Four: Tough Learning
"I work my tail off for these people, and I feel like they betrayed me in an anonymous survey."
"I know how you feel, however, at an emotional time like this, you need to understand things are never as bad as they seem...just like in good times, they are never as good as they seem. They are always somewhere in between.”
“Some of the common responses seem to revolve around the fact you need to step up to your role as the leader. It sounds to me like your team is begging for accountability...For sure, it is rare for people to say they want to be held accountable, but in reality, everyone wants everyone else to be held accountable…that’s the message they are screaming. They want you to make better use of their time…Bottom line, I don’t think they are asking too much. They want you to be their leader…not their buddy.
The survey is a reality check. Because the pace of business is faster than ever these days, most people don’t stop long enough to take a reality check, so they keep doing the same things until they run out of options. Sometimes we are in such a hurry with our demanding schedules, we don’t take time to stop to refill our professional fuel tank-until we are on the freeway at six in the evening, praying we can make it to a gas station before our vehicle sputters to a stop. It seems like this survey came along just in time…because you still have options available.
In a perfect world, we want everyone to agree with our ideas, and we want our actions to be praised as the best ever. But the reality is that we will have critics…and having critics is a good thing. Our choice comes when we decide what we do with the criticism that comes our way.
That type of personal criticism focused on your person—will never help you become more successful as a manager. In fact, those critics are not worth spending your time on trying to understand. Personal critics remind me of a story about an old farmer who advertised his “frog farm” for sale…don’t allow the critical noise of “one old bullfrog” keep you from doing what you need to do.
Ultimately, we all need criticism, no matter how successful we become. Criticism whips our fragmented attention into a laser focus on some of the more important aspects of our jobs and our lives. I believe criticism is a learning g tool that teaches us hard lessons throughout our lives.
The healthy approach to criticism is to pay attention to it. Always listen with the intent to understand why the criticism is being leveled at you and why the critic may want you to know his or her feeling.
And there’s an upside to criticism, too. Criticism from the right people could lead to improvement. Many employees dread performance reviews or employee surveys. They know that criticism is on the way, even though there are probably more positives than negatives in performance reviews. There is always something we can do better, do more often, or do with a different intensity. Appropriate criticism helps us focus our attention on what we need to do to become more successful.
All my life, I have heard people boast, “I welcome constructive criticism,” but sometimes that invitation is hard to believe. Because of our human nature, constructive criticism carries a certain sting, even though it may help us correct a wrong, strengthen a weakness, or chart a more successful course.
One reason for criticism’s stinging effect is something referred to a “psychosclerosis,” which comes from the Greek term psyche, or “mind,” and the Latin term sclerosis as in “hardening of.” I call it hardening of one’s imagination. Our natural tendency is to think our idea is the best- or the only-idea that will work. The second phase of full-blown psychosclerosis is becoming closed-minded to any suggestion. So if we think we have the best or only idea and we’re closed to any suggestions, the result is that we become stagnated in our own stubbornness.
The opposite of psychosclerosis is the ability to be flexible-listening with the intent to learn so that you can make a better-informed decision.
Five: Do "Right Things"
Tony was sympathetic. “I understand where you are coming from, Jeff. I’ve been there, too. These types of decisions are gut-wrenching, and, I’m not going to tell you what to do. This must be your decision. However, I’m going to ask you some questions that may help with your decision making process.
First, does he understand the company policy and your team’s code of behavior about drinking on the job?
Are the policy and your expectations reasonable and fair?
What would you do if one of your falling stars was caught drinking on the job?
So what is the right thing to do?
“Before you say anything, let me explain. You have two competing emotions-one being what is right, and one being what is easy…Your job is to raise the bar for long-term, sustained success, not for short-term convenience. Short-term results are easy. You can threaten people, pay them more, or just give them what they want, and you’ll get short-term result…achieving long-term results requires establishing a code of behavior that must be followed. It requires providing accurate feedback. It requires delivering the consequences-positive and negative- based on decisions that employees make. It requires that you hold people accountable. All of these require courage-your courage-to do the right thing”
Second, I subscribe to the “Do Right” Rule. Simply stated, do what is right even when no one is watching! You are in the middle of a real-life, personal “integrity check.” “Choose your path carefully,” Tony admonished. “Sometimes the decisions that seem so minor become major over time. That’s also how your personal integrity is lost- one degree of dishonesty at a time.” the only way to fix the problem is to go directly to what’s causing the light to flash and fix the cause. Like the pilot, an action plan should have been decided upon long before the crisis developed.
My third questions, is, Why do you think you’re the only one seeing the problem? Many times the manager is the last to know about a problem on the team. What the manager sees is normally a very small part of the whole. The closer you are to the situation, the more you can see. Todd’s teammates are closer to this “iceberg” than you are, and I would be surprised if they are not wondering why you are allowing him to do what he is doing.
Fourth, everything counts when it comes to your leadership. If you think ignoring the problem doesn’t matter, you’re wrong. You’re always leading, even when you’re ignoring a problem and thinking no one else is looking. Your team doesn’t really cares if your company has an ethics department or compliance officer. What matters to your team is what you do…and everything you do matters because your team is watching.
"I work my tail off for these people, and I feel like they betrayed me in an anonymous survey."
"I know how you feel, however, at an emotional time like this, you need to understand things are never as bad as they seem...just like in good times, they are never as good as they seem. They are always somewhere in between.”
“Some of the common responses seem to revolve around the fact you need to step up to your role as the leader. It sounds to me like your team is begging for accountability...For sure, it is rare for people to say they want to be held accountable, but in reality, everyone wants everyone else to be held accountable…that’s the message they are screaming. They want you to make better use of their time…Bottom line, I don’t think they are asking too much. They want you to be their leader…not their buddy.
The survey is a reality check. Because the pace of business is faster than ever these days, most people don’t stop long enough to take a reality check, so they keep doing the same things until they run out of options. Sometimes we are in such a hurry with our demanding schedules, we don’t take time to stop to refill our professional fuel tank-until we are on the freeway at six in the evening, praying we can make it to a gas station before our vehicle sputters to a stop. It seems like this survey came along just in time…because you still have options available.
In a perfect world, we want everyone to agree with our ideas, and we want our actions to be praised as the best ever. But the reality is that we will have critics…and having critics is a good thing. Our choice comes when we decide what we do with the criticism that comes our way.
That type of personal criticism focused on your person—will never help you become more successful as a manager. In fact, those critics are not worth spending your time on trying to understand. Personal critics remind me of a story about an old farmer who advertised his “frog farm” for sale…don’t allow the critical noise of “one old bullfrog” keep you from doing what you need to do.
Ultimately, we all need criticism, no matter how successful we become. Criticism whips our fragmented attention into a laser focus on some of the more important aspects of our jobs and our lives. I believe criticism is a learning g tool that teaches us hard lessons throughout our lives.
The healthy approach to criticism is to pay attention to it. Always listen with the intent to understand why the criticism is being leveled at you and why the critic may want you to know his or her feeling.
And there’s an upside to criticism, too. Criticism from the right people could lead to improvement. Many employees dread performance reviews or employee surveys. They know that criticism is on the way, even though there are probably more positives than negatives in performance reviews. There is always something we can do better, do more often, or do with a different intensity. Appropriate criticism helps us focus our attention on what we need to do to become more successful.
All my life, I have heard people boast, “I welcome constructive criticism,” but sometimes that invitation is hard to believe. Because of our human nature, constructive criticism carries a certain sting, even though it may help us correct a wrong, strengthen a weakness, or chart a more successful course.
One reason for criticism’s stinging effect is something referred to a “psychosclerosis,” which comes from the Greek term psyche, or “mind,” and the Latin term sclerosis as in “hardening of.” I call it hardening of one’s imagination. Our natural tendency is to think our idea is the best- or the only-idea that will work. The second phase of full-blown psychosclerosis is becoming closed-minded to any suggestion. So if we think we have the best or only idea and we’re closed to any suggestions, the result is that we become stagnated in our own stubbornness.
The opposite of psychosclerosis is the ability to be flexible-listening with the intent to learn so that you can make a better-informed decision.
Five: Do "Right Things"
Tony was sympathetic. “I understand where you are coming from, Jeff. I’ve been there, too. These types of decisions are gut-wrenching, and, I’m not going to tell you what to do. This must be your decision. However, I’m going to ask you some questions that may help with your decision making process.
First, does he understand the company policy and your team’s code of behavior about drinking on the job?
Are the policy and your expectations reasonable and fair?
What would you do if one of your falling stars was caught drinking on the job?
So what is the right thing to do?
“Before you say anything, let me explain. You have two competing emotions-one being what is right, and one being what is easy…Your job is to raise the bar for long-term, sustained success, not for short-term convenience. Short-term results are easy. You can threaten people, pay them more, or just give them what they want, and you’ll get short-term result…achieving long-term results requires establishing a code of behavior that must be followed. It requires providing accurate feedback. It requires delivering the consequences-positive and negative- based on decisions that employees make. It requires that you hold people accountable. All of these require courage-your courage-to do the right thing”
Second, I subscribe to the “Do Right” Rule. Simply stated, do what is right even when no one is watching! You are in the middle of a real-life, personal “integrity check.” “Choose your path carefully,” Tony admonished. “Sometimes the decisions that seem so minor become major over time. That’s also how your personal integrity is lost- one degree of dishonesty at a time.” the only way to fix the problem is to go directly to what’s causing the light to flash and fix the cause. Like the pilot, an action plan should have been decided upon long before the crisis developed.
My third questions, is, Why do you think you’re the only one seeing the problem? Many times the manager is the last to know about a problem on the team. What the manager sees is normally a very small part of the whole. The closer you are to the situation, the more you can see. Todd’s teammates are closer to this “iceberg” than you are, and I would be surprised if they are not wondering why you are allowing him to do what he is doing.
Fourth, everything counts when it comes to your leadership. If you think ignoring the problem doesn’t matter, you’re wrong. You’re always leading, even when you’re ignoring a problem and thinking no one else is looking. Your team doesn’t really cares if your company has an ethics department or compliance officer. What matters to your team is what you do…and everything you do matters because your team is watching.
Six: Hire tough
Lynn said we need to “role-play” the termination and think through
every reaction Todd could conceivably have. She also said to go to “neutral”
site- I picked the conference room. And she said that we needed to have all of
his paper work ready. We were not walking into a debate; we were there to
implement a decision that he had made. Her advice to me before the session was
to do everything we could to maintain Todd’s self-respect and dignity while
being firm and fair with him
The meeting was thirty extremely long minutes of intense
emotions. Lynn told me that the majority of people who are fired feel the same
way: It’s always someone else’s fault, management has no heart, and there are
extenuating circumstances.
After taking a few minutes to steady my own emotions, it was
then time for my weekly team meeting. I
told them that Todd was no longer with our company and that my umber-one
priority was to fill his position as soon as possible. I said I would not go
into any details other than that we have to work together to take up the slack
we all feel without Todd…Here was my surprise. I overheard Kevin and Shannon,
two of my middle stars, saying they were relieved they wouldn’t have to cover
up for Todd’s drinking any longer. I don’t know if I was the last to discover
his drinking on the job, but I do know I wasn’t the only person aware of the
problem. My team was watching, and my integrity was being challenged. Tony, you
were right again.
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