Monday was about dealing with jerks in your workplace and yesterday about managing lazy co-workers.
What about bosses? Where are they? Why is it being left to workers to deal with problem co-workers?
Over the years (decades, actually), I’ve heard all the excuses — ‘I can’t be everywhere’, ‘I’m working on it’, or the ubiquitous ‘I’m busy’.
Those are the “good” excuses; here are the bad ones — ‘they’re really good at [whatever]’, ‘they’re a friend/relative of X’, ‘they’ve been here since the beginning’, and, in some ways, the worst ‘deal with it’.
Being self-motivated and self-managing should not include having to manage your colleagues.
That’s the boss’ job and why they make the bigger bucks.
I’ve never forgotten what Terry Dial, who eventually became vice chairman of Business Banking at Wells Fargo, told me decades ago when I was a recruiter, “People are 90% of our costs as well as the key to customer service and satisfaction. The only thing that should take priority over hiring a new employee is keeping a current one.”
That hasn’t changed in all these years.
Which begs the question, what are the bosses doing?
Avoiding direct interactions by hiding behind social media and chat apps, just as they hid behind email and, before that, memos.
Sometimes it’s because they are promoted in spite of not being a “people person,” which has nothing to do with whether they are extroverts or introverts.
Good bosses know that when someone is messing up, hurting or one of the other myriad causes of less than optimum behavior, it’s their responsibility.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
People. Whether at work or in your personal life, how you choose to respond to people is usually the make or break of any situation. That is especially true when dealing with someone’s negative actions.
I’m in love — with a man I never met, never spoke to, never followed or chatted with online.
His name is Rich Waidmann and he’s founder and CEO of Connectria Hosting.
I love him because when he started his company he consciously set out to make it a great place to work.
That means it’s a job requirement at his company that every employee treat everyone else with courtesy and respect as well as “going the extra mile” to take care of people in the community who are less fortunate
Then his company did a survey and found that
More than half (55%) of 250 IT professionals in the US. surveyed said they had been bullied by a co-worker. And 65% have said they dreaded going to work because of bad behavior of a co-worker.
Waidmann believes it shouldn’t be that way so he’s starting a No Jerks Allowed movement in an effort to encourage better cultures.
Way back in 2007 Stanford’s Bob Sutton wrote The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, but looking at the stats I’m not sure how much good it actually did.
The Talmud says, “We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.” Moreover, it’s often as we are that particular day, or even minute, and even as we change, minute to minute, so do others.
Jerks are known to lower productivity and kill innovation, so a lot of good information on identifying and dealing with jerks has been developed since Sutton’s book came out.
Contributing to that effort, here are my four favorite MAP attitudes for dealing with jerks.
Life happens, people react and act out, but that doesn’t mean you have to let their act in.
Consider the source of the comment before considering the comment, then let its effect on you be in direct proportion to your respect for that source.
Use mental imagery to defuse someone’s effect on you. This is especially useful against bullying and intimidation. Do it by having your mental image of the person be one that strips power symbols and adds amusement. (Give me a call if you want my favorite, it’s a bit rude, but has worked well for many people.)
And, finally, the one I try to keep uppermost in my mind at all times
At least some of “them” some of the time consider me a jerk—and some of the time they are probably correct.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Welch is still alive and must love today’s optimized millennials, who were raised to constantly strive and never stop working. Burnout would be no problem, since he could simply fire them.
In spite of that I doubt he could manage them; neither they, nor their elders, would take kindly to his style.
In fact, Welch’s approach is actually the fastest way to produce a bumper crop of weeds.
I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.
“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”
It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)
Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.
Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.
Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?
What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.
As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.
If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.
And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.
There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.
As you probably guessed, Jack Welch has been on my mind, mainly because I was stuck having lunch with a retired executive who went on and on about what a great role model Welch is.
When I disagreed, with specific examples, he informed me that he expected my reaction because I was a woman.
Huh?
Wow. I’m really glad this guy is retired, because he sure doesn’t relate to today’s workers no matter their age.
But nothing replaces high EQ, empathic, humane (not just human) bosses.
Not processes, not technology, not AI, and definitely not robots.
No matter what big and little tech want, believe or tell us, people are analog and always will be. For that matter, the real world is analog and always will be.
So, for the foreseeable future, the management and leadership skills needed to grow strong, creative, highly productive workers will be found in those who understand the limits of digital and can move freely and successfully in an analog world filled with analog people.
Back when Jack Welch implemented forced ranking throughout GE. was perched at the top of management gurus he
Also known as forced distribution and, derisively, as “rank and yank,” the practice was championed by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who insisted that GE identify and remove the bottom 10 percent of the workforce every year.
Hundreds of companies used it, including tech giants, but most (all?) have stopped. Some took longer than others, Microsoft got rid of it in 2015.
Amazing how it’s only taken 30+ years for management to figure out that setting employee against employee does not foster teamwork.
Having to watch your back, knowing it’s “you or them,” doesn’t foster anything.
But even without a formal forced ranking policy, some managers still believe that pitting team members against each other is the fastest way to boost productivity.
However, it’s a great way to increase your experience hiring
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I wrote this in 2012 and reposted it in 2015. The idea behind it is one the most important and viable concepts a manager (supervisor, team lead, executive) will (can, should) learn during their career. It is the difference between good and great.
As companies grow and managers build their organizations they frequently talk about “weeding out” low performing employees—Jack Welch was a ninja weeder.
If that thought has crossed your mind you might take a moment to think about James Russell Lowell’s comment, “A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.”
As with weeds, there are better ways to look at under-performing employees.
95% of the time it’s management failures that create weeds and those failures run the gamut from benign neglect to malicious abuse and everything in-between.
Weeds can come from outside your company, inter-departmental transfers and even from peers in your own backyard.
What is amazing is how quickly a weed will change with a little TLC.
“Weeds can grow quickly and flower early, producing vast numbers of genetically diverse seed.”
People grow quickly, too, and often produce innovative ideas just because someone listened instead of shutting them down.
And while trust that your attitude won’t change takes longer to build, the productivity benefits happen fairly rapidly.
So before you even think about weeding look in the mirror and be sure that the person looking back is a gardener and not a weed producer.
Oh joy. A new study of 25,000 employees, working in more than 1,000 different companies across 20 industries spread across Northern America, Europe, Asia, and Australia was done over the 12 months of 2018.
43% of employees said that they would be likely to leave their current companies if they were offered a 10% pay rise elsewhere. That number was up from 25% in their 2017 survey.
The report says that weak company cultures are to blame, while the author thinks the strong job market is also responsible.
I disagree, because if the majority of the stuff listed below is actually fixed it will take a lot more than a 10% raise to attract someone to a culture that probably has those same problems.
Here is the list.
Technical issues with software, and other tools
Interruptions and disruptions from Slack, emails and noisy office environments
Poor communication from management / lack of training and information
Disorganized and time-wasting systems and processes
Misguided decisions from management / bad leadership
Lack of flexibility / no opportunities to work from home
Overworked / under resourced team
Office politics / favoritism
Difficult customers
Too many meetings
The sheer size of the responding group means smart bosses will take note of these irritants; most are fixable without much impact on the budget.
Most require changes the boss can effect or, at least, influence. People aren’t stupid, they know their boss can’t change the whole company. But if they change what they can and keep working on the others, their people will stay and work with them.
What often matters most is that bosses recognize that they are part, if not all, of the problem and are honestly trying to change.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
You got MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), I got MAP, all us humans got MAP. MAP reflects your values — whatever they may be — and culture is MAP in action.
What does the boss really contribute to their organization?
The culture; it’s the boss’ MAP that forms and shapes the culture for their organization.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a mom and pop operation, startup or global giant; whether the company has two, two thousand or twenty thousand employees; whether the boss is called owner, founder, president, or CEO.
Cultural ideas can’t percolate up from the ranks without a top boss who enables the bottom-up culture in the first place, as well as providing the fertilizer that allows ideas to bloom.
It’s not enough to announce the cultural attributes in which you believe, such as no politics, and then ignore political actions because you believe that your senior staff are adults and won’t engage in behavior that goes unrewarded.
Even those who manage culture by benign neglect must see to it that there are repercussions for actions that flaunt the corporate culture just as there are for actions that violate legal issues such as harassment.
And all this is just as true for the individual subcultures that establish themselves around every manager in the company all the way down through team leader.
Creating and caring for the culture should be written into every manager’s job description at every level.
If that seems a bit extreme, keep in mind that study after study has proven that culture affects productivity, engagement, innovation and retention.
When you’re a boss, one of your biggest responsibilities is to help your people grow.
Doing that requires patience, because they won’t all grow at the same rate.
Some people grow fast, like a hare, others are more in the tortoise category, but that doesn’t make them less valuable.
The hares may grow faster, but the growth often lacks substance. Tortoises, on the other hand, are known to dig deep in order to go beyond the knowledge needed to do something and understand the underlying principles.
Speed is important and the lack of depth may not be a problem until something goes wrong. Finding a solution or work-around often requires the deeper understanding that tortoises possess.
The smart boss knows having a balance of both hares and tortoises yields the strongest team; one that can accomplish far more on time and in budget than a team that is predominantly one type or the other.
Yesterday’s Oldie was a reminder that there are very view motivators that can beat VSI (vested self-interest) when it comes to engaging your team.
Some people respond to money, but many more respond to intangible rewards.
How do you know what works?
How can you tailor motivators individually for each person?
I’ve heard from bosses at every level that they’re already stretched, they need to focus on the deliverables and their team and just don’t have the time to deal with individuals.
Which is laughable, since the team is comprised of individuals and the bosses job is to engage and motivate them, so the deliverables are delivered on time.
Great managers have no fear of using one of the most efficient approaches, i.e., ask your current team and each new hire.
Don’t suggest or use multiple choice, just ask.
What makes you eager to come to work?
If you could choose just one thing, other than compensation, that would light your work fire what would if be?
Don’t ask in a group situation if you want real answers, honest answers.
In fact, don’t ask in person, since you may not be able to control your initial reaction. If that happens it will break trust with that person and it is unlikely to be rebuilt any time soon.
Remember, this isn’t about what motivates you, nor is it any business of yours to judge what motivates someone else.
Hand the questions out in hard copy with each person’s name already on it.
Tell them you are using hardcopy to avoid the chance of accidental leaks and promise their responses won’t be shared with anybody.
It is extremely important that you don’t share them, even anonymously, with anyone, especially inside the company. Doing so for any reason, with anyone is betrayal, pure and simple.
Explain that because all humans are different you want to understand what really matters to each of them and that once you do you’ll do your best to provide it.
Finally, don’t kid yourself, if you don’t honor your promise it is betrayal, the equivalent to sleeping around when in a committed relationship.
If you don’t know how to be faithful, you’re better off just forgetting about this post.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
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