One of the tricks to maximising employee performance is to minimise any work that conflicts with your people actually doing what they are being paid to do.
For example, let’s say you employ sales people. You pay them to make sales. So, they’re most productive when they are interacting with customers and potential customers. If you require them to spend several hours a week on paper work and administration, then you reduce their effectiveness. Finding ways to minimise this unproductive time would be essential to maximising their productivity.
Similarly with your managers. Leadership is a contact sport. In order for your first-level managers to maximise the performance of their team, they need to spend time observing, interacting and communicating with their people. In white collar work places there are two common activities that just get in the way of managers leading their people for high performance. One of them is email.
The problem is that managers simply become a slave to their inbox. They allow the email they receive to dictate the shape and pace of their day, rather than putting in place routines that enable them to ensure they best use the time they have available. Leaving their email open means they frequently end up treating it as their number one priority. It isn’t. Leaders are paid to get results through others.
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Generally leadership development is focussed on an event, such as a training workshop. However, Effective Leadership development is more of a process which occurs over time. This means that it requires much more than attending a training workshop. It requires on-going support, follow-up and feedback. In short, it requires on-going contact.
One of the keys to embedding leadership activity is to measure improvement in the leadership effectiveness of people managers over time. Any increase in effectiveness can’t be determined by the managers themselves. Rather, it has to be assessed by their direct reports and their co-workers.
Typically, the assessment is completed by way of a web-based feedback tool. For example, my company developed a 180 degree feedback tool that we’ve branded as BravaTrak®. It asks each manager’s direct reports to evaluate them against a series of behaviourally- based leadership statements. It also asks each manager to self-evaluate against the same statements.
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We all deceive ourselves about something. And mostly it’s harmless.
You know how it goes. My rear doesn’t look big in this. I don’t drink too much. I’m pretty fit.
But sometimes it’s harmful. I see this from time to time with frontline managers.
The other morning after a workout I was chatting with a fellow gym member and she asked me what line of work I was in. I told her that I’m a Frontline Leadership Specialist and that my business creates significant and sustainable performance improvement for organisations by enhancing the leadership practices of their frontline managers.
That got her interest, so she asked me for a couple of tips as she and her husband ran their own business. I mentioned to her that I’ve noticed that all high performing frontline managers have a strategy, or system, to provide frequent positive feedback to their people. She replied that she and her husband did ‘that sort of thing’ already. As the Tui beer billboard says, “Yeah right”.
How could I be so dismissive you may ask? For three reasons:
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How is it that we get excited by games and sports, but often not about work?
By way of example, let me share with you a situation I observed while I was at secondary school and university.
I grew up in Masterton, New Zealand. The town is known for producing a number of outstanding individuals such as musician Pip Brown (better known by her stage name of Ladyhawke) and Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords. (Little known fact: Jemaine and I went to the same secondary school. Admittedly, I finished my last year there just before he was born).
My parents were rather poor, though I didn’t notice it at the time. Consequently they couldn’t afford to contribute to my university education. So each summer I worked at the local meat processing plant (the Waingawa Freezing Works) for three months, to make enough money to pay my fees and survive for the year. I mostly worked on the lamb and beef processing chains.
Masterton is an inland rural community. Summer temperatures can get pretty high, and the meat processing industry was highly unionised at the time. So inevitably there was a union enforced rule that once the air temperature rose to a certain level on the meat processing floor, everyone would stop work until the temperature dropped again.
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Last week we took a look at the things that managers can do to make behaviour inefficient, and thereby ensure poor performance from their team.
These factors were originally identified by Thomas Gilbert who trained under the founder of behavioural psychology, B.F. Skinner. I suggested that since these factors lead to lower employee productivity (and inevitably lower business unit performance and profit), we can deduce that they are likely to have a significant impact on employee engagement or motivation.
This week we’ll take a look Gilbert’s model for engineering high performance. And we’ll compare the factors in that model with the key drivers of employee engagement identified through global research.
You’ll remember from last week that Gilbert applied the Skinnerian ABC model to the world of work. This suggested that for adequate performance to occur, several conditions needed to be met. Using the example of walking into a dark room and turning on the light we can break down the components of behaviour as follows:
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For those who haven’t come across the term ‘Employee Engagement’ before, it’s simply a new term for ‘employee commitment’, or good old-fashioned ‘employee motivation’.
Employee engagement, or employee motivation if you prefer that term, is important to you and your organisation. There is now considerable evidence from many sources that low employee engagement generates lower employee productivity, business unit performance and profit; along with generating higher employee theft, accident rates and employee turnover.
Many research and survey companies measure employee engagement. A number position themselves as the company whose research has uncovered the true drivers of employee engagement. The real truth is that the underpinnings of employee engagement were identified more than 30 years ago by Thomas Gilbert. He trained under the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard University, and his work led to the establishment of the International Society for Performance Improvement.
In 1978, Gilbert published his ideas in the book, ‘Human Competence – Engineering Worthy Performance’. Early in my career I was so taken by Gilbert’s work that for a while I called myself a Performance Technologist. That didn’t last long as no-one had a clue what I was talking about.
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If you are going to be successful as a manager you must recognise three very important basic facts about your role:
Fact #1. Management is getting things done through others
Fact #2. You need your team members more than they need you
Fact #3. You get paid for what your team members do, not for what you do
These facts were proposed by Ferdinand Fournies in his book “Coaching for Improved Work Performance”. Originally published in 1978, the book has become a management classic. Let’s examine why these three facts are true.
Imagine that you’re a manager with eight people reporting to you. For some reason you are off sick today but all of your direct reports have gone to work. If the total production or work output to be completed by you and your team is 100%, what percentage do you think will be completed by your team in your absence?
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In order to get the change in behaviour you need from your team members (or child, spouse, partner or friend) you need to guide their thinking.
The key tool you have to guiding their thinking are the words you choose to use, the questions you choose to ask and the conversations you choose to have. Today we’re going to focus on the questions that you choose to ask.
Last week, I recommended that you do yourself a favour. When you’re correcting behaviour, or seeking behavioural change, I recommended that you ask open-ended questions to get your team member talking; to get the words coming out of their mouth rather than yours.
I’m hoping that you tried this out and received the benefits of taking this approach. But there is one trap you need to side-step when confronting any sort of performance problem or issue with behaviour. And that trap is asking ‘why?’
Let’s put this in context. Let’s imagine a very simple situation to illustrate the problem this causes. Imagine that it’s important for your team members to arrive at work on time, and one of them has just arrived almost 10 minutes late for the second day in a row.
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Last week we checked out why you would ask questions to kick butt. This week we’ll examine how you might go about this.
Remember the old acronym KISS? Most people say it means, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Well, I prefer “Keep it short and simple”.
Short and simple, there are two main types of questions. What are they?
Right – open and closed.
A closed question can be answered by using a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or by providing a simple piece of information. Examples:
Question: “Are you going to the kitchen?” Answer: “No”
Question: “What’s your name?” Answer: “James”
An open question gives the person answering it much more opportunity to provide information they feel is relevant. It can, to some extent, force a person to provide more information then they would have otherwise. Examples:
Question : “What’s the book you are reading about?
Question: “What did you do on your holiday last week?
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Why would you ask questions to kick butt?
Good question. I’m glad you asked.
The results your people deliver for you don’t just happen. Your people have to do something in order for them to be achieved. Sometimes they do the right thing; sometimes they do the wrong thing. And sometimes they just don’t do anything.
Your job as a people manager is to manage the behaviour of your team members to ensure they are doing the right things to achieve the results you need. When they’ve done the wrong thing or nothing at all, our inclination can be to tell them. Tell them what they’ve done wrong. Tell them what they haven’t done. And tell them what they need to do differently. However, often there is a better way.
To understand why asking questions will often be a more productive approach, let’s put you in the hot seat. Let’s imagine that your manager confronts you about a piece of work that you’ve just completed which has been done poorly. If your manager simply tells you what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed, what’s your level of motivation to make the improvements? I’m guessing that it’s relatively low. It is likely that you’ll just do what you need to do without any significant sense of commitment.
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