The Truth About Getting the Best From People

by Martha I. Finney

  Keep your promise—Better yet, surprise them: Be early. No matter what you do, even if you have to disappoint them with your final decision, keep the date you promised. And if you can, beat that date by a few days.

  People coming to you with issues or complaints also bring with them lots of history of how their managers have let them down in the past. How you actually resolve the issue at hand may satisfy them. Or it might not. But the way you listen to everything they have to say about the matter and respectfully take action on it will take you far in solidifying the bond of trust between you.

  The result: Everyone's expectations and hopes for the future will be raised significantly.

  Truth 42

  Crap happens

  Unless you work for a waste management company, not much money gets made cleaning up the past. The real profits come in creating better ways of enjoying the future. That's the fun part, and fortunately, that's what most of us get paid for. But, as a manager, you're also paid for hanging in there—and inspiring your employees to stay on the team—when things don't go quite as you had expected.

  Terrible things happen in business, even on an average day. Key clients go belly-up. An eleventh-hour investor loses his focus on your starving business because of a family emergency. Your main competitor steals your publicity thunder with a new product announcement that makes your latest offering look like last year's shoe style. These things happen. Your employees are naturally demoralized, and they're wondering, "What's the use of trying?" You can see it in their eyes.

  For the moment, at any rate, your employees are feeling that maybe they're not the masters of their destiny after all. In the 1970s, psychologist Aaron Beck identified three interpretations of what happened that feed this feeling and lead straight to depression. They reflect a person's way of making sense of what just happened in terms of negative things he thinks about himself, the future, and the world in general: "I'm worthless," "the future is hopeless," and "this just goes to show there's never any point."

  When your business has hit a rough patch, this is your time to really show what you have as an engaging manager. You have to hang on to your own optimism for dear life. And you now have to back up your positive outlook with a powerful resiliency toolkit.

  Return control to your team—Help team members find a way to reconnect what they do to making some kind of difference in the world. A group project that makes an immediately visible difference will start to return them to their own sense of empowerment. This is not an elective. They can choose the project itself, but no one gets to sit this one out.

  You have to hang on to your own optimism for dear life.

  Return a sense of purpose to your team—The fun of going after a potential win is always compelling. But even if the win is lost, there is still an underlying value or mission that hasn't changed. As a group, discuss the reasons why you embarked on this adventure in the first place. And restore a team commitment to the core meaning behind all the work you're doing.

  Review your marketplace and its needs—Your people are paid to be change agents, but failure might have put them into a temporary existential shrug. Let them say, "Well, I guess that's just the way it is," only once, so they can get it out of their system. Then put them back on the job to understanding what their customers continue to need but still aren't getting.

  Keep things in perspective—You've had better days, to be sure, and your team has as well. But we've all had far worse days in recent years, personally, economically, and nationally.

  Hang on to your own self-esteem—The failure may have been your stupid idea in the first place. And now you're questioning your own abilities to make prudent decisions and wise business choices. Cut yourself a break. If you're not pushing your own personal boundaries as a leader, you're not letting your people know that it's okay for them to take calculated risks for the sake of your organization. Some work, some don't. That's life.

  If you're not pushing your own personal boundaries as a leader, you're not letting your people know that it's okay for them to take calculated risks.

  Apologize to your team, if appropriate. Explore together what the team learned (good and bad) as a result of this misadventure. Acknowledge your group for their heroic dedication to the goal, and personally thank the individuals for their contributions to the effort. Be specific, one employee at a time.

  Then get on with the next project. The future is waiting. The world deserves it. And you're up to the challenge.

  Truth 43

  Engaged employees need to know more

  When employee engagement is driven throughout the company as an organization-wide initiative, the corporate communications (corp comm) office almost always gets in on the action. In fact, because communications is such a core element to engagement, employee engagement is often driven by the corp comm office. For companies that see the value of sending corporate engagement messages and information throughout the ranks, this makes obvious sense. (It makes even better sense, however, when the HR and organizational effectiveness departments are allowed to collaborate with corp comm as equal partners in the initiative. As companies get increasingly sophisticated in understanding all the complex facets of employee engagement, corp comm will eventually support HR and organizational effectiveness, rather than lead it.)

  Because employee engagement promotes a sense of ownership among engaged employees, they have a compelling need to know what's going on throughout the company. They have a stake in the outcome of the company's various projects, so they deserve to know how their efforts are paying off. Engaged employees take their roles inside their company very personally. So they want to know how the company is being perceived by the community and in the media. They want to be reminded of what makes their job at their particular company better than their job at a different company.

  This isn't a sense of entitlement that they expect to be catered to. They're pouring their passion and lives into their work. Therefore, they deserve to know what's going on throughout the entire company. And corp comm is there to make that happen.

  This isn't entitlement; they deserve to know what's going on.

  Let's say you don't have the services of a communications department specifically dedicated to unifying all your company's employees through a common channel of messaging. Say you're on your own. You can still keep your employees in the know. You'll just have to do it yourself.

  Make a point of letting them know every single detail you can about what and how the business is doing—Obviously, you'll be under some restrictions now and then—a planned merger, for instance, that can't go public until the companies are ready for it to go public to everyone. But it's a safe bet that companies generally can tell their employees much more than they do. Most of the time, it's simply an oversight. You don't have to make that mistake. Develop the habit of asking yourself if each and every development that crosses your desk is something that you can share with your people.

  Tell them before they can find out any other way—Don't let your employees get essential company news from the local television, their neighbors, or their stock broker. If the buzz is big enough to hit the grapevine, make sure your employees are among the first to find out—from you.

  Answer all questions fully and honestly—If you want to nurture a workplace culture of individuals who own a stake in the company's success, they need to know that they can trust you for the straight scoop. Don't try to sugarcoat bad news. Tell it exactly as it is.

  Give them room to speak freely—Communications only works when it works both ways. Give employees the chance to speak freely within the circle of your department without fear of reprisals. This way, you'll know what's on their minds. You'll have the chance to respond to all their concerns. And you can correct misconceptions.

  Engaged employees are high maintenance when it comes to requiring all the news and facts about their company. Can you blame them? They're being asked to provide their utmost of dedication, inspiration, and energy to their
company. And over the years, they've seen examples of trust that was misplaced, with employees coming out the worse for their dedication.

  If you want your employees to give their all to their jobs, you must be willing to give your all to them.

  If you want your employees to give their all to their jobs, you must be willing to give your all to them—especially all the company information that's fit to share. That way, they'll be better positioned to make informed, adult decisions—one of which, preferably, will be to stay and continue giving their all for the company.

  Part VIII: The Truth About Teams

  Truth 44

  Your team has untapped talent

  You don't need to be a psychologist to know this principle about the way the brain works: You tend to notice most those things that are important to you. If you're looking for your door keys, you're not necessarily noticing that your cherished copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the fourth LP from the left on the shelf over the stereo. You might notice the dust bunny under the couch, but usually only if the keys happen to be embedded in it. You can sleep right through the siren on the street below your open window, but your child's sniffles will keep you awake all night. And if, after years of dreaming, you've finally resolved to buy that red Corvette, you're going to suddenly see a lot of red Corvettes on the road.

  We notice what's important to us, a habit that can be traced back to the times we lived cheek-to-jowl with mastodons. We needed to pay attention to what was going on around us just to stay alive. And to help us out with this essential task, our brains learned to filter out the trivial details. We couldn't be so deeply distracted by watching the flitting of a moth that we didn't discern the faint shift of air on the back of our necks as a cheetah closed in to strike. We wouldn't have survived long enough as a species to invent that Corvette.

  Today, thanks to the invention of such things as doors and fast cars, we can afford to relax and look around at more details that our brain would have earlier dismissed as unnecessary to survival. We have the luxury of seeing beyond what we need to notice what we actually have and how we might use those attributes to make our lives even better.

  We practice this same survival-level focus at work—especially when we consider who our employees are and what they can do for us. We may hire people specifically to help us with our core business survival needs. But, with that job-specific focus, we tend to overlook the other talents they bring to the team. Consequently, without meaning to, we may be forfeiting a more empowered, inspiring future for the sake of tackling the basic survival needs of today.

  We may be forfeiting a more empowered, inspiring future.

  Even if you're still barely staggering along in survival mode, invest at least a couple of hours every week in exploring what else your team can bring to the organization. For starters, take a fresh look at their resumes. Remember that they were probably tweaked to respond specifically to the published requirements of the job your employees ultimately landed. A variety of talents and skills might have been edited out or thrown into the background to highlight those abilities and skills you had originally asked for.

  Search the resumes and applications to discover what other talents and passions might be buried there. You may discover, for instance, that you have a cadre of multilingual employees who can use that untapped skill to open new markets in previously neglected communities or countries. Or perhaps one of your employees has special expertise, understanding, or personal contacts in a relatively unique market, but a market, all the same, that represents customers who could uniquely benefit from your product.

  All that passion, knowledge, and talent represent a resource that will open all sorts of doors of opportunity.

  Likewise, make sure you keep up with your employees' ongoing development and education efforts, especially the classes they take independently, for the sheer love of learning. All that passion, knowledge, and talent that your employees voluntarily acquire after they have met their own survival needs represent a resource that will open all sorts of doors of opportunity—for your company, for your employees, and for you. All you have to do is just look up from your own survival-level tasks and notice.

  Truth 45

  People need to fight their own battles

  In the business world, people work in close quarters—even if they're half a globe apart. When limited resources (time, money, space, raw materials, personal imagination) clash with unlimited catalysts (personal agenda, grudges, mistrust, misunderstandings that travel the speed of the Internet), you've got yourself some trouble among the ranks. It's going to happen sooner or later. Prevention, of course, is almost always a good management approach. But no matter what you do to prevent the predictable conflicts, the unpredictable ones come up in their place. How you handle a conflict among employees is a hallmark of engaging management.

  How you handle a conflict among employees is a hallmark of engaging management.

  Handle it poorly, and you've got unresolved conflicts that could persist for years to come. Handle it well, and you've got an even tighter bond within your team of employees—even if they have to agree to disagree. If you're committed to empowering your employees to independently solve business problems without running to you for every decision, make the same commitment to empower them to solve their interpersonal problems equally independently. The agreement they strike—and own—together will be far more powerful than any solution you force on them just because you're the boss.

  Take every grievance seriously. If your employee is peeved enough to come to you, that's reason enough for you to listen. Bear in mind, though, that you two have separate reasons for this initial conversation. His is to vent and then, perhaps, seek a solution. Yours is to assess. If you're hearing evidence of harassment, threats of physical violence, bullying, or substance abuse, this meeting needs to be documented and kicked straight to your legal or HR department. This one is out of your hands.

  Even if complaints turn out to be laughably petty, don't belittle the employees—or their complaints—and then josh them on their way. Give them a serious and respectful hearing, without taking sides. It may feel like a waste of time at the moment, but you're building your own reputation as someone who cares enough to listen. The next beef might not be so trivial, and you want to know about that one, too.

  You're building your own reputation as someone who cares enough to listen. The next beef might not be so trivial, and you want to know about that one, too.

  Assuming that the complaint is relatively benign (something that won't require the services of your attorneys, the police, or paramedics), encourage them to resolve the dispute without your intervention. Presumably, everyone is a grown-up in your office. So make it clear you respect your employees enough to expect them to act like adults. Provide conflict resolution training once every year or so (even more frequently, if necessary, depending on your new employee turnover or how emotionally charged your workplace is). This way, your employees will follow the same rules of the game. If, as a pair, two conflicting employees work on the mutual goal of achieving an agreement, relying on the same procedure they learned in the safe, hypothetical confines of a classroom, they will discover together that the system works. And you may have, as a result, a newly minted, freshly bonded team of two that you can then assign to a happier, more productive project.

  Don't treat the conflict as a floor show. This is not a battle of impassioned titans who bring the spectacle to your office for your amusement. If the issue is serious enough for your employees to be upset about, it's serious enough for you to be respectful of.

  If the issue is serious enough for your employees to be upset about, it's serious enough for you to be respectful of.

  If you must bring the antagonists into your office for a conversation, don't allow the exchange to disintegrate into a showdown. Make sure you are professionally trained in facilitation skills. Establish the ground rules up front that you are meeting to discuss behaviors and expectatio
ns—not personalities, bad breath, or body odor.

  Don't hold this episode against the vanquished. Employee conflicts should never be about who wins and who loses. They should always be about working toward an agreement and using the experience to build greater understanding and trust. If there is to be a loser in the conflicts among the people you manage, make sure that they lose just this battle, not their face, spirit, or heart.

  Truth 46

  Games don't build teams

  Some people just don't like to be afraid. And some people really don't like to lose their composure, face, and bladder control while standing on one foot atop a telephone pole. And hearing "You can do it!" shouted encouragingly 30 feet below from one's coworkers doesn't help one tiny little bit.

  Most team-building games, challenges, and events accomplish only one thing: They serve to remind us that despite outward appearance—and very real adult financial obligations—we really haven't made much progress in wisdom and perspective since we were 15. And neither, by the way, have any of those bullies and weasels who have also only gotten older and taller.

  Those Outward Bound wannabe exercises such as ropewalks, rappelling, trust falls, and endurance hikes are fabulous confidence builders for people who are pretty confident already. They know that they're capable of doing so much more in their lives and jobs if they could only bust through some self-imposed boundaries and negative thinking. But no one should actually be forced to go through those experiences. Certainly not in front of people they have to see again, especially at work. At work, now as before, image is an essential component of our confidence kit. We like to keep our fears and any incompetence to ourselves.