Monday Mentor Week 26-Stop Being the Answer Man (or Woman)

One of my most frustrating childhood memories involves asking my mom how to spell a word and receiving her stock response of “look it up.” She knew how to spell the word and she knew that her answer frustrated me but she said it consistently and constantly until I stopped asking.


Stopped asking her to spell the word and looking for it first in the dictionary. She taught me how to problem solve and think. She could have answered my question but I would not have grown and learned on my own. Well done mom.

The first step in reducing and eliminating sheep and sheep-like behavior in your team is to cease being the answer man.

This is an area in which the enemy you fight has an outpost on the top of your shoulders. It is powerful to have the answers. People look to you as the brightest bulb in a room. You are a walking Wikipedia of work knowledge.

With every question that you answer, you are strengthening the chain of co-dependence to you and micromanaging the work environment. When you answer the question of a team member, you are subtly telling them that they do not need to think because you will provide all the answers that they need.

Don’t underestimate this ego battle. It is so cool to ride your white horse to the rescue of your team members and fix their dilemmas. They need you. They tell you how important you are. It feels good. You have the knowledge and the power and they love you for it. Bah.

The most effective leader will inquire behind team member questions about what they believe is right. That sounds like “what do you think you should do Leon?” Further ratcheting this up response you might say something like “Terri, you saw the same issue last week and worked through it nicely.”

Some leaders will hesitate asking questions back because they fear it will make them look weak and unknowing. The opposite is quite true. It is the leader secure in his or her skill set and competencies as a leader that will not rely on being the answer person and seek to grow the knowledge and abilities of their team.

The absolute most effective leaders create and share power and not just store it up. In the equation of forcing team members to think and articulate their own solutions, you are shifting power to them and creating real growth in your team.

When asked, ask back. Don’t be the leader with all the answers, be the leader with all the questions. If you persist in having all the answers, congratulations, you have made yourself invaluable and you are in the last job you will ever have.

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.