Getting Involved

Posted on August 25, 2008 by dan

To start todays post, I want you to make sure that you do NOT think about pink elephants. Just don’t. And every time you do, I want you to make a mental note that you have.

Research is really clear on this topic. In the US, employees want to feel like their opinions are valued, they are valued, and that they’re involved. When you’ve got that going, your employees will be highly productive beyond your wildest dreams.

But… what is really important is that it’s sincere. In my series last week, I talked about how leaders can fail badly if they start to think that there’s a real class difference between themselves and their employees. Everything you think will come through in your actions and your behaviors. This is what social psychologists talk about as your implicit and explict attitudes.

Implicit attitudes are those little thoughts that nibble around at the back of your brain can (and do) come to visit when you’re not attending to them. If you don’t believe me, visit and play around with the IAT. But, keep in mind, the point of this test isn’t to tell you how many racial biases you have. It’s just to make you aware of the power of implicit attitudes. Don’t walk away from it thinking, “Wow… I’m a bigot.” Walk away thinking about how implicit attitudes can affect your outward behaviors. That’s how you defuse them.

The problem with implicit attitudes is that you can’t constantly attend to them. If you pay too much attention to them, you end up falling victim to them. The old trick for this is what I put at the beginning of the post about not thinking about pink elephants. How many times did you? You did it, because you were lured into it. By trying not to think about them, your brain does it anyway. It’s a catch-22 that can send your brain into a fit.

If you’re not sincere about your desire to be an involved employer, your employees are going to notice. Your brain will always tip your hand to them, no matter how much you act and try to pretend. So, how do you deal with it?

Get involved. Start thinking about your employees as people. See them as individuals. When you think about them as individuals, take note of what other thoughts come up associated with them. That gets down to how your neural network is arranged and it lets you see what implicit attitudes are being activated when you think of them. When you start thinking about those things and sincerely examining them, you’ll change how your neural network is structured.

Then act on it. Get involved and change.

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The Three Best Ways to Fail as a Leader (Part 3 – Leadership)

Posted on August 22, 2008 by dan

Now that I’ve posted 10 ways that you can be a better leader, I’m going to change gears a little bit. This time I’m going to give you some behaviors to avoid and how to avoid them. A lot of these things are really easy to fall into, but if you keep up with them, they can be avoided.

So, now I’m going to tell you how to can become the worst leader possible, and in some cases (if you’re the boss) how you can make the worst leader possible.

1. Make sure that you think of yourself as completely different than, and if at all possible, better than your employees – I’ve seen this a number of times and it’s really disturbing to see. One job that I was at had a number of family members working in upper echelons of the company. This group of family members really started to think of themselves as though they were of a different class than their employees. After telling all of the employees that the company was losing so much money they couldn’t afford to give anyone pay increases, each of the executives showed up with brand new, very expensive cars. It didn’t take long for the employees to start performing worse, and theft of company property to increase. So, make sure that if you want to ruin things, start thinking of yourself as different and better than the people who work for you.

2. Have different rules for you and your employees – One thing that can happen (especially in industrial settings) is that your employees might be paid as hourly employees and you could be a salaried employee. If you really want to make sure that you can get your employees to rebel, if they’re scheduled to show up at 7 AM, be late a couple of times a week. You can also ocassionally take a late lunch every week. Employees don’t make the distinction between salary and hourly, so consequently, when you do this, you’ll insure that they feel like you believe point number 1, even if you don’t. Generally, I’ve found that employees will accept hard adherence to rules, as long as you’re just as rigorous yourself. But, if you try to enforce rules that you don’t follow yourself, then you’re going to get a lot of pushback.

3. Promote the wrong people for the wrong reasons – This can really take two forms. If you’re promoting someone into a leadership position, don’t think of it like it’s a form of reward. Too often, people who perform well in a line position are offered promotion into leadership without regard for what’s needed to be a good leader. When you do this, you could be setting a star employee up for failure. If you’re going to promote someone to a leadership position, make sure that they’re really management material. If they need help, make sure to train them to be a leader. Don’t just dump someone into management who’s never been a leader. The second form that this can take is with a supervisor who doesn’t want to lose a star performer. Change is never easy, but if if you won’t let someone advance, who really wants to because you don’t want to lose their productivity, you’re going to set yourself up for failure. Eventually, the employees who can’t get promoted will stop performing and those who see that the way to advancement is mediocrity will either perform at that level, or they’ll just move on to another company.

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To be the Best Leader (Part 2 – Leadership)

Posted on August 20, 2008 by dan

Today I’ll be continuing on with my list of my observations that can make or break a leader. Again, these are my own observations and opinions. I’ll probably toss in any research that I know of that supports those opinions, but in many cases, these are just my own feelings. Also, these aren’t really in any specific order. They’re just here as they come to me.

6. Be Fair and Honest with your Employees – When a new person would come on board with me, I’d always take a couple of minutes to talk to him or her about this. I’d always say, “I’ll be honest with you. I will probably be the best boss you’ve ever had, or the biggest jerk you’ve ever dealt with. If you’re on the up and up with me, I will be too.” The key to this is that you have to check your worries about your career at the door. Expect to get into a tangle with upper-management or your peers, but if your employees have earned your protection, give it to them like a pit-bull. One of my experiences involved a confrontation with a vice-president who’d gotten me to promise a group of employees a free lunch, if they worked a 12 hour shift at a point when we really needed them to, in order to get a shipment out. Then he turned around and reneged his part of the deal in a meeting with me. When I stood up to him and said, “Someone’s buying my shipping crew lunch tomorrow, and if it’s me, you can be damned sure they’ll know that.” It made life harder with him, but I found out later that it bought me points with his boss.

7. Be willing to be wrong or make a mistake – A lot of young managers get into this cycle of stress. A new manager is going to make a lot of mistakes in their job, but they feel like they can’t let themselves be seen as being wrong in front of their employees. However, you’re human, just like the people who work for you. If you allow your employees to make mistakes and learn from them, when you fall down, they’re going to be willing to forgive you. When something breaks, start fixing it. Don’t start trying to figure how to keep anyone from seeing that it happened. When you need help, go get it.

8. Recognize that all of your employees are different – This sounds really easy, but it’s dismissed too quickly by many managers. All of your employees are going to have different strengths and weaknesses. Learn to leverage those best. I’m not saying to molly-coddle your employees, but if an employee is really deficient in one area and it’s not absolutely necessary that they be exemplary there, don’t force them to be. You also need to learn what motivates each one of your employees. Earlier, I talked about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. You need to figure out what motivates who and use that to your advantage.

9. Do not rely on your own memory – I don’t care how good you think your memory is, it’s not good enough to remember everything that every employee has done over the last year. There are two psychological artifacts that you can remember that will help you understand this. One is Recency (the natural tendency to remember only the most recent things) and Primacy (the natural tendency to remember the first thing you were presented with). This means that if you rely on your memory, you’ll only rate people based on your first impressions and on what you recall in the last couple of weeks. If your employees are bright, they know when their performance evaluations are, and they’ll be perfect angels about two weeks before them. Do yourself a favor and carry a pad of post-it notes with you while you’re working. When you see something (positive or negative) make a note, write the date, then stick in a file at the end of the day. When the review rolls around, you’ll have a lot of information to draw on.

10. Be aware of the signals that you send – I’ve not been all that great on this one in the past, but it’s something I’m working on. If you’re talking to an employee, be in that moment. Don’t look at your watch, or appear to be ignoring them. Even if you’re really not interested in what they’re saying, at least look like you are. If you’re fiddling with something and not paying attention, employees will pick up on that. All of this also goes into how you carry yourself. If you’re not happy with a fellow supervisor or manager, keep that hidden. If you send the signal that there’s dissention, that will let your employees think that it’s okay for them to fight amongst themselves, or–worse–play your fellow manager off against you.

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