Early intervention for new hires and promotions is key to success.
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This podcast is 4 minutes 59 seconds long.
Tag Archives: employee
Podcast: Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth
Shifting your focus from weaknesses to strengths is a powerful step towards being personally more effective and building a more effective organization.
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This podcast is based on an earlier blog posting: “Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth”.
This podcast is 7 minutes 21 seconds long.
You can download a PDF file with the transcript of this podcast
Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth
The Myth
Managers spend a lot of time worrying about the weaknesses of their employees. “If only I could get her to perform better we would have a really great team.” And countless more along that line. Companies have performance evaluation systems that focus attention on how employees should overcome their weaknesses by additional training, supervision and mentoring, and, above all, more work on self-improvement by the employee. Perhaps this focus on weakness flows from an educational system that has always been more attuned to the “Cs” and “Ds” and what must be done to raise those scores, rather than building on the strengths. Our focus on overcoming weakness is reflected in a saying like, “You can become anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough.”
Debunked
In the management world, Peter Drucker, the great god-father of modern management, spoke clearly about this matter way back in 1966 in his still prescient and useful little book, The Effective Executive (still in print). He wrote, “The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength…. Performance can only be built on strengths. What matters most is the ability to do the assignment.”
More recently, others have also come to see that when it comes to both people and organizations the only way to build for results is to build on strengths. One example of this is the work of the Gallup Organization and Marcus Buckingham and Donald D. Clifton in Now, Discover Your Strengths ( (Free Press, New York 2001) and Tom Rath, Strengths Finder 2.0 (Gallup Press, New York 2007). Go to the website (https://www.strengthsfinder.com/) and check this out.
A Better Approach – Build on Strength
Focusing on strengths engages peoples’ best attributes, skills, and experiences. Focusing on strengths engages people where they have the most passion, energy and success. Focusing on strengths focuses on the activities where people have already demonstrated results. Focusing on strengths creates a positive relationship because you a talking about activities that the employee is good at and has the best chance of producing good results.
Managers should focus their attention on how to be sure that every person is working on their strengths as much as possible.
There is another reason for this focus on strengths, it removes a crutch that managers use to avoid taking complete responsibility for their performance and the performance of the organization – the myth of lousy personnel – “If I only had better people, I could get my organization to really perform.” I wrote about this recently in another posting, It’s Always Your Fault – taking responsibility for your personnel”.
Start With Your Strengths
To move us beyond this discussion, ask yourself:
“What are my strengths?”
The simplest way to answer this question is to look at the activities where you have had the most and best results. These are your strengths. You might enrich this line of thinking by asking which activities make you happy, put you into a state of flow where you really concentrate and loose track of time? An external, third party assessment can be helpful. I have used StrengthsFinder 2.0. It is good, adequate detail without overreaching. There are others.
Then ask this question:
“Am I spending most of my time working on my areas of strength?”
Make a list of your activities over the last two weeks. Do a large number of your strengths play a significant role in many of your day-to-day activities? If there are, great!! If not, you need to take action.
The most important step is to move your work day towards your strengths. Start by asking yourself how you can make changes. Many times my clients find that they are doing tasks out of their strength zones simply because they always have. Habits are made to be changed. Look around the organization to find someone whose strengths include these tasks. Off load them. Keep your eye on the results required, but, off load. Other clients have realized that they need a new employee or business partner to take on the tasks that are in their weak zones.
One of the great side effects of moving to your strengths is that the tasks you shed will be performed better, in a more productive fashion, by somebody who feels good about exercising their strengths in carrying them out.
Look for Strengths in Others
Once you have identified your own strengths and acted to move towards them, you can turn to asking others in your organization, “What are your strengths?”. It is important that you empower them to answer the question for themselves. Then, together, you can act to move them towards their strengths. This is a task requiring more space and time than possible here. A hint is that you will need to build a matrix that displays all of the organization’s primary activities’ strengths requirements on one axis and the strengths of all personnel on the other.
What About The Weaknesses?
OK, so it is true. Everyone has weaknesses. It is true that inevitably these weaknesses show up in the results. The only useful answer to this quandary is the old saying, “Just take your lumps.” Whenever you find a bad result due to someone working in a weakness zone, ask yourself, as the general manager, “Could I have assigned someone else to do that job and have it in their strength zone?”
If you work seriously for yourself and those in your organization to focus on strengths, you will find that the results overall are much better and you and everyone else feels better because they are working in the strength zone.
Managers – Don’t Answer That Question!
The miraculous practice of not answering subordinates’ questions. A counter-intuitive strategy for high performance, yours and theirs.
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The podcast is 6 minutes 34 seconds long.
Building a Positive Culture – the no jerk zone
A very common question from managers is, “How do I build a positive, supportive, productive culture in my company?” This seems like a very abstract objective until you face up to some of the negative behaviors that can be found in many companies. When you identify these behaviors, and they are not hard to notice, you are then presented with an important opportunity to improve the culture and set a better standard of behavior. But, this requires you to be forthright and take action.
Here is an example. “What do I do with an employee who is disruptive, disrespectful, in short, a jerk?” Frequently this question concerns an employee who is perceived by the manager as very productive or a key player in the organization.
One of the first steps to take is to clearly evaluate the true costs of having this person in the organization. Jerks are like zones of repulsion that disrupt work all around. People avoid communicating, or worse, working directly with a jerk. Many people will have a hard time not reacting with their own negative behavior to fend off jerks. When you add all of this up, jerks are always a negative, no matter how individually productive they may seem to be.
(Before going on to the next steps, review your company personal policy carefully concerning disciplining employees and conditions for termination. You want to be sure to follow these procedures carefully. )
So, what to do? The first step is to confront the jerk. This is best done by direct observation and immediate feedback. Wait for the negative behavior to be demonstrated and immediately take the person aside to a private space and indicate to them that this kind of behavior will no longer be tolerated. Do not engage in a colloquy or argument. This is a policy statement, not an invitation to a discussion.
To be honest, you take this step, rather than just dismissing the person, because it is the right thing to do, not because there is much hope for reforming the bad behavior of an inveterate jerk. You are doing this because it is sound human resource management practice and because it is sound interpersonal behavior. Good management of people demands observing real behavior and taking corrective action immediately. And, surprise, surprise, sometimes better behavior breaks out!
Now, you must be ready to act. Sometimes, once a jerk is confronted about their behavior they will in fact make good faith efforts to change. If you see this, be supportive and provide immediate corrective direction when the person falls back toward the bad behavior. On the other hand, confronting a jerk may just as well cause them to flee, to quit. Be ready for this and have a replacement, or backup, in the wings. Finally, true jerks will revert to their natural behavior shortly and, without repentance, continue along. Follow your company’s procedures for terminating the employee closely. If you feel that the employee is unsalvageable, do the right thing for you, the company, and the employee, insist on termination not a transfer to another department or division.
You will be amazed at how others in your company will react to your handling this situation so well. They will know that you are not going to tolerate disruptive, disrespectful behavior and they will feel positively that you handled the situation with respect and care. So, you have taken a clear step towards a positive, supportive, productive culture in your company. There is much more to be done, nevertheless, you have taken a highly visible step.
There is a great article about this topic in The McKinsey Quarterly (May 2007), Building the civilized workplace: Nasty people don’t just make others feel miserable; they create economic problems for their companies. by Robert Sutton (opens in new window).
Managers – Early Intervention Is Key To Getting Your People Right
After you hire or promote a person, there is a tendency to walk away with a big smile on your face. “What a smart person I am. I hired the right person and now my job is done.” Six months later you realize that the person has drowned in their new post, everything is in disarray. But, now it is too late. The damage is done.
To correct this managers need to practice a little humility and be attentive, supportive and alert during the early stages of a new hire or promotion’s tenure. The humility arises from recognizing that more than at any other point in the life span of a manager-supervisee relationship, the early stages require the most intense application of an all important management rule: “If an employee is working below expected or required performance it is always the manager’s fault.” The first place to look is at the manager. After all, the manager hired or selected the person. The manager defines the work, provides tools, training, and all other resources required for the job. The manager is responsible for the success of every person they supervise. By focusing on the results achieved and understanding how to move the performance towards the desired results, you can focus on tools, training, support resources that will allow your new person to succeed.
Beyond this principle, we have to acknowledge that the hiring and promotion process is one of the more flawed management practices. Some claim that in a third or a half of the cases we make the wrong decision. This merely emphasizes the need to be very observant of the performance of new hires a and new promotions because we need to be ready to act when it turns out that we’ve made a mistake.
So, when you have your new person in place and have given them clear instructions about their initial tasks, set up a time, within a week or so, at which you will have a meeting to review performance and see what further support needs to be provided. This is especially valuable in environments where you have a new hire or promotion in a new position where the variables of the goals and tasks are inherently unclear. There’s nothing like having a quick meeting to take the pulse of the new tasks and make course corrections immediately. And, remind your new person that you are readily available to discuss their work at any time.
If you find yourself in one of those rare positions where your decision to hire or promote a person turned out to be fatally flawed, don’t let the situation just linger on. If you follow that strategy, you will end up with a lot of poor performance and unhappy people. It is almost always true that other people in the organization will readily recognize that your new hire is not performing well and is in fact in the early stages of drowning. When you let a person linger in this manner, you are demonstrating to others that you are not a very competent manager, nor a caring one. And, your new hire or promotion know themselves that they’re having deep trouble performing their job. You are doing no one a favor by allowing a failing person to linger on. If you’re in a larger organization, you should seek out alternative positions where this person could perform well for the company. If such a transfer is not possible, you have to face up to it and terminate the person’s employment. When you act promptly in such situations, everyone around you sees that you are a competent manager who is facing up to an error in judgment. And, in my experience the employee involved is grateful that you dealt with the situation in an objective, fair, and caring manner.