Author Archives: Tom Foster

About Tom Foster

Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. In short, transforming groups of people into teams working together. Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. This blog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, the names are changed to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies.

Fear of Failure

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“When I became the manager, things changed,” Muriel answered.

“What changed?” I asked again.

“When I became the manager, I became accountable for the results of the team,” she replied. “It’s a different level of accountability. Whatever the team does, is now on my dime.”

“And, what are you afraid of?” I pressed.

“Afraid? I’m not afraid. If I was afraid, I wouldn’t have confidence in my solution,” Muriel snapped.

“What if you were afraid? What would you be afraid of?”

Muriel was not so quick to respond. “I am afraid that if the team doesn’t implement the right solution, I will be seen a failure as a manager,” she finally replied.

“Is it possible, you provided a solution to the team out of fear, rather than allow the team to struggle to find their own solution? If you could go back and do it over, what might you do differently?”

What Changed?

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“Tell me, Muriel, when your solution was challenged, how did you respond?” I asked.

“It’s pretty simple,” she replied. “I gave them the answer to the problem, but they worked in a different direction. They went directly against what I told them to do. I had to pull them together, find out who the ringleader was. You know, I have to find out who was bucking my authority.”

“Do you think the team believed in your solution?”

Muriel paused. “Does it really matter? I’m the manager. If I had the solution to the problem, they should implement it. It doesn’t matter if they believed in my solution.”

“Let’s play this out,” I prompted. “If they didn’t believe in your solution, but you forced them to implement it, how much energy and enthusiasm did they pour in your direction to prove you right? Or did they appear to follow your direction, without enthusiasm to prove you wrong? Either way, you still had a fight on your hands. Did that serve you? Did that serve the team? Did that serve the solution to the problem?”

“But!!” Muriel protested.

“No, buts,” I interrupted. “When you were part of the team, as an equal team member, how did you work together?”

“Well, back then, it was collaborative, we worked together to solve problems.”

“So, what changed when you became the manager?”

Fight for Respect

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“Being promoted to manager is not all it was cracked up to be,” Muriel moaned.

“How so?” I asked.

“When I was part of the team, we were all collaborators, working together, solving problems, in general, we had a really good time at work. Now that I am the manager of the team, they don’t seem to respect me or my position.”

“Tell me more,” I prompted.

“I tell them how to solve a problem, and they go about trying to solve it in a different way. When I catch them not following my solution, they push back. They seem to question everything I say. It’s like I am in a big fight for respect.”

I smiled. “If you feel like you have to fight for respect, you are more likely to get a fight than respect.”

Disabling the Team

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“I’m stuck,” Remi flatly stated. “When I was first promoted to manager, things were okay. I could sit in my office, get my work done, the team knew what to do already. You know, do the same thing as yesterday.”

“Sounds like a cush job,” I replied.

“But, then, people started stopping by with a question here and a question there. Still not too bad, but then the floodgates opened. Sometimes, there is a line outside my door with people needing an answer, more direction, solving a problem. It’s a constant stream of distraction.”

“Why do you think your team has come to depend on you for answers to their biggest unsolvable problems?” I asked.

Remi shrugged her shoulders. “You got me?” she said.

“No, your team has you,” I smiled. “In a few short weeks, you have trained your team to bring all their unsolvable and solvable problems to you. And you were happy to help. We are always happy to help. But, what did you train them to do?”

“I get it,” Remi shook her head. “But, I’m the leader. I’m supposed to support my team. But, they seem to need support for everything.”

“Yes, you are the leader. But, the best form of leadership is self-leadership, and you have, by your good intentions, stripped that away from them. In a way, you have disabled your team from thinking for themselves.”

“So, what am I supposed to do? Not help?”

“The most effective managers are not those who tell people what to do. The most effective managers are those who ask the most effective questions.”

The Sandbox

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Myra continued to stare, the (mis)behavior of two top executives, one in engineering and one in sales, rattled in her mind. “I know I need each system to run smoothly, efficiently, but they need to work together, or at least act like they are working together.”

“Look, you’re the CEO. From where you sit, what does their not-working together look like?” I asked.

“Here’s one,” she started. “We get a sale, a contract, which goes to engineering. Engineering takes the contract and starts to moan and groan about why they cannot engineer the elements of the contract. They complain there is missing information or the customer has a problem, but the engineered product isn’t going to solve the problem, or may even make matters worse. Then they complain that the sales people just aren’t smart enough be sales people. At that point, everything kind of goes off the rails.”

“So, there is a handoff meeting between sales and engineering that isn’t working?”

“What meeting?” Myra replied. “They both think meetings are a waste of time, so they just email contracts and drawings back and forth. Don’t get me wrong. I think our sales team does a really good job of getting interest and contracts from our customers. And, I think we have one of the best engineering teams around.”

“When a company starts off, they just have to get people to play their roles effectively,” I nodded. “But, once we have people effectively playing roles, and the company gets bigger, those individual roles have to work together. It’s a sandbox game that we learned when we were four or five years old. You have to get both teams in the same sandbox so they can learn to play together.”

Island Fever

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“No man is an island,” I nodded.

Myra stared back, returning my nod. “I agree. I’ve got one hot-shot technician and one rainmaker on my executive team. Between the two of them, they are driving me crazy.”

“How does it show up?” I asked.

“It seems like they are in it for themselves. All they ever do is talk about me-me and my-my. My budget, my team, my resources. And the salesperson thinks nothing happens until a sale is made. He struts around like a rooster. I have to remind the both of them that we are a team. If the sale isn’t made, we don’t have budget. And if the product isn’t engineered, we have nothing to sell.”

“It’s a trouble in most growing companies,” I replied. You have a couple of core systems that hum along, high pace, high quality, but the other systems tip-toe around, get pushed around, underperform, pretty soon the wheels of the entire organization get wobbly.”

“What do I do with these two characters?” Myra wanted to know.

“That’s the hat trick for every manager working in a company that has grown multiple systems. The silo effect takes hold.”

“So, I need to get rid of my silos?” Myra stated in the form of a question.

“Nope,” I smiled. “You put those silos there for a reason. You needed them to be efficient, internally profitable, no waste, no idle, charging pace. But, now you have multiple systems who don’t care about each other. You have to convince them that the company is larger than their individual system. Each system is interdependent on all the other systems.”

Myra was quiet. Shook her head. “So, how do I do that?”

Collusive Behavior

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Carson was deep in thought. “How do I, as a manager, interrupt the cycle of victimhood, to shift a team’s mental state from negative to positive?”

“It’s not quite as simple as that,” I replied. “If the only states were negative and positive, we could solve that with a motivational speaker and posters on the wall.”

Carson smirked. “Yes, we tried that. The teamwork posters became wallpaper that eventually faded.”

“It’s not negative vs positive, though that is a start,” I nodded. “This is not a binary condition, like a switch we can turn on and off. Humans, teams and their mental states are more subtle. Let’s take a look at a number of parameters, and I will concede to the first as negative vs. positive.

  • Negative – Positive
  • Irrational – Rational
  • Unscientific – Scientific
  • Collusive – Cooperative
  • Uncontrolled – Controlled
  • Unconscious – Conscious

All of these are mental states. How do you, as a manager, influence a shift in the mental state of the team?”

Infectious

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“You said, being a victim is a mental state?” Carson wanted to explore.

“Yes, it can even be more pervasive,” I replied. “There is a continuum – a mood, which is temporary, to a mental state, or a prolonged mood, to the way we see the world, a belief, which is longer term, persistent, base on a thought we think over and over. Moods are easy to change with ice cream. A mental state, not so much. And beliefs become ingrained, not permanent, but doggedly stubborn.”

“And infectious,” Carson flatly stated.

“How so?” I asked.

“I can have a teammate in a mood, less say, not so positive, bordering on negative. That mood influences other teammates, mostly at the water cooler. ‘You wouldn’t believe what happened to me on the way to work today. This guy cut me off in traffic, almost crashed my car’.”

“And, now you get a better story from someone else, and on it goes, until it creates a mental state for the whole team,” I smiled.

“What’s worse, the team now has to solve a real work problem from a triggered state. And, the real problem becomes the vehicle of bad luck, for which the team has no accountability.”

“It’s a cycle,” I nodded. “How do you interrupt the cycle? How do you, as a manager, shift the mental state of the team?”

Obesity

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“Yes, luck would be easier to blame things on,” I nodded. “Luck is something outside of our control. It is popular, because it allows us to be off the hook on accountability.”

Carson chimed in. “Good luck or bad luck is a common scapegoat. Luck doesn’t require us to understand what happens when things go well, more specifically, what we did in sequence when things go well, things we might repeat. It was just luck. Luck allows my team to shrug their shoulders when things go poorly. It was just luck. It allows the team to exist as a victim, without agency that might impact the outcome one way or another.”

“And, being a victim creates a cottage industry of people, consultants, special programs to manicure external circumstances to suit the victim mental state,” I said. “We used to describe the role of a parent, and you can think the role of a manager in a similar capacity, was to prepare the child for the path of life. We now see parents, consultants, special programs preparing the path of life for the child, who now has no accountability.”

“Like lung cancer is no longer the fault of the smoker. Or obesity is no longer the fault of the overeater, or more directly, the grocery shopper. It is a matter of corporate greed and the solution is a GLP-1 drug,” Carson mused.

“So, how do we improve the situation, prevent the death spiral of victimhood?” I asked. “How do we prepare the child for the path of life. How do we prepare our team members for the path of their employment?”

Mastery and Practice

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“And, how does the rest of your team see Carl?” I asked.

Carson smiled. “I get it. You are right. The rest of the team sees him as a brown noser. They laugh behind his back. Maybe secretly jealous.”

“Jealous of what,” I prodded.

“Carl gets some preferential treatment. If we can only send one person to training, we pick Carl, because we know Carl will come back and share what he learned.”

“Does the team see Carl as successful?” I wanted to know.

“Yes, they do, but they think it was all about luck. Sometimes, I have to step in and mitigate some of the taunting.”

“So, having someone competent, inquisitive and curious on the team can create a problem for you?”

“Yes,” Carson nodded. “As long as people see success as luck, it can be made fun of. As the manager, I have to be vigilant and communicate success as a mastery and practice of fundamentals, enthusiasm and support of the team.”

“Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be a little lucky.”