Managers like Mike C. aren’t suggesting that gaining varied experiences is a bad idea, simply that it is insufficient. They know that an employee will fail to find the roles that fit him if he spends his career gorging himself on skills and experiences, while neglecting to look in the mirror — an approach to career building that is as likely to succeed as is trying to build a healthy body by popping vitamins and diet pills while neglecting to exercise.
Second, these exemplary managers emphasize that the point of self-discovery is not to fix your nontalents. The point is not to “identify and then fill in your skill gaps,” as many human resources departments euphemistically describe it. In the spirit of the insight that “you cannot put in what was left out, you can only draw out what was left in,” the point of self-discovery is to learn about yourself so that you can capitalize on who you are. The point is to take control of your career, to make more informed decisions, and to gradually select roles that represent an increasingly good fit for your natural talents.
THE MANAGER AND THE NEW CAREER
How can the manager help? In the new career, the employee is the star. It is his responsibility to take control of his career. It is his responsibility to look in the mirror and make sound choices based upon what he discovers. But what role should the manager play? She is no longer the gatekeeper, picking and choosing from among the most attractive, the most skilled, the most experienced supplicants. What is her role?
One could make a case for saying that since the employee is the star and since companies can no longer guarantee lifelong employment, the manager’s role has become less significant. She should focus her people on performance today, but not concern herself with where they are headed tomorrow. The employee should figure that out for himself. Besides, if the manager invests too much in her people, she might soon be disappointed. Given the speed of change today, she might well end up having to terminate the people she has nurtured so carefully.
The best managers reject this perspective. They know that in this new career they can play some significant roles. They can level the playing field. They can be the ones to hold up the mirror. And they can create a safety net.
GREAT MANAGERS LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD
This is why creating new heroes, designing graded levels of achievement, and establishing broadbanded pay plans are all so important. These techniques provide an environment where money and prestige are spread throughout the organization. Since the employee now knows he can acquire them through a variety of different paths, money and prestige become less of a factor in his decision making. He is free to choose his path based upon his current understanding of his talents and nontalents. He may still make the occasional misstep, but he is much more likely to focus not only toward roles where he excels, but toward roles that bring him lasting satisfaction and roles that he yearns to play for a very long time.
On this leveled playing field, you hear conversations that you never thought you would hear. Conversations like the one Jeff H., the computer software sales manager, had with his supervisor:
“I love my role. I’m the best in the company at it. I am making a lot of money doing it. And I am having more of an impact than I ever thought was possible in my life. So I said to my boss, I said, ‘Your one objective with me is to see to it that I am never promoted again. If you can do that, you have me for life.’”
GREAT MANAGERS HOLD UP THE MIRROR
Great managers excel at “holding up the mirror.” They excel at giving performance feedback. Don’t confuse this with the once-a-year performance appraisal chore, with its labyrinthine form filling and remedial focus; or with the empty, arbitrary employee-of-the-month feedback. The feedback given by great managers is quite different.
It is the kind of feedback that Laura T., the petrochemical executive, gives to her people. She describes a program called Excel, where she meets with each of her twenty-two direct reports once every quarter. “In these meetings we quickly review the last three months. And then it’s on to the good stuff — the next three months. What are their plans, their goals, what measurements will we use? With each of them, we talk about what they enjoy doing and how we can structure things so that they get to do more of that.”
Martin P., the police chief, is less structured but has the same kinds of conversations. “I have sixteen direct reports, and with each of them I probably spend about twenty minutes each week talking about their performance, the project they are working on, how they can improve, and what I can do to help. These discussions happen all the time. With one of my guys, we went to a convention together last month. We accomplished nothing at the convention. But we did on the plane, and in the rental car, and over dinner, and in the lobby of the hotel.”
Jeff H. simply schedules time to travel on sales calls with each of his salespeople once or twice a quarter. “I try to not play the role of the knight on the white horse, riding in and saving the day. Instead I just travel with them, listen to their challenges, watch them with clients. I need to get a granular look at them at work. Back at the office, I replay what I saw for them. We then talk about plans and goals, and together we figure out the best way forward. My role isn’t to correct or fix. My role is to keep them aware of their style and to keep them realistic about what is possible, given that style.”
Other great managers make use of 360-degree feedback techniques or psychological profiles or employee opinion surveys or customer comment cards. Whatever their style, whatever their tools of choice, they are all trying to do the same thing: to hold up the mirror so that the employee has a chance to discover a little more about who he is, how he works, and the footprint he leaves on the world.
Although each manager employed his or her own approach to feedback, in the study of great managers Gallup found that their approaches did share three characteristics.
First, their feedback was constant. They varied the frequency according to the preferences or the needs of the individual employee. But whether the meetings happened for twenty minutes every month or for an hour every quarter, these performance feedback meetings were, nonetheless, a constant part of their interaction with each employee throughout the year. How much of a time commitment did this represent? According to the managers in Gallup’s study, the total time spent discussing each employee’s style and performance was roughly four hours per employee per year. And as one front-line supervisor said, “If you can’t spend four hours a year with each of your people, then you’ve either got too many people, or you shouldn’t be a manager.”
Second, each session began with a brief review of past performance. The purpose of this was not to evaluate, “You should do less of that. You should fix this.” Rather, the purpose was to help the employee think in detail about her style and to spark a conversation about the talents and nontalents that created this style. After this review, the focus always shifted to the future and how the employee could use her style to be productive. Sometimes they would work together to identify the employee’s path of least resistance toward her goals, but often the discussion would revolve around partnership. What talents did the manager bring that could complement the nontalents of the employee?
During that convention trip, most of Martin P.’s conversations dealt with partnership. “This guy is incredibly driven, incredibly goal oriented, but he lacks strategic thinking — he has a hard time imagining what obstacles might get in his way as he plows ahead. I can help him here. I can play out alternative scenarios for him, and then we can put together contingency plans should any of these scenarios actually happen.”
Jeff H. gives a similar description. “One of my salespeople knows all the tricks for getting her foot in the door and asking the right questions, but lacks creativity when it comes to pricing the deal. I’m pretty good at that. So when we meet, she tells me the players and the situation, and I tell her whether she should present a leasing option, a buy-back option, a volume discount deal, or whatever.�
�
Third, great managers made a point of giving their feedback in private, one on one. The purpose of feedback is to help each individual to understand and build upon his natural strengths. You cannot do this in a group setting.
This sounds obvious, but given today’s preoccupation with teamwork, it is surprising how many managers forget the importance of spending time alone with each of their people. As Phil Jackson, the extraordinarily successful coach of the Chicago Bulls, observes:
“I prefer to deal with [the players] on an individual basis. This helps strengthen my one-on-one connection with the players, who sometimes get neglected because we spend so much of our time together en masse. Meeting with players privately helps me stay in touch with who they are out of uniform. During the 1995 playoffs, for instance, Toni Kukoc was troubled by reports that Split, Croatia, where his parents live, had been hit by a barrage of artillery fire. It took several days for him to get through on the phone and learn that his family was all right. The war in his homeland is a painful reality of Toni’s life. If I ignored that, I probably wouldn’t be able to relate to him on any but the most superficial level.”
GETTING TO KNOW YOU
With descriptions like this, Phil helps provide an answer to the manager’s age-old question “Should you build close personal relationships with your employees, or does familiarity breed contempt?” The most effective managers say yes, you should build personal relationships with your people, and no, familiarity does not breed contempt.
This does not mean that you should necessarily become best friends with those who report to you — although if that is your style, and if you keep them focused on performance outcomes, there is nothing wrong with doing so. The same applies to socializing with your people — if that is not your style, don’t do it. If it is your style, then there is nothing damaging about having dinner or a drink with them, as long as you still evaluate them on performance outcomes.
When great managers like Phil Jackson say they build close relationships with their people, when they say that familiarity does not breed contempt, they simply mean that a great manager must get to know his employees. And “getting to know someone” extends beyond a detailed understanding of an employee’s talents and nontalents. It extends all the way to the practicalities and dramas of his personal life. The great manager does not necessarily have to intervene in the employee’s life — although some do — but she does have to know about it. And she does have to care about it.
During Gallup’s eighty thousand manager interviews we asked this question: “You have a talented employee who consistently shows up late for work. What would you say to this employee?” The answers ranged from the authoritarian to the laissez-faire:
“I would fire him; we don’t tolerate lateness here.”
“I would give him a verbal warning, then a written warning, then fire him.”
“I would lock the door to the office and tell him that, from now on, even if you are two seconds late, you won’t be allowed in.”
“That’s fine. I don’t care what time they come in as long as they stay late and get their work done.”
Each of these responses is defensible. Each has its merits. But these were not the answers of great managers. When told that an employee was consistently showing up late for work, the great managers gave this one reply, which sums up their attitude toward manager-employee relationships:
“I would ask why.”
Maybe it has something to do with a bus schedule. Maybe he has to wait for a nanny to arrive. Maybe there is trouble at home. Once they had understood the employee’s personal situation, they might take any number of different actions — ranging from changing the employee’s hours to ten to six to telling him to get the situation sorted out, fast. But no matter what the next step, their first step was always to get to know the employee: “Ask why.”
Phil Jackson’s comments about personal relationships end with this line:
“Athletes are not the most verbal breed. That’s why bare attention and listening without judgment are so important.”
GREAT MANAGERS CREATE A SAFETY NET
The conventional career path lacks forgiveness. As the employee climbs from rung to rung, the rungs are burned behind him. If he climbs onto a rung and struggles, he knows that his reputation will suffer and his job will be in jeopardy. There is no turning back. By punishing career missteps so severely, this path discourages everyone from taking bold career steps. In conventional wisdom’s world, taking bold career steps in order to discover a latent talent or to refine an existing one is almost as foolhardy as volunteering to learn the trapeze without a safety net. No wonder people are so protective of their careers, so closed to their own feedback, so reluctant to change their career track based upon what they have discovered about themselves. This career path kills learning.
Great managers want to encourage career learning. They want to promote active self-discovery. So they have devised their own makeshift career safety net: trial periods.
Ellen P., the manager of in-flight training at Southwest Airlines, describes the safety net she built:
“It is a big step for a flight attendant to move out of the planes and into the training room. Some people want to become a trainer because they will get to travel less — we knock those people out right away. But others talk about wanting to teach, wanting to pass on the tradition of Southwest. If we think they have the talent, and if we think they are seeking the job for the right reasons, then we bring them in for a six-month trial period.
“We are very explicit that this is a time for them, and for us, to decide if this is really something that they will love to do, for a long time. People don’t realize that teaching is hard. We do teach ideas for having fun with the guests and playing games and telling jokes. But there is a lot of boring detail to communicate and a lot of rules for the students to learn. This trial period is a way for them to get a sense of how they like this kind of work.
“During the trial period, we sit down with them once a month and discuss their performance, what they are really enjoying, where they are struggling. We send other trainers in to evaluate them and give them feedback. And at the end of the six months they have to pass certain tests to show that they have learned all the necessary information.
“Most do exactly that — and we now have a really talented group of trainers. But all of our trainees knew that if, during the trial period, either they or the company felt that they were not a fit, they would have been able to go back to the planes and resume their flight attendant role. And that’s happened a couple of times over the last few years. There was no shame in that, no failure. These people wanted to experiment, to learn if they could be a trainer. They took the step and learned that teaching was not for them.
“It worked out great for us, too. They are back on the planes now, focused on our guests, and undistracted by vague thoughts of moving into training. They have closed that door. They can move on.”
Trial periods are tricky. You must not use them as a substitute for selection. Like Ellen, you should use them only with people who have already shown some talent and some genuine interest in the role. After all, your main focus as a manager is not to help every employee play around within the company in the hope of finding something they like to do. Your main focus is to drive performance by matching the talent to the role. Even if an employee begs and pleads for a chance to discover a new talent, if you know he doesn’t have it, don’t offer him the trial period.
Furthermore, if you use trial periods, then, like Ellen, you must be very clear about the details. How long will it last? What criteria will you use to assess fit? How often, if at all, will you meet during the trial period to discuss performance? Where will the employee go if she does not stay in the new role? You must answer all of these questions explicitly if the trial period is to be a success.
Finally, and most significant, you
must make it clear that the employee will be moved back into his previous role if either you or he is unhappy with the fit. This will avoid any unfortunate misunderstandings. The trial period is not just for his benefit; it is also for yours. If, after the trial period is over, he loves the role but you perceive a misfit, your assessment wins. He may not be happy with this, but at least he will not feel ambushed.
The Art of Tough Love
“How do great managers terminate someone and still keep the relationship intact?”
Whether the employee is at the end of a trial period, or whether he is just struggling along in his current role, it is still difficult to bring him bad news. It is still difficult to tell him that he needs to move out of his role. During Gallup’s interviews, many managers, both great and average, confessed that they were physically sick before each conversation of this kind. No matter how you approach it, no matter how accomplished you are as a manager, removing someone from his role is never easy.
Here we are not referring to situations where the employee has committed some heinous or unethical act — with their quasi-legal or legal nature, these dramas are more clear-cut. Rather, we are referring to those unfortunate times when it becomes obvious that a particular employee is consistently failing to perform.
Situations like this are much less well-defined. As a manager, you have many decisions to make: What level of performance is unacceptable? How long is too long at that level? Have you done enough to help, with training, motivation, support systems, or complementary partnering? Should you break the news all at once, or should you give them a probationary period? When the final conversation happens, what words will you use?
Some managers are so overwhelmed by these questions that they avoid the issue altogether. They take the easy way out and “layer over” the problem employee with a new hire. In the short run this can appear to be a painless and convenient solution. But in the long run, like wrapping pristine bandages around an infected wound, it is deadly for the company.
First, Break All the Rules Page 21