TEACHING OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS

I have been regularly surprised about how many Managers I come across who believe that a valid Management approach is to look for people to do something wrong and then to help them correct it. I surmise that this satisfies two basic urges that these managers must have. The first one is that it gives them a chance to prove that they are more skilled than their subordinate, and therefore justify their elevated position, and secondly it gives them a chance to show that they have retained the Vocational skills that made them the brilliant “engineer” that they were in the first place. For many this helps to overcome the worry that being just a “manager” is not enough.

I have always believed that this is totally the wrong approach, and I am reminded of a friend of mine in New Zealand who went through a rather messy divorce. After the departure of his wife and son, he realized that he was rather lonely and decided that he should get a puppy to keep him company during the evenings and weekends.

Unfortunately the puppy got into the habit of peeing on the floor of his bedroom.  Being a skilled “Engineer”, and seeing a problem that needed solving, he attacked this problem with incredible zeal. Every time that he found a puddle of pee, he would grab the puppy by the scruff of the neck, drag it into the bedroom, rub its nose in the pee, slap it on the rump with a piece of rolled up newspaper, and throw the puppy out of the window. ( he had a one story house so no need to call the SPCA). He could justify this approach by rationalizing that he had shown the puppy the problem (pee on the floor), had administered the resulting punishment (slap), and had shown the solution (do it outside).

After about 10 days of this the puppy started going into the bedroom, peeing on the floor and jumping out the window.

The problem with this approach to problem solving is that the puppy obviously understood the process. It was just trying to cut out the bits that it didn’t like …. It didn’t like having its nose rubbed in the pee nor being slapped with the newspaper.

People are no different.

When we make mistakes, none of us particularly like having our noses rubbed in it, neither do we like being punished for it.

As a result, when Managers take this approach to problem solving, the result is that people take the same approach as the puppy… they start to cut out the bits that they don’t like, such as being caught, reprimanded and punished, which means that mistakes often get hidden rather than being made visible and resolved jointly.

The way to train a newly acquired puppy to pee where you want it to, means that you have to dedicate at least the first weekend to training the puppy on what is expected. You do this by taking the puppy out to the required dog loo every 30 minutes or so, and waiting for the puppy to pee. When it does (and they do a lot), you praise it lavishly, and at the same time give it a command as it does the job. It will very quickly associate the praise and fuss with doing the job in the right way, in the right place, and very quickly the command (like “busy, busy, busy” which we use with our five dogs) becomes the suggestion to the dog that it is time it went outside and relieved itself. The early positive re-enforcement of the behavior that is required, quickly gets established as the pattern of behavior that should be followed.

In this respect, people are not very different.

You can achieve a lot more as a Manager by looking for your people to do something right, and then reinforcing that behavior with praise and reward, than by waiting for the mistakes. I understand that there are times when the mistakes need to be addressed, but if the culture of positive re-enforcement is the predominant one in the group, the need to occasionally address the problems becomes easier to deal with and has less negative impact on the group’s ability to work openly and well together.

NOT ALL MANAGERS ARE CREATED EQUAL

“We are all flawed, but basically effective managers are people whose flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. Maybe the best managers are simply ordinary, healthy people who are not too screwed up”.
Canadian academic and author Henry Mintzberg

I have interviewed, hired and/or rejected, hundreds of managers during my career, from first level young potentials to possible CEOs and Board members, and have realised that no matter how experienced they may initially appear, they can come in many guises, including some that need to be quickly disqualified from consideration for employment, no matter how good they may look on the surface. (see “Why are so many managers so bad at recruiting” posted December 12, 2011).

The problem is that it is never easy to totally and accurately measure how well someone will do in a new management role, no matter how well they have done in previous senior roles, even if there are roles that they have held in the past that appear to be similar to the one you are currently trying to fill. As we all know, CVs can be somewhat embellished with some artistic freedoms and some judicious re-engineering, and there are some people who look great on paper and present themselves really well, but who are really a well-developed facade with very little solid structure supporting the attractive visible front.

Author: Rkwriting (own work); via Wikimedia Commons

Here are a few of these that I have come across in my time, and that one needs to look out for:

The 2-year cycler … On the surface, from their CV, they may look like they have 20 years of experience, but in reality they actually have only 2 years of experience repeated 10 times. These people have the ability to come in, stir everything up and drive change, but cannot sustain the momentum so run out of steam after about 2 years. The IT industry is full of people like this, as the industry has grown so quickly over the last 50 years that many people have never had to live with their own implementations and could just move on and start all over again before being seriously tested. Unless you have a 2-year assignment for them, don’t bother.

The empty suit … Looks the part and says the right things, but has an extremely shallow set of management skills and capabilities. This is the sort of person who works harder on looking as though they belong in the role rather than on actually doing the job. I once, in error, promoted a national sales manager to the role of MD. He immediately upgraded his suits and ties, whipped up his travel to first class and his hotel accommodation to suites, but changed nothing else in the way that he did the job, thus continuing to fulfil the function of the sales manager without taking up any of the responsibilities of a CEO, but he sure looked good while the business stalled.

Author: Argenberg; https://www.flickr.com/photos/argenberg/308888568/sizes/m/in/photostream/; CC BY 2.0 license; via Wikimedia Commons

The gift to mankind … Presents himself as the great saviour and the great leader. One interviewee described himself to me thus “I am very inspirational and a brilliant public speaker”. I decided to test him on his self-perception, so told him he had 5 minutes to prepare an impromptu speech on his view of “The meaning of life” and left the room for a cup of coffee. When I came back 5 minutes later he launched into a platitude-filled meaningless ramble which was far from brilliant and not at all inspirational, with really old hackneyed expressions like “I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”. I have found that really great people don’t have to tell you of their greatness, in the same way that I am always suspicious of people who have to tell me how intelligent they are. Mensa members please take note.

The Engineer … I am always nervous about people who believe that it is all about the product rather than being about the people. I have no really serious issues with managers with an engineering background, though I do use them as a regular source of humour (see “Teaching old dogs new tricks” posted June 20, 2010), but I do sometimes struggle with senior managers in Europe who still believe that product is the main competitive advantage rather than having passionate, committed and self-driven people who understand what has to be done and how to go about doing it.

The seen-it-all-before … This is the “I’ve been everywhere, man” (made famous by Johnny Cash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmFN9C9PVpg ). I have come across candidates in a recruitment process who have tried to convince me that the reason that I should hire them is that they have done everything, and seen everything that exists in their environment. As I have a strong belief that the right attitude is more along the lines of Randy Bachman’s “You aint seen nothing yet”, I have little time for people who believe that there is little left for them to learn, see or do. Learning is a life-long journey not a destination, and people who do not understand this do not deserve consideration for a senior role.

The sound-biter … Perhaps driven by the need to say something memorable in a 30-second TV news clip, I am surprised by the number of people who have forsaken the need to say something original and meaningful in their own words, for the convenience of dropping some sound bites. I once had a candidate tell me that “Leaders do the right thing whereas Mangers do the thing right” as being part of his personal philosophy. He went all a-dither when I asked him to explain to me what that actually meant for him, but in his own words. For much the same reason I have always looked somewhat suspiciously at people who see “The one minute manager” and “Who moved my cheese” as being great works of management insight, rather than being just some interesting brochures. Being a successful leader and/or manager is a tough role to fill, and is not for the simple-minded.

Author: Andre Engels; via Wikimedia Commons

The recruitment process is one of the most critical elements of any manager’s role, and having the best people in place to provide leadership and direction to great people everywhere in any organisation is the key driver of success.

As said by American business consultant and author Jim Collins “People are not your most important asset. The RIGHT people are.”

THE MANAGEMENT ART OF GARDENING

“A garden requires patient labour and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfil good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.”
Liberty Hyde Bailey, American Botanist (1858-1954}.

I have often compared being in a management role, and being given responsibility for a team of people, as being similar to being given a garden to tend (see “It was good enough for me” posted August 16, 2010), and one that you will ultimately have to hand over to a successor.

Author: Basvb (own work); CC BY-SA 3.0 license; via Wikimedia Commons

The question is … what sort of “gardener” are you ?

Leave it to nature approach. Many managers take the laissez faire approach to management. This is particularly true of many vocationally brilliant specialists who are pushed, sometimes reluctantly, into a management role. This enables them to keep focussing on their vocational tasks, now with a better title and an increased salary package, but with minimal change to what they had been doing most of their working life as an individual contributor. Like the laissez faire gardener this is a hope based strategy that hopes the fates will provide the right amount of sunshine and rain at the right times and in the right quantities for the garden to stay alive, without them actually having to do anything. One Head of Development that I worked with spent most of his time debugging software for members of his 3000+ strong software development organisation, whenever they got stuck. This was because it was what he loved to do and at which he considered himself to be quite brilliant. He ran his organisation in the hope that his own management team would not act the same way that he did, and that they would focus on actually acting like real managers. He was only partially correct in this assumption.

Cultivate mushrooms approach. Some managers will keep an eye on their people and wait for them to do something wrong, so that they can show them the correct approach. This is another style common with vocationally blinkered managers, as it not only gives them an opportunity to use their vocational skills, but also enables them to show their people that “they still have it”. I find this to be an approach much favoured by those with a strong engineering background (see “Teaching old dogs new tricks” posted June 20, 2010). One manager I worked with would prowl his domain looking for things that needed fixing, and whenever he found something amiss that he felt merited his attention, he would call an all-hands meeting for a lecture on what he had discovered that was being handled incorrectly and the correct procedures that he expected to be followed. He saw this as a way of achieving improvements in his business area, but the real result was that he just held a lot of meetings. I see this as being along the same lines as cultivating mushrooms, which are mostly kept in the dark, but occasionally have some manure dumped on them.

Author: Rob Hille (own work); CC BY-SA 3.0 license; via Wikimedia Commons

Dabble occasionally approach. Some managers see their management responsibilities as being something that they need to do only from time to time, generally because they are just badly organised, are serial procrastinators or are just too busy trying to put out fires that they have allowed to ignite in the first place. These tend to be easily recognisable as they are the ones that never quite meet the deadlines for necessities like performance and salary reviews and monthly reporting. They are also always the ones who never seem to get around to agreeing annual goals and objectives for their people, and who don’t have compensation plans signed even by the end of the first quarter, and who only actually get things done when leaned on from above. This approach is actually the way that many people tend to their gardens. They mow their lawns when either pressure from their neighbours or their spouse mounts to a point where it cannot be ignored, weeding is only done when the weeds block the view and the access to the swimming pool, and any fresh planting is generally only to replace what has died due to neglect.

Let’s make it flourish approach. Good managers leave little to chance. They plan the year ahead and ensure that their “plants” are well supplied with everything that they need to survive and grow. They act to encourage the growth of all that they are responsible for, not just the brightest, and they weed out those that add no value and that could end up strangling those around them. They ensure that they have a strong base that will encourage their charges to spread out, and they try different things, such as new plantings from outside their area, so that their “plot” gets better each year. They also ensure that larger individuals do not shade the smaller ones to stop them from growing. They work hard so that the best of what they have grown are transplanted to other gardens to facilitate their continued growth in new areas.

Author: Aernoudts jean; CC BY-SA 3.0 license; via Wikimedia Commons

In summary, managers must ensure that they have improved their domain to give their successor an easier start, and a better developed facility than the one that they themselves started with originally, even if s/he understands that the effort they put in is for long term development that will benefit the successor even more than the originator. As so well said by D. Elton Trueblood (1900-1994), American author and theologian, “A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants a shade tree under which he knows full well he will never sit”

FOURTH RULE OF MANAGEMENT

The first rule of management is that successful management is actually more about how you manage yourself rather than being about how you manage others (see “First rule of management” posted June 25, 2012).

The second rule of management is that the key to your own success is totally dependent on the success of your people (see “Second rule of management” posted September 24, 2012).

The third rule of management is that no man is an island, and you need to build a network in all directions (see “Third rule of management” posted October 1, 2012).

The fourth rule of management is that you do not manage people, but you manage their behaviour.

This means that the values and culture (sum of the behaviours) that you create as a leader is significantly more important than any controls, policies and procedures or rules that you put in place for your team, whatever its size.

Managing behaviour is a moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day activity for a manager and not something that can be done occasionally, which is why formal performance reviews do not work, even if they are scheduled more often than just as an annual event.

Firstly you need to build a framework for the needed behaviour patterns to flourish by establishing a strong set of ethics based on a sense of integrity in the team, being “what we believe is what we say is what we do”. This is critical, as some managers seem to have a belief that “if I say it, so it shall be”, without understanding that their staff will mainly disregard their words but will watch their actions, and will ultimately copy their behaviour patterns, no matter what rhetoric they sprout, no matter how often they sprout it, and no matter what they write in their mission and vision statements.

You can continue to write and say “our customer is number 1” an infinite amount of times but, if you do not actively and personally live your management business life with this belief at the core of all your actions, no one will believe you and they will all tend to act the same way that you do.

One CEO I worked for never stopped talking about the importance of the customer, but went out of his way to avoid customer contact, and spent much of his time complaining to his executive team about how ungrateful the customers were about the “pearls” that we provided for them. As a result, the pervasive attitude in the company towards its customers was one of arrogance and general disdain. When I had the need one time to bring a customer issue to the attention of the VP Engineering, his response was that the problems the customer was facing with our products was due to the fact that they kept hiring “stupid people”, and that I should tell them that if they had smarter people in their team the problems would go away.

“Actions do speak louder than words …”, and as so ably added by Mark Twain “… but unfortunately not as often.”

Source: steamboattimes.com; Author: A.F. Bradley; via Wikimedia Commons

Secondly, you need to understand that every interaction you have with a member of your team is an opportunity to reinforce desired behaviour, remembering that positive reinforcement is a significantly more effective way to manage behaviour than telling someone where they went wrong (see “Teaching old dogs new tricks” posted June 20, 2010). The goal is to catch people doing something right, and to tell them that this is the case, that it pleases you and that it benefits the team and the company. This not only reinforces the behaviour that you want to see repeated, but also establishes the fact that you care about your people and are aware of what they are doing.

Author: Glen Bowman; via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 license

As said by Keith Henson, American Space engineer and evolutionary psychologist “People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years …”.

You also need to ensure that you dedicate a significant amount of time to spend managing the behaviour of people in your team who are struggling in their allocated role. Too many managers leave “strugglers” alone till the end of the year formal performance review, which for some subordinates will be the first time that they will learn that their performance during the previous year was not at an acceptable level. I believe strongly that if you have hired people for their strengths, you cannot fire them for their weaknesses if you, as their direct supervisor, have not made significant efforts to help them redress these (see “Move them up or move them out” posted August 23, 2010). The sooner you address performance issues the sooner you have a chance to correct them, and the sooner you are able to make a considered judgement on whether the underperformer will ever be able to meet the standards of required behaviour, and hence the performance needed, to be successful.

Annual performance reviews are at best only an analysis of historical activities and as such have little influence on effectively managing behaviour, which is best handled when it is first exhibited and noted, and not left to fester till many months later. Behaviour that is unacceptable, if left alone for too long, can become so ingrained in a person and/or a team that it becomes seen as being acceptable and becomes part of standard behaviour and hence much harder to change or eradicate.

The way that you and your people behave both internally to other departments and externally to your wider ecosystem is what defines you as a manager and leader, in the same way that your behaviour in the community defines you as a neighbour, a friend and ultimately a human being.

“When man learns to understand and control his own behaviour as well as he is learning to understand and control the behaviour of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.” American author Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Author: Playing Futures: Applied Nomadology; CC BY 2.0 license; via Wikimedia Commons

PRAISE AS A KEY MANAGEMENT SKILL

We all know that positive reinforcement is the right way to train and manage behaviour with our children and our pets (See “Teaching old dogs new tricks” posted June 20, 2010), and yet most managers are quite unskilled in how and when to praise those around them, relying on short term and minimal return programmes like “Employee of the Month”.

Recognising good performance should be on a daily, weekly, contact by contact sincere reaction to what has been achieved, as structured recognition programmes tend to be short-lived and of limited real benefit in reinforcing the behaviour that you want employees to repeat.

The focus should be on “catching people doing something right” and reacting straight away, so don’t just spend time creating formal recognition programmes, but make it part of your management responsibility and focus.

Some tips …

1. Be sincere and specific

My first real job was at International Harvester NZ (a company now long gone so I can name them) which had a CEO who would walk the corridors and shop floor regularly and would say hello to everyone and tell them that they were doing a great job. While it was nice to meet the CEO, the reality that he did not know who we were or what we did, meant that not only did it have no meaning, but the fact that he couldn’t tell anyone how or what they were actually doing well meant that he wasn’t treated seriously, nor was he reinforcing any specific behaviour. It also meant that when he actually did try and honestly praise someone for having done something specific and worthwhile, the impact was diminished.

Author: Tomorrow Never Knows; via Wikimedia Commons

2. Strike while the iron is hot

The longer you wait the lesser will be the impact. To wait for the end of the year to do performance reviews and hand out performance awards has little lasting impact. To wait till the end of the month for the “all hands” meeting can have some benefit from a peer recognition viewpoint, but telling someone that they have performed well immediately after the event has greater impact, and reinforces the behaviour that is being recognised.

3. Forget the advice about being balanced when praising

Many managers believe that praise should only be handed out when balanced with some advice on improvements. This doesn’t work, and discussions on what improvements are needed should be left to another time with a session that is well prepared. The advice that negative feedback should be balanced with something positive is reasonable, but using a praise opportunity to also cover shortcomings will just detract from the chance to encourage someone to keep doing what they have just done well.

4. Praise at all levels

It is always easy to praise top performers, as they tend to exhibit the behaviours that are needed to make them successful anyway, but you should also look for reasons to praise the behaviour and positive actions of those that are under-performers, as it is unlikely that even those who are struggling are doing everything incorrectly.
As it is your job as a manager to help everyone to improve their performance (See “Move them up or move them out” posted 23 August, 2010), praise for a “struggler” is one key element of trying to help them move up the performance ladder. It is obviously much harder to do this with low performers but the results can be dramatic if done with sincerity, and as a way of showing that you are aware of what they are doing and that you are there to help them succeed.

5. Praise needs to be tailor-made

Praise should not be doled out in an approach of “one size fits all”.
Some people want their recognition to be open, loud and visible (like many sales people), whilst others prefer it to be very personal and private. You have to know your people well enough to understand what form of recognition has the greatest impact for them rather than believing that everyone wants to be picked out in front of a crowd.

Author: Inga Munsinger; via Wikimedia Commons

6. Surprise them

Don’t always use the same approach as after some time it will lose its impact and become mundane. Recognition at a sales meeting is fine, but I have found that a personal visit, or a hand-written letter, from the CEO congratulating someone (or a team) on winning an important sale for example, can leave a greater impression.
It is important to also not forget the contribution made by an employee’s family, as flowers sent to the wife of a hard working employee, thanking her for her understanding and support for his absence from home can have even greater impact than just praising your team member.

Author: Rico Shen (User:BrockF5); via Wikimedia Commons

I believe that effective and timely use of praise is a key element of success of any team.
Whilst most managers find formal and structured recognition programmes easier to implement and administer, using personal praise that is due when it happens has much greater impact on long term behaviour and performance. At the same time, it is also important that you don’t overdo it as that will downgrade its value and make it humdrum.

Praising every minor thing that happens will ultimately have the same effect as praising little, but its proper use as a management tool is critical.