July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Advice for new managers: Corrections done correctly
Last time I talked about the need to take corrective action when people — intentionally or unintentionally — act in ways destructive to what you are trying to create.
Like the nuclear option, firing someone is the option of last resort, and there are lots of things that should be done before you get to the point of even considering dismissal. But when taking any of these corrective actions, you have to be careful to do it right.
Get the facts
Make sure you talk to everyone involved, and follow the chain of command. If there are five people involved in an incident, talk to all five — separately. It has been my experience that no matter how black and white an incident appears, there is often a mitigating factor.
Be clear and direct
When correcting an employee, be direct and honest. Beating around the bush, using euphemisms, or being indirect will simply not do. You cannot risk anything to interpretation or misunderstanding. In other words, don’t try to finesse the situation.
Explain yourself
Always explain why you are taking action. Start by assuming that the person involved has no idea that his or her actions were destructive. Don’t assume that the undesirability or impact of the actions is recognized, and be prepared to say why you view those as destructive. Unless the employee understands exactly what he did wrong and why it was wrong, he’s likely to repeat the behavior.
Start small
Don’t act publicly unless the wrong action warrants it and you are completely sure of the facts. Very few infractions require an immediate and public correction. Public corrections can be extremely effective — public shaming has been used since biblical times as a very powerful punishment and deterrent. But if you act too quickly without all the facts, you will reduce your own credibility enormously. Even more importantly, you’ll have committed a wrong against the person in question from which it will be fairly difficult for both you and the person to recover.
Escalate methodically
When you do start small, take escalating actions, culminating in the maximum appropriate penalty for repeated infractions. And be consistent: if your team sees that your core values apply only some of the time for some of the people, everyone will start to disregard them as meaningless marketing, and you will cease to be an effective leader.
Correct down
Corrections should be managed at the lowest appropriate level in your team commensurate with the degree of the infraction in question. You want to empower your managers (assuming you have some below you) to do their job. Talk to them about your concerns, and let them handle the incident if it is appropriate. You’ll want to handle problems in your management team itself, or problems of sufficiently large scope or severity, on your own. But even then if you are taking action against one of your managers’ team members, coordinate with them ahead of time so they know what is going on and why.
Incidents that I always handle myself, no matter where in my organization they happen, are harassment issues, anti-team behavior with a large scope or very public outcome, security violations, and anything that will or could result in immediate employee dismissal or administrative leave, or conviction for a crime.
Keep it legal
Keep in mind that in today’s increasingly litigious society it is always a good idea to get an outside opinion on your course of action before you initiate conversations about serious infractions. Talk to someone you trust and one or more of your mentors. Depending upon what you anticipate might be the final outcome, you may also want to review your plans and options with your Human Resources or Staffing department ahead of time as well. This will ensure that you are dealing from a position of strength that you know will ultimately be supported and supportable by your organization.
Remember the Golden Rule
Finally, give everyone a fair chance. Presume innocence and ignorance over guilt and malfeasance. If your tactics aren’t working, make sure you’ve communicated your concerns frankly and directly. Rely on your mentors before you take precipitous actions. And if you become emotionally involved in a particular issue, find a way for someone else to handle the situation with you as a check on your own behavior.
This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.
Posted by John West on July 10, 2007 08:43 AM
June 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Leading a team is hard, mostly because managing seems to be part of our nature. To know and control everything that goes on around you always seems to be the best way to minimize your risk of failure or of being seen to make a public mistake.
Fighting your inner manager
You will find yourself fighting the manager within you on a daily basis, at least early in your career. I make it a point to think about the decisions I have made and critically evaluate them. Did I micromanage? Did I specify a solution when I should have just communicated the problem and let the team find its own solution? Did I assign a decision to someone and then not follow the direction he or she picked?
When my review turns up an un-leaderly action, I undo it. If I can’t undo it, I find the person that I failed and apologize. Every time. You won’t always do the right thing the first time. Make the lesson stick—heart-learn it—by fixing your mistake quickly and as publicly as is appropriate.
It's always easier to avoid a mistake than fix it
Also, I rely on my mentors here. When I am unsure of my own motives, I always find a sounding board in one of them before I act. I may still follow my original intention, but this step gives me the chance to refine my plan and at least be aware of any short-comings before I get started. Sometimes my judgment is clouded by my own emotional response to a perceived slight or threat (leading is a human activity, after all, and we human beings are filled to overflowing with silly emotions).
At these times, my mentors never hesitate to lead me to see this for myself, usually before I’ve acted. Very occasionally my boss, who is a leader, will see something in my actions that I have not seen. At these times it's his job to correct me. Never pleasant, but remember as you're going through it that this kind of thing is a) usually for the best and b) never really gets easier. So I try to cut him a break.
Keep this in mind when you are interacting with your friends and coworkers and do the right thing: you never know who is learning from your example.
Posted by John West on June 6, 2007 03:38 PM
April 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Handling a glitch during a presentation
I gave a talk this week that I’ve given before. It was tweaked to the audience, prepared but not rehearsed, and well organized. I was familiar with the slides. I had assessed the room the night before the talk and had actually stood on the stage (a handy tip for making sure there aren’t any surprises when you step out to give your presentation). 2 hours before the talk I had connected my Mac to the projector and made sure there weren’t any issues. It all worked.
Houston, we are all systems go and ready for launch.
Speaker, speaker, break, speaker. Then it’s my turn. I walk up, connect my Mac to the projector, and the synch is wrong. Slides look muddy, whites are yellow, and there is a slight jitteriness on the image.
Well, dang.
Steve the introducer-guy starts my intro while I fiddle with the screen; I figure I’ve got 45 seconds to get it working. I futz. I fiddle. No difference. Intro is finished.
Decision time
So right now I could continue to fiddle. Other speakers have done that before me. I have seen this glitch once before (also with an Epson projector: note to self, remember to curse Epson when I am endowed with magical powers), and it resolved after much fiddling, connecting, and disconnecting. I might be able to fix this.
But, the slides are readable. Colors are wrong, and I’m not happy with that, but the audience can easily read them and the problem isn’t distracting to anyone but me.
I decide to go ahead with the presentation. Continuing to fiddle will be disrespectful of the audience’s time, and draw further attention to this problem. Most groups are sympathetic to a technical glitch, it’s happened to everyone. But the longer you work the problem the more of it sticks to you. The idea here is to get in, get it “good enough,” and get on with the talk.
Was it just me, or did that go OK?
I started out a little flustered. It really is important not to apologize at the start of your talk; you might get sympathy, but not respect. I didn’t exactly apologize, but I did stammer something about this not having happened in rehearsal. I don’t know why. Crap was just leaping out of my mouth.
I got a hold of myself right after that fell out, though, and plowed into the talk. The audience was engaged, and the talk mostly landed. Afterwards a dozen or so people made their way up to talk more about the topic or to tell me that they enjoyed the talk. Of course all I could think of was how ugly it looked.
What’s going on here?
Presenting is a performance, and a lot of performance happens inside your head. Everything did not go as planned, and a little of that ickiness stuck to me during the talk. It’s like if you’re runnning a race you’ve trained hard for, it’s on TV and your girlfriend is going to see you, and you show up with mismatched socks. It doesn’t really matter too much, but it niggles at you.
The content was solid, and the message was one the audience was interested in. These things engaged the audience’s attention, and are ultimately what let to a positive reception.
Defensive presentations
As it turns out, my presentations are also designed to insulate me in small ways against these kind of problems. Here are some of the structural things in my presentation that helped people focus on me and the content, rather than the problem.
First, my slides use a basic black and white color scheme: white text with a very dark gray gradient background. The room lighting was medium, so this color scheme worked fine (it is almost unreadable in a bright room, though, so if you don’t know what the lighting is ahead of time, go with black text on a white background).
I use color for pop, not to hold the audience’s attention on the screen. I want their eyes on me, not the screen. Although the colors were muddied by the projector, the only thing that was lost was the pop for emphasis; the primary information was there and perfectly readable.
Second, I used the Lessig Style for this talk (info here). With this style there are lots of slides - I had 115 in 30 minutes - but each one only has a single image or phrase on it. So there isn’t a lot to grab your attention on any one slide, and the primary feature of the talk is motion through the slide deck, not what’s on any one slide. This worked in my favor this time, since people weren’t looking at a slide long enough to wonder why the first work was slowly oscillating back and forth like a projector synch belly dancer.
Third (and last), I try to make my slides fun. There isn’t a lot of text, and I tend to pick non-traiditional images and objects to trigger me to talk about a concept rather than cramming the whole concept in text on a slide. As a result my presentations are usually different from everyone else’s, and so more fun to look at it. People cut you slack when your slides are fun.
Don’t focus on the problem
Twice during the presentation I referenced the synch problem and resulting bad image on the screen. This was a mistake.
Drawing attention to a problem is never smart. In fact, several people after the talk made a point to ask me to show them what the problem was: they hadn’t seen what the slides were supposed to look like, so the problem wasn’t obvious to them. My references distracted them from the talk and triggered them to see a problem they hadn’t noticed. I lost points with these people only because I drew attention to the problem.
Preparing for the worst
In the end, you have to prep. Know your audience, know your slides, and know your venue. But you can’t prepare for everything. And you can’t prevent everything. Bad things happen, apparently randomly, to good talks.
What you can do is to put yourself in a position to be able to handle surprise problems with flexibility and grace, and to go on with the show.
Posted by John West on April 4, 2007 02:56 PM
February 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I spend a lot of time focused on trying to get people—especially people just starting their careers—to think about their career over long term and to identify ways that they can do something meaningful with their time. It's fun, but I realize I'm leaving out a small but important part of the workplace: those who don't want to get anything done and would rather be just left alone. So for the three of you that I've neglected so far I present 5 ways to kill your career.
These tips build in complexity, so we'll start off easy.
Tip 1: Ignore deadlines
If you want to be sure that you have very little promotion opportunity and that no one wants you on their team—both key to killing your career—you'll need to start ignoring deadlines. You need to build this one slowly, missing deadlines by a few days at first. Eventually you'll want to step up to blowing off assignments completely. People need to know that they cannot count on you to deliver and to stop asking.
The skill here comes in knowing when you can safely start totally ignoring a deadline. If you open with that, or move to it too early, your boss will still have enough drive and energy to try and rehabilitate you. You've got to slowly burn him out by repeated delays of increasing length so that by the time you get to the full productivity blockade he doesn't have the will to fix you.
Tip 2: Sloppy work
When you do turn in work, make sure it isn't up to par.
Again, this is one that takes some skill to apply. You can't really start going to town on this one until you've burned out your boss and your team mates to the point that they aren't willing to try and “help you get better.” Start by leaving a few bugs in your code. If you have to, add a few extra spelling errors to your report. Then work in a segmentation fault, sentence fragment (hopefully using slang!), or “feature” that will actually injure your customers if used as designed.
You can really be creative here, and it's best if your particular failings are slightly different than the ones you've seen at your work before. If your boss hasn't had to deal with a problem like yours already, he's more likely to ignore it over the long haul.
Tip 3: You're right
You've had at least four years of school, and longer if you count grades 1-12. Hey, that's more than, like, 10 years of school!
You can't possibly be wrong with all that training. And anyone who thinks you are is either too entrenched in the old way of doing things that she can't see your brilliance (reserve this feeling for bosses) or just plain stupid (you can spread this around among co-workers and bosses).
The only way to help these people is to mentor them through their failings. When they disagree with you, you need to push back, explain why you are right and, most helpfully, identify this as yet another loop in a pattern of stupidity on their part. This technique is only really effective when exercised around a lot of other people, so pick staff meetings, customer briefings, and large gatherings as locations for your mentoring sessions.
Tip 4: Tune up your communication
Look, you're smarter than everyone around you (see Tip 3!), but except for the new co-op student no one seems to appreciate that. You need to really emphasize the value of your training and intellectual gifts. Fortunately, you have an effective channel for this campaign.
As you are writing reports and doing presentations you've probably been getting questions, right? Mostly from co-workers and bosses who just don't see the value of your contribution and who want to challenge your solutions. Well, this is your fault! Your communication is still too focused on getting your message to your audience. You need to refocus all of your communications to send out one message: “I am smart, don't ask questions.”
This is going to mean really smarting up your presentations, written reports, and even email. There is no reason that these dolts should even be pretending to understand your designs, and they wouldn't try if they knew how talented you really are.
Use bigger words. Use more advanced (other will see this as unclear) sentence structure and document organization. You can even kick this technique up a notch by applying your gifts to the English language itself. You've always found the rules of grammar, spelling, and vocabulary restrictive, right? Why “consider” a design when you can “peripherate” on it? Why “analyze the problem domain” when you can “realm” it?
Tip 5: There is no “team” in “me”
Let's face it, everyone else is just hanging on your coat tails. Isn't is time that things were a little more focused on you? What are your needs? What are your accomplishments? In what ways did you succeed despite the failings of your team/boss/division/company/or major religion? In what ways do our future development plans and meetings interfere with your life?
If you aren't happy you aren't productive, right? Share these things with the hangers-on so that they can at least structure an environment that will maximize your productivity. Ungrateful losers.
Happy sailing
I'm positive that if you apply these tips along with a “can do” attitude and a strong commitment to success you can bring your career to an abrupt halt. With skill, you might even push in over the balance and into decline.
But don't be frustrated if you don't get fired. In truth it's hard to find a corporate environment that can create managers with the will and skills to manage and prune a workforce into good health. You might have to be satisfied with simply being shunted into a windowless closet in the basement next to the mailroom.
Posted by John West on February 8, 2007 01:48 PM
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