Monday Mentor-Week 21-Saving People from Themselves

For those of us that are parents, we realize all the oxygen we used to tell the kids to not touch the stove when lit was absolutely wasted. We showed them. We told them it would burn. We said it was dangerous.


They touched it anyways.

It hurt. They learned their lesson.

And with that transaction, leaders should see a valuable lesson in how team members learn and grow. You will never be able to save your team members from themselves and you will never be able to warn them of all potential outcomes until they try something and fail themselves.

Like our children, the most valuable lessons for team members in their growth and development is often failure. Success teaches some lessons but the ones that stick with us the most are the points of our failure. As leaders, we need to allow our team members to fail for their ultimate growth and development.

Now a special note to those who may think this is reckless. When the risks associated with failure include physical harm, loss of organizational integrity or credibility, significant financial harm or even the loss of a great customer, the leader must mitigate this risk and prevent horrible things from occurring. By contrast, if the risks associated with failure are minor, even when you know the team member is going to fail, you must let them. They will never learn and grow if you do not let them fail.

Another area of allowing failure is in pure job performance. You cannot compromise your expectations of performance and behavior. If you compromise once, you will need to be prepared to compromise often. If the team member is not meeting expectations, they are not meeting expectations and need to receive your best efforts from a coaching perspective. If they are still not performing, the failure is theirs and not yours.

Not every team member is in the right job at the right organization. Effective leadership is not about saving everyone but about making sure the right people are in the right roles. It is not a failure on your part when you have to let a team member go after the right amount of coaching and teaching. If they have to go, they have to go. Both the team member and the organization need this transaction.

Monday Mentor-Week 14-Breeding Sheep in the Workplace

Sheep.

Need constant attention. Need to be told and shown every step along the way. Not thinking. Not deciding. Not innovating. Just following and doing what they are told. Nothing more and nothing less.

Bah.

Sheep in the Workplace

Even if you have never left the comfortable confines of the big city, you have been exposed to sheep at work.

They are the people that require constant direction, sometimes the same direction, over and over again. They cannot solve problems, cannot think creatively, cannot deal with change and cannot make decisions. There will never be independent risk taking. They develop a co-dependence on leaders to guide them on a constant and continuous basis. They require a great deal of time to get even simple things accomplished.

There is no correlation between the amount of money paid to, the education level of or the type of job in which sheep congregate. Sheep come in all sizes, salary levels and ages.

Why Sheep are Bad?

When sheep become pervasive in a working environment, they will suck all of the valuable time and energy from a leader. They are very needy and require tons of time to manage.


Sheep also place a grossly unfair burden on leaders to have all of the answers and all of the ideas. Effective leadership must be able to capitalize on the ideas of his or her team and not just rely on their own creativity or innovation skills.


The presence of sheep in the workplace also create a paradigm shift in many leaders. When forced to deal with sheep, many leaders will micro-manage everyone using the assumption that all team members need that level of instruction and daily direction. Nothing will alienate a leader and render them ineffective faster than consistent micromanagement.


Sheep also have a significant impact on overall performance of an organization and the quality of service provided to your customers. Because decisions are bottlenecked back to the leader, effectiveness in reduced. When customer issues require leadership intervention, the service experience suffers.


Who is Responsible for Sheep?


Now for the hard part. You may struggle swallowing this for a minute but if you are truly self-honest, it should resonate.


To truly understand the origin of workplace sheep, we must examine recruiting, hiring and interviewing processes. Do you look for smart, experienced and thinking job candidates? In the interview process, do the job candidates indicate that they will need instruction on every step of the way and will need you to answer the same question multiple times? Do you pride yourself on being an employer of choice?


Well, if indeed you hire bright candidates that claim to have some levels of decision making and independence, where, when and how do they become sheep-like?


This is where the answer becomes a little painful. We breed them.

Through our management and supervision skills we breed sheep. Through our organization’s policies and procedures we breed sheep. Through our lack of providing feedback we breed sheep and through our taking a quick approach rather than a long term approach, we breed sheep.


Like it or not, we play the most significant role in turning a team member from a bright and ambitious rising star into a sheep. When we provide all the answers, avoid positive feedback and stifle innovation, we are building our flock.

Barriers to Delegation and Empowerment

From the Soaring Eagle Enterprises' training program Coaching II-Delegation, Development and Empowerment.

1. Insecurity
Fear of losing control and fear of criticism prevent some leaders from delegating. Ultimately, they are afraid of losing their job.

2. Lack of Confidence in Others
Some believe their team members are not competent to take on a task, but through delegation, they can improve their skills and competence.

3. Lack Of Ability To Train Others
If proper training is not provided, team members will fail and become resentful. Some leaders lack the ability or desire to articulate directions and desired outcomes.

4. Personal Enjoyment
Some things are hard to let go of, but leaders should not retain control of a task simply because they enjoy doing it.

5. Habit
If a task becomes simple and repetitive, it should be delegated to free up your time for more complex issues and responsibilities

6. Reluctance Caused by Past Failures
Determine the cause of failure. Failed delegation is typically due to a poor match, lack of training or poor tracking of delegated tasks. Avoid the mistake, not delegation.

7. Lack of Time
Training, preparation, and delegation require a time investment. While it may take time in the short term, it will be a time saver in the long term.

8. “I Can Do It Best”
Leaders who think that to do something right, they have to do it themselves will achieve very little strategically.

Bottlenecks-Poor Leadership and Organizational Dynamics

I have the opportunity to be associated with a local organization that offers a great perspective of poor leadership and organizational effectiveness.

This particular group bottlenecks all decisions and points of concern back to the CEO. The organization has several quality professional staff members but they are powerless to act without the blessing of the CEO.

This creates, among other things:

1. Powerless and empowerment-less team members that cannot solve issues or think on their own.

2. Unneeded delays in responding to routine and common requests.

3. Lack of morale and sense of total purpose among team members.

4. Isolation and lack of availability from the CEO (he is too busy approving everything).

Take a look at your own organization and decide if too much is bottle necked by applying a 10% rule. If 10% or less of all decisions need to be run up a level (or run to your level), you are a healthy organization. If more than 10% of all decision points require one-up approval, you need to look at efficiencies, organization and empowerment of team members.