What I learned about Management and Leadership This Week – March 28th

I am coaching a senior manager in a municipal environment.  He has been with the organization for many years and in his current position for 14 years.  He is talented – he knows everything about his industry.  His peers from other organizations call him for advice and direction; the Human Resources department relies on him for in-depth, background knowledge during contract negotiations; his direct reports always get the answer they need when they bring a problem.

He just resigned his position and he is going back to front-line delivery of service, either directly or through some form of teaching.  I was dumbfounded when I heard and I asked him why.

In a nutshell, this is what he said:

“Michael, I hate managing.  I hate having the phone beside my bed every night.  I hate having to do budgets, performance evaluations, and reports to Council.  I got into managing when I was in my 20’s and continued to move up the ladder.  Every step I took got me farther and farther from what I enjoy the most, which is front-line service delivery.  I’ve got 10 years left before retirement and I am not going to spend that time doing something I hate.”

I learned that management isn’t for everyone, no matter how talented the person may be.  There has to be a fit and a desire or it won’t work.  More than that, I learned that hating what you do isn’t something that you can cover over with an excellent salary, benefits and pension package.  In the end, its better to walk away.

Managing is like … riding a horse!

I was coaching a supervisor yesterday and he commented that while he was spending lots of time with his direct reports, he wasn’t actively managing or leading them; in essence, he was working with them on a project, like a peer.  In the case of one rather difficult direct report, this approach was not working for this supervisor.  He felt he needed to be more proactive.

What he needs to do is be ‘on’ all the time with his direct reports.  He needs to realize that when he is with them in a work environment, doing work, he needs to understand that he is in his ‘manager’ or ‘leader’ role and act accordingly.  What does being ‘on’ look like?

It looks and sounds like this:  A manager weighs his words before they are uttered to ensure they are in keeping with his role.  Are the words appropriate to the situation?  Is the tone proper?  Am I providing direction and information such that my direct report can use it?  Generally, am I coming across like an objective, rationale manager who knows what he is doing?

All these things should run through your mind, more so if you are new to this type of thought process and less if you are a seasoned veteran.  I am not saying be worried about what you say and do, fearful of making a mistake.  I’m saying make sure you review your words before uttering them.  Make sure they are the right words for the situation, spoken in the right tone.

So, how is this like riding a horse?  Well, I recalled when I was taking riding lessons that my instructor said ‘every time you get on a horse you are either schooling it, or unschooling it.’  The point being that if you were schooling it, the horse was receiving the instruction it needed; if you were unschooling it, the horse was becoming more difficult to manage.  The same thing goes with managing and leading.  You are either actively managing and leading or just holding the title.  You must be ‘on’ and active in performing your role so that your direct reports continue to develop, grow and assist in achieving organizational objectives.

Let me know how that works for you.

Set your expectations and your direct reports will thrive

Setting expectations is about stating what you want from your direct reports.  But why are they essential to managing people’s performance?

Role descriptions (the HR variety) are the ‘what’ of jobs.  They state what people should and shouldn’t be doing, in a given position.  Expectations tell people the ‘how’ of their job.  Properly stated expectations will point out how an employee should behave in terms of delivering service, interacting with others, balancing work and life priorities, keeping current with job skill requirements, etc.  By having the ‘what’ of a role description, in concert with the ‘how’ of an expectations document, employees will more clearly understand how they should operate.

Do this:

1. Sit down with each employee and in an informal way, probe whether or not they fully understand all that they do in their role.  Make notes – I’m sure there are some things they’ll need to work on.

2. Going further, get a sense for how they do their work.  Find out if their behaviour lines up with one or more of: the corporate mission, vision and values; the organizational customer service ethos; or any other standard or code that your organization has that prescribes how people should operate in the work place.  Make note of any gaps between what their stated behaviour and what you think they should do and create a professional development plan.

3. Create a set of expectations for your direct reports.  Come up with 10.  Ensure they line up with the mission, vision, values of the organization, but make them behavioural so that people can ‘see’ how they should behave.   Talk about them at a staff meeting and make it clear that you expect people to align with them and that you will be following up.

What you’ll find is that over time, people will align with your expectations because you have laid them out first, monitored them and given people feedback regularly.

Expectations + role descriptions = great performance.  Take the time to set expectations and you will see a significant performance improvement among your team members.

 

Fixing Difficult Employees by Changing Your Behaviour

We’ve been getting a lot of interest at 2WA, for our work on helping people deal with difficult employees.  We publish a monthly newsletter called 2WA Musings (get on the mailing list at www.2waconsulting.com), and going forward, we are going to write about a series of situations and provide some insight on why these situations occur and what you as a leader can do about them.

Often, difficult employees earn that reputation because they don’t meet their manager’s expectations.  Every manager has at least one of these people and are always looking for ways to ‘fix them’.  Our view is that by adjusting your style in engaging those employees, your expectations will be met.  

A common situation is where a manager delegates work to a direct report and it comes back poorly done.  Let’s sketch it out and show you ways to improve the performance of this ‘difficult employee’ by changing your behaviours.

Let’s say you gave your assistant a task like this, on a Monday:

“I need you to research this topic and provide me a 2 page summary, complete with references.  I need it by Friday, for a newsletter I am going to write on the weekend. OK?  Any questions?  Great, off you go.”

You had the assistant repeat back what you wanted and despite some concerns due to his past performance, you went away satisfied that all was in hand.  What you got back was a 5 page document that consisted of comments and articles from on-line bloggers that had been cut and pasted into a Word document without the matching source documentation.  The material didn’t have any common thread and you couldn’t make heads or tails about what the majority point of view was on this topic.  Oh and the proposal that your assistant was supposed to have couriered out on Wednesday didn’t make it; you lost that bid.

What happened?  A couple of things:

1. Quality – You didn’t specify the quality of the research.  Did you tell him you wanted, scholarly first principle research? On-line documents? Blogger rants?  You didn’t define what research looked like, in your eyes.

You need to be clear on exactly what search should look like, going so far as saying what is in bounds and what is out of bounds for the project.

“I want you to focus on on-line information that uses business periodicals as the source material.”

2. Time & Effort Expended – Did you indicate how much time the person should spend on the project?  Was it a 5 day or a 1 day research effort?  Clearly the time spent impacted on other work that didn’t get done.

We always tell people how much time they should spend on a project that we delegate.  We also tell them that if they get close to the timeline and are concerned about needing more time, ask us first.

“If you spend more than 1 day on this, you are doing too much.  If that happens, tell me and we can sit down and look at it before you do any more.”

3. Priority – There are lots of things your assistant does for you.  Did you make this a top priority that superseded all other work, or was your expectation that he would work it in to the existing schedule without missing any previously identified work? 

“You should spend about 6 hours on the researching and about 1 hour on the writing of the summary.  If you find that it isn’t enough, let me know and we can review.  Is there any other top priority work that might get in the way?  Do you need help with any of that?”

4. Check in – You assigned it on Monday and didn’t ask for him to check in with your AND you didn’t check in with him.  Doing so isn’t micromanaging, its managing.  If we didn’t need managers, they wouldn’t exist.

“Hi, I noticed you worked late last night and given that you have a couple of projects on, I wanted to check in and see how the research is going.  Where are you with it?”

 

Managers ask us to come in and ‘fix’ their employees; we do so by ‘fixing’ the manager’s behaviours.  Works every time.

 

Put Your Hands in Your Pockets! … How to Manage Properly

I’m doing a lot of 360 Feedback process debriefs this week.  This is the conversation that I have with each person taking part in a 360 process, which in this one client’s case, leads to the start of our leadership development program.  In the course of the debrief, I was asking this one manager about the fact that they were getting a lot of scores and comments that indicated that they were spending a lot of their time doing the work of their direct reports, rather than the work that related to their role as manager.

Now these particular people I am working with are all new managers to the organization and haven’t been in management more than a year.  Typically, they were hired or promoted internally and have worked their way up through the ranks to their current position.  The guy I’m referring to is Jim.  He’s been in the role for about 9 months and in our discussion he said that he felt like he was ‘drinking from a fire hose’, meaning trying to get all the work done and ending up drowning in it.  His perspective is that he had to ensure that the people who reported to him (Jim was in finance and had a number of clerks and accountants he supervised) did the work properly and accurately.  That’s a great focus for any manager; my issue with Jim was how he went about it.

When he started, one of his direct reports (a new hire at that time) would come into his office with a problem looking for some direction.  Jim used to do that role and would provide a solution and the employee left with satisfied.  But Jim wasn’t just providing a solution, he was actually doing the work.  This situation went on with the one employee, but soon after it started,  another employee started doing the same thing.  You see, his direct reports quickly figured out they could get Jim to do the tough work, by going into his office and asking for help.  Pretty soon Jim became what I like to call a ‘Super Worker’, a manager that was doing the really tough front-line work himself.

Two problems:  one, Jim couldn’t keep up and he became a bottleneck as work piled up.  Two, his manager’s work wasn’t getting done.  He was behind on performance appraisals, budget submissions and Council reports.  Things had gotten to the point that his supervisor brought him in for a sit down and had him participate in the leadership development program, which is how he and I came to be talking.

Our conversation boiled down, went something like this:  Jim couldn’t figure out how to get his employees to do the difficult work that they had successfully uploaded to him.  I pointed out to him that he was likely promoted due to his high level of technical ability.  He was really, really good at doing hard work like figuring out variances and writing up management reports to explain them.  But he hadn’t been given any direction when he was promoted on how to be a manager.   And because he wasn’t sure what to do as manager, he didn’t do a good job.  Which made him feel incompetent.  Which he didn’t like.  So he did what made him feel competent and valuable, which were things like variance analysis and reporting.  Which his direct reports were supposed to be doing.

You see the trap, right?

I got Jim to do this:

1. Everyone coming to him for help had to have three solutions for their problems and together with Jim they would identify the best one.

2. Jim met with his people with his hands in his pockets.  That way he could do the work, he could only tell them how to do it.

It worked pretty well.  Jim got out from under the work load and started having time for his managerial work and with the help of his supervisor, was becoming an effective member of the finance team.

Do this:  Next time a direct report comes to you and asks for help, put your hands in your pockets before you do anything else.

“What’s my role here?” … How to Improve Your Relationships

I’ve coached people for a number of years and as part of that work, I’ve learned a lot and have also offered a lot of advice. I am sharing an approach that seems to always work for the people I am coaching. It relates to knowing yourself and your style in your professional life and it is this:

Make sure you know the role you are to play, in any situation that you are in, be it with a peer, a direct report or your boss.

“But Michael”, they typically say, “I’m the manager, my role is obvious. My role to take action, identify a solution, move things forward”. And I usually say something like, “Really? Is that your role all the time? If it is, you are likely not meeting people’s needs.”

People go to others in an organization for many different reasons. They may indeed need a solution for their issue, but they might just need to get feedback on a solution they are thinking of implementing or they might need to vent or they might just need to connect with their boss, their colleague, their friend. If you jump right into the conversation with an approach that conveys a sense of ‘OK, what’s the problem? Let’s get it solved and move on’, you may be jumping to conclusions. Worse, you might be alienating them because if you have it wrong, you will come across as not listening and not aware of their needs.

Do this: If it isn’t obvious why they want to get some face-time with you, simply ask the question ‘What role do you want me to play here?’ That tells them that you are open to many possibilities and that their needs are most important at the moment. Follow along with what they ask for and make sure you check in to ensure that the convesation is going along as they hoped. If they want advice, ask them what kind and how much and then give them your thoughts. If they want to vent, nod sympathetically, ask a few questions to ensure they get all their words out. If they want to brainstorm, give them lots of ideas but don’t overwhelm them.

Above all else, don’t let the conversation go on endlessly – put limits on it at the front-end and make sure the agenda is clear. You have work to do and so do they. End the conversation with some words around the fact that you are glad they stopped in, that you hope they got what they needed and to make sure they know that you are open to further such interactions. Make sure you tell them what you got out of the conversation as well. Make sure things end on a positive note.

Remember, making sure you play the right role in a situation will make you feel confident because you are doing the right thing. Try it and let me know how it works.

Fish waiting to be caught

I’ve been working in the organizational development world for over 15 years and have consulting in many different sectors.  Over that time, I’ve developed views on many things (hey, I’m a consultant, we are supposed to have opinions!!) and today’s topic is an overarching truth amongst managers today.

That truth is that managers purposely avoid doing the things they should do – and are supposed to do as part of their job description –  that would make them more successful and their lives easier.  You should underline the word ‘purposely’.

What is it that managers are supposed to do, but don’t?

They do not do as much managing as they should.  Rather they engage in work that can only be described as ‘super work’.  Keep in mind that managers are still promoted into an oversight role based up on their professional and technical knowledge and experience.  Very few are promoted just for their managerial ability; that’s an error.  The phrase ‘super work’ is meant to convey the idea that managers often take on the difficult tasks that their direct reports bring them.  Instead of taking the time necessary to teach the direct report how to do this difficult task, the manager does it themselves, feeling very proud of themselves for being so smart and after all ‘it would have taken more time to teach someone, so it makes sense to do it themselves’.

There is the heart of the matter, there is the very conundrum that managers don’t see and generally don’t understand.  If I’m trying to ‘save time’ – presumably to all the other stuff that I have to take home each night – why do I try and save time by doing it myself?

This is the classic ‘give people a fish or teach them to fish’.  The manager has decided giving fish is faster, which means he has to go out and catch the darn fish.  Yet his own fish are still waiting to be caught.