Building appropriate and genuine relationships with team members is also an important skills and competency for leaders. These relationships are built on establishing commonalities, listening effectively, providing respect and knowing a little bit about each team member. These relationships represent the core ingredient in loyalty and the desire for someone to push them in working for you.
When building relationships with team members, remember to spend significantly more time in finding out who they are as compared to telling them who you are. To paraphrase Covey: seek first to understand and then seek understanding. Also be very in-tune with the clues that your team gives you. Look for pictures, bumper stickers or clothing themes that provide a hint about someone’s interests, passions or family composition. Largely, people enjoy talking about their family, their pets, where they are from and in what they are interested. Let them and use that information for future follow-up.
Being an effective leader does not require superhuman memory skills as much as it requires the desire to be interested and the desire to remember team member information. In the pre-proliferation-of-computers era, leaders made index cards that included some key information from relationship building as well as important dates such as work anniversary, promotion date and birthday. That information was reviewed periodically prior to interacting with team members. In the more modern world, many leaders note key information about team members in contact management software and databases for future reference.
One great dividing line of good leaders and a very challenging line for new supervisors is the difference between friendly and friends. Effective leaders bridge the pitfalls related to the appearance of favoritism, clouded judgment and poor perception by being friendly with all their employees but friends with none of them. This is an important distinguishing line that often requires the use of “no, I am sorry I can’t” when responding to an after work drink invitation.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Monday Mentor-Week 30-Leading Others Through Change
Just because you are comfortable and supportive of a change does not mean your job is done. You have to lead others through that change.
A couple of common pitfalls to avoid in leadership include assuming that everyone else is as comfortable with change as you are and that you cannot have any impact on the cycle of change. The truth is that you have great influence over how the cycle of change impacts your organization and no two people will react to change in the same manner. Your role as effective leader compels you to guide your team through the change event with the minimum loss of results and with maximum effectiveness.
Your role in leading others through change has an interesting little rub point. Just suppose for a moment that you do not agree with or support the change and cannot reconcile even the slightest elements of it. That does not let you off the hook in guiding your team through the change. Whether you support it or not, you must be a willing and enthusiastic leader during changing times. This is your responsibility to your team and your organization.
There are three primary ingredients needed to helping others and an organization as a whole deal with change. The first and a very critical element is input. The best time to seek input on change is before change occurs but that is not always possible because of business needs or issues outside of the control of the organization. Input from those affected is the biggest cure to the depth of the mourning phase in the change cycle.
In the most simple terms, it is allowing team members and other stakeholders to define key elements of the needed change. It is soliciting opinions about how to accomplish the desired outcomes and looking for the unintended consequences that were previously discussed. The effective leader lays out what the desired outcome is and then allows team members to provide input on how to accomplish those objectives.
This is not allowing the inmates to run the prison but rather an attempt to achieve full buy-in and support for a change initiative. Just because you are seeking input does not imply you are running your company or department as a democracy. You are still free and empowered to enact the direction or change that you choose. People are far more likely to embrace change when they have input and feel as if they were part of the decision making and direction.
This cannot be overstated. Input equals buy-in. It cannot be bought. It cannot be achieved in a slide show. Buy-in only occurs with input.
The second key ingredient of leading others in change is communication. Input reduces or eliminates the depth of mourning in the change cycle and communication will reduce the amount of time the mourning and embracing parts of the cycle last.
As a person in a leadership position, you have heard things like “no one likes surprises” or “I wish someone would have told me this was coming.” Those statements and those like it are cries for information. Information that can only be delivered through frequent communication.
In order to guide team members through a change event, communication prior to the event occurring is critical. Your team needs time to process the changes, see how it impacts them and find the positive outcomes. Through your personal communication, you will provide them with the answers and give reassurances that the changes are needed and the impacts will be minimized. Without the communication, they will fill in the blanks for themselves and you risk them focusing only on risk based or failure based outcomes.
The standard rule of thumb for change based communication is to over-communicate. If you meet with your team twice a month, double that in a changing environment to focus on those changes and provide redundant information. Send out weekly or even daily status updates that talk about the change and how it is going. Be more open than ever to answer questions and address concerns.
The most surefire way to raise anxiety about change and lengthen the time of coping and embracing is to effect the change behind closed doors. Changes need to occur with transparency and in full view.
The final element of leading others through change is developing cultural tolerances and conditioning about change. Without the consultant speak, that is putting your team or the entire organization on notice that you and your team will be nimble and in a constant state of evolution.
Easily said but a little bit harder to actually pull off. There are several techniques to utilize including reminding team members about the previous changes that they have encountered, worked through and embraced. Another technique is not to focus on the history of the company or department and focus more on the future or vision and the need to change to in order to achieve that future view.
Change tolerance can also be achieved in a daily operational manner. If you routinely change and modify work flows and assignments (i.e. rotating jobs and schedules), dealing with larger scale organizational change is easier. Condition nimbleness by rotating assignments, hours and even where a person sits. That also helps with reducing the comfort to complacency equation.
The final reminder about leading others in change is about you. Remember that the example that you set in change management is extremely important and the team you lead will take a big clue about how to deal with change from how you deal with change.
A couple of common pitfalls to avoid in leadership include assuming that everyone else is as comfortable with change as you are and that you cannot have any impact on the cycle of change. The truth is that you have great influence over how the cycle of change impacts your organization and no two people will react to change in the same manner. Your role as effective leader compels you to guide your team through the change event with the minimum loss of results and with maximum effectiveness.
Your role in leading others through change has an interesting little rub point. Just suppose for a moment that you do not agree with or support the change and cannot reconcile even the slightest elements of it. That does not let you off the hook in guiding your team through the change. Whether you support it or not, you must be a willing and enthusiastic leader during changing times. This is your responsibility to your team and your organization.
There are three primary ingredients needed to helping others and an organization as a whole deal with change. The first and a very critical element is input. The best time to seek input on change is before change occurs but that is not always possible because of business needs or issues outside of the control of the organization. Input from those affected is the biggest cure to the depth of the mourning phase in the change cycle.
In the most simple terms, it is allowing team members and other stakeholders to define key elements of the needed change. It is soliciting opinions about how to accomplish the desired outcomes and looking for the unintended consequences that were previously discussed. The effective leader lays out what the desired outcome is and then allows team members to provide input on how to accomplish those objectives.
This is not allowing the inmates to run the prison but rather an attempt to achieve full buy-in and support for a change initiative. Just because you are seeking input does not imply you are running your company or department as a democracy. You are still free and empowered to enact the direction or change that you choose. People are far more likely to embrace change when they have input and feel as if they were part of the decision making and direction.
This cannot be overstated. Input equals buy-in. It cannot be bought. It cannot be achieved in a slide show. Buy-in only occurs with input.
The second key ingredient of leading others in change is communication. Input reduces or eliminates the depth of mourning in the change cycle and communication will reduce the amount of time the mourning and embracing parts of the cycle last.
As a person in a leadership position, you have heard things like “no one likes surprises” or “I wish someone would have told me this was coming.” Those statements and those like it are cries for information. Information that can only be delivered through frequent communication.
In order to guide team members through a change event, communication prior to the event occurring is critical. Your team needs time to process the changes, see how it impacts them and find the positive outcomes. Through your personal communication, you will provide them with the answers and give reassurances that the changes are needed and the impacts will be minimized. Without the communication, they will fill in the blanks for themselves and you risk them focusing only on risk based or failure based outcomes.
The standard rule of thumb for change based communication is to over-communicate. If you meet with your team twice a month, double that in a changing environment to focus on those changes and provide redundant information. Send out weekly or even daily status updates that talk about the change and how it is going. Be more open than ever to answer questions and address concerns.
The most surefire way to raise anxiety about change and lengthen the time of coping and embracing is to effect the change behind closed doors. Changes need to occur with transparency and in full view.
The final element of leading others through change is developing cultural tolerances and conditioning about change. Without the consultant speak, that is putting your team or the entire organization on notice that you and your team will be nimble and in a constant state of evolution.
Easily said but a little bit harder to actually pull off. There are several techniques to utilize including reminding team members about the previous changes that they have encountered, worked through and embraced. Another technique is not to focus on the history of the company or department and focus more on the future or vision and the need to change to in order to achieve that future view.
Change tolerance can also be achieved in a daily operational manner. If you routinely change and modify work flows and assignments (i.e. rotating jobs and schedules), dealing with larger scale organizational change is easier. Condition nimbleness by rotating assignments, hours and even where a person sits. That also helps with reducing the comfort to complacency equation.
The final reminder about leading others in change is about you. Remember that the example that you set in change management is extremely important and the team you lead will take a big clue about how to deal with change from how you deal with change.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Monday Mentor Week 29-What You Need is Not What They Need
Another stumbling block in the correct application of positive feedback is using your own need for it as a model for giving to everyone else.
Leaders have greater self-management. Leaders have a greater resiliency. Leaders have greater mechanisms for providing honest feedback internally. You know when you have done well. You may even have a small, internal celebration. Unfortunately, many leaders assume that all team members have the same internal dynamics.
People need to feel appreciated and that their contributions are valued. This goes beyond a paycheck and they desperately want to hear some positive feedback from their leaders.
In a perfect organizational climate and culture, line level leaders are hearing positive feedback from mid-level managers. Mid-level managers are hearing positive feedback from division leaders. Division leaders are hearing positive feedback from senior executives. That is the way it should be.
Reality check. Sadly, in many organizations, positive feedback needs to be provided to team members even when that leader is not hearing any positive feedback. It is easier when you receive it but just because you might not, it is not an excuse to not provide it to your team members.
There is another message here as well. Some team members will attempt to rebuff or minimize any positive feedback. They will even tell you that they don’t need it. Don’t buy into their shtick. They want positive feedback and need it as much as any other person.
Leaders have greater self-management. Leaders have a greater resiliency. Leaders have greater mechanisms for providing honest feedback internally. You know when you have done well. You may even have a small, internal celebration. Unfortunately, many leaders assume that all team members have the same internal dynamics.
People need to feel appreciated and that their contributions are valued. This goes beyond a paycheck and they desperately want to hear some positive feedback from their leaders.
In a perfect organizational climate and culture, line level leaders are hearing positive feedback from mid-level managers. Mid-level managers are hearing positive feedback from division leaders. Division leaders are hearing positive feedback from senior executives. That is the way it should be.
Reality check. Sadly, in many organizations, positive feedback needs to be provided to team members even when that leader is not hearing any positive feedback. It is easier when you receive it but just because you might not, it is not an excuse to not provide it to your team members.
There is another message here as well. Some team members will attempt to rebuff or minimize any positive feedback. They will even tell you that they don’t need it. Don’t buy into their shtick. They want positive feedback and need it as much as any other person.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Monday Mentor-Week 28-Corrective Feedback
The polar opposite of positive feedback is corrective feedback. The purpose of positive feedback is to achieve the replication of a valued event or behavior. Therefore, the purpose of corrective feedback is to reduce or eliminate a poor event or behavior.
Corrective feedback, in large part, is the process of establishing expectations and boundaries for team members. It is not punitive. It is not a form of discipline. It is rather a very direct response to a situation when a team member does not produce or behave in needed areas.
A great disconnect occurs in many organizations because of a hesitancy or fear in providing regular corrective feedback. When asked, team members will pretty universally want to know where they stand. They want to know what they are doing well and what they could do better. In the other corner, many leaders have trepidations and fears associated with providing corrective feedback and would rather defer or save the information for later. Some would rather put it in writing or surprise a team member with the corrective feedback in an annual review.
The remarkable thing about corrective feedback is that the many of the skills and techniques associated with positive feedback are used for corrective feedback. Immediacy in corrective feedback is very important to make sure that the risk of a poor piece of performance or bad behavior is not replicated. In corrective feedback, this risk takes on a multiplier effect because other team members see when a team member errors and is not coached about the event. This could cause greater performance slippage among the team and now you will be coaching multiple people instead of a single team member.
One of the reasons that immediacy of corrective coaching is often missed is because of an avoidance tendency in many leaders. Fearing a confrontation or not wanting to risk their likeability, some leaders will defer a corrective coaching interaction until later. Unfortunately, later rarely happens and some leaders use justifying statements such as “I will talk to her if she does it again” or “the next time he does that, I will talk with him” or “it really wasn’t that big of a deal.” These types of deferrals must be fought off and the feedback must be provided immediately when performance or behavior is unacceptable.
Another shared skill with corrective feedback and positive feedback is using a direct and matter-of-fact communication method. In positive feedback, a direct approach is used to improve clarity and make sure team members understand what they have done well in the most simple terms. With corrective feedback, clarity is also important but directness is used to make sure the leader does not use too many words or paint themselves into a corner. Simply indicate the failure point, iterate the expectation and make sure the message was understood.
In narrative form, that sounds like “Bob, you were late today. I need you here every morning at 8:00am. Are you clear with that?” Or in another form it is “Mary, your report is not accurate. You need to go back and check the numbers in the farthest right columns. This report must be accurate because of the impact it has on our financial statements. Do you understand what I need?”
Some people will look at this type of dialog and perceive harshness. Harsh is a tone element and not the words you use. Direct is necessary to insure the team member clearly understands the intent of the coaching interaction and clearly understands the expectations for performance or behavior. It is not harsh but just direct and to the point.
Corrective feedback, in large part, is the process of establishing expectations and boundaries for team members. It is not punitive. It is not a form of discipline. It is rather a very direct response to a situation when a team member does not produce or behave in needed areas.
A great disconnect occurs in many organizations because of a hesitancy or fear in providing regular corrective feedback. When asked, team members will pretty universally want to know where they stand. They want to know what they are doing well and what they could do better. In the other corner, many leaders have trepidations and fears associated with providing corrective feedback and would rather defer or save the information for later. Some would rather put it in writing or surprise a team member with the corrective feedback in an annual review.
The remarkable thing about corrective feedback is that the many of the skills and techniques associated with positive feedback are used for corrective feedback. Immediacy in corrective feedback is very important to make sure that the risk of a poor piece of performance or bad behavior is not replicated. In corrective feedback, this risk takes on a multiplier effect because other team members see when a team member errors and is not coached about the event. This could cause greater performance slippage among the team and now you will be coaching multiple people instead of a single team member.
One of the reasons that immediacy of corrective coaching is often missed is because of an avoidance tendency in many leaders. Fearing a confrontation or not wanting to risk their likeability, some leaders will defer a corrective coaching interaction until later. Unfortunately, later rarely happens and some leaders use justifying statements such as “I will talk to her if she does it again” or “the next time he does that, I will talk with him” or “it really wasn’t that big of a deal.” These types of deferrals must be fought off and the feedback must be provided immediately when performance or behavior is unacceptable.
Another shared skill with corrective feedback and positive feedback is using a direct and matter-of-fact communication method. In positive feedback, a direct approach is used to improve clarity and make sure team members understand what they have done well in the most simple terms. With corrective feedback, clarity is also important but directness is used to make sure the leader does not use too many words or paint themselves into a corner. Simply indicate the failure point, iterate the expectation and make sure the message was understood.
In narrative form, that sounds like “Bob, you were late today. I need you here every morning at 8:00am. Are you clear with that?” Or in another form it is “Mary, your report is not accurate. You need to go back and check the numbers in the farthest right columns. This report must be accurate because of the impact it has on our financial statements. Do you understand what I need?”
Some people will look at this type of dialog and perceive harshness. Harsh is a tone element and not the words you use. Direct is necessary to insure the team member clearly understands the intent of the coaching interaction and clearly understands the expectations for performance or behavior. It is not harsh but just direct and to the point.
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