Have you noticed that more people are behaving badly these days? I’m not going to speculate about the triggers, but how to deal with bad behavior has crept into many of my conversations with clients.
It seems that the offenders don’t hesitate to be contentious, whereas previously they would have been more patient or conciliatory to reach consensus. Here are a but a few of the examples that have surfaced recently.
How do you engage your people to be more involved in their work? The old cliché about the carrot and the stick comes to mind. Some managers feel that they need to be tough, demanding, or unrelenting in their approach.
Well, barking at your employees or dictating to them or condescending to them is usually more detrimental than effective. And if you randomly schmooze with them, people may feel good, but this doesn’t portend more engagement.
A recent article in The Washington Post discussed the concept of emotional labor. This is described as “the work someone does to regulate, modulate or manipulate their feelings to affect the emotions of people around them.”
The author, Rose Hackman, suggests that most emotional labor is provided by women. She contends that those who embrace emotional labor in the workplace are not being compensated for these behaviors.
This topic has come up with clients several times in the past few weeks. For example, one executive who is preparing for retirement wants to hire someone to manage operational issues in the company. He hadn’t thought of this as succession, but that’s exactly what it is.
When you hire for succession, you’re not just thinking about hiring a competent person to fill a position. You’re considering a longer-term leader for key positions in your company or department.
I received some great comments on last week’s column on “Think Time.” Although it’s a relatively simple concept, it isn’t that easy to implement consistently. Over time, tight schedules take over and people forget about it, schedule over it, or procrastinate doing it.
The comments triggered a good segue to a directly related theme. One of the factors that differentiates top performers from everyone else: they stay focused on the result. They think about how their work can have the greatest impact on the result. This is an example of think time in action.
My executive clients bemoan the fact that they “can’t get anything done” during the business day, and in fact, “the real work begins after 5:30.” Their schedules are filled with meetings, calls, email and putting out fires.
One study revealed that CEOs average only 6 hours a week working alone. Think about this: the day-to-day “stuff” dwarfs the strategic elements of the job.
A recurring management theme is leaders who assume that their people know what’s on their minds. I call this “managing by telepathy”, as these leaders often neglect to articulate what they want.
This is rarely intentional. After all, you don’t sit in your office and think about how you can avoid good communication with your people. But you can get swept up in the busy-ness of your day and simply think that you said something when actually it never left your mind.
I was introduced as a resource to Sarah, a leader who is working on an initiative that is very important to her professional advancement. Our interaction was limited in that it was over text.
I tried to engage Sarah during these exchanges, to no avail. I understood her communication style, which was direct and to the point. Although I tried to be open minded, her directness and aloofness influenced my perceptions.
Hank is a talented practitioner and emerging leader who is expanding his professional practice into a business. The business is growing, but Hank is frustrated by the pace of growth and the obstacles that cross his path. As confident as his outward persona is, he experiences periods of self-doubt.
This isn’t at all unusual; in fact, many of my clients have had similar experiences. As Hank and I dug through what he perceives to be the obstacles to his success, I learned that he has been strongly influenced by some prominent business “gurus”.
I once knew someone who worked at my local library branch who had a Zen-like response to annoying people. Janey had a mantra, which was, “Relax – relate – release.”
When she shared this with me, I was immediately drawn in and wanted to know more about this 3-step mantra. Had she gone through customer service training? Did she read about this in a book? Perhaps she had seen something on the internet?