The Lumbergh Principle - You have to mean it

Despite a now insignificant pre-Y2K (Year 2000) computer software plot and laughable late-90’s fashion, the 1999 cult movie classic Office Space still matters in today’s workplace -- in your office space.  The social commentary on display through caricatures of the American workforce, such as the “Upper Management” character Bill Lumbergh, still stings.  People still laugh at this movie because bosses and companies still do the very things that this movie makes fun of. If you have never seen Office Space, the name Lumbergh might not mean anything to you.  If you have seen the movie, the video clip below may just inspire a revision of your weekend entertainment plans.  Either way, the clip should serve as a decent framework for understanding what has come to be known as the Lumbergh Principle.

Actor Gary Cole portrays the perfect disingenuous, high achieving authority figure -- the type that would have been likely shot in the back by his own soldiers in a time of war, yet manages to ascend into Senior Management in environments with less plausible deniability.  In this instance, Corporate Vice President Bill Lumbergh pours on the friendly.

This is not, however, what our “Best Boss” research sample of **20,000** employees meant when they described the best boss they had ever had as -- being friendly.

We instinctively know that a “Best Boss” is a friendly boss.  As children and employees, we have seen sufficient successful parental and supervisory applications of friendliness used to help the one with authority to get results from the efforts of others that lack authority.  Certainly the pendulum of leadership history is heavy on the side of heavy handedness, but the modern workplace is different.  Given the choice of a friendly boss or an unfriendly one, both the shiny shoes in the corporate tower and the dirty boots on the shop floor have come to prefer the friendly approach.

The Bill Lumberghs of the world also recognize the obvious correlation between Friendliness, Best Boss Status, and Desirable Results.  So, they have done what only makes sense -- pretend to be friendly.

The problem is that friendly can’t be faked.  It can be, but not with “Desirable Results” as the predictable outcome.

The Lumbergh Principle defined -- Friendly doesn’t work, if you don’t mean it

The heart of the issue is that employees and kids alike can tell if you mean it.

Advice for Accidental Lumberghs

1.)  Knowing that you can’t fake friendly, don’t try.  Be yourself.

2.)  It is possible that your employees think of you as a walking-talking Lumbergh Doll and all you are really doing is innocently imitating an unfortunate model from your past.  Open your eyes and align yourself instead with the basic tenets of Best Boss Friendliness:

• Friendly is not about hiding behind friendly words.  It means not being Antagonistic or Hostile.
• Friendly is not about forsaking performance to be nice.  It means showing concern for things that concern others and listening to help deal with those concerns.
• Friendly is not about being buddies.  It means creating a relationship that helps individuals and teams share their concerns and ideas while working to accomplish their agreed upon objectives.

3.)  Take the time to understand some of the potential consequences of a Lumbergh-esque style:

• Subordinate Resentment
• Disengagement from Team Goals
• Sabotage (remember that the subordinate characters in Office Space go on to embezzle millions and even burn down the office, even as the audience roots for them to get away with it.)
• The loss of genuine access to the hearts and minds of employees when in a position to actually work with them to “Find a Fix” for their concerns and the concerns of the team.

4.)  Talk with someone away from work or away from home about why you are having trouble shedding your Lumbergh skin.  Feeling the need to fake friendly or the genuine lack of concern for others may indicate there is an opportunity to dig deeper into your own personal context and maybe improve more than just performance metrics.

Before you discount this concept as something only valuable for the “shiny shoe”, white-collar crowd, watch this out-of-the-cubicle take on the same approach.  Lumbergh’s cousin, the Drilling Rig Safety Man, stands even less a chance of improving performance with this strategy.

A Taste of Your Own Medicine

Leading by example means accepting redirection as willingly as you provide it.

It is difficult for most of us to accept criticism from anyone, but especially from our children or our employees.  After all, we are supposed to have all the answers and know how to do everything the correct way, right?  Wrong!   Everyone makes mistakes, even bosses and parents, and we really don’t know everything.  Willingness to accept feedback from others is important in how we lead.  If you want your children and your employees to accept your feedback when they fail, you have to be willing to accept theirs when you fail.  So how do you do it?  We suggest that there are four key things to keep in mind to successfully receive redirection from others.

1. Remember that they are taking a risk.  In the parent-child and employer-employee relationships you have the power and they don’t.  You can make their lives difficult and in some cases even dissolve the relationship (we don’t recommend this with your children).  Therefore it is vital that you understand that they are assuming all of the risk when giving you this type of feedback.
2. Assume that they have your best interest in mind.  It is very easy to become defensive when receiving less than positive feedback.  The primary reason that we become defensive is because we assume that the other person is trying to hurt us in some way.  We generate a “guess” about their motive and that guess is usually negative.  If you start with a guess that they have your best interest in mind, then you will be less likely to become defensive and more likely to have a successful conversation.  If they are trying to hurt you, then you have an opportunity to discover why and determine what you can do to rectify that.
3. Listen with respect.  Respectful listening really means allowing the other person to express their views and thoughts without you becoming defensive.  Ask clarifying questions when you don’t understand something, but don’t justify your actions/results before the other person has finished because this will most likely be seen as defensive.  It is also important to show good body language through your posture, eye contact and facial expression.  How you look and what you say will set the tone for the conversation and will either lead to success or failure.
4. Show gratitude for their feedback.  Remember that it is difficult for someone with less power than you have to step up and give you feedback.  It is very important that you let them know that you recognize this and that you appreciate their willingness to help you become the best leader that you can possibly be.

If you want to lead by example, you will need to be willing to accept negative feedback as easily as you are willing to give it.

Deal with Employee Failure -- the SAFE Way

Have you ever worked for someone who seems to notice every small error you make (and points it out), but almost never says anything when you are successful?  We call this leadership style “The Persecutor” and we see it a lot in both industry and parenting.  We have learned by talking with Persecutors that they are trying to motivate people to improve by holding them accountable for their results, but the exact opposite actually occurs because of the way they do it. Employees become demotivated because there is no balance between positive and negative feedback, and because they feel disrespected in the process.  People need both correction (what we call “Redirection") for failure and positive feedback for success.  So how can you avoid persecution and create the results that you need?  We suggest that you use the following redirection guidelines when correcting performance.

• Remain calm.  Emotions such as frustration and anger only make us less effective in thinking and communicating.  Most of the time those emotions are the result of a “guess” about why the person failed.  Avoid guesses and you will have much more control over your emotions.

• Conduct the session in private.  One of your primary objectives is to reduce defensiveness so that you can get the employee to help you examine the reason(s) behind the failure and develop a “fix” for the future.  Calling someone out in public almost always leads to defensiveness, so make every effort to find a private location for this discussion.

• Eliminate interruptions and distractions.  Gaining the full attention of the employee is critical for an effective conversation.  Make sure that you control as many distractions as possible and you will get much better attention from your employee.

• Point out positive aspects of performance first, followed by identification of the inadequate performance.  Typically the employee will have had some success that you want to continue in the future.  Positive feedback helps to strengthen those behaviors, so take this opportunity to create repeated success with positive feedback.  Then point out the specific result, action, lack of action, etc. that you have identified as failure.  Avoid ambiguous terms such as bad attitude, unmotivated, etc.

• Follow the SAFE* approach to giving feedback.
  • Step Up:  When you see failure, say something, but say it with respect.  If you don’t step up, then the things that have led to this failure will continue to create failure in the future and if you say it the wrong way (disrespectfully) you will create defensiveness and less desire for improvement going forward.
  • Ask:  Learn the real reason for the failure.  Was it motivation, ability, pressure, lack of support, etc?  Evaluate the total context that led to the failure before you come up with a plan for improvement.
  • Find a Fix:  Find a fix for the real reason for the failure.  Work with the employee to determine a way to create success in the future.  Don’t create the plan yourself, but rather create it in concert with the employee when possible.  This brings more ownership and more motivation for improvement.
  • Ensure the Fix:  Keep an eye on improvement and give feedback accordingly.  If the “fix” works and you observe success, then give positive feedback to strengthen performance.  If you observe failure, then work your way through the SAFE approach again until you find the real reason for failure and the right fix going forward.

*SAFE Skills are a component of The RAD Group’s PerformanceCOMPASS^TM training.

Can you work incident free without the use of punishment?

I was speaking recently to a group of mid-level safety professionals about redirecting unwanted behaviors and making change within individual and systemic safety systems.  I had one participant who was particularly passionate about his views on changing the behaviors of workers.  According to him, one cannot be expected to change behavior or work incident free without at least threatening the use of punitive actions.  In his own words, “you cannot expect them to work safely if you can’t punish them for not working safely.”  He was also quite vocal in his assertion that it is of little use to determine which contextual factors are driving an unsafe behavior.  Again quoting him, “why do I need to know why they did it unsafely?  If they can’t get it done, find somebody that can.”  

What an Idiot!

I meet managers like this from time-to-time and I’m immediately driven to wonder what it must be like to work for such a person.  How could a person like this have risen in the ranks of his corporate structure?  How could such an idiot...oh,wait.  Am I not making the same mistakes that I now, silently scold him for?  You see, when people do things that we see as evil, stupid, or just plain wrong, there are two incredibly common and powerful principles at play.  The first principle is called the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) and, if allowed to take over one’s thought process, it will make a tyrant out of the most pleasant of us.  The FAE says that when we see people do things that we believe to be undesirable, we attribute it to them as being flawed in some way or to them having bad intentions.  They are stupid, evil, heartless, or just plain incompetent.  If we assume these traits to be the driving factor of an unsafe act and we have organizational power, we will likely move to punish this bad actor for their evil doings.  After all, somebody so (insert evil adjective here) deserves to be punished.  The truth is that most people are good and decent people who just want to do a good job.

Context Matters

This leads us to our second important principle, Local Rationality.  Local Rationality says that when good and decent people do things that are unsafe or break policies or rules, they usually do it without any ill-intent.  In fact, because of their own personal context, they do it because it makes sense to them to do it that way; hence the term “local rationality”.  As a matter of fact, had you or I been in their situation, given the exact same context, chances are we would have done the same thing.  It isn’t motive that normally needs to be changed, it’s context.

With this knowledge, let’s look back at the two questions from our Safety Manager.

1. “How can I be expected to change behavior or work incident free, without threatening to to punish the wrong-doers?” and
2. “Why do I need to know why they did it unsafely?  If they can’t get it done, find somebody that can.”

Once we understand that, in general, people don’t knowingly and blatantly do unsafe things or break rules, rather that they do it because of a possibly flawed work system, e.g. improper equipment, pressure from others, lack of training, etc., then we have the ability to calmly have a conversation to determine why they did what they did.  In other words, we determine the context that drove the person to rush, cut corners, use improper tools, etc.  Once we know why they did it, we then have a chance of creating lasting change by changing the contextual factors that led to the unsafe act.

Your key take-aways: 

1. When you see what you think is a pile of stupidity, be curious as to where it came from.  Otherwise, you may find yourself stepping in it yourself.
2. Maybe it wasn’t stupidity at all.  Maybe it was just the by-product of the context in which they work.  Find a fix together and you may both come out smelling like roses.

Because I Said So! The Importance of “WHY”

Sending a clear message, such as an assignment to an employee requires that we make sure that Six-Points are understood: WHO-WHAT-WHERE-WHEN-HOW & WHY.  Sometimes we send mixed or unclear messages because we leave out one or more of these points.  This can happen because we are pressed for time, we assume understanding or because we just don’t see the importance of that point.  Failure to communicate any of these points could lead to failure, but one point in particular can really impact motivation.   In most organizations, there are those tasks that nobody enjoys doing.  They may be either repetitive or noxious, but they have to get done anyway.  For example, some of our client companies use Behavior Based Safety (BBS) as a component of their comprehensive safety program.  One aspect of many of these BBS programs is the requirement for employees to complete “observation cards” on a regular basis (a repetitive task).  We find that many employees don’t see the importance of this task, so they put it off until the last minute and then “pencil-whip” or “make up” the observations just to satisfy the requirement.  The reason this happens is because the employees don’t really understand the “WHY” behind the observation task.  Supervisors assume that they understand the purpose behind the task so they don’t take the time to communicate this clearly to their employees.  As you might guess, this “false” data can lead management to make safety decisions that may be misguided.  We have found that simply telling employees that their observations are actually used to direct safety decision-making by management can greatly increase the validity of those observations.

People need to understand why they are being asked to do something that they don’t really like to do.   Simply saying “because I said so” doesn’t work with children and it certainly doesn’t work with employees.  Take the time to clearly communicate the reason behind what you are asking them to do and you will increase motivation.

Overcoming the Tendency to “Micro-manage”

Micro-management is the failure to delegate when delegation is appropriate.  It is giving an assignment to an employee who has the capability of executing on their own and then overseeing the details of the execution of the assignment.  In many cases, it is driven by a lack of trust in the other person, but even if it is not, it is almost always viewed as such.  The perception of lack of trust increases frustration and reduces both motivation and the desire to show initiative.  In other words, micro-management creates an environment that negatively impacts results.  So how do you overcome the tendency to micro-manage?  The key is trust, and trust grows with successful accomplishment.  There are three steps to developing trust.

• Fairly evaluate the competencies of the individual.  The tasks that you assign require certain competencies for success.  Start by identifying those competencies and then evaluate your employee’s skill set relative to those competencies.  If a skill is lacking you can provide support through training.  If all the skills are present then you can predict a high probability of success.
• Make assignments on the basis of competencies.  The more success that you observe and the individual achieves, the more trust you will have in the person and the more confidence the person will have in their ability.  Making assignments on the basis of competencies increases the chances of success.
• Communicate your expectations and trust to the individual.  When making assignments, make sure that you clearly communicate your expectations by providing information needed for success.  We call these the six-points of a clear message and they include What-When-Where-Who-How-Why.  Don’t over focus on the “How” component with a competent employee because this can communicate lack of confidence in their ability.  Make sure that you give them information that may be specific to the current task that they might not have, such as “When” you need the task accomplished.  When appropriate, communicate that you have every confidence in their ability to complete the task at hand.

Empowering employees to accomplish tasks on their own not only creates a more confident and competent workforce, it also gives you more control over your time and peace of mind.

Incentives as a Motivational Tool

Many organizations use both monetary and non-monetary incentives to increase performance.  What do good incentive programs look like and are they really useful?  First of all, when we talk about incentives, we are talking about the application of something desired by the employee that increases the likelihood that they will perform at a higher level.  The objective is to motivate the employee to perform a task/skill for which they are already competent at a faster, more frequent or more reliable level than they have been doing.  Incentives, as defined here are not used to teach, but rather to motivate behavior.  Good incentive programs have three primary characteristics that lead to success. 1.  The behavior required for success is clearly understood.  People can only be expected to achieve a result in a particular manner if they understand the standard against which they are being measured.  I remember once I told my then 10-year old son to “clean up his mess” after a group of his friends had been at our house for a party.  When I came back to evaluate his work, I couldn’t see anything different than before.  When I questioned him about his “failure”, he said he did “clean up his mess”; all that other mess was made by his friends.  I obviously had not defined the standard against which I was measuring his performance.

2.  The measure of success is quantifiable and achievable.   The result must be quantitative so that it can be precisely measured.  Qualitative measures (e.g. high quality) are too ambiguous and leave room for differences of opinion.  Leaving no soda cans or chip bags in the family room after you have cleaned up your mess would have allowed me to have a defendable measure of my sons success in the cleaning task.

3.  The incentive is something that is desired by the employees and is clearly tied to success. The incentive that is applied should be something that is seen as worth the effort by employees (or children, as the case may be).  If it is not, then it will not serve as a motivator and cannot be expected to improve results.  Money is not always required as an incentive.  In the example with my son, I told him that as soon as he met our agreed upon standard he could go outside and play basketball with his friends.  That non-monetary incentive increased the quantity of items that he picked up and the speed at which he did it.  Make sure that you have accurately determined the desirousness of your incentives.

4 Keys to Effective Delegation

As a supervisor, one of the ways that you get your job done, and manage your time more effectively is to delegate to your employees.  Delegating requires trust in their ability to get the results that you expect.  Here are four keys to making sure you delegate effectively.

1. Identify the competencies required to accomplish the task.  This sounds simple, but how many times do we actually do a task analysis before making an assignment.  We know the result that we want, but many times we don’t take the time to really determine how we want that result achieved.  Understanding what competencies are needed for success is critical before you can do what comes next.
2. Assess your employees relative to the task competencies.  An honest comparison of employee skills/competencies against task requirements will help you determine whether you can delegate or whether you need to provide additional support to the employee, including training.
3. Communicate your expectations clearly.  When giving an assignment, there are 6-points that need to be understood by the employee:  What, Who, When, Where, Why and How.  If you are delegating to an employee who has the requisite competencies, then probably all you will need to communicate is “What result you need”.  If this is a special situation then you will need to communicate those aspects of the task that make this special, e.g., when you need it done.  Going over every detail of “How” is certainly not needed if the person is truly competent in this task and doing so would be seen as “micro-managing” due to lack of trust.
4. Give appropriate feedback once the task is done.  Feedback is obviously dependent on result, but don’t forget to give positive feedback for success (maybe a simple “thank you”).  If failure occurs, then take the time to determine why so that you can make sure that failure doesn’t occur again.

4 Steps for Successful Career Coaching

Career development is a personal responsibility, but really good supervisors understand that they can help by being a career coach to their employees.  Here are four keys to being an effective career coach. 1.  Help the employee identify career goals.  Career success requires both ability and motivation.  Help the employee identify strengths and interests as the starting point to defining career goals.  It is not the role of a career coach to judge the appropriateness of the employee’s career goals, but it is appropriate to help the employee explore the consequences of moving along a particular career path relative to strengths and interests.

2.  Help the employee identify developmental needs.  Once a career goal has been identified, help the person assess the requirements for success and determine the requisite knowledge, skills, experience, etc.  Help the person honestly evaluate their current level of readiness and what must be done to move forward and to achieve their career goals. 3.  Help the employee discover barriers to development and develop plans to overcome those barriers.  An honest evaluation of barriers to personal development is essential to the development of a career plan.  Many times the employee is unaware of those barriers and needs another person to ask questions that lead to discovery.  Once barriers have been identified, a realistic plan of action needs to be developed.  This is the responsibility of the individual, but, again, asking relevant questions and appropriately challenging assumptions is an important part of planning. 4.  Hold the employee accountable for implementing plans.  This does not mean punishment for failure.  Here accountability is really tied to the “giving account” part of accountability.  The career coach should be there to ask questions about plan schedule and accomplishment and provide encouragement and feedback as appropriate.

The role of a career coach is that of “helper”.  They facilitate development, not dictate it.

Trust: 3 Keys to Establishing Shared Purpose

“Purpose” is the reason for which something is done, so “shared purpose” means a “common” reason for which something is done.  When people strive to “win” by beating the other  person, they may share the purpose of winning, but they are actually at “cross-purpose” because both cannot achieve their desired outcome.  So how do you establish shared purpose?

1.  Define the purpose of each person.  Many times you and the other person already have the same or similar purpose in mind, but don’t know it.  Intentionally and candidly talking about purpose should bring to light both differences and commonalities.  For example, in a coaching relationship both parties need to desire the improvement of the person being coached and the feeling of appreciation for their contributions.  Bringing this to light can lead to increased awareness and trust on both sides.

2.  Determine where you have common purpose.  Once you understand each other's purpose you can now determine what you share and what you don’t.  Sometimes you may have both common- and cross-purpose, so you have to determine how you can capitalize on what you share and minimize what you don’t.  My wife and I recently went on a vacation and both shared the purpose of enjoying each other's company, getting some rest and engaging in personal interests.  Hers was touring gardens; mine was playing golf.  We had a lot of time to pursue the first two commonalities and we found opportunities for each of us to individually pursue our own personal interests by setting times for her to tour a garden while I was playing golf.

3.  Create common ground when necessary.  Sometimes shared purpose is either not present or not very obvious, so you have to create it.  This is where the term “creative” comes into play.  Many times you can find a higher order purpose if you look for it and other times you can combine purposes into a shared purpose. One afternoon on our vacation I wanted to play golf and my wife wanted to visit a garden.  Because we only had one car and the two facilities were too far apart, we had to find common ground.  We both decided that we really wanted to do something together (common, higher order purpose) and that was more important than either golf or touring a garden.  We looked around and found a golf course on our route that also was known for its natural beauty, so she rode with me in my golf cart and checked out the local flora while I chased around a little white ball that on more than one occasion ended up in the same flora she was observing.

Trust starts with knowing that you and the other person have the same purpose in mind and that both will be striving for the same end.

Building Effective Relationships Through Mentoring & Coaching

In our last blog we discussed the importance of building relationship with employees so that you can more effectively motivate them to perform.  Now let’s talk about how to build that relationship.  

Supervisors play two basic roles with employees: Mentor and Coach.  So what is the difference?

Mentoring is a relationship in which one person facilitates the development of another by sharing knowledge, perspectives and insights from past experiences.  This is accomplished by helping the person being mentored recognize areas to improve, discover barriers to improvement, provide guidance by sharing knowledge, perspectives and insights from past experience, and helping the person adapt perspectives and insights to his or her specific circumstances.

Coaching is a relationship in which one person directs the personal/professional development of another by providing instruction and ensuring that the other effectively follows that instruction.  This is done by helping the person being coached identify areas to develop, discovering barriers to development, providing instructions for development and holding the other person accountable to following those instructions.

Both of these roles are based on trust through shared purpose and mutual respect.  As trust grows, the relationship grows and as the relationship grows, influence and the ability to motivate increases.  Best bosses know when and how to build relationships by mentoring and coaching.

Relationship: The Key to Motivating Different Generations

There has been a great deal of research and discussion about the differences between the various generations over the past several years.  Three generational groups make up todays workforce and while there is some disagreement as to what birth year ranges make up each, the following can be used for our discussion; Baby Boomers (1943 - 1960); Generation-X (1960 - 1981); Generation-Y (1982 - 2001).  While Baby Boomers have been the primary supervisory group for the last couple of decades, they are now retiring and Gen-X’ers and older Gen-Y’ers are moving into those positions in larger numbers.  So is understanding generations important? Research findings have not always been consistent, but in general, findings have indicated that Baby Boomers are motivated by money and title, Gen-X’ers by freedom to do their thing, and Gen-Y’ers by meaningful work.  We would argue that this information is particularly useful at the bigger, systemic level (HR policies and systems), but is less useful at the individual level.  Treating all members of a generational group as homogeneous - all motivated in the same way - would make us generally bad at motivating specific people.

The best supervisors treat their employees as individuals rather than members of a generational group, and establish relationships with each employee based on knowledge of the person.  We can all be motivated by money, title, freedom and meaningful work depending on the stage of life and the goals that we have set for ourselves.  Those good at motivating others understand this and attempt to “know” each employee’s desires and use this information to create a relationship that works to capitalize on what each individual hopes to accomplish.

Money may be more important as a person starts a family or approaches retirement.  Freedom and creativity may be more important as a person is attempting to define him/herself.  Meaningful work may be more important as a person is attempting to determine what occupation they will choose.   I am a “Boomer” who wants more money for retirement, likes the title that I have achieved, the freedom to do my work independently and I certainly want to do only what is meaningful to me and valuable to my company and my clients.  Best Bosses don’t look at employees as generational members, but as individuals who desire to be successful - and they make the effort to understand each employees’ definition of success.

Why Do I have to Tell Them Everything?

We all want our employees to take appropriate initiative in their jobs because it makes our jobs a lot easier and makes the employees’ jobs more interesting.  Here are four critical factors in getting increased initiative on the job.

  4 Keys to Increasing Employee Initiative

 

1.)  Tell them that you want it.  Giving permission to show initiative can open the door to appropriate “initiative taking.”  Some people have been punished in the past for acting before being told and they are reluctant to step out again.  The first key is to let them know that you want them to take appropriate initiative.

2.)  Focus on confidence-building.  The key to building confidence is to give people meaningful activities to accomplish and then follow success with your recognition.  Remember that “meaningful” is in the “eye of the beholder”.  What you see as meaningful may not be seen the same way by the employee.  Take time to know your employees’ aspirations and engineer opportunities for meaningful success.

3.)  Reinforce initiative taking.  Certainly recognize success, but even when failure occurs you can recognize the effort.  You never want to recognize/reward failure because that creates confusion about expectations, but you can recognize that the person attempted something and that you want them to continue showing initiative.  For example, you might say, “Even though the result was not what was expected, I want to thank you for trying it on your own.  I appreciate your initiative.  Now let’s talk about how to get a better result.”

4.)  Redirect failure without reducing self-esteem.  Aways focus negative feedback on the result, behavior, or both, but never on the person as a person.  Blaming the person only serves to reduce self-esteem and reduces the probability of taking initiative in the future.

4 Meaningful Ways to Give Positive Feedback

Positive feedback strengthens performance and increases the likelihood of repeated success.  Really effective supervisors use more positive feedback than they do negative feedback.  Here are four ways to use positive feedback successfully.

1. Give positive feedback in front of peers, but make sure that it is done in a manner that is not embarrassing to the person.

2. Explain “why” you are pleased with their performance. Make sure the person understands the relationship between their performance and the success of the team when possible.

3. Place a “letter of commendation” in the person’s personnel file and make sure that the individual has a copy of the letter.

4. Note their successes as part of their performance review so that the person can see the connection between specific successes and your evaluation of overall performance.

Help!! I'm tired of doing everything myself!

3 Steps to Make Delegating Less Risky Many of us find that we just can’t seem to get done in a day everything that needs to get done.  If we work alone, then this may be primarily a personal time management issue, but if we supervise a team, then it may well be a delegation and training issue.

Sometimes we fail to delegate tasks to our team members because we simply don’t trust them.  We have delegated to someone in the past and they have failed us, so now we are afraid to try it again.  The fact is that, as supervisors, our job is to get results through the efforts of our team members and if we aren’t delegating, we are not doing what we are getting paid to do.

So how do you develop enough trust so that you are willing to take the “risk” of delegating?

1.  Do an Ability Inventory -- The first step is to accurately understand the ability level of each team member with respect to each task for which they have responsibility.  An honest evaluation of ability will give you a starting point.

2.  Delegate with Support -- Once you have this information, then you can determine what and to whom you can give more responsibility.  Make sure that you provide enough support to ensure success without “looking over their shoulder” all the time.

3.  Develop “The Bench” -- Additionally, you need to determine an on-the-job training process to develop the skills needed by each team member so that they can be successful when delegated specific tasks.  This gives you more “bench strength” so that you have more options for delegation.

Balancing delegation and training will really help you manage your time and also help manage the time of your team members.

3 Keys to Building Confident Employees

Most supervisors want employees who are willing to show appropriate initiative in their work - employees who do things without having to be told to do them.  How many of you would like for your children to clean their room without being told?  OK, maybe that is a little far fetched, but you get the idea.  We know from a lot of research over the past 50-years that people with confidence are much more willing to take initiative.  With this in mind, really good supervisors do everything they can to instill confidence in their employees.  So how do they do it? There are three essentials to building confident employees (and children): 

1.  Evaluate strengths and weaknesses

2.  “Engineer Opportunities for Success” based on those strengths and weaknesses  

3.  Acknowledge success to increase confidence

First, you have to honestly evaluate what each employee is really good at and where they could use some improvement.  Second, “engineer opportunities for success” primarily for the areas needing improvement, but also for the areas that are already strengths.  Remember, while we can learn from failure, confidence is built primarily on successes.  Finally, “acknowledge the success”.  People need positive feedback from important people in their lives, and as a supervisor or parent, you are significant.  Be a confidence builder and you will find that things get done faster and with less of your effort.

What is Accountability Anyway?

One of the primary roles of a manager, supervisor or parent for that matter is to hold people accountable for their performance and the results that they either achieve or fail to achieve.  We hear over and over again that people must be held accountable if you want improvement.  We agree, but what is accountability anyway? Here are some real life examples of what accountability is NOT:

• Blaming a peer when they fail to meet an important deadline

• Making an example of an employee to discourage others from making the same mistake

• Threatening the team during a meeting to demonstrate that you won’t tolerate “poor performance”

• Sending out a memo to let everyone know that team members must have thick skins to keep standards from slipping

• Writing a “strongly worded” performance evaluation to reflect your sincere disappointment with an employee’s contribution over the last few quarters

• Giving your significant other the cold shoulder or withholding affection until they start paying attention to your needs, too

• Sending a child to his room when he doesn’t do what he is told

Here are the common themes with all of these accountability failures:

1. The disappointed party assumed that motivation was the cause and blamed the poor-performer for the results they observed, and
2. The disappointed party chose to punish the poor-performer into new behavior.

This simply isn’t what effective accountability is all about.  For us, accountability is a process and it includes two basic components:

1. Examination of the facts/reasons underlying a specific event/result -- We take the “accounting” in accountability seriously.  Without knowing exactly “why” the person didn’t meet expectations, it is virtually impossible to know how to do the next step.
2. Applying appropriate consequences for the actions and results -- These consequences must be logically tied to the real reason behind the result if you want improvement.

In our March newsletter we will be discussing how to effectively use these two basic components to effectively hold others accountable when they fail to meet expectations.

Are you a "Best Boss"

For the past 30+ years and with thousands of participants, we have been conducting an informal survey to determine the characteristics of those people deemed to be “best bosses”. While teaching supervisors how to manage the performance of their direct reports, we had them participate in an exercise where they listed the characteristics of the best boss they had ever had.  We noticed that there was a lot of consistency across groups and around the world.  We came to call the leadership style that emerged from the data “The Facilitative-Relational Leader” because these bosses used skills to create an environment that made it easier for their team members to express their ideas and achieve their objectives.  While there is some variance in the lists that were generated, there are 20 characteristics that always showed up, and they are:

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

Over the next few weeks, we are going to address some of the key characteristics and delve into how the best actually express them, but for now, you may want to think about how you would be viewed by your employees.  How would you stack up against this list?  We have our class participant’s rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 means “not at all” and 10 means “very accurately”) on how well each characteristic describes them as a manager/supervisor.  You may want to imagine how your team members would evaluate you.  This will give you an idea about what you should focus on to become more effective in your role as a leader.

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.