Some managers solve the problem by deciding to keep all their employees at arm’s length. With this neat trick they hope to diminish the tension and the pain inherent in giving bad news to a friend. Unfortunately, as Phil Jackson pointed out, by refusing to get to know their employees, they also diminish the likelihood that they will ever be able to help any of these employees excel.
The best managers do not resort to either of these evasive maneuvers. They don’t have to. They employ tough love, which is not a technique, or sequence of action steps, but a mind-set, one that reconciles an uncompromising focus on excellence with a genuine need to care. It is a mind-set that forces great managers to confront poor performance early and directly. Yet it allows them to keep their relationship with the employee intact.
So what is tough love? How does it work?
The “tough” part is easy to explain. Because great managers use excellence as their frame of reference when assessing performance, tough love simply implies that they do not compromise on this standard. So in answer to the question “What level of performance is unacceptable?” these managers reply, “Any level that hovers around average with no trend upward.” In answer to the question “How long at that level is too long?” great managers reply, “Not very long.”
It was this uncompromising standard of excellence that drove Harry D., a successful manager of two car dealerships. “We opened a second car dealership, much larger than the first. I wanted to create what I called a total service culture, where the customers received a seamless quality experience whether they were dealing with the sales department, the financing department, or the service department. I was looking for total integration of systems and total cooperation from my department heads. Big plans, right? It got off to a rocky start, let me tell you.
“My biggest mistake was the guy I promoted to head up the sales department, Simon. He came from my smaller dealership, where he was sales manager, very successful. But when he moved into the new spot, he couldn’t get into the cooperation thing at all. He wouldn’t communicate with the other department heads. He wouldn’t show up for meetings. He wouldn’t sit down with the other department heads and work out how to integrate the systems and ease the interdepartmental handoffs so that the customer wouldn’t feel a jolt. He was just interested in his guys and his numbers.
“At the same time, back at the other dealership, I had stupidly promoted one of the salespeople to sales manager, and he was struggling, too. So I had grown from one success to two failures. Not bad going.
“I knew I had to move quickly. I had talked with Simon about my concerns a couple of times but saw no improvement at all. So, five months in, I pulled him into my office and told him that I wanted him back in the other dealership. I told him that in this new dealership I was not interested simply in sales numbers, that I wanted to build this integrated, total service experience, and that he wasn’t helping. I told him that he was a loner and that, back in the other dealership, he could narrow his focus all he wanted, but here, in the new world, it wouldn’t fly. I’m sending you back, I said.
“He was so pissed off, he looked like he was going to punch me. ‘You haven’t given me enough time. You got to let me have another shot.’ All that kind of stuff. But I know my people, sometimes better than they know themselves. I knew that Simon wasn’t a team person. I knew that he would never be able to build the total experience I wanted. Better to pull the trigger now, I thought, rather than letting things drag on, with him beginning to feel more invested and me getting more disappointed.
“Now he’s doing extremely well back at the smaller place, and I managed to find a collaborative sales manager for this place. My brave new world is coming along nicely.”
Harry is universally loved by his employees. He is a pushover when employees need to change their hours, take a day off, or short-cut a process for the sake of the customer. But he is rock solid when it comes to excellence. As he says, “Excellence is my thing. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. Just don’t come to work here.”
The “love” element of tough love is a little subtler. This element still forces managers to confront poor performance early but allows them to do so in such a way that much of the bitterness and the ill will disappear. And it all springs from the concept of talent. An understanding of talent, an understanding that each person possesses enduring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, is incredibly liberating when managers have to confront poor performance. Why? Because it frees the manager from blaming the employee.
Consider the manager who believes that with enough willpower and determination, virtually all behaviors can be changed. For this manager, every case of poor performance is the employee’s fault. The employee has been warned, repeatedly, and still he has not improved his performance. If he had more drive, more spirit, more willingness to learn, he would have changed his behavior as required, and the poor performance would have disappeared. But it hasn’t disappeared. He must not be trying hard enough. It is his fault.
This seductive logic puts this manager in a very awkward position. Since she told the employee what to do, and since it wasn’t done, then the employee must be weak-willed, stupid, disobedient, or disrespectful.
How can you have a constructive conversation with someone when beneath the surface politeness this is what you are compelled to think of him? It’s hard. If you are, by nature, an emotional manager, you fear you might lose your temper and let your anger show. If you are, by nature, a caring and supportive manager, you worry that he might see through your soothing words and realize how deeply disappointed you are in him. Whatever your style, a conversation where you have to mask your true feelings is a stressful conversation, particularly when your feelings are so negative. No wonder so many managers try to avoid it.
But great managers don’t have to hide their true feelings. They understand that a person’s talent and nontalent constitute an enduring pattern. They know that if, after pulling out all the stops to manage around his nontalents, an employee still underperforms, the most likely explanation is that his talents do not match his role. In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.
If there is blame here, it is evenly spread. Perhaps the employee should have been more self-aware. Perhaps the manager should have been more perceptive. Perhaps. But this is just hindsight pointing the finger. No employee will ever be completely self-aware. No manager will ever know each of his people perfectly, even if he has selected very carefully for talent. So casting errors are not cause for anger or recrimination. Casting errors are inevitable.
When an employee is obviously miscast, great managers hold up the mirror. They encourage the employee to use this misstep to learn a little more about his unique combination of talents and nontalents. They use language like “This isn’t a fit for you, let’s talk about why” or “You need to find a role that plays more to your natural strengths. What do you think that role might be?” They use this language not because it is polite, not because it softens the bad news, but because it is true.
This is the “love” element of tough love. The most effective managers do genuinely care about each of their people. But they imbue “care” with a distinct meaning. In their minds, to “care” means to set the person up for success. They truly want each person to find roles where he has a chance to excel, and they know that this is possible only in roles that play to his talents.
By this definition, if the person is struggling, it is actively uncaring to allow him to keep playing a part that doesn’t fit. By this definition, firing the person is a caring act. This definition explains not only why great managers move fast to confront poor performance, but also why they are adept at keeping the relationship intact while doing so.
All in all, the tough love mind-set enables a great manager to keep two contradictory thoughts in
mind at the same time — the need to maintain high performance standards and the need to care — and still function effectively. Tough love enables Mike H., an IT executive, to say in the same breath, “I’ve never fired someone too early,” and, “I truly care about helping my people be successful.”
Tough love allows John F., a manufacturing supervisor, to reminisce, “I have fired a few people in my time. But I’ve stayed close to them. Now that I think about it, each of the best men at my two weddings was someone I had previously fired.”
Tough love explains the incongruous nature of Gary L.’s conversation. Gary, an enormously successful entrepreneur, six-time winner of the Queens Award for Industry, brought in one of his factory managers one evening and told him, “Come in, sit down, I love you; you’re fired; I still love you. Now, get a drink and let’s talk this through.”
“MANAGER-ASSISTED CAREER SUICIDE”
Tough love is a powerful mind-set, providing a coherent rationale and a simple language for handling a delicate situation. But if you choose to incorporate it into your own management style, remember: Counseling a person out of a role is, and will always be, a delicate situation. Tough love is helpful but will never make it easy.
Harry D., the car dealer, captures one of the constant difficulties perfectly with his comment “But I know my people, sometimes better than they know themselves.” In the tough love approach, the manager often has to confront the employee with truths that the employee may not be ready to hear. This will always be a subtle negotiation. That is why you need to get to know your people so well, why you need to meet with them so regularly, why your rationale needs to be clear and your language consistent.
Some may complain that even if you do all of these things, you still don’t have the right to believe that you know the person better than he does himself. Great managers disagree. When Gallup asked, “Would you rather get employees what they want, or would you rather get them what is right for them?” the great managers consistently replied, “Get them what is right for them.”
This sounds authoritarian, even arrogant, but Martin P., the police chief, makes a compelling point:
“I believe that, deep down, the poor performer knows he is struggling before you do. Maybe he can’t find the words, or maybe his pride won’t let him say it, but he knows. On some level he wants your help. And so, subconsciously, he puts himself in situations where his weaknesses are exposed. He is daring you, pushing you to fire him. I call this manager-assisted career suicide. If you suspect that this is happening, the best thing you can do is help put him out of his misery.
“I had one police officer, Max, who couldn’t handle confrontation. Imagine, as an officer you meet the worst people, and you meet the best people on their worst days. You get shouted at, verbally, and sometimes physically abused. You have to keep your cool under all of these conditions.
“Max couldn’t. He would become frustrated, angry, rude. We had reports of an occasional use of profanity. These are low-level disciplinary matters that are brought before a tribunal. I would sit in on these meetings and read the reports and Max would deny them, vigorously. Very vigorously. I saw exactly the kinds of behaviors in these meetings that citizens were complaining about.
“We gave him behavioral counseling, and he worked on it. But it was such a basic part of his personality. He kept going out on patrol, he kept losing his cool, and he kept denying it in the tribunals. He was committing manager-assisted career suicide. He wanted me to fire him. It was his only way out.
“So I did. I removed him from the department. He was a good person with the wrong demeanor for a police officer. Through our outplacement service he found a role as a claims adjuster for an insurance agency here in town, which fits his character so much better. I am still in touch with him, still friendly, and more important, he is doing very well.”
Many of the great managers we interviewed echoed the themes in Martin’s story: The employee refused to confront the truth of his situation and so was angry at the time, but months, and sometimes years later, the employee would make a call, or write a letter, or walk up to the manager in an airport, to tell him, “Thank you. I didn’t realize it then, but moving me out of that job was one of the best things anyone has ever done for me.”
It doesn’t always happen this way. Some employees remain bitter to the end. But tough love does provide a way for the manager and the employee to handle this delicate situation with dignity. Tough love keeps everyone whole.
CHAPTER 7: Turning the Keys: A Practical Guide
* * *
The Art of Interviewing for Talent
Performance Management
Keys of Your Own
Master Keys
Every great manager has his or her own style. But every great manager shares the same goal: to turn each employee’s talent into performance. The Four Keys, select for talent, define the right outcomes, focus on strengths, find the right fit, reveal how they attack this goal.
In the previous four chapters we described the Four Keys, how each works, and why each is important to the challenge of turning talent into performance. Now, in this chapter, we will describe what you can do to turn each of these Keys. Bear in mind that these Keys are not steps. They are not a structured series of actions intruding on your natural style. Rather, each Key is simply a way of thinking, a new perspective on a familiar set of challenges. As we mentioned in the introduction, our purpose is to help you capitalize on your style by showing you how great managers think, not to replace your style with a standardized version of theirs.
We are not suggesting that you incorporate every single one of these actions into your style. These techniques simply represent a cross section of ideas gleaned from thousands of different managers. No one manager embodies them all. We suggest you pick and choose from these actions, refine them, improve them, and fashion them into a form that fits you.
The Art of Interviewing for Talent
“Which are the right questions to ask?”
1. MAKE SURE THE TALENT INTERVIEW STANDS ALONE
Recruiting can be a complicated process. The candidate has to learn about you, the company, the role, and the details of his compensation. You have to check his résumé, make him an offer; he may counter, you then resubmit your offer; and so the negotiating continues until finally you both feel comfortable enough to commit. This process is important, but all of it should be handled separately from the talent interview.
The talent interview should stand alone. It has but one purpose: to discover whether the candidate’s recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior match the job. This is difficult enough without trying to accomplish everything else simultaneously. So set aside a defined amount of time where both you and the candidate know that the exclusive goal is to learn about his talents. Let him know that the interview will be a little different from other interviews. It will be more structured, more focused; less banter, more questions.
2. ASK A FEW OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS AND THEN TRY TO KEEP QUIET
The best way to discover a person’s talents in an interview is to allow him to reveal himself by the choices he makes. In a sense, the talent interview should mirror verbally what will face him on the job behaviorally. On the job, he will face thousands of situations every day to which he could respond in any number of ways. How he consistently responds will be his performance.
So in the interview, ask open-ended questions that offer many potential directions and do not telegraph the “right” direction — questions such as “How closely do you think people should be supervised?” or “What do you enjoy most about selling?”
The direction he takes, spontaneously, will be most predictive of his future behaviors.
When you have asked a question it is best to pause and remain silent. If he asks you to explain what you mean, deflect his question. Tell him that you are really more interested in what he means.
Say that it is his interpretation that is important. Let him answer your questions as his filter dictates. Let him reveal himself to you.
Most important, when he answers, believe him. No matter how much you might like his first impression, if you ask him how important it is to be the best and he replies, “Well, I like to be the best, but mostly I just try to be the best I can be,” believe him. If you ask him what he likes about selling and he keeps talking about how quickly he wants to move into management, believe him. If you ask him what he loves about teaching and he never mentions children, believe him. Whatever he says, believe him. A person’s unaided response to an open-ended question is powerfully predictive. Trust it, no matter how much you might want to hear something else.
3. LISTEN FOR SPECIFICS
Past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior. Therefore questions like “Tell me about a time when you …” can serve you well.
But be careful with these “Tell me about a time” questions. First, you should always be listening for a specific example. And by “specific” we mean specific by time, by person, or by event. In this way you will avoid giving credit to the person who rattles off a whole paragraph of theory about how important something is but who never actually recounts a specific time when she did it.
Second, give credit only to the person’s top-of-mind response. Past behavior is predictive of future behavior only if the past behavior is recurring. If the behavior does indeed happen a lot, then the person should be able to come up with a specific example with only one prompt. If he can, then it gives you a clue that this behavior is a recurring part of his life.
For example, let’s say you are selecting for a sales position and you have decided to include the relating talent assertiveness in your talent profile. You might ask a question like “Tell me about a time when you overcame resistance to your ideas.” Notice that you haven’t asked for a specific — you have simply asked the individual to tell you about a time when it happened. However, you are now listening for a specific.
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