As promised, this week’s post is a follow-up from last week’s post about using inclusion as a means of broadening “your” leadership skill set.  In that post I stated that by drawing on the knowledge of their team members leaders can understand all aspects of the problems they are facing, and find the best solutions.  By doing so they improve their effectiveness in making decisions and gaining support and commitment for implementing those decisions…two important leadership skills.

In this post I am writing about the use of delegation as a means of broadening “your” leadership skill set.  Delegation enables you to access and utilize skills that you may not possess.  In my recent post on Delegation, http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=397, I discussed the importance of delegation from the perspective of improving productivity, motivating employees, and reducing costs.  In that post I noted that your job as a leader is to orchestrate the activities of your team to achieve the goals and objectives of the organization, not to DO them all.  That means that as a leader you must find a way to access the special skills of your team members and deploy them effectively in reaching those goals.

To do so, however, you must first acknowledge that no one possesses all the skills required to be the best leader in every situation…not even you!  There are some skills that others will have that you will not.  There will be situations in which someone else possesses a set of skills which are better suited to the situation than your own.  This is NOT a flaw in your makeup as a leader, it is simply a reality.  However, it is also an opportunity.

As an example, I was once a part of an organization in which the CEO had an undergraduate degree in marketing and had started working her way up the corporate ladder in marketing functions until she had moved into general management.  She was not technically trained, but was highly effective in leading the operations of the business.  Her challenge was in understanding all of the technologies of our business and remaining abreast of advances in those technologies. 

To supplement this skill shortfall she relied on her Chief Scientific Officer to keep her informed of the relevant technical issues facing the business and industry.  She knew enough, and had the CSO explain enough of the details, to enable her to incorporate that technical information into the decisions she was making to lead the business. 

She also followed this approach with all the key functional areas of the business.  She was not expert in any of them, except perhaps some aspects of marketing.  However, even in that area it had been more than a decade since she had had daily direct responsibility for marketing.  She had become expert in orchestrating all the activities required to move the organization in the desired direction…leading. 

In this example the skill she accessed and utilized to help her lead the organization was remaining abreast of industry knowledge, although there are many skills you can draw upon by delegating.  As Peter Drucker said in his book “The Daily Drucker”, know the strengths of the individuals on your team.  To further that thought I would add that you must use those strengths wisely.  You must be clear on who possesses what leadership assets.  Those assets are at your disposal and they are just as much assets as your technology, equipment, facilities and processes. 

As a leader, it is absolutely one of your responsibilities to draw on ALL those assets, and to orchestrate their effective use to move the organization forward in meeting goals.  Recognize the areas in which your employees may be better suited to accomplish certain tasks than you.  Leverage those strengths to supplement your own skill set.  By doing so, you expand your own set of leadership skills, not because you have instantly developed that skill yourself, but because you have accessed them in one of your team members and drawn upon their skill to meet a certain business need of the moment.

I think it is fair to say that all leaders have a limited set of skills for doing business and leading an organization.  The skills they generally possess are those that they have relied upon and been successful with throughout their careers.  As with any other such asset, they have come to lean on those skills as their primary skills for leading a business.     

If their leadership role is a limited one with a defined short term outcome, such as leading an integration, divesting specific assets, or downsizing, those skill limitations may not pose a problem.  However, if the role is to be long term, leaders must have the ability to recognize the changing needs of the organization and utilize the appropriate skills to respond to them. 

Leaders must also recognize that as they address one set of problems, others WILL emerge.  Chances are that these new problems will be problems with which they are not accustomed.   This is true because problems are less likely to arise in a leader’s area of strength simply because they tend to be more attentive to issues in those areas.  As a result, new problems are likely to arise in areas in which the leaders are less familiar and for which they may not have the appropriate skill set.  It is at this critical juncture that leaders must have access to new skills.  How do they do that?

There are many answers to that question…many ways to adapt to change.  But, one that is readily available, and easy to implement on short notice, is inclusion.  In this case, inclusion means involving other members of the team.  By doing so, leaders supplement their own set of skills and abilities.  They use the insights of their team members to understand all aspects of the problems they are facing, and they draw on the strengths of their team members to find the best solutions.  As a result, those solutions represent a broad array of perspectives which gain commitment and yield better results.

Inclusion enables a leader to adapt to new situations by drawing on different skills – the skills of their team members.  No doubt you have heard the maxim that great leaders surround themselves with a great team.  This does not mean that great leaders are lazy and find a group of experts to do the job for them.  It simply means that they cannot be expert at everything.  Therefore, they must have a strong team working with them.   Inclusion is a process through which to gain information, expertise and skill in as many areas as possible in handling your widely varied leadership responsibilities. 

As a leader, this requires you to put your EGO aside and recognize that being an effective leader does NOT mean making all the decisions, but rather it means enabling the organization to arrive at the correct solutions by involving the right people at the right time.  It requires you to develop a culture which fosters participation.  It requires you to establish the appropriate mechanisms to enable that participation to take place.  It requires you to systematically put the important issues on the table for discussion.  However, be sure to note, it does NOT require you to make decisions based on consensus.  As the leader, you ALWAYS maintain the right and the responsibility to make the final decisions. 

Next post will look at Delegation as another way to “Broaden Your Skill Set” as a participative leader.

Thank you, Amy, for submitting this piece.  It is a wild one.

Have a look at this article.  It is long, but I have captured some excerpts below and made some comments.  I would be very interested in reading yours. The link is:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128362511&sc=nl&cc=es-20100711

Employee performance reviews should be eliminated, according to UCLA business professor Samuel Culbert. “First, they’re dishonest and fraudulent. And second, they’re just plain bad management,” he says.

Periodic reviews create circumstances that help neither the employee nor the company to improve. As Culbert and his co-author, Larry Rout, write in their book, Get Rid of the Performance Review! annual reviews do not promote candid discussions about problems in the workplace — and their potential solutions.

I cannot speak to whether performance reviews are truly “fraudulent”.  That has never been my observation, but I do not know on what grounds the author is making that assertion.  My observation is that performance reviews are not effective because they are poorly prepared and executed.  This seems to be a chronic problem in organizations, and I do not think that it is because the concept is wrong.  I think it is because the practice is flawed.  It seems that the process generally lacks leadership commitment requiring it to be done well, and it lacks rigor in how it is actually performed. 

• Management does not make it clear that performance review is fundamental to the success of the business. 
• Management often does not require that the basics are in place to enable that to happen, i.e., they do not oversee the process to ensure that job descriptions and goals exist and are clear and accurate. 
• Management does not do an adequate post mortem of the process to evaluate how well and completely it was conducted, and to determine how to make it better in the future.

Many organizations I have seen have a decent approach for defining job roles and responsibilities, and setting goals for the year.  However, the process often seems to fall apart in the measurement of performance against those goals, and the discussion or feedback about that performance.  Often, managers do not clearly define what the expectation is or how it will be measured.  When the time comes to evaluate performance they have to come up with that way of measuring it, if they even do that at all.  When it is done it is often done after the fact by the manager and comes as a surprise to the employee.  In addition, managers often do not take the time to collect all the relevant information to do an adequate job of really measuring performance.  As a result, the performance review discussion is flawed.

Further, the discussion itself often becomes combative.  Managers are frequently not well trained in conducting effective conversations about performance.  As a result, individuals feel personally attacked and the opportunity for constructive discussion is lost.  See the link http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=391 for our previous post on Feedback.

The author Culbert goes on to say that “The boss already has heard [from] his boss what they want to pay the guy, or the woman. So they come up with a review that’s all backwards.”

Unfortunately, I have to agree with some aspects of this point.  I have experienced many times when performance charts are force fitted to comply with a pre-determined pay raise amount.  Having said that, in my experience it is an overall amount that must be distributed based on what the company can afford, not based on an individual.  The manager’s task is then to manage that pool of salary increase funding as best they can to make it as equitable as possible.  In all honesty, I cannot say that that is inappropriate.  The business can afford what it can afford.  Now, one may certainly take umbrage with what that amount is and how it is determined, but it is not at all unusual, nor inappropriate, for businesses to know how much they can afford to give in pay raises and to determine a pool of funding from which to distribute those raises.

This aspect also is connected to how the organization wants to strategically position themselves from a pay perspective.  Some organizations intentionally do NOT want to be at the high end of the pay scale.  They do not mind the fact that they will lose some of their best employees to competitors who are willing to pay top dollar for top performance.

Finally, forcing a percentage increase to be distributed across an employee base does require managers to distinguish between employees who are performing and those who are not.  This is an area in which managers are notoriously weak.  It is distasteful for many to have to do this and so, given the opportunity to by-pass that responsibility, they will take the easy way and give everyone a good rating and pay raise, which defeats the purpose of pay for performance.  This approach does require them to make some effort to distinguish between good and poor performers.

Asked if performance reviews might be tweaked instead of eliminated outright — for instance, a manager might use statistics to measure an employee’s effectiveness — Culbert says that one-dimensional measurements can bring a new set of problems.

“Once you set up the metrics, that’s the only focus for the employee,” Culbert says. “The problem with performance reviews is that the metric that counts most for the employee is the boss’s opinion. So the employee starts doing what he or she thinks is going to score in the boss’s mind, and not even talk about what he or she believes is necessary for the company to get the results that really matter.”

Yes, this is likely to happen.  One performance measure is unlikely to result in strong overall performance of the business.  However, I will come back to my previous assertion that this is a result of poor execution, not bad concept.  There are models for elementary approaches such as Balanced Scorecard which are designed to address the fact that there are many aspects which must be performed well and will be measured.  They just have to be used and executed properly.

How could something so obviously destructive, so universally despised, continue to plague our workplaces?

• In part it’s because the performance review is all executives have ever known, and they’re blind to the damage caused by it.
• In part it’s because few managers are aware of their addiction to the fear that reviews create amongst staff, and too many lack the confidence that they can lead without that fear.
• In part it’s because HR professionals exploit the performance review to provide them a power base they don’t deserve.
• And in part it’s because few people know an alternative for getting the control, accountability, and employee development that reviews supposedly produce—but never do.

This I do not agree with, especially about HR professionals using it to “provide them a power base they don’t deserve.”  Again, I think that the concept of performance review is correct.  It is the execution that is flawed.

Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe.

Agree here…again, refer to the post on Feedback link: http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=391

…the alleged purpose of performance reviews is to enlighten subordinates about what they should be doing better, the real purpose is intimidation aimed at preserving the boss’s authority and domination in relationships. 

No, not buying that one.  While it probably does exist, I would not make the blanket statement that the “real purpose” of performance reviews is intimidation and preserving the boss’s authority and domination.

To me, the problem boils down to one word: insecurity (although incompetence comes in a close second). Too many managers relish the authority they have—and fear losing it. They worry they won’t be able to persuade their direct reports to do things their way. So they get their self-confidence the only way they know that the current corporate structure allows—by intimidating their subordinates into silent compliance. In other words, they scare the hell out of them.

Personally, my observation has been that organizations do not do a good job of training their managers to manage.  That includes many aspects, such as organization design (to match the key processes of the business with the desired outcomes), job definition and description (to provide clarity to the individuals about who is doing what to get there), and performance management (to enable effective and constructive discussions to take place to enable individuals to see where they are hitting the mark and where they are missing it in the daily performance of their jobs).

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Please reply right to the blog rather than emailing me with your thoughts

A critical aspect of leading a business is clarity; clarity of direction, clarity of roles and responsibilities, and clarity of processes.  People need that.  They need to know exactly what is expected of them in their jobs, and what they must do and how.  Their training is derived from it.  Their performance and pay is linked to it.  The organizations ability to operate profitably is directly affected by it.  A lot of fundamental elements of organizational effectiveness are wrapped up in clarity.

I am sure you have all heard it said that specialization of tasks enables people to perform with high quality and efficiency.  Adam Smith characterized this as division of labor and wrote of the advantages of specialization for enhancing human productivity as early as 1776 in his classic book The Wealth of Nations.  Clarity and consistency are fundamental elements of that concept. 

…[leaders] often do not realize that they have the opportunity, in fact the responsibility, to draw the line as to what options they are willing to offer in their products and services, and in their processes to deliver them.

The less clarity and consistency an organization has, the more the variability that creeps in.  With that variability comes different ways of doing things from one situation to the next.  Those different ways of doing things cause quality problems and inefficiencies, errors and increased costs.  Much of what you learn in process improvement technologies, such as Lean Sigma and Kaizen, is all about reducing variability for that exact reason.

However, customers often want things their own way, and it is important to be flexible in providing your products or services in order to meet those special needs.  The McDonalds/Burger King war hinged on that exact concept.  Burger King waged the “Have It Your Way” campaign for years to distinguish themselves from McDonalds and earn market share.  It worked, but it was expensive for Burger King.   

However, Burger King used the Core Concept quite effectively for that time.  They identified a range of options within which customers could “have it their way”, but they limited those options.  For example, you could have your burgers with or without lettuce, cheese, pickles, etc., but you could not specify what type of lettuce, cheese, pickles or bun you wanted.  Most importantly, you could not have your burger made any other way than grilled.  You could not have it fried or sautéed with onions and mushrooms. You could not order your burger rare, medium or well-done.  Why not?  That degree of variability would have been too much for their operations to handle efficiently (to say nothing of the fact that it would have taken away their major differentiator).  That degree of variability brings with it increased operating costs.  With increased costs comes increased prices, and they would no longer have been able to compete with other fast food restaurants.  So, while Burger King was adding a degree of flexibility to their operations and their service offerings, they were protecting the core operations of their business by limiting the options that they were offering. 

Every operation has the same issue, and many leaders do not realize it.  Customers often feel that they have a special need that cannot be met any other way than the way they have in mind.  In an effort to meet the disparate needs of all their customers, leaders often lose sight of the core strengths of their business and their business model.  They try to be everything to everyone.  They do not realize that they have the opportunity, in fact the responsibility, to draw the line as to what options they are willing to offer in their products and services.

Remember, your customers are not the experts in YOUR BUSINESS and usually do not know all the options available to them for meeting their needs.  They do not understand the benefits of doing things the way you do them from a cost and quality standpoint.  That is the discussion that you must have with them.  That is the education they need.  

It is right to try to find every possible way of meeting your customer’s needs.  The key is determining where and how to draw that line.  As a leader you need to decide in which areas will you choose to be flexible, and in which areas will you not?  In which areas will flexibility enhance your product or service offerings, and in which areas will it not?  How much flexibility can you profitably manage within the context of the business model you have chosen and the market segment in which you are competing?  Those processes constitute your CORE. 

• Those core processes are where you establish and maintain your position as an expert supplier or service provider.  
• Those core processes are where you add the most value to the end results your customers are after. 
• Those core processes are where you maintain the opportunity to ensure the profitability of your business.

To protect your CORE, you MUST demonstrate the technical and economic equivalence or superiority of your methods to what your customer is proposing.  

The obvious question becomes what if you cannot prove the technical superiority or economic advantage of your methods?  Then you may need to consider implementing their recommended changes on a broader scale.  Don’t be afraid of this outcome.  Don’t let your ego get in the way of listening to ideas that may help you improve your operations.  Remember, your customers are a great source of competitive information.  They are shopping your competition every day.  Take advantage of that. 

Just for the record, customers are not the only group that can affect your core processes and operations.  In addition, processes are not the only aspect of your business that can be affected by external influences.  Employee attitudes can be affected as well.  Regulations, media communications, competitive changes are examples of external influences that can affect processes and/or employee attitudes and your organization’s ability to perform correctly.  Therefore, a task that you have as a leader is to minimize the impact that all “external influences” have on the CORE of your business. 

Think about this.  What business are you in?  What is your expertise!  What are your core processes?  Identify the core elements of your business and build structures and processes to enable that core to operate as efficiently as possible.  Then, protect that core from external influences.  It will enable you to improve the quality of your services and the profitability of your operations.

“Be mindful of the responsibility you have to those you serve, but be more mindful of the responsibility you have to those who serve you.”

In other words, it is critically important to take care of your employees, perhaps more so than it is for you to take care of your customers.  To a large degree, it is your employees that take care of your customers, not you.  If you treat your employees well, they will do the same FOR your customers.  If you treat them poorly, they will do the same TO your customers. Both are a reflection of how you have treated them and how they feel about YOU!  Think about that!

How you get things done is a reflection of YOUR character as a person and as a leader, and it creates an expectation of how people will expect you to act in the future. 

Similar to the last quote, I like this quote because it speaks to “how” you get things done as a leader, more so than ”what” you get done.  In this case, though, it is speaking to the “how” as a reflection of Values rather than Process. 

As a result, it defines the behavior that people within your organization will come to emulate.  It defines the culture that you will create in your organization, and how the organization will grow to operate in the longer term.  It defines the character that the organization will come to have and for which it will become known, inside and out. 

It will define YOUR legacy.

A short time back I was talking with a friend who was having trouble with several aspects of his pharmaceutical regulatory consulting business.  He was not getting the performance he wanted from his employees and they were demotivated.    He was not making the profits that he should and he was overworked.  He felt that if he just worked harder, things would get better.  Unfortunately, he had been saying that for quite a few years, and he had not made any progress.  I could not imagine him working any harder, but he kept thinking that that was the answer.

This is not an unusual perspective for technically trained people, particularly people who hold the professional credentials for their business. 

In a moment of desperation, he asked me what I thought he should do.  First, I remarked that he was not utilizing his team effectively; he was not delegating enough; he was doing everything himself.  I said that this has a couple of bad effects on the business.  First, it is demotivating for your employees.  If you do everything yourself, your employees lose their motivation to think and act.  They have no latitude to draw upon their own expertise to contribute to the business.  They end up standing around waiting for you to tell them what to do and performing tasks that are well below their capabilities.  They feel no sense of accomplishment and they see no future for growing and developing their skills.

You have to look at delegation as assigning authority.  You maintain control and responsibility from a distance.

 The reason delegating is motivating is because it tacitly recognizes someone’s worth.  You trust them to do the job well, and they want to live up to that expectation.  They want to contribute.  They want to be of value.  Controlling everything yourself has the opposite effect.

Then I explained to him that there is an even more important aspect of effectively structuring your operation and delegating tasks.  To start we agreed that a fundamental principle in profitable business operations is delivering the right product or service, at the right price, at the least possible cost.  The “right service” is closely regulated in the drug development world, and pricing is very competitive.  That leaves cost reduction as the key to managing profitability. 

The problem here was that he was doing everything.  By doing so he was minimizing his profitability because HE was handling most of the tasks, and HE was the most expensive employee in the company.

He needed to do a better job of delegating.  His response, of course, was that he could not.  His license depended on everything being done exactly per the regulations, and he felt that he was the only one who knew the correct way to do these things.  So, I asked him if he always got regulatory approval on his submissions the first time.  He said, “rarely”.  So, I said, apparently the regulators feel that there are some other ways to do things that may be just as good, if not better, than the way you think best.  He agreed and recognized that perhaps he could allow people more latitude to do things without his direct involvement.

If you are not delegating, then you are not leading; you are doing.

Finally, I pointed out that if he were the only one performing all these tasks, or overseeing every aspect of every job, then the total volume of work he could expect to do in his organization was limited to the workload that he alone could handle.  That put a great limitation on his business prospects for the future.

So, he agreed to consider this idea of delegating.  Question was, “how”? 

• Simple first step: I told him to list ALL the tasks he ever finds himself doing…every one of them.  Take a few days, take notes about what you are doing, and make a list. 
• Second: Put that list in order from the most to the least by what REQUIRES your technical training and abilities. 
• Finally: Start to delegate by taking the bottom 10% of those items and assigning them to someone else.  Get them OFF your list.  Clearly define exactly what you want done, and establish the methods and mechanisms for keeping an eye on the quality from a distance by developing and reviewing checkpoints or metrics. Over time you can go to the next 10% of the items on the bottom of your list, and so on until you find the right balance.

Though it has only been a short time since we had this discussion, he has indicated that his team has been energized by the prospects of this new direction, and he is now able to focus his time and energy on those aspects of running the business that really require his expertise.    

*****

It is very difficult for people to let go of control in their businesses.  However, it is fundamental to effective and profitable operations to have a clear and appropriate delineation of duties.  You have to look at delegation as assigning authority while learning to maintain control and responsibility from a distance.  If you are not delegating, then you are not leading; you are doing.

Here are a few more thoughts on the subject of giving feedback…

A constant flow of information about how people are performing will keep their performance as close to on target as possible, as we pointed out in the last post.  Waiting to give feedback allows performance to stray until such time as you actually give the feedback to correct performance.  Every minute of substandard performance costs your organization.

Interestingly, your other employees know when a co-worker is under-performing long before you do.  They are closer to it and they see it every day .The longer it takes you to recognize the poor performer and act on it, the more credibility you lose as a leader.  The other employees see you as weak, unaware, or unable to make the tough decisions.  Conversely, when you do act on poor performers, other employees learn from it.  They learn that they must perform; they learn what poor performance looks like; and, they learn that you will act on poor performance.  Most importantly, they will learn that you have the strength and courage to do what is in the best interest of the organization and, therefore, in their best interest.  They will respect that.

Also, consider this.  When giving feedback to an individual about something they have done, you need to do so as soon as the action has occurred, or as close to it as possible.  In this way the action you are referring to has just occurred and the specifics of it, the assumptions and motivations behind it, and the impact of it are as clear as possible.  It is easiest to correct the behavior in that moment; the learning opportunity is at its greatest.  Waiting until the annual performance review to give examples leaves a lot of room for a lack of clarity and misunderstanding.   

Finally, how you give feedback is as important as what you say.  A couple of pointers on this:

Make feedback about an action and a result, not about the person.  As an example, one time I had a CFO whom I had asked to develop cost standards for one of our operations.  He did so, but they were not done correctly.  As a result, we were incurring unfavorable variances every month despite performing our production processes as defined.  I called him into my office and pointed that out.  I told him that we are incurring unfavorable manufacturing variances every month, and that the standards we are using apparently were not done correctly.  Then I asked him to tell me what he thought was wrong with those standards and how we should change them moving forward.  I made no mention of his or anyone else’s involvement in developing those standards.

By taking this approach, I focused on the problem and not the person.  He knew that those standards were standards that he had developed, and he knew that I knew it.  He did not need to hear anything more than the fact that they were wrong to get the point that he had made a mistake.   By focusing on the problem and not the person you move directly to corrective action without damaging their ego or self-esteem.  They can then focus on correcting the situation.  They will not feel that they have to defend themselves.  Saying to them that “the standards you developed are all wrong and are causing variances” carries with it the message that “they” did a bad job, that “they are not competent”.  Their response will be defensive, they will be less likely to hear the suggestions you give them, and they will be less likely to move forward quickly with correcting the situation.  They will be devoting time and energy to worrying about and repairing your impression of them; unproductive time.

Having said that, there will come times when it becomes clear that an employee is actually NOT able to perform a given set of tasks.  See the post on Managing Performance for tips on how to handle those situations.  http://www.scottneilson.com/?m=200902

Last point…Make giving feedback a personal matter between you and your employee.  I generally (not always) provide feedback, both positive as well as “constructive”, in private.  I call the person into my office and have a casual conversation about it.  Personally, I feel more comfortable that way anyway.  Funnily enough, I must say that giving feedback in this way makes for a very interesting scenario.  Whenever I ask someone to come into my office and I close the door behind them, they always assume that the end of the world is near and I am about to give them their last rites.  When I tell them that they did a good job with “X” or “Y” and what I liked about it, they always look surprised and say “but”, as if I am about to tell them all the things I did not like.  When I say, “no buts, nothing else, just a nice job on that”, they look surprised but pleased, and leave my office in a bit of shock but uplifted.

However, sometimes it serves a very useful purpose to give feedback in a more public setting.  For example, a positive stroke can send a message of credibility for an employee among his or her peers, and there may be a time when that is needed.  Likewise, “constructive” feedback for an individual may provide a lesson that is more broadly needed for a group of people.  In this case it is important to immediately and clearly frame that feedback as relevant for the whole group, not just an individual.  It may even require you to give other examples of similar behavior that quietly implicates others on the team and provides a broad lesson for the group.  In that way the one individual does not feel that he/she is being singled out in front of their peers, but broader feedback is being provided for the group. 

*****

There is a lot to giving feedback.  It is an important aspect of leadership, and one which you must be good at.  Like many other leadership skills it is not rocket science, but it does require developing an understanding of the concepts and applying them.  It requires practice.  It requires you to make it important.

This is a subject that generally scares people.  FEEDBACK!!!  “How do I tell someone when they are not performing up to my expectations?”  “I hate filling out performance evaluations.”  “I hate annual review discussions”.  The whole subject is fraught with negatives, and it doesn’t need to be.  Feedback must be given…it is so critically important to getting good results.

You achieve better results by giving people positive feedback about what they are doing right than by only giving them feedback about what they are doing wrong, or no feedback whatsoever.

One of the reasons people have trouble giving feedback is because they only focus on discussing the negatives.  Many people assume that giving feedback means telling people when they are doing something wrong; transmitting negative information that people will be upset about receiving.  It shouldn’t be that way!

Someone once said that you get a lot more mileage out of telling people when they are doing something right than only telling them when they are doing something wrong.  Think about it.  There must be a hundred ways to perform a task incorrectly, and only one way, or a few ways, of doing it correctly.  So, if you are only telling people when they are doing it incorrectly, then they are getting little, or no, information about how to do it correctly.  Absent any other feedback they will experiment with many ways, which may be wrong, while hoping to stumble upon that one way which really accomplishes the task.  What an unproductive use of time!!!

There is an activity I once saw conducted along these lines.  It demonstrated the point quite well.  A group was divided into two sub-groups…team A and team B.  The task was for each group to blindfold each member of their team, one at a time, and have that person walk across the room and try to put a sticker on a target which was hanging on the wall.  Each team would blindfold their contestant, spin them around a few times, and aim them in the general direction of the target.  Team A could give NO feedback to their team member who was walking across the room trying to figure out where the target might be.  Team B was to clap when their member was going in the RIGHT direction, and make no noise when they were going in the wrong direction.  As you would expect, the stickers from team B were very close to the target while the stickers from team A were all over the wall.

The point was clear.  You achieve better results by giving people positive feedback about what they are doing right than by only giving them feedback about what they are doing wrong, or no feedback whatsoever.

I have tried to make giving feedback a habit of this in my personal life as well as my professional life.  With my children I find it does a lot of good for their self-esteem to get messages about things that they are doing right, even if it is about things that I imagine to be small things.  With employees, I find that it is not only a way to ensure the results you seek, it is motivating for them.  Feedback, in these cases, is recognition.  Recognition means that they are of value to you.  Being of value satisfies a core need that we all have.

Bottom line is that I try to spend as much time giving positive feedback as I do giving “constructive” feedback…actually, even more.  When you focus on the positives, everyone feels good about it.  It contributes to a positive attitude in the workplace.  It contributes to continued good performance.  Unfortunately, the fact that people are often surprised to get good feedback is a sad commentary on what people have come to expect in the workplace.  It reflects that we have gotten in the habit of focusing on only the negatives in giving feedback and managing performance; that punishment is seen as a primary motivator in leading teams.

Oh well, the next minute is the first minute of the rest of your life.  It may be time to chart a new course.

Heard this one the other day…I thought it showed great poise.

Terry Francona…Manager of the Boston Red Sox was being questioned by the media about the batting slump that David Ortiz was experiencing for the first few weeks of the season.  Is he over the hill?  Has he lost it?  Should he be replaced?  How long will you wait before changing him out for someone else?  How do you plan to react?

He replied, “You can’t react to everything”.  The implication was right on.  As  a leader, you can’t react to everything.  Sometimes you have to let things play themselves out a bit before jumping in and taking action.  Immediately acting on everything raises the level of pressure on the situation, and creates an atmosphere in which everything becomes a crisis.  It creates a level of stress which inhibits everyones ability to perform effectively.

By letting things play out a bit you show poise and calm, which is so needed by your constituents…in this case the other team members, the fans, and the owners.  You demonstrate that the situation may not require intervention at this moment.  You diffuse the pressure.  You make it clear that you are aware of the situation, the implications, and that you have it under control.  It is critical to your constituents that they know you are in control of the situation.

In this situation Terry Francona was absolutely right.  David Ortiz is a pro.  He, like any other professional athlete, will have slumps and hot streaks.  If he were to have gotten all excited about this situation it would have made the situation worse.  It would have put extra pressure on Ortiz to resolve his problems, and it would have demonstrated to the team that they had better not go into a slump, or they would come under the same kind of scrutiny.  That would negatively affect the performance of the team.

What Terry Francona did not only silenced the media and took the pressure off Ortiz, he protected the core of the rest of the team and the organization from the same kind of pressure…a great leadership response on his part. 

The result of Terry Francona’s leadership was exactly as one would expect…Ortiz did come out of his slump in grand fashion and has been on a hot streak for the past several weeks.  Now, one could say that Ortiz would have come out of his slump anyway, which is certainly true.  But, the bigger effect of his actions is in how the rest of the team, the fans, and the ownership respond to his ability to manage the media and public scrutiny of their performance. He minimized the effect that external inluences could have on the performance of the team.

(By the way…I am to be congratulated on my objectivity in this post since I am a die hard Yankee fan.)

I like this quote because it speaks to “how” you get things done as a leader, more so than ”what” you get done.  To me, the “how” has a greater affect on your ability to sustain organizational performance than it does on achieving a short term result because it defines an approach which, if reflective of your style and attitude, is representative of how you will do things in the future.  It is therefore also reflective of the results you will continue to achieve.

The quote goes:

“Being successful as a leader does not mean having all the answers, it means getting them.”

This quote speaks to knowing the strengths of your team and being able to access their knowledge and expertise for the use and benefit of the entire organization.  By doing so you leverage your own strengths and abilities, and you exponentially increase the results your organization can achieve. 

This aspect of leadership requires having the right processes and mechanisms in place…something we discussed in the post on leadership as being a process rather than a set of skills http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=63

It also implies a strong degree of empowerment in your workforce which enables people to draw on their own creativity and motivations to excell in their work and bring all their skills and abilities to performing their daily taks.  This is a big subject and one which I really want to get into.  It has many sub-parts which must work together to be successful.  It combines aspects of several posts I have done recently, and will be a nice assimilation of the thoughts in each…showing how it all ties together.  That has to be a subject for another post.