If Not You, Then Who?

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“This is all spilt milk, anyway,” Melanie snorted. “I know I have to step up, get out there, put an ad in the paper. I have gone through this before, third time this year.”

“I know,” I nodded. “I read the exit interviews. Did you know that two of the three supervisors that left you this year graduated from night school?”

Melanie’s eyes got wide. “Well, I knew they were going to school at night.”

“Did you know they had new jobs lined up three months before they graduated?”

“Well, I thought that was all talk. I didn’t pay attention to that.”

“I know you didn’t pay attention. If you had paid attention, you would have three months advance time to make a different move, prepare a new supervisor to take over. Now, you have to scramble. Melanie, the only reason you still have a job, here, as a manager, is that you are a pretty good scrambler. But, one day, you won’t be able to scramble and you’ll get sacked for a loss.”

Messenger or Manager?

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“I feel let down,” Melanie lamented. “One of my team members, Kyle, just quit. I don’t know how I am going to explain this to the CEO. He has a short temper for this kind of thing. The worst part, I’m just the messenger, but likely to get the brunt of it.”

“Why do you feel you are just the messenger?” I asked.

Melanie moved her head back, almost startled. “I am not sure what you mean,” she said. “I’m not the one who quit. I am just the one who has to report it upstairs.”

“You’re Kyle’s manager?” I confirmed.

“Well, yes, but Kyle is the one who quit.”

“I understand Kyle is the one who quit and I am also curious to know who is responsible for the team that is now missing a member with a backlog that is going to crunch an important deadline?”

“But, Kyle is the one who quit,” Melanie protested. “You can’t hold me accountable for the pickle we’re in. I know I am the manager, but what am I supposed to do?”

Pace and Quality

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:

I manage a drafting department of 12 people and have been quite successful over the past 5 or 6 years in improving the quality of our output and the morale of our team.

I have one team member with good skills but he takes forever to get anything done. In my effort over the years to make him more productive, I’ve afforded him the opportunity to become skilled at many different tasks, each time hoping that this would be the one that “clicked”. His production level, however, never improves even after the “learning curve” of any new skill is overcome.

I’m finally facing the fact that this guy will not ever make the pace we expect. Letting him go is difficult for me though, since I’ve acted all this time as his “enabler”. I probably should have realized his limitations a lot sooner and avoided the situation that I’m in now, that being, having a multi-skilled individual who ironically, is too slow.

What’s your take on this?

Response:

Some people master a skill quickly; others may complete a task only after some hard work (which takes time). Your response (training him in many skills) to the amount of time for task completion may have been misguided, making matters worse, even slowing his production time. Two critical components for every role are pace and quality. Pace and quality.

1. Determine what you need this team member to do. This should be based on what the company needs from him. What is his role? Write this down. Instead of training him on many different tasks, focus on the essentials of his deliverables. Don’t create a role around him. Determine the role and determine his capability to fill that role.

2. Baseline evaluation of the “candidate.” This is a very serious conversation. You have had conversations before, this one is different. Your prior conversations have been searching for something he might be good at. This conversation will focus on what the company needs from him in his role. This is a focusing conversation. The next conversation will be your evaluation, after one day, of his baseline performance in that role.

3. Improvement metrics. Rather than looking to train him on many different skills, the focus should be on throughput speed in the essential deliverables the company needs from the role. Examine each step in the process that speeds him up or slows him down. We don’t need him to learn a whole bunch of other skills, we simply need to get him faster at the essential skills.

4. Evaluate his long term contribution. After a period of three weeks, as a manager, you will know whether his behavior is becoming more effective or staying the same. As his manager, it will be time for you to make a judgment. It will be time for you to make a decision. Is the candidate becoming more effective in the essential role that we have for him? This is a yes or no question.

5. If the answer is yes, then you have a contributing member. If the answer is no, inform your manager that you are de-selecting this person from your team. If your manager has another role which might be suitable, turn this person over to your manager for placement. If your manager has no other role, it is time to release this person to industry.

Every part of this should be explained to the candidate. There should be no secrets. The candidate should understand the consequences of underperformance. At the same time, underperformance does not make him a bad person. It is likely that he will be relieved that he can look for a position more appropriate to his speed level, rather than live in the shadow of underperformance and constant scrutiny.

Leadership is Observable

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The group worked for ninety minutes in a simulation to complete a complex task. Once the task sequence and its steps were decided and practiced, the test was to complete the entire sequence in a twenty minute time frame.

I stopped the simulation to ask a simple question. “Which of you is the leader?” There had been no formal selection, but the group immediately looked at Sam.

“What is it about Sam, that made him the leader?” I asked.

The team members exchanged glances, wondering if they were all thinking the same thing. “Well, Sam seemed to know how to organize this thing together,” Marvin volunteered.

“How did he do that? You have not worked together as a team before.”

There was a brief moment, then Kyle piped up. “Sam pulled us all together, asked questions about what each of us thought. Within three minutes, he had a plan, assigned some individual responsibilities and we started working.”

Sam was chosen as the leader because he understood the complexity of the situation better (at least faster) than the others.

At that moment, Emma stood up. She was sitting on the sidelines, in fact, I wondered if she was paying attention.

“I think we can complete this task in five minutes, instead of twenty,” she said.

All eyes turned. In an instant, a new leader emerged. Leadership is an observable phenomenon.

2016 Planning Template

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It’s that time of year. Lingering days of 2015 will fade into the holidays AND 2016 will come rushing in. Are you ready? In my groups, we have an early January session to talk about planning and goals. To help organize thoughts, we distribute our annual planning document. It is a Word.doc, so it expands as you type into it. If you would like a copy, just give me a shout at Ask Tom?

A Little Compromise, Give and Take

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“What happened?” I asked.

“It was amazing,” Sean described. “We changed the name of the meeting from the VPs Meeting, to the President’s Meeting.”

“How was that different?”

“It was now clear that, as the president, I would be accountable for the decisions of the group. Before, the group was accountable as a group, sort of, but not really. Now, it is crystal clear. I am accountable for the decisions in the meeting.”

“What happened?”

“The tone of the meeting was completely different,” Sean continued. “Before, everyone was tactful and compromising, give a little here, take a little there. It was quite an agreeable bunch, and they arrived at quite agreeable decisions.”

“And?”

“And, now, without the need to compromise, knowing that I will listen to best advice and the decision is mine, there was quite a difference of opinion. The group uncovered problems that had always been swept under the rug. Some issues surfaced that had been off limits before. The discussion was actually uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable?” I said.

“Yes, and whenever the discussion is uncomfortable, I know we are talking about something important.”

The Clarity of Accountability

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“it’s funny,” Byron thought out loud. “You always ask me, as the manager, about my contribution to the problem. Immediately, I always think – Who? Me? I didn’t contribute to the problem.”

“And, what have you discovered when you deny accountability?” I asked.

“I just have to stop. I have always confronted my team with blame-colored glasses. When I realize that I am the one accountable for the output of my team, everything changes. When I realize that I am accountable for the output of the team, I take ownership. Ownership is a powerful stimulant for caring about my team. Constructive coaching automatically follows, not because I have to, but, because I am accountable.”

“And your team?”

“They change too. They are no longer on the receiving end of blame, but are now, part of a team, supporting me, as their manager,” Byron nodded.

“And did that change happen because you circled the team to sing a song?”

“No, it happened because we got clear about accountability.”

The Electrifying Subtle Shift

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“So, it turns out that the ten percent reject rate was caused by a burr on a threaded plastic part. Your inspection system failed to sample a new vendor at a higher rate and their sub-standard parts were co-mingled with good parts from your current vendor?” I nodded.

“That’s about it,” Byron agreed.

“And, yet, you yelled at your team for not working hard enough, until you discovered the defective parts?”

“I did,” Byron fessed up.

“Yet, your team was doing their very best already.”

“I know, but we were still getting the ten percent reject rate. I had to do something,” Byron protested, again denying responsibility.

“Don’t get defensive, this is important. You had a ten percent reject rate and you responded in two ways, one effective and one not.

  • You yelled at your team (not effective).
  • You inspected your system, ultimately focusing on receiving inspection, and sample rates of inspection (effective).

And where did you find the problem?”

Byron understood half the problem. “It was only when we looked at the system,” he said.

“And the other half of the problem is this. Your team is only accountable for full commitment and doing their best. When you yelled at them, you were holding them accountable for the ten percent reject rate. As the manager, you can ONLY hold them accountable for doing their best. It is you, as the manager, who is accountable for the output of the team.

“You solved the problem only when you examined your own contribution to the problem. As the manager, you are accountable for the system. It was a system problem.

“What did you accomplish by yelling at your team, holding them accountable for output?” I challenged.

“The only thing it did,” Byron admitted, “was to crush the team. I think I described it as down in the dumps.”

“And, what did you accomplish when you examined your system? You solved the problem. This subtle shift in accountability is electrifying. The team is accountable for full commitment and doing their best. It is the manager accountable for the output.”

Best Two Books to Give an Executive for the Holidays

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The two biggest problems faced by most executives are –

  • Defining roles and finding people to fill those roles.
  • Defining the working relationships for those roles, or structure.

That is why I wrote Hiring Talent and Outbound Air.
HT-SoftBevel-150
Hiring Talent
Most managers are not very good at hiring. They don’t practice enough to get good at it. They don’t prepare for it. They fall into traps, make the hiring decision too quickly, based on emotion. And the cost is huge. If a manager does this job well, life is wonderful. If a manager does this job poorly, life is miserable and for a very long time.

Outbound Air
Outbound Air
As we define roles for people to play, how do we define the working relationships between those roles. It’s all about structure. Structure is the context in which people work. Structure drives culture. Most org charts are full of lines and boxes. Some of the lines are solid, some are dotted. We have an intuitive feel for how we want people to work together, but there is actually a science to it. Outbound Air is a business novel that chronicles how organizations grow and mature. Everyone wants to take their company to the next level, but few have a clue what the next level is. Everything we know about organizational structure and levels of work rests on the research illustrated in Outbound Air.

Whose System Is It?

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“You were right,” Byron admitted. “I took a look at the system. The ten percent reject rate was caused by a small burr on a threaded plastic part. The part didn’t seal right and the cylinder wouldn’t hold the pressure.”

“So, your team could have worked harder, stayed longer, given it all their might and the reject rate would have stayed at ten percent?” I floated.

Byron nodded. “I was sure it was the team. I am actually sorry I yelled at them. They just seemed down in the dumps, lackadaisical, you know, unmotivated.”

“Why do you think they were down in the dumps?” I pressed.

“Probably my fault. They were, in fact, doing their best. I thought their best wasn’t good enough. I was too quick to lay blame. In the end, it was my fault. I ordered some surplus parts from another vendor. Our original supplier was so good, we only sampled one in a hundred parts in receiving, they were always good. The new vendor parts had a 50 percent failure rate, but the samples we pulled, one in a hundred, didn’t pick up they were out of spec half the time. It was the system that allowed the failure rate.”

“And, whose system was that?”

Byron almost choked, but managed to get it out. “Mine.”