Give your workforce the ‘Trophy’

Picture the scene.  You’ve been given a tight deadline.  Unrealistic some may say.  The work you need to do will eat-in to your personal life, but it’s something that you just have to do.  You will have to tell your family that you need space and time to get this done, which means that you won’t be available to attend the party you said would go to, you can no longer go to your child’s play or visit the relative that you promised you would.  Looks of disappointment come your way.  Perhaps a few arguments break out?  Guilt weighing heavily on your shoulders coupled with the stress of performing for your boss to ‘pull it out of the bag’ is making you wish that you were somewhere else.  If only you were on a beach in the sunshine with a good book and a cocktail or two.  But the work needs to be done and it must be completed on-time. 

And so you work, in isolation, throughout the night to complete the much-needed project.  By 4am you’ve read through your proposals and recommendations a thousand times.  You’ve made more amendments than you can remember.  In your mind, it’s a masterpiece.  Your brilliant work is ready for submission.  You ensure that all of the attachments to your covering email are there.  You don’t want to fall at the last fence and make your boss think that you’re too stupid to remember those attachments!  And you hit send.  You check your ‘sent box’ to make sure that the work has been transported to your boss’s computer, wherever that may be – but wherever your boss is you know that they’re probably fast asleep and oblivious to the effort you’ve made as well as the fights you’ve had with your family about having to work so late. Still, you’re pleased with yourself.  You did it!  As you turn off your computer and get ready to snatch what’s left of your sleep allowance you begin to wonder what they’ll think of your work.  Will their opinions of you change?  Will they now finally realise your brilliance?  Will they now understand and appreciate how hard you work?  No doubt they’ll tell you in the morning – or what’s left of it anyway.

And then…. Nothing!

You’re 100-page document with appendices and flow charts, examples and well-constructed arguments is ignored.  You begin to worry that perhaps they didn’t receive your work.  Check your ‘sent box’ again!  No, it went.  It was sent at 0410am.  But they’ve not mentioned it.  Not one word.  Maybe they haven’t had the time to read it yet.  Maybe they’re thinking up the correct words to tell you how brilliant they consider your work to be.  But, maybe they hate it!  Maybe they’re considering ways of getting rid of you because of it?  Maybe they’ll talk to you later, tomorrow perhaps? 

But tomorrow never comes.

If you’re in the business of allocating projects and setting deadlines for your workforce to meet then it’s only fair that you provide them with the feedback they’re expecting at the end of the arrangement.  Lack of useful feedback means lack of direction and leads to frustration.  If you consider yourself to be a leader, then you must provide your followers with direction, not only before a task but on completion.  How else will they ever develop if they’re working blindly never knowing if they’ve met their objectives or even got close?   Very few employees will purposefully provide their bosses with poor work; so they may very well have tried their level best to give you what they believed you wanted. In order to provide effective feedback to your workforce, you may wish to consider the ‘Trophy’ acronym that I have developed over the years.  And it goes like this:

T – is for ‘Timely’.  Timely feedback is vital to correct errors and aide in the development of your team member.  It’s also very useful as a motivational tool so that hard work is recognised in a timely manner and the individual is rewarded appropriately.  Such reward could be as simple as a ‘thanks’ or some other acknowledgment for the work completed, especially if a tight deadline was met to achieve it. We all have ‘esteem needs’.

R – is for ‘Relevance’.  Whatever you choose to say or do in response to someone’s work must be relevant to the situation and subject at-hand.  There is no point diverting the message to encompass other things. If what ends up being discussed actually bears no relevance to the objective set or work completed; then the communication becomes meaningless and demoralising.

O – is for ‘Objective’.  Personal feelings should not shape nor prejudice the structure of the feedback taking place.   To that end, a big-picture approach is preferred.

P – is for ‘Participative’.  Communication should be a two-way affair.  Allowing the other person to respond is imperative in effective communication because both parties must listen to each other.  Allow time for questions to be raised and stay one-step ahead of the game by anticipating likely responses.

H – is for ‘Hierarchical’.  Concentrate on the most important part of the message that you want to convey rather than going through a seemingly endless list of compliments or complaints.  Too much focus on the positives or negatives will become patronising in the ear of the person who has provided the work.  This will cause them to switch-off and view you as a whining child.

Y – is for ‘Yours’.  Never subject anyone else to your interpretation of someone else’s view. Neither should you ever ‘dress up’ a view as someone else’s when in fact it came from you!  I once had a boss that did this all too often.  He’d say that someone in the organisation wasn’t happy with something I’d done or said when in fact it was him that wasn’t happy, but he lacked the guts to tell me himself.  If you’re ever asked to give a member of the team feedback that belongs to someone else then it’s their responsibility and ultimately their duty to give it.

Working in the dark is horrible.  As bosses and leaders, your vision should have a light.  An almost blinding light so that everyone can see it so that no one is ever left behind in the dark. 

In a winning team, we all need to take our turn to hold the Trophy!

Wishing every success in all that you do,


Keith

Keep Calm and Carry On...

I missed my flight on Saturday, due to a series of events over which I had very little or no control.

I had been in London for the week.  The first few days were spent work-shopping ideas with colleagues for exciting new products and then on the last two days I delivered a course for Enterprise Architects during which the delegates and I had lots of discussions around Emotional Intelligence and emotional self-control.  And so there was some irony in having my own levels of patience and ability to control a stressful situation tested less than 24-hours after the discussions had ended.

I had booked to fly out of Stansted Airport which is situated about 35-miles to the North East of London.  It is not uncommon for commuters to take a designated express train out of London to Stansted.  These fast trains usually run every 15-minutes and the journey takes around 40-minutes.  I had bought a return ticket for the Stansted Express when I arrived in the UK on the previous Saturday and had planned to take the trip in reverse to connect with my flight home.  So it was all arranged and straightforward…well, it should have been!

I arrived at the Station to take the train to the airport in good time however, I was soon informed that there had been a fatality on the rail line just minutes before my train was due to depart and so all services to Stansted were suspended.  The rail staff had no idea when the line would be re-opened so I had to take a contingency route which in reality meant taking a taxi.  I knew that this mode of transport would severely impact my time of arrival at the airport as although the distance between the two points is not necessarily that far, I would have to rely on the taxi’s ability to compete with London’s heavy traffic flow and numerous traffic light systems to get me there in-time.  I needed to find a taxi with a knowledgeable driver and find one quickly.

I began to feel stressed. 

Murphy’s law roughly assumes that ‘if anything can go wrong, it will.’  As I recount the situation, I now realise that I fully expected to miss my flight from the moment I was told that the train had been cancelled.  I don’t know why.  There should have been ample time to get to the airport.  Taxis are everywhere in London and must travel to the feeder airports every day.  Yet I had this nagging feeling in my gut that today was not going to be a day when things were to go in my favour.  To cut a long story short, I missed the usual baggage check-in by a few minutes.  I was directed to Security (the area where they X-ray your cabin luggage) with my bag for the hold.  I assumed, wrongly, that they would take my hold-baggage from me – as they do at the standard check-in - and that I would go through the usual process with the rest of the passengers.  It was here that I was informed that my hold-baggage would be treated the same as what people from the US call ‘carry-on’ baggage which meant that I would have any fluids, lotions, sharp objects etc, taken from me and was given a few minutes to remove all such items from my bag.  I’m still not sure why they insisted on this as one would think that a bag for the hold is a bag for the hold and that all are treated equally (unless all hold luggage gets X-rayed?).  Anyway, I had misunderstood the order to rid the bag of absolutely everything that had seemingly ever been in contact with water!  Subsequently, my hold bag failed the X-ray test and was put aside for searching.  I now had ten minutes to undergo a bag search and make it to the departure gate.  I knew it was never going to be completed in time and protested that I would now miss my flight.  Increasing stress levels and a breakdown in communication was causing anxiety neurons to fire all over my brain to the point where for a second, I considered leaving all luggage items and their now spilled contents where they were – displayed for the world to see and make a run for the departure gate.  Had I done this, I would have undoubtedly been arrested.  As the search concluded the security manager approached me to tell me that my gate had closed and that I had now indeed missed my flight.  The expected (but unexpected) wave of anger almost got the better of me.  I wanted to retaliate, to bang my fists on the desk, to shout at someone, anyone!  My first thoughts were about calling home to tell my wife and little boy that I wouldn’t be home.  I had spoken to my son via Skype only hours before and I knew that by now they would be getting ready to leave the house and drive to the arrival airport to pick me up.  I had bought my son a gift and he was really excited about getting it.  Now I had to make the call to tell him I couldn’t come home and that would make him sad.  Waves of anger lapping around in my head.  Feeling angry, looking angry, being angry.  I should have been on that flight.  If the taxi had got there just a few minutes earlier or the security staff had just an ounce of sympathy to my plight then I knew I would have made it.  Right about now I should be strapped in my aeroplane seat watching the pre-flight safety brief.  And then I thought about why I wasn’t.

Some of you will have probably considered this already but it wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind at the time.  Someone had died earlier that day.  Hit by a train. As I sat outside the airport with a large coffee I began to try to imagine what on earth they had been thinking about at the time.  I had assumed it was a suicide, later I found out that it had been an accident.  A tragic accident that ended the life of a schoolgirl and would shatter the lives of many, many others.  Anger was replaced by sadness, more so when the details were later released.
The main point of this post is in the very first line above which is repeated below:

“I missed my flight on Saturday, due to a series of events over which I had very little or no control.”

I had no control of the cause yet I reacted to the effect.  Struggling to maintain emotional behaviour can at times be very difficult.  How very quickly perceptions and interpretations of your environment trick your mind into thinking that events and people are conspiring against you.  There is mileage in the well-known saying that ‘it is what it is’.  Living in France I guess I should know better as I have yet to see an irate French national during my time here.  They appear to laugh in the face of stress and accept situations for what they are.  Of course, this attitude is not always possible so we must consider what level (if any) of influence over events we really have at the time we’re exposed to them.  To be emotionally competent and see the bigger picture at all times is a skill, but most skills can be developed and refined.

The fact is, I was inconvenienced whereas only an hour or so earlier someone’s life had ended and the aftermath of that would throw family and friends of the deceased into a hell pit.

Don’t sweat over what you can’t control.  Keep calm and carry on

Wishing you success in all that you do,

Keith

Dedicated to Katie Littlewood (may she rest in peace) aged 15

So... How are those New Year's resolutions going?

Happy New Year to you all!  

I sincerely hope that you are already experiencing the peace and good health that you may have wished for as the clock struck midnight on the last day of 2011.

So, what resolutions did you make?  Aside from a promising yourself to make every effort to transform your lifestyle by taking up another health club membership/dietary programme/marathon plan or make amends to previously difficult or dissolved relationships - what else did you wish for?  What else did you hope for?

I hope that you realise there is a good chance that at the same time you were considering your future, some of the people who work for you were vowing to change their own direction in some way.  Some will have decided that this is the year that they will take on a new challenge; a new beginning through a new job.

If you are a manager then my question to you is simple…

Why?

Why is it that some of your staff want to leave you and why does it take a traditional moment like New Year’s Eve for them to face up to the issues they have and plan to make such a significant change with such significant risks?

Things must be bad!

Firstly, you must not take it all too personally.  After all, I imagine you’ve made similar promises to yourself in the past that have never materialised.  In reality many of your people will not go through with it.  Most will get sidetracked with one thing or another but, some will make it, or at least get very close to seeing it through.  But this does not mean you should ignore it.

If you were to enter the words ‘common reasons why people leave jobs’ into a standard web search engine you will be faced with numerous articles and lists providing insight into the motivating factors that trigger such decisions.  I have read through quite a few of them whilst simultaneously writing this post and as one might expect – they are all saying more or less the same thing and citing the same reasons.  And those reasons are inevitably due to poor management.  Here’s a factoid that sums it up from: www.ihatemyjobnow.com:

“As is often said, “Employees don’t quit their companies, they quit their bosses.” About 35 percent of workers who have quit a job cite a bad boss as the deciding factor…”

Now I cannot guarantee the accuracy of the statistic quoted above but I can imagine that the perceived inter-relationship between ‘boss’ and ‘worker’ is the main motivator for the majority of resignation letters that cross the desk on a daily basis across the world over.   

Note I use the word ‘perceived’ as I believe that the employee’s misinterpretation of the relationship is often the root cause of workplace unhappiness.  Busy and stressed Bosses can sometimes over look the importance of the employee’s interpretation of the psychological contract. 

The prevention of free thinking and true ownership of tasks prohibits development and individuals will seek other opportunities to ‘make their mark’.  Similarly, a thankless environment and a culture of blame will also cause unrest and is not conducive to a happy workforce.  Managers must learn to lead; and leading effectively means empowering others.

It’s never too late to add to your New Year’s list of resolutions.  If you are a Manager; make sure that somewhere near the top of your list is the promise that you will make an extra effort to make your organisation an exciting and participative place to be for your workers and teams.  Promise yourself that you will consider the needs of your staff as part of your everyday activities.  Otherwise, you can guarantee that many of them will be doing their level best to act upon their resolution to leave.

Wishing you every success in all that you do,

Keith