Are Your Employees Afraid of You?

At a meeting in a manufacturing town in the old Soviet Union, the speaker was wrapping up his presentation. The factory had once again exceeded its goals for the five year plan, “Thanks to the wisdom and inspiration of our great leader, Comrade Stalin!” The audience leaped to its feet, shaking the hall with their clapping. The applause went on for a minute. Then two minutes. After five minutes, people started looking around to see who would stop first. After ten minutes, hands sore from clapping, old white-haired Ivan sat down. Relieved, the rest of the group settled back down in their seats.

Ivan didn’t show up for work the next day. No one seemed to know what had happened to him, but no one asked, either.

I was never that kind of leader, or so I thought. At a staff cocktail party after work, my fiancee pointed out that my staff members were really very good at sucking up to me without being obvious. “Nonsense!” I told her. “They don’t need to butter me up. They know they can say anything they want to me, good or bad.” She just smiled. I then realized that, while I genuinely liked my subordinates, I had power over them, even when I didn’t use it. I could put off that raise, delay that promotion, reduce that bonus, and not realize I was doing it. And then I saw I treated my boss the same way. I always held back a little, knowing that my career depended on his good opinion.

It’s hard to manage, even when you have good information to work with. But if your staff is afraid to deliver bad news, criticize your proposals, or argue with you over a decision, you’re operating in the dark. You may have already told your staff that you want to hear open and honest communication. But your message to them consists of more than words. All it takes is a frown or a roll of the eyes to let people know that what they just said was not welcome. Even worse, a comment like, “That’s a dumb idea” will shut down all but the most self-confident employee.

I was lucky. I always had at least one staff member who realized I would always be fair (see my other blogs on Trust.) They would alert me to my blunders. Find one of those folks if you can. In addition, there are some things you could do to keep the communication lines open:

• Have someone watch your body language in meetings. They should let you know what messages you’re sending without realizing it.
• Practice neutral language to handle ideas or comments from your staff when you really don’t agree with something they’ve said. Try, “Interesting idea, Ted. I’ll give it some thought,” instead of, “No, I don’t think that will work.” Follow up with a one-on-one session with Ted to let him know where his idea fell short - if it did.
• Put criticisms in a “parking lot” for later review, and let people know you’ll go over them later. Then give yourself time to react rationally rather than emotionally.
• Learn to listen. That means hearing what people say and mean, both verbally and emotionally. Mirror what they’ve said to let them know you heard and understood it, and to be sure you really got it right.
• Give credit where it’s due. Acknowledge the person who came up with an idea or a valid criticism.
• Acknowledge your mistakes and say what you’ll do to prevent them from happening again.
• Finally, say what you mean and mean what you say. If your actions match the words the use, your employees will learn to trust you.

George Krafcisin is President of Mosaic Management, Inc., where he does coaching and training for businesses and executives who want to become better leaders. He gives his services away to those who don’t have “profit” in their mission statements. Contact him at Mosaic_Management@mac.com, www.MosaicCoaching.biz, or www.LinkedIn.com/in/krafcisin.

The Profit In Not-For-Profit

nonprofit jobs

The accountant teaching my finance course made it quite clear:  “The only difference between for-profit businesses and not-for-profit organizations is that one pays taxes.”  I’ve since found he was only partly right.  What he meant to say was that the only accounting difference was paying taxes. It’s taken me a while to learn the real difference.

I’ve spent years making money in the for-profit sector, and it’s been rewarding and challenging. I’ve learned a lot.  The last few years I’ve been more involved in the not-for-profit world. It’s been even more rewarding and challenging, and I’ve learned even more. 

As a volunteer for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (http://www.rfbd.org/) I helped convert books into audio files for people who can’t read text. It always amazed me to think that a person who has trouble reading could digest a textbook on quantum phyics, epic poetry or computer programming by listening to my voice.  At a thank you dinner for volunteers, one of RFB&D’s clients told me, “I know your voice - you read the case study for my marketing course.  Thanks for helping me get my MBA!”

At SCORE (http://www.score.org), the volunteer arm of the Small Business Administration, I counseled dozens of entrepreneurs trying to turn their dreams into businesses. One of them now runs a medical escort service for senior citizens who need to travel; another develops websites for arts organizations.

My current volunteer activity has almost become a full time job.  I work for the Executive Service Corps of Chicago (http://www.esc-chicago.org), a not-for-profit that takes the management experience of people like me and transfers it to the not-for-profit community in Chicago.  We give them the tools they need to carry out their missions.  In my six years at ESC, I’ve logged a few thousand hours of volunteer time.  

I’ve

• Coached the Executive Director of an agency that teaches kids life skills through the discipline of musical performance
  
• Helped a park district develop a strategic plan that will result in more recreational opportunities for residents
  
• Facilitated a growth plan for an agency that helps people with nervous disorders lead a normal life
  
• Built an advisory board for a halfway house that helps ex-felons re-enter society as productive citizens
  
• Did team-building for an agency that helps people find and keep decent housing
  
• facilitated peer group meetings of executive directors in which they share their challenges and solutions
  
• Taught management skills for a library’s staff
  
•  Developed a marketing program for an association of people with dysphonia, a speech disorder
  
• Taught a hundred or so other ESC volunteers how to do Strategic Planning and Coaching
  

My reward?  I’ve got a certificate of thanks on my wall, a couple of engraved pens, some coffee mugs -- and the personal and genuine thanks of dozens of executives, managers and volunteers for helping them help other people. I get the same reward they get:  in a small way, I’ve helped make the world a little better.

So, what’s the real difference between for- and not-for-profits? Check your organization’s mission statement.  Does it contain the words, “Increase shareholder value”?  Or does it say, “Help someone who needs help!”

George Krafcisin is President of Mosaic Management, Inc., where he does coaching and training for businesses and executives who want to become better leaders.  He gives his services away to those who don’t have “profit” in their mission statements.  Contact him at Mosaic_Management@mac.com, www.MosaicCoaching.biz, or www.LinkedIn.com/in/krafcisin. 

Confronting the Problem

By HR-Worldview Regular Columnist: George Krafcisin

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At one time in my career, I inherited supervision of a group of consultants. I was happy to manage the crew, who were for the most part seasoned veterans who knew their jobs better than I did. Except for “Jane.” She had been in the same job for over twenty years, and I could see from the reports of her consultations with clients that she was still doing the job the way it had been done when she started. My budget for red ink went up as I rewrote her reports before our clients could see them. On the other hand, she was a dependable worker, very pleasant, and clients liked her. Heck, I liked her. But she clearly couldn’t handle the changes in the profession, and she was a drag on our success.

Her prior supervisor - my boss - had always given her a pass on appraisals, so the safe thing would be to ignore the issue. Her performance review date was coming up soon, so I had to fly out to her office on the East Coast and do something. So was I going to be the hard-hearted axe-man and just fire her? What would that do for my reputation with the rest of the staff? I could just spend some extra time rewriting her reports. Was that fair to the rest of the staff, and to me? Maybe I could offer her extra training and hope that she could turn around twenty years of underperformance. I knew that wasn’t going to work. So what to do?

I didn’t really have a plan, other than to lay out what I thought was wrong with her work, and see what happened. With my usual good sense of timing, I flew out two days before Thanksgiving for the confrontation. I got out the report drafts from the last few months, went through all of my notes highlighting the problems. Jane didn’t say a word. When I was done, I asked, “OK, so where do we go from here? Do I just keep giving you grief until you retire?”

In retrospect, I can see what I had done right - and wrong. On the good side, I had decided to do something, rather than ignore the situation. It wasn’t fair to Jane, to me, or to the company to tolerate performance that just wasn’t acceptable. I had also set up a good, objective set of criteria that defined “good performance”, and had documentation of the shortcomings, so there were no arguments about that.

On the bad side, I had caved on deciding what I really wanted to happen. I hoped for a good outcome, but I hadn’t really decided what I would do if nothing changed. Also, I had implied that I would like Jane to retire and that would have gotten me in hot water if she decided to make an issue of it. And I hadn’t separated myself from my emotional need to be nice to a nice person. So I had crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. And I had no idea what Jane thought - I’d given her no feedback on what her review might contain, just copies of rewritten reports.

Jane’s response? She said, “I’ve been thinking about this situation for some time. I’m tired of doing this same old job. I’ve met someone special, and we’re thinking of getting married. I would like to work a few more months, and then retire. Would that fit in with your plans?”

Which leads me to a checklist for dealing with those conversations you wish you didn’t have to have:

1. Decide in advance what you want to happen with the “problem”. What outcome do you want to see? Shoot for a “win-win” if you can.
   
2. Do your homework and define the facts - not your feelings. What is the problem? Can you document it so there’s no argument about it?
   
3. What are your feelings? You need to know what they are to understand how they are influencing your actions.
   
4. What is the other person’s view? Do you know? How can you find out? How might that change the situation?
   
5. Lay out the problem in objective terms and avoid criticizing personal traits. Say, “Your reports don’t meet standards,” rather than “You can’t write good reports.”
   
6. Get a clear agreement from the other person as to what will happen by when. And follow up on it.
   

As for Jane? Happily married and retired. She asked if I wanted to join her and her fiance for dinner next time I was in town.

About Our Columnist:

George Krafcisin is the President, coach and trainer of Mosaic Management, Inc. He writes regular installments on the topics of leadership and management here on HR-Worldview.

His last article "Play Now, Pay Later" can be found here.

Play Now, Pay Later

By HR-Worldview Regular Columnist: George Krafcisin

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We went to our granddaughter’s third birthday party on Sunday. We gave her some cute new outfits, a book about cars and trucks, and a bill for $40 trillion.

Huh? Yes. By now you’ve heard that she and her older sister will be paying their share of a national debt that will grow from today’s $10 trillion to $40 trillion or more over the next few decades if we don’t do something about it today. I’m willing to bet that Congress (responding to YOU) will do nothing about it.  The decisions are too painful to address, so they’ll be ignored. And my granddaughter will end up sending most of her paycheck to Washington to service federal debt.

Why do we put off thinking about difficult issues? In your life, have you put off setting up a budget?  Talking to your spouse about something they do that bugs you? Planning for taking care of your elderly parent when they can’t drive any more? Cleaning out the garage? Starting a diet? Going to the gym?

I think we put things off because we all have a built-in procrastination filter. When confronted by an unpleasant future problem, we subconsciously shut it out. “Maybe something will change, or the problem will go away, or I’ll die before I have to face it.” There’s pain in facing the problem, no immediate pain to ignore it.  Instead, we watch football, eat pizza,  or go shopping. The pain comes later.

It isn’t just bad things we push off – we put off thinking about how good the future might be, if we start now.  Many of my coaching clients have no definite thoughts about what they want to be doing five or ten years from now. They come to me with an immediate problem – their company’s sales are slow, or they hate their job, or they can’t keep up with their workload. But when they stop and think about what the future could be, rather than how miserable the present is, they discover possibilities and a path to a more satisfying future. They learn that today’s to-do list is the first step towards that really satisfying career five years from now.

So the first thing to do about avoiding difficult problems is to give some thought to what you should be doing, but keep ignoring.  Talk it over with a good friend, your spouse, a trusted co-worker, or your coach.  But DO something about it.

About Our Columnist:

George Krafcisin is the President, coach and trainer of Mosaic Management, Inc. He writes regular installments on the topics of leadership and management here on HR-Worldview. 

His last article "Breaking the Rules" can be found here.

Breaking the Rules

As part of our series of articles by exceptional HR professionals, today we present another article by our regular guest author, George Krafcisin.

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Working with people is frustrating - they don’t follow neat, logical rules. If you’re an analytical type, comfortable with flow charts and equations, but have to manage or work with people, you have to learn as much as you can about behavior and then make your best guess as to what to do. It would be nice to have an idea of what people factors most affect productivity and profit.

That’s why I was pleased to run across some usable data from the Gallup Organization – the pollsters.  Their book First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, gives statistically rigorous data correlating how people feel about their workplace and the profit performance of the companies they work for. The study found that worker’s positive answers to six questions were strongly statistically correlated with productivity, profitability, employee retention and customer satisfaction. The six questions are:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
   
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
   
3. Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
   
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
   
5. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?
   
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
   

Some of these seem obvious – if you don’t know what’s expected of you, how can you perform well? – but believe me, they can get lost in the fog of everyday struggles to meet schedules. And of course, it’s obvious that people need to feel cared about.  But are you doing your best to get Yes! answers to the six questions? Is your boss doing the same for you?

The book has a lot more information, including six more questions less strongly correlated with good performance, and some opinions on how to make the most of the information. I highly recommend it.

About Our Guest Author:

George Krafcisin is the President, coach and trainer of Mosaic Management, Inc. He writes regular installments on the topics of leadership and management here on HR-Worldview. 

His last article "Workplace Confessions" can be found here.

Workplace Confessions

As part of our series of articles by exceptional HR professionals, today we present an article by guest author, George Krafcisin.

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Leaders become more effective when they appear to be in control*.  But success or failure for an organization is often beyond the leader’s control. It’s easy for management to blame bad performance on commodity prices, the weather, or stubborn customers who inexplicably refuse to buy the company’s inferior products.

One research study tracked the share price performance for two situations. The first group studied was companies where performance problems were explained by management as due to internal problems that they planned to fix – in other words, they accepted the blame. The other group consisted of companies where management blamed performance problems on external, uncontrollable factors. The surprising result: the first group, where management accepted the blame, had consistently higher share price performance in the next year. It appears that honestly accepting blame is good policy for leaders.

But there’s more to accepting blame than just saying, “I’m sorry.” I looked to my own extensive list of personal management mistakes and recalled a small example from my corporate officer past.  A fellow manager took me aside one day and said, “You might want to talk to John. He’s a bit upset because you’re overdue on his evaluation and raise, and he’s afraid to confront you about it.” (Hmmm . . . sounds like at least two mistakes on my part!)

I checked my files, and sure enough, I had forgotten the evaluation, maybe because I was consumed with other “important” matters, maybe because I hated doing evaluations. Whatever the reason, it was definitely my fault.

I did talk with John, and for a change, I did a smart thing: I admitted my error, and I didn’t try to minimize or dismiss it. I assured him it was a case of sloppy management on my part, and not related to his performance or what I thought of him. Then I immediately moved to correct the mistake, abasing myself before my boss and the HR bureaucracy to get John a retroactive raise. Then I told John and my boss I was setting up a tickler file system with evaluation due dates for the whole staff so I wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

I’ve used that lesson a number of times in my career, accepting blame when it would have been very easy to dump it on someone else. I believe doing that consistently established some personal credibility. People knew that when I said something happened because of some outside factor, I was telling the truth, because they had heard me accept blame when it really was my fault.

So when you have to explain why things went wrong, think hard about what part of the problem was your fault.  Then do more than say, “I’m sorry.” Go on to tell what you’re going to do to correct the current problem, and what you’re going to do to prevent it from happening again. Then do it. It will pay off in the long run, even if it hurts short term. 

*“‘The Half-Truths of Leadership” by Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge (http://hbswk.hbs.edu). This article is no longer on the site but I can make an electronic copy available. 

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About our guest Author:

George Krafcisin is the President, coach and trainer of Mosaic Management, Inc. Mr. Krafcisin has over thirty years of experience as an executive and manager, which he applies to his coaching and training services.  He holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University and has held a number of positions in teaching and training.  He is the author of a text on quality management and many articles on technical and management topics. He currently offers coaching for business executives, strategic planning and leadership training for businesses.