Why Divorcees Make Lousy Managers

"How you do one thing is how you do everything."

That's the same principle you hire people by: their past performance being the prime indicator of their future performance. You ask people the stupidest questions during interviews that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job and base their candidacy on the answers to meaningless questions like:

• Tell me about yourself.
• Tell me about a situation when your work was criticized.
• What makes you angry?
• Tell me about the most boring job you’ve ever had.
• What changes would you make if you come on board?
• How could you have improved your career progress?
• Where could you see some improvement in you?
• What do you worry about?

By the way, these questions were taken from an HR LinkedIn group discussing the "best" questions to ask in interviews. Judge for yourself but if these are the "best" questions to ask in interviews, I think HR is in trouble.

Applying the same logic as used in job interviews, if a potential manager were divorced, it could be argued they can't communicate well or work towards solutions or negotiate settlements. That logic would say that divorcees make lousy managers. But stupid HR questions are overlooked when it comes time to being considered for manager aren't they? Of course, because the best indicator of an employees capabilities are hands-on experience - not their past personal lives.

So, in order to overcome the ridiculousness of inane questions that are meant to take up time in an interview, why not change your Culture to consider "test-driving" employees for a few days - even up to a week. Pay them for their time to job-shadow, integrate with other employees, study their on-the-job abilities and base their suitability on what they do present-day instead of asking them what they worry about.

Who cares if they're good at rehearsing smart answers for dumb questions and instead consider the "training camp" philosophy of sports teams. They show up to camp and their on-the-job abilities are judged for suitability. I'll bet you find a better crop of good future-managers this way. And it won't matter what their past looks like will it?

Culture Bounce: Why Culture Initiatives Fail

Here's where most Culture initiatives fall down: in the "Culture Bounce" pictured here.

Senior Management sends a new policy initiative downstairs with the expectation of implementation (or they would have consulted with their mid-managers and front-line workers prior to the decision). Notice that the policy decisions only travel one way: down. Mid-managers are expected to push the policy down onto front-line workers and have them buy into it.

But here's where policy decisons inevitably hit their "Bounce" point. Employees will want to question the "why" of new policy decisions - change resistance makes people ask questions because they want to feel like they have some control over the "how" of their work. Employees will look at it from their own perspectives and then send the ball bouncing up through mid-management hoping that their suggestions will spark a re-think from senior management. But if the ball never gets back up to senior management, it forces mid-managers to make excuses or to put their foot down and force the initiative down their throats - thus creating a more fragmented Culture.

It's "Bounce" that creates the Corporate Culture of Apathy. Feeling like there is no one listening to them or by feeling powerless, employees will begin to disrespect their workplaces and their bosses.

It's at the point of the "Bounce" that employees test their superiors. If the "Bounce" won't allow the ball to permeate the Executive floor, no matter how much you want to influence a positive Culture change, the old, existing Culture will swallow the new initiative.

If you want to have your policies be more readily accepted, you must eliminate the "Bounce." Culture is NEVER created at the Executive level. Policies and influential direction may be created at the executive level but Culture is always created at mid-manager level and below. Culture is "how we do things" which is decided by employees - regardless of the processes.

Recognizing how the "Bounce" works will help you build a stronger Culture initiative.

Shoot For The Middle Of The Pack

Sports teams invest heavily in their people: the best training equipment and expertise, the best coaches and assistants and finally, that competitive edge, sports psychologists. Because sometimes, even the best athletes need a little mental advantage to help them reach a new performance level.

So what do you do to invest heavily in your people? Do you have the best trainers, equipment and expertise? How about the best coaches and managers? Even your best managers will come to a point where the student outperforms the teacher. What's your plan then?

How are you going to get your people to be the best in your industry? Or are you OK with establishing a Culture of Mediocrity?

Maybe it's just easier to do nothing special. Maybe it's easier finishing near the bottom of the league every year. How many teams do you think shoot for finishing near the bottom every year? Maybe it is easier to not even try to create a Culture of Performance. After all, if you try then you have to do something about it. Maybe it's better that you play it safe and shoot for the middle of the pack. There's no effort required in being ordinary.

You Big, Fat, Two-Faced Liar

You've seen it. I know you have. There are a lot of businesses, especially restaurants, who specifically ask, no make that "plead" with you, to tell them how they are doing. (See photo)

Businesses want to be better. They want to serve you better. They want to offer you better products and service. They want to offer you innovative new ways of improving what they do to make your experience that much better.

So they ask important questions like, how was your experience today? And do you know what you do as they attempt to access your expertise as a customer to improve themselves? You lie right to their faces and say everything was "fine."

Even when they print it on their menus how much your feedback means to them, you still lie to them and tell them everything was fine. Then you go home, tell your friends to never go there. You tell your followers on Facebook and Twitter not to go there. You trash them. Even when they come right to you and try to get an honest conversation going, you lie to their faces. And then, when you are a safe distance away and know that they have turned their backs, you ruin their business.

On Filter-Free Fridays™ you tell them exactly how it was. Don't be a jerk about it. Just be honest. Offer something constructive so they can be better at what they do. On Filter-Free Fridays™ you grow a pair and HELP them - don't hurt them.

Or just stay out of their place of business and stop ruining a business. You are not entitled to ruin them just because they had a little too much salt in their soup and you didn't have the courage to say something.

Harsh? It's Filter-Free Fridays™ - get over it.

Taking An Entire Staff Hostage

A senior executive with an aging, ailing mother moves closer to her creating and hour and a half commute to the office. Once at the office, he spends the vast majority of his day on-line communicating with his regional managers in their respective territories.

After a few months, he discovers that the hour and a half commute each way still only allows him to manage his managers from a computer terminal. He decides to cut out the wasted three hours each day and communicate with his managers on-line from home. He schedules his in-person meetings two days per week and works from home three days per week. Any senior executive could see the intelligence in that decision.

But what about applying the same rules to general staffers? Are you asking your people to show up to the office and work their whole day on-line because it is necessary or because you don't trust that they're working at all and you feel you need to keep your eye on them? Be careful how you answer that because your Culture will be more aligned with your thoughts than your actions.

Maybe one or two lazy employees are screwing around and not being productive but don't hold a great staff hostage because of one or two idiots. (Why are they still working there if you already know who they are?) What kind of message are you sending? Are you causing your staff to be focused on results or focused on the clock?

The difference is the Culture you create.

First Step to Changing Your Life

The motivational speakers tell you, "Change your thinking and you change your life." What a load of hooey (one of the reasons I so dislike motivational speakers). Not the "change your life part" but the "change your thinking" part.

To change your thinking requires you to become conscious of every thought, every word and every action. You must be conscious of what you are about to say or do before you actually say or do it. But in order to change requires you to be completely accountable foreverything you say, do and think. That's unheard of when cultures of blame and finger-pointing are so prevalent and so accepted in the workplace.

Yes you CAN change your life but you have to stop lying to yourself and others first.

Cowards Write Online Reviews

... when they don't bring their concerns either by telephone or face-to-face first to those they are trashing.

Look, anyone can write a bad review and many do - especially the cowards who refuse to voice their opinions to the businesses they trash online. It's so easy to hide behind anonymity. Businesses serve you face-to-face. Businesses ask you how they did face-to-face. What bothers me is when people repond "fine" when asked how everything was and then go home and trash them on the Internet, trash them on Facebook and Twitter and tell their friends to stay away - all unbeknownst to the people who could have corrected the situation, had only something been said.

Filter-Free Fridays™ are the days you step up, grow a spine and honestly (not hurtfully) tell a business how they are doing. If the restaurant meal isn't right, send it back, don't lie and pretend everything is OK.

How can a business improve if you won't tell them what is wrong? Not saying anything and pretending everything is OK is selfish. Yes, I said it is selfish. Because the people who are about to follow you: to order that same meal, to hire that same contractor, to buy from that same car dealer or whatever will now experience the same poor service or product because you were too afraid to tell them it was wrong.

Is it the fault of the business when they get trashed in their reviews? Sure, sometimes it is. But I'm willing to bet money that the vast majority of problems could have been solved if only someone hadn't grown feathers (turned chicken) and instead offered up an honest critique - face-to-face.

Do it differently starting on Filter-Free Fridays™.

Judge Slaps Hand for Texting While Driving

News story in the Calgary Herald this morning is about a judge who cracked down on a texting driver.

In my mind, the penalty for running into the back end of another driver on the highway while texting should be more than a couple of thousand dollars and a 90-day suspension of a driver`s license. But it`s a start I suppose. 

Since the Province of Alberta still has yet to enact their cell-phone while driving legislation, this judge hit the 20 year-old in question as hard as he could.

To the government powers that be, demerits are the answer in addition to fines and license suspensions. Demerits cause insurance rates to rise for bad drivers. Make careless drivers who text while they drive pay attention to the road by making them pay attention to the long-term consequences of putting other drivers at risk. You will never get people to change until you make the consequences dire.

You build Cultures of Safety by educating, legislating and shifting perceptions and attitudes. When you make the penalites severe enough, people make different decisions.

Do You Work For A Good Boss?

Do you work for a good boss? If you're a manager, are you a good one? Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule recently penned a list of ten signs that you work for a good boss. It was too good to pass up.

You work for a good boss if he/she:

1. REALLY listens to what you say, doesn't just pretend.

2. Is careful to give you as much -- or even more -- credit than you deserve.

3. Sticks-up for you behind your back.

4.  Takes care not to embarrass you.

5.  Apologizes sincerely and completely when he or she does something that upsets or hurts you.

6. Goes out of his or her way to make it easier for you to mesh the challenges in your personal life with your job.

7. Is respectful of your time.

8. Takes time to learn your quirks and idiosyncrasies -- and accommodates them within in reason.

9. Goes the extra mile to make sure that you succeed at your job and keep developing skills.

10. Doesn't bullshit you about your weaknesses or screw-ups -- tells you the truth.

Go ahead, make a copy and leave this anonymously on your boss's desk.

When It Is Time To Quit

When I was a smoker (hey Barack Obama is still a smoker) I would use this excuse: "Quit? The whole world hates a quitter." People would laugh. But then I quit smoking. What I learned is that sometimes it's OK to quit.

Here are some other examples of when it is OK to quit:

• when you don't find any joy whatsoever in your work
• when you fight thoughts of hurting someone physically
• when your spouse is a serial cheater
• when your boss or co-workers are abusive
• when your values don't line up with what you do or who you're with
• when you finally come to realize that the path you're on is not where you want to be (change university majors, etc)

Then there are times when it's OK to encourage other people to quit:

• when they display unhappiness about their work
• when they complain constantly about the people they work with
• when they are holding back the team
• when you can see that they are going the wrong way and won't admit it to themselves
• when the rest of the staff refuse to work with them
• when their values clash with the corporate values
• especially when they need a little nudge to get out of the no-win cycle because they're afraid to do it themselves

On Filter-Free Fridays™ it's your task to tell the truth: to yourself and to others. Sometimes you just need to finally quit in order for you to be able to go do the thing you're supposed to doing. Every person has some sort talent but sometimes you end up staying in something that you're not right for, just because you're too afraid of what the future might bring. Being familiar is not necessarily the right thing to do.

Sometimes you hire not the "right" person but the "right now" person. Sometimes the "right now" person needs a "right now" job instead of the "right" job. And sometimes you end up with Mister or Mrs. Right-Now instead of Mr. or Mrs. Right. In instances like this, when the fit isn't right, quitting may be the right thing to do.

As a manager, sometimes you need to occasionally encourage a staffer to quit when you know that they are always going to struggle with the job, the hours aren't right, the values clash, personalities clash, you get the picture. On Filter-Free Fridays™, sometimes you just have to cut people free so they can go find what they are right for.

 

Mission Statements And Employee Engagement

"It is our mission to dramatically initiate performance based opportunities as well as to proactively leverage existing quality leadership skills to meet our customer's needs."

Huh? Is that your mission statement? Cripes, could you be just a little less specific? Not much wonder you can't get your people to engage. They don't know what you do.

Here's the deal: if your mission statement isn't absolutely specific about what you do, how will your people ever know what TO do?

"But," you complain, "I'm just a manager. I don't have any say in the mission statement."

"Horse-pucky," I say. Develop a departmental or work-unit mission statement. Get your staff involved in writing their own mission statement. Get them real clear on what they're supposed to be doing and they will do it. And they will engage because you engaged them in finding their purpose.

Managers manage. They don't throw their hands up and say they don't have any power to change it. That's not managing. That's excusing.

No more excuses. Call a staff meeting for Friday at 10 in the morning and work for two hours to craft your departmental mission statement. If you can't get it done in two hours, then that's a sign that your department has no leadership. So, you won't be using the word "leadership" in your mission statement.

Advice: craft something. You can always revisit it at any time to smooth it out. But do something. It doesn't have to be perfect - it just needs to be something specific.

When Employees Shop Online At Work

A new study shows a 52% increase in online shopping during work hours and a whopping 75% increase on Wednesdays between 9 and 4. That means that your people are shopping online when you think they should be working.

But you've blurred the lines of work by giving your people Blackberrys, by sending text messages and emails at all hours of the day and night, by calling them on cell while they're on vacation and by interrupting family get-togethers on weekends. Your business doesn't stop asking your people to work at 5 o'clock. Why should they not be able to do personal stuff on company time if they're getting company stuff done on personal time?

But that's good for the people who never seem to leave the work behind. What about those who only have to perform work between 9 and 5?

There's a old notion that says a person compulsive shopping is an attempt to fill a void in their soul. If your people are shopping online during business hours, then they're probably just filling a void left by not having meaningful work, something they can be proud of. They are disengaged employees because you, as a manager, aren't engaging them.

But then there is the Gen Y worker who, we are told, are great multi-taskers. No they are not. Gen Y has simply always had many things going on at one time. They find it easier to concentrate on several tasks at once because doing just one thing is boring - so they jump from task to task to task. So they could be shopping as a release from the boredom of putting together your latest D-U-L-L PowerPoint presentation - which will just be riveting at the next (far too lengthy) staff meeting. (Oh, and stop thinking that PowerPoint is engaging. It's no more engaging than overhead projector slides.)

People shop when they are bored or when you take their personal life away. Don't blame them. It's a response to boring work from boring managers.

Are You Too Old To Lead?

High schools are using Interactive White Boards which can seriously increase a student's attention by using moveable graphics, Internet connectivity and video - not to mention social media and instant messaging. Schools are also starting to ditch books in favor of laptops and iPads with digitized e-books, video connectivity, access to Wikipedia, social networking and collaborative messaging. Students are participating more in class because it's fun, it's hands on and it's exciting.

Now, when these same students finish school and enter the work world, they will encounter your trainers using archaic and (oh my God this is BORING) PowerPoint slides. They are asked to shut off their cell phones, are not supplied laptops but are given 3-ring binder manuals and no access to Internet video, no collaborative messaging and especially NO social media (because it is viewed as a time-waster).

Not much wonder these new workers think your workplace is a step back in time. Look, these kids are learning with technology you probably not only don't understand but arent even aware exists. Their parents (some of your workers) are helping them with their homework (with rudimentary knowledge of how it all works). Then, when the students become old enough to work for you, you take everything away from them because you don't know how it works.

Who looks like the leader now?

If you want to build a Culture that will attract these new workers, you had better be looking to the educational system to see what your workforce of tomorrow is using today. Stop being such an old fart and get with the program. Social media is here to stay. Internet video is here to stay. In five years, the high school students of today will be coming to work to use technology that hasn't even been invented yet.

If you're still having a difficult time with your email, maybe it's time you stepped out of the way and let people who can use the technology embrace it and run with it. Maybe they are much better able to relate to your up-and-coming workforce.

Filter-Free Corporate Culture

I was fortunate to be invited to deliver a presentation to a gravel company last year. Since then, I have had a great relationship with several of the staff members. In fact, my blog posts regularly make their way through the emails of managers and supervisors - and I am thankful for that. Funny though, my philosophy of Filter-Free Fridays™ has been one of the more popular suggestions.

There are a few more inter-departmental phone calls and a better willingness to tell the truth on Fridays. The conversations usually begin with, "It's Filter-Free Fridays™ right?" Once they hear a "yep (with a knowing smile)," then they let go and tell the truth. And what a great place it is to work when co-workers don't bite their tongues for fear that someone might be offended - especially when there is little to be offended about. It's an even better place to work when, on Fridays, some of the guys go for a beer after work and talk truthfully about where they work - in full view of others - and they speak highly of their workplace. Can you say you do that?

In fact, in speaking with the HR Director today, I found out that the last five people hired have been as a result of being referred by friends already employed by the company. Imagine never having to put out another "Now Hiring" sign or an ad in a newspaper looking for people because they're lining up to come work for you. That's a solid Corporate Culture built on many ideas - including one of openness and honesty.

A funny thing happens to an organization when they embrace an idea that they like: they keep it at the conscious level in their brains - not the unconscious level. When you give people permission to speak freely, provided their utterances are not hurtful of demeaning, they will usually welcome the chance to not have to run every word through a filter before they speak it. And that is the concept behind Filter-Free Fridays™.

Fridays are the days you speak the truth, where you yourself become accountable and help others become accountable. Fridays are the day you take the protective plastic packaging off of your ideas and thoughts and you let people see the real you speaking your real truth in an effort to help, not hurt.

Eventually, every day becomes Friday. Once it does, it becomes an attractive Culture for others to want to join.

How Managers Are Causing Employee Disengagement

I wrote a post on my safety blog yesterday about the inherent problem with many corporate safety managers. In it, I made the point that Safety Managers, although well meaning, can sometimes sanitize a workplace so well (to be free of hazards and risks) that the employee doesn't need to worry about it - or think about it for that matter. And that's when trouble can begin. When workers don't think about their own safety, they open themselves to real danger.

But it's not just in safety that this is happening. Organizations are building processes and policies that are meant to be dummy-proof. Their employees don't even have to think about what they are doing because all they have to do is follow the procedure - the thinking has already been done for them. What you end up with is a bunch of mindless workers who simply check their brains at the door and become living examples of the walking dead.

Yet, in the same breath, managers complain about Employee Engagement levels and how their people aren't engaging as well anymore. On the one hand managers create foolproof procedures and policies by proactively doing the thinking for their people and in the same breath, managers complain that their people don't seem to care about the work they do. Why don't workers care? Because the work's not challenging that's why. They don't have to think. You, as a manager, somehow don't believe they are capable of thinking for themselves so you don't even let them try.

Take away the need to use one's brain and you take away the challenge of the work. Take away the challenge and people actively disengage.

So what can you do? You can stop telling your people how to do it and ask them how they would do it. It forces them to think. When they think, they engage.

Stop operating like an over-protective parent who childproofs the house resulting a world free of dangers and consequences. (Yep, that'll prepare a kid for the real world - sarcasm). Stop dummy-proofing your department. You want your people to mess up. People learn from messing up. Let them be who they are and then, as manager, help them get better by inspiring them to think for themselves.