Monday is Memorial Day. Please take a few minutes to watch this video, it will touch your heart.
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Counseling To Coaching
28 Dec
Several recent blogs have focused on the importance of developing an effective feedback style in building managerial and leadership competence. A frequently used synonym for feedback is counseling. Progressive counseling is a change tool for working with non-performing employees. Some employee handbooks also label this progressive discipline, this is a harsh term and implies punishment. Punishment doesn’t usually improve performance, it just makes people angry and stupid.
Counseling/feedback blend into another important tool in the capable manager’s repertory: coaching. My fellow “Owl,” Gale has written a lively article that clearly illustrates this blend. Go to this article first.
More about coaching and progressive counseling in the next weeks.
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Manager From Hell Self-Test
21 Sep
Following up on the “Watch the Waitress” blog.
Over the years of working in organizations I have compiled a list of managerial practices that employees find disrespectful and incompetent. Consider using this list as a private self-test. Answering yes to any one of these suggests that you need to do some thoughtful reflection about your management style.
- sarcasm directly to a person (Latin root – “tearing flesh”)
- condescension, “talking down” to people
- not listening, ignoring
- sniping (talking about someone when you should be talking to them)
- punishing
- writing policies or scolding “all” for one person’s misbehavior
- breaking confidences
- asking for input when the decision has been made
- not explaining why
- giving negative feedback with others present
- “talking over” people in meetings
- habitually coming to meetings late
- multi-tasking or side-talking during meetings
- e-communication all hours of the day and night
- e-mail offences too many to enumerate
Actually let me enumerate what may be the most disliked email offense, overusing “reply all.”
Beyond Luck is now an e-book on Amazon. At $6.95 it’s a great deal.
Comm Series #2: Principles
19 Jan
The very best of human behavior is principle driven, as compared with thoughtless, impulsive responses to situations. Exemplary communication needs principles we can test our decisions against to assure we behave in a manner that is consistent and wise.
The over-arching principle of exemplary communication is simple:
The better informed people are, the better they perform.
This is more than a principle and it is also a belief. As you test your communications competency begin by testing this principle in two parts,
Do you believe it? and
Do you practice it?
With few exceptions it is better for people to know, than not to know. One assumption of this series is that people are extraordinary learners. However, people cannot adapt and learn without timely, accurate information from their environments.
I believe there are few exceptions to this principle and raise it whenever someone is considering what to share. Please note the answer is not more, but rather what and how.
Change Comes in Two Flavors
23 Jun
Guided, incremental changes in processes. Examples are continuous quality improvement, Six Sigma, TQM, Lean etc. Such change is well understood, and effective organizations often introduce and manage this type of change to drive improvements. Larger leadership-driven changes are related to this category of purposeful, initiated change.
The best examples here would be leadership of cultural change. When carried out organically, these change strategies have a fair to good chance of succeeding. However, large, extra-cultural changes such as acquisitions and mergers usually fail.
Unpredictable, disjunctive change where there is a switch in some aspect(s) of the business environment that introduces new opportunities and/or threats. Prospectively, these are difficult to identify, but appear obvious after the fact. This type of change is disruptive, and new losers and winners often emerge. Having the ability to sense the change and the flexibility to make rapid adjustments may be the keys to success in this situation.
Interestingly, this type of change may happen rapidly or slowly. Consider the rapid demise of the wind-up watch versus the slow motion train wreck that is General Motors.
Here is something to reflect about when you are considering change
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Eternal Verities
24 Mar
A couple weeks ago my lady and I drove out to Ladora, Iowa with another couple to visit a fine little bistro http://www.ladorabank.com/index.html (Iowa is filled with many such fine little places – must be the corn). Walking into the bistro I was struck by the dictum on the façade of the building.
As imbibing fine wine often makes my companions and I wax philosophical. we were discussing the power of these words:
The wealth of the community embodies the richness of her soil and the integrity, frugality and diligence of her people.
How timely these are today and how leadership embodies these three exemplary characteristics. Food for thought
On the comments:
Thank you for the comments on e-media issues. A diversity of perspectives: inter-generational differences, organizational disruption from letting IT dominate the business and two very personal examining the joys and travails of email. Interesting how many mentioned going back to the gold standard: speaking directly with others in person or by phone – what a novel idea.
Why the wrong people become managers
19 Jan
On December 3 Lynn posted: “The irony is that in many organizations the middle managers who are promoted are those who violate many of the self-test rules you mention above. If only everyone would pay more attention to the Mary Poppins rule.”
There are actually three reasons that managers, especially first-line managers all-too-too frequently make the listed mistakes:
• Well-meaning executives often promote managers based on competence without realizing that competence alone is not sufficient. Evidence from longitudinal research on manager development shows that although competence is a necessary condition, two other predictors are even more important: People skills and Integrity. The absence of one or both of these attributes is the reason for the wide range of performance of managers in most companies. This phenomenon is often referred to as the Peter Principle, simply stated is we promote people to their level of incompetence. For a more in-depth discussion on this topic see “What Predicts Managerial Success” in my book, Beyond Luck.
• When people are promoted into management positions they often don’t realize that they are making a career change moving from “doing work” to “getting work done through others.” The skills sets are very different and it takes time and hard work to become an effective manager. See my recent post on “The 10,00 Hour Rule.” For help in making this transition go to “Becoming the boss” in the Harvard Business Review.
• Finally most people are thrown into managerial positions without clear expectations, on-the-job training, a support system and an experienced mentor. They have no idea that management is a principle-driven art that requires substantial knowledge as well as an extensive repertory of skills. This absence of development opportunities is the reason for Beyond Luck.
Food for thought
