies for overcoming the problems that were identified. It makes for great TV, but is it the right method? Understanding your organization is critical, but our experience is that how you do it matters. The RAD Group has been successfully helping organizations assess their cultures, and the problems inherent in them for many years. So here is a simple review of how we do it? First, we interview the executive team to gain an understanding of the culture that they view as their ideal. We then head to all levels of the organization, including the front-line and interview a cross section of employees. We conduct one-on-one interviews and all information is completely confidential. It is critical that the employees feel that they can trust us so that they will be candid in their comments, so we spend time building trust with each person that we interview. We have specific questions that we use to start the interviews, but when issues within the culture are discovered we investigate. Once the data is gathered we then analyze all of the information and evaluate it in light of the ideal culture that was identified by the executives. Invariably there are gaps between the actual culture and the desired ideal. With these gaps identified, we can then devise strategies to close those gaps.

So what’s the difference? In Undercover Boss, we see two glaring issues. First, the executive is only exposed to a very small sample within the organization. It could be likened to a doctor simply taking the blood pressure of a patient and declaring that the person has heart disease. There are many more tests that must be run before an accurate diagnosis can be made. Secondly, in the TV show the data is gathered by tricking the employees into trusting the new hire, only to find out later that it was an executive all along. With our method transparency is crucial and employees know exactly why they are being interviewed, that they are safe from repercussions, and that the information gathered will be used to make their organization better. Since they know that they are anonymously participating in a diagnosis designed to identify both what is working and what is not they are more willing to contribute and help give us a clear picture of the organizational culture as it actually is. Since they are involved in identifying issues, they are also more willing to accept changes that will inevitably follow.