Tagged: Management

Put it in writing…

How many times have you heard “we can’t do anything about it until you put it in writing?”

For whatever reason the person making the statement has – it’s rarely a helpful statement to make. You say “write” and I hear “dismissed”. Especially in response to a conversation about other’s poor behaviour.

Yet the experience of many employees who may want to talk through behaviour problems with their manager or the HR department is to met with.

At work the statement “I can’t do anything unless you put it in writing” puts the responsibility on individuals to pursue behavioural issues usually through an individual grievance – a process which largely dissatisfies those who use it.

Formal grievance procedures ought to be the last step taken – after all informal avenues are exhausted – in addressing problem poor conduct.

With sound leadership about resolving behaviour problems informally managers may initiate action without waiting for something in writing. The first step would be to ask around and get some perspectives of the conduct being talked about. Your findings will often be ambiguous – rarely do people make bad decisions and behave poorly to all colleagues all the time. The different perspectives will help decide the range of management actions – the informal attempts to resolve what is happening.

You do not need a written grievance to hear the concerns, to be alive to the impact and the concern of staff members about the behaviour of another.

With safeguards against raising false concerns in bad faith or for personal gain the initiative is worth considering in all workplaces struggling with significant under-reporting of poor behaviour and a poor record of resolving behaviour concerns.

Does your approach to dealing with reports of unreasonable behaviour resolve concerns or create them?

What’s the difference between an argument and a triangle?

Have you been caught up in an endless argument – either as a bystander who could not escape or as a willing participant?

Interested in avoiding endless arguments?

Here’s how to use some questions to avoid an argument about anything really.

They are generic questions – use them anytime someone says something general – “I don’t think we should be doing anything about employee engagement, customer satisfaction, employee bonuses, waste reduction, safety, career pathways, sustainability.” or specific – “I disagree with asking customers for a referral!”

Here are the questions and I’ve used customer referrals as the example:

  • What is it about how willing our customers are to recommend us you feel so strongly about?
  • What would you like to see us do differently?
  • What do you think would interest our staff, our customers and those with whom we are yet to do business?

Your goal is not to convert the person to your ideas on customers – your goal is simply to avoid an argument, and not rise to the bait.

And the difference between an argument and a triangle – the triangle has a point.

Let me know if I have avoided an argument or created one?

Preaching to the converted

The converted. Let’s define them those who have helped to improve some feature of their work area, and who are now trying to make sure the improvements are sustained.

Against the sometimes ambiguous results of change programs the converted may be an endangered species – certainly rare. If they are not nurtured, supported and encouraged their involvement may weaken. Commitment to reform deteriorates.

And yet “preaching to the converted” has somehow come to mean “stay away from the converted – leave them to it”. While preaching and lecturing have no constructive place in creating and maintaining behaviour change neither does ignoring success.

So – how do you treat your converted – those who are hard at work trying to sustain the improvements they have achieved? After making successful changes we do need to work hard to sustain them, so let’s not leave success to chance.

Here are three ideas to consider for helping a work group keep up the changes they have made:

1. Stress at work increases the risk of abandoning the changes – so why not help those working at sustaining change to anticipate and better deal with stress
2. Encourage those working at maintaining improvements to take credit for what they have achieved
3. Hold “lessons learnt” sessions – simply have the team identify what worked well and what didn’t work so well and focus on how to have more things go well.

 

Hello Tiffany

Before going along to a training session it’s useful to have a good idea why you are going.

Last blog post “Dear Ann” had some ideas on the conversation to have after training, here are some ideas to consider before the training.

Here is the email from Ann, Tiffany is to attend the training and Ann is her boss.

I wonder if a meeting with an agenda like the one suggested and preparation along the lines suggested would help participants – and therefore their employer – extract more value from a training session? What do you think?

 

Hello Tiffany

An invitation

I’m writing to invite you to sit down with me and go over how we might get the most value from our investment in “Supervising Your Team”.

Here are the points I’d like us to review, and you may have some other thoughts to bring along too:

  1. How can I best support you?
  2. Let’s talk over and agree the results the training is expected to deliver and how those results are useful and important to contributing to our goals.
  3. How a ‘day at the office’ will be different once you can successfully apply the skills learned during the training.
  4. Let’s agree times for you to check in and talk through applying the skills, identify what I can do to help maintain your enthusiasm when progress seems to be frustrated.
  5. Let’s agree the progress milestones to effectively apply the skills learned to the workplace.

6 thought starters

Here are some points to consider before we meet and you might want to email our trainer your responses to these questions too – let’s make our expectations clearer.

  1. What did you like most about other Supervising programs you have attended?
  2. What did you like least about other Supervising programs you have attended?
  3. What areas of supervising would you like to strengthen?
  4. How might your expertise in supervising affect your future employment and promotion opportunities?
  5. What actions do you plan to take to make this program successful?
  6. What will make this program in supervising stand out for you?

A

Do your meetings need tarting up?

Some meetings go really well. For most of the meeting everyone there knows what’s being talked about.

Decisions are made after everyone has had their say.

We all know what has been decided.

Follow up is planned, responsibilities assigned, deadlines are set.

If this is rarely your experience then maybe your meetings need tarting up?

You can TART up a meeting by finishing it with four simple steps:

  1. Here is what we Talked about.
  2. This is what we Agreed – decisions.
  3. These folks are Responsible for the following actions – action plan.
  4. This is the Timing of the actions – deadlines.

Use a checklist to guide decisions about developing supervisors

For many supervisors the focus of workshops on conflict is about delivering feedback to employees – something supervisors have to do, and do well. Conversations about unhelpful behaviour and poor performance however do not occur in a vacuum.

While many employees would like to better handle delivering and receiving feedback there are some conditions at work which make the task of delivering feedback that much harder. While part of the solution may be to develop supervisor skills in delivering feedback firmly and in a timely manner, the following checklist has been used to identify some of the work conditions which make delivering feedback well an almost impossible task.

Consider the scenario where your supervisors give poor performers too many chances and when they do act – expect turnaround miracles. What if your organisation’s response to the checklist items is “No”?

You can see that improving supervisor skill alone is not going to cut it.

Conflict Prevention Checklist

Item

Rating
 

No!

Definitely not

       Yes!Absolutely
We have employee education programs about

 

        
·         Our expectations about acceptable work behaviour
·         Our workplace policies and procedures
·         The unwritten rules and expectations about work behaviour
·         How to conduct, participate in and follow up meetings with colleagues, clients and suppliers
Our workplace procedures and policies  

 

        
·         Cover all employment law requirements
·         Have been communicated to all employees
·         Include standards against which the conduct of employees may be evaluated
·         Provide a legal basis for imposing discipline, suspension or termination
·         Provide for effective complaint resolution procedures

Finally

Time spent developing, training and coaching supervisors is a scarce resource. One way to suck more value out of a scarce resource is to make better decisions about how to use it – in this case better deciding how to use supervisor development time. The big idea here is that we are more likely to accurately identify what supervisors need to get better at by assessing the operational conditions under which they and their teams perform, rather than only assessing the supervisor – or worse – conducting no assessment or diagnosis at all.

Measure team performance

There are many ways to assess the performance of a team and the conditions under which the team performs. Let’s look at an approach developed by McKinsey and refined by the World Management Survey.

The World Management Survey’s approach is to get a variety of employees taking about  18 topics, to reveal the conditions under which work is performed. Questions are used as conversation starters to cover topics such as how change is introduced, if and how people are held accountable, what people are held accountable for, performance measurement and tracking, etc.

Here are some of the questions (the complete list may be found here). The questions have been used across manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education which means the questions are robust and the discussions generated will help you make better decisions about enhancing team and supervisor performance.

Example questions

The conversations about process improvement and documentation include:

  1. How do problems typically get exposed and fixed?
  2. Talk me through the process for a recent problem that you faced?
  3. Who typically gets involved in changing or improving?
  4. How do/can different staff groups get involved in this process? Take me through a recent example?
  5. How can the staff suggest process improvements?

For the topic of clarity and compatibility of goals the conversation starters include:

  1. If I asked someone on your staff directly about individual targets, what would they tell me?
  2. How do people know how their own performance compares to other people’s performance? Is this published or posted in any way?
  3. Could every person here could tell me what they are responsible for and how that will be assessed? What would they say? What would you say?

Contrast the scenarios where most people interviewed about the above topic in an organisation indicated they had no clear idea of how performance is measured, with another organisation where performance is continuously tracked and communicated to all staff using a range of visual management tools?

It’s hard work to identify accurately the development needs of a supervisor independent of the operational maturity of the organisation.

Supervisors – inspiring others

This month the initial results of an online poll of some 2000 Australian employees of their thoughts on leadership revealed that they didn’t think much of their Australian bosses.

I asked a senior healthcare executive for her thoughts on the most pressing development  needs of supervisors. She reflected on her experience.

“I would also suggest that many supervisors  “fear” providing any negative feedback, some have had training or attended courses but lack the support, mentorship, confidence and or courage to address the issues.  There is an inaccurate sense that it is best to ignore the behaviour hoping it will stop but as we all know the behaviour will generally escalate.  

So the question I ask then is how best to skill up the supervisor OR better yet how was the recruitment of the supervisor performed – there is a lot to be said about recruiting well in the beginning. 

 Planning and preparing to provide feedback is vital and often underperformed or just plan not done – I learnt by my errors and found that when I took the time to structure and plan what I needed to address with the staff member it was a lot easier plus focused on the identified issues.  Didn’t always go to plan but again was prepared to learn from those situations. 

 Supervisors also need to own their position responsibilities and learn to self-reflect in order to address their learning needs not always wait to be told.  My colleagues and I have often had the discussion!  If people (supervisors) are not held to account for either behaviour or performance targets etc then the majority do not self-manage – self managing I believe is also vital to performance. 

 It is like a cascading/ripple effect – then this all leads to the culture of the organisation. Performance of teams/units etc are most definitely a shared responsibility of the supervisor and the team members and I suspect that there are not many organisations that provide the clarity required and the expectations from the beginning ( I could be wrong though).”

What change could you make to developing your supervisors so they are better equipped to achieve results through others?

tsk tsk TSK

tsk tsk TSK

I live about 70 kilometres from Sydney in the mountains (hills really). I use the train to get to the city. I used to sit in the quiet carriages where noisy conversations, loud mobile phone conversations and chortling at the videos on your smartphone are discouraged.

Used to. I’m convinced that quiet carriages on trains attract those who enjoy reminding others of the rules. Generally by expressing annoyance, a frown, tsk, shake the head. Part of the deal seems to make more noise than the micro decibels you are complaining about as you do battle with the unquiet.

Following the rules at work and outside work is a civil thing to do. Rules, policies, procedures, protocols, guidelines – expectations all. It is easier to work with colleagues who meet our expectations about behaviour and performance. It can be a nightmare working with those who disregard the rules – creating more work for the rest of us.

Another nightmare may be created though when we work with those who only follow the rules. Some of the behaviours these colleagues may display include chastising those who sometimes deviate slightly from the rules, who are quick to cry “it’s not in my job description”. Those for whom there are no exceptions, no discretion – “the policy says we don’t…”.

Following the rules at work is not straightforward. For a start there are big rules (violate these at some risk) and little rules – most of us would not even know about them. For example many multi-facility organisations have rules about signs you may post in elevators, rules about how paintings are to be hung, the way to spell program. “Little” rules surely.

Most of us seem to be able to negotiate our way around the rules – observing the “big” ones, using discretion with “little” ones, breaking the letter of the rule sometimes – better to observe the spirit of the rule.

“It’s against the rules!”

Forgotten you have a mind of your own? Tsk.

Executive women

One of the most common pieces of business advice to almost anyone seeking to build their business or career – no matter what the profession – is to seek the counsel of a mentor. It’s become almost one of those things people ‘tick off’ on the list – and many organisations incorporate formal coaching and mentorship into their development programs.

However, there’s something to be said for seeking out someone who brings a completely different perspective. Someone who can listen, challenge and provoke… someone to help chair the ‘internal/infernal committee’ that goes on in so many of our heads.

This year I’ve had the pleasure of being a mentor to Executive Women. I’ve always believed in the power of mentorship, and it was refreshing to have that reinforced recently – illustrated by these snatches of conversation a few nights ago at a wrap-up of the 2013 Mentor Program for Executive Women run by Kim McGuinness CEO of Network Central.

 “Things seemed to fall into place after meetings with my mentor, I’d be worried about what was happening, prepare to talk it through with my mentor and after talking it through – then in the next day or so – it just fell into place. I used to think learning came from books – it does and so much more comes from people”

“I’d prepare for catching up with my mentor, she’d draw out more information and my feelings, We’d plan the conversation, rehearse it. Then when I had the conversation – half the things I was worried would happen didn’t – it has made me think about the things I worry about in my life.  Most of the stuff I worried about never happened – what a waste – the mentoring has changed my outlook”

“As a mentor I saw the woman I was mentoring just going around in circles – so frustrating to watch. My job then was to listen to her talk to herself and ask her what was she looking for?”

The conversations alerted me to three powerful insights into mentoring:

  • Mentors ask questions that encourage those with whom they are working to talk about what is important to them
  • Practising conversations, or saying things out loud to another is critical – it would appear once people hear themselves saying something, they are more inclined to actually do it
  • Mentors only give advice when they are directly asked for it

Why get into a mentoring program? Here’s one reason.

I’ve talked with lots of people who comment that their conversations with themselves, their self-talk, the comments of their “internal committee” rarely change. The conversations are a lot like what happens at poor meetings – everyone says their set pieces, like lines in a bad play and nothing changes. If you find a mentor who delivers on the three insights above then you too might find that you can change your conversations with yourself by having them out loud with someone who listens and who every now and then asks you a question that disrupts your set piece.

Why not start now and find someone who needs a good listening to and – ask if you can listen?