Michael Timms's Blog, page 2
April 18, 2024
The Three Degrees of Leadership
What’s the difference between a good leader and a great one?
Steve Jobs is one of the most celebrated and admired leaders of all time. Apple, the company he co-founded, substantially changed our world. He revolutionized several industries, including personal computing, animated movies, music, and cell phones. His story is legendary. He was kicked out of the company he cofounded and then returned 12 years later to save it from bankruptcy and turn it into the most valuable company in the world. Jobs was described as a brilliant, autocratic perfectionist who was tough on people.
When his biographer asked him about his tendency to be rough on his people, Jobs responded, “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.”
Having willing followers is evidence of leadership, but does that, and producing great results, qualify one as a great leader? Exactly what does qualify someone as a leader? This is an important question to answer, for, without a clear standard for leadership, we’ll continue promoting and rewarding people who don’t deserve it and overlook those who could really make a difference.
Different Standards of LeadershipI have observed three levels, or degrees, of leadership, and one counterfeit. Each degree has its own criteria.
Degree Zero – Holds a Leadership Position
CEOs and other senior managers are often referred to as “leaders.” However, simply holding a leadership position does not make one a leader. This common misuse of the word has led many people with impressive titles to believe that others should obey them simply because of their position. Similarly, those in positions of authority tend to believe they don’t need to learn how to be an effective leader because, in their eyes, they’ve already met the criteria.
Holding a leadership position is a counterfeit standard of leadership. The reason people do what those in authority want them to do is because they fear the consequences of not doing so.
First Degree – Has Followers
The minimum standard of leadership is to have followers—people who willingly comply with your requests. Some celebrities, influencers, and politicians meet this minimum standard. People who follow influencers get free success tips, and influencers get more brand power. Likewise, voters hope to get the policies they want, and the politicians they vote for get elected.
Simply having followers may make you a leader of sorts, but it’s just scratching the surface of leadership. It’s transactional. Quid pro quo. Followers may admire and respect first-degree leaders, but they are not accomplishing anything together. People follow first-degree leaders primarily for what they hope to get.
Second-degree – Achieves Results Through Others
Most celebrity CEOs are second-degree leaders. Despite their personal shortcomings, many people willingly followed and admired Jack Welch and Steve Jobs in their day, and others follow and admire Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today. Second-degree leaders inspire followers by their vision of a better future. People follow them because they want to be on a winning team.
Following a second-degree leader requires commitment and sacrifice. Elon Musk expects his employees to work “long hours at high intensity.” Jeff Bezos stated “It’s not easy to work here, but we are working to build something important . . .”
Followers must get in the game and contribute their energy to accomplish their leader’s vision. They’re happy to work hard for their leader’s vision because they believe in it, and they know they’ll gain experience and skills that they can’t get anywhere else.
Followers of second-degree leaders don’t have any illusions about where they sit on their leader’s priority list. If their performance dips for any reason, they know they’re gone. But they are willing to make that trade-off to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Third-degree – Models a Higher Standard
Truly great leaders elevate the behavior of their followers while they accomplish a worthy goal.
How do they do this? By striving to live a higher moral standard themselves.
Bob Chapman, chairman and CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, turned a struggling manufacturing company into a $3.5 billion juggernaut that outperformed the S&P 500 by almost 400 percent over sixteen years. However, his focus shifted from profits to people after he had an epiphany that every one of his employees was someone’s precious son or daughter. He calls his leadership approach “Truly Human Leadership” where ensuring team members feel valued and cared for is a top priority.
The 2008 economic downturn hit Barry-Wehmiller hard. The standard business response is layoffs. Instead, Chapman proposed a furlough program where everyone would take a month off without pay. He explained that “It’s better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should suffer a lot.” His gesture of caring for others caught on. Some employees who could afford it offered to take six weeks unpaid leave for those who could only afford two weeks.
Second-degree leaders inspire followers to work hard to improve the world, but third-degree leaders inspire followers to improve themselves while they work hard to improve the world.
Second-degree leadership is focused on improving things. Third-degree leadership is focused on transforming lives.
Great Leaders Model a Higher StandardAngela Merkel is often credited with being the steady hand that guided the EU through more than a decade of crisis, including the 2009 euro debt crisis, the 2015 migrant crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She is known for her calm, analytical response to problems. She seeks cooperation over confrontation and finds common ground with opponents to win allies.
When widely criticized for her decision to let a million refugees into Germany, many of Muslim origin, she responded, “The necessary and decisive battle against terrorism does not in any way justify putting groups of certain people under general suspicion, in this case people of Muslim belief or of a certain origin.”
It’s been said of Merkel that “she seems to have no vanity. She doesn’t need to win every argument. She doesn’t have to get in the last word. She quietly assesses the different factors involved in a given situation and then decides which way she wants to go, and does it quietly and without fanfare.” A diplomat observed that it’s remarkable for a politician to put other people’s interests before their own, but that’s precisely what makes Merkel stand out and why she earned the trust and respect of other world leaders.
Second-degree leaders care more about achieving their goals than about the people they lead. Third-degree leaders care deeply about achieving their goals, but elevating the people they lead is always a central part of their vision.
For instance, second-degree leaders abandon or fire team members whose performance dips. Third-degree leaders find temporary workarounds and invest extra attention to support their team members to overcome performance challenges. This may require leaders to own the consequences of short-term setbacks, but it often produces greater long-term commitment and success when the team member overcomes their challenge.
The employee of a client who is a third-degree leader told me that early in her career, dealing with her father’s substance abuse problems affected her work performance. After a particularly bad week of dealing with her dad’s issues, she realized she had dropped the ball on an important project. She walked into her manager’s office and told him that she had screwed up. He told her to go ahead and look after her father and not worry about her project; he would take care of it. Moments later, she learned that her father had just committed suicide. Although company policy provided for one week of paid bereavement leave, the firm gave her two weeks.
She was blown away by how understanding her manager was, especially since she had put him in a difficult situation. From then on, she was totally committed to her manager and her company. She’s been with the firm for sixteen years.
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Become a Great Person to Become a Great LeaderAlthough most of the examples above are of famous leaders, anyone can become a third-degree leader. Great leadership boils down to making a few commitments.
Accomplish Big Goals Through Others. A general once remarked to Dwight D. Eisenhower that it must take guts to delegate. Eisenhower responded by quoting a nineteenth-century German general who said, “Centralization is the refuge of fear.” Giving others the opportunity to try new things and supporting them to make decisions is how you build their capacity, and yours, to accomplish big goals.Care For and Elevate Those You Lead. Oprah Winfrey is famous for her demonstrations of generosity to her viewers, her team members, and the community. The monetary value of what she gives is a token of what she is really giving—love. A former employee said of Oprah, “You always felt that your hard work was in direct proportion to the accolades that you would get at the end of the day.”Strive to Live a Higher Moral Standard. You don’t have to be Gandhi to be a great leader; you simply must be willing to sacrifice your ego and subjugate your impulses for the good of others. This includes things like resisting the urge to blame others when things go wrong, acknowledging your part in problems, accepting critical feedback with gratitude, and addressing potential conflicts directly and with an open mind instead of firing off a fiery email. You must discipline yourself to model the behavior you want to see in others.Truly great leaders are first concerned with becoming a great person. We can all become great people and truly great leaders. As Stephen Covey taught, the process is inside out. Be the change you want to see in others, and they will follow you anywhere.
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January 10, 2024
Leaders Set the Standard of Accountability & Performance
You’d think that a CEO of a major airline who is earning over $12 million a year would understand this basic principle of leadership:
Leaders set the upper limit of accountability for their organization.
No one will take accountability to a greater degree than their leader does.
Apparently, Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau hasn’t learned this.
According to a new report, Air Canada notched the worst on-time performance among large airlines in North America in 2023, maintaining their last place ranking from 2022.
But that’s not the problem, its a symptom of the real problem: poor leadership.
When Rousseau acknowledged Air Canada’s last place ranking, he followed up with a list of lame excuses such as bad weather, global supply chain issues, and high load factors creating more “spilling traffic” after flights are cancelled.
Those excuses “ring hollow,” according to Gabor Lukacs, president of the Air Passenger Rights advocacy group. “WestJet is flying the same weather, the same air traffic control environments,” he said.
John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University and who worked at Air Canada for 18 years, agreed. “Delta does value on time performance quite highly. Air Canada does not,” he claimed, stating that its last-place results partly reflect business decisions around scheduling and route choices.
When Leaders Make Excuses, So Will Everyone ElseCorporate culture is a function of leader’s behavior because, in a hierarchy, everybody looks up to determine what behavior is tolerated and rewarded.
Presumably, Rousseau will discuss on time performance at the next executive meeting and demand explanations and better performance. Since he has already signaled that making excuses is the way to handle problems, you can bet that’s precisely what his executive team will give him. And when his executives discuss on time performance with their direct reports, they’ll certainly offer creative excuses for the company’s lackluster performance and why they can’t do much better.
Even if Air Canada executives try to hold employees accountable for the company’s poor results, it’ll never stick. Employees will argue with management about why it’s not their fault instead of providing solutions. If the CEO won’t take any accountability, why should they?
Here is a critical leadership lesson that most people in leadership positions never learn:
Leaders must earn the moral authority to hold others accountable.
Before others will allow their leader to hold them accountable, they must first see their leader hold themself accountable.
Accountability Starts at The TopGreat leaders set the standard of accountability and performance by taking ownership of problems and empowering others to find solutions. They do this by teaching their team the difference between explanations and excuses.
Explanation: An analysis of all the factors that contributed to the problem, including personal mistakes, to identify solutions.
Excuse: A justification for poor results to absolve oneself of accountability.
Explanations are helpful. Excuses are not.
Great leaders teach accountability first by example, then by words, in three simple steps:Resist the urge to blame or make excuses.Acknowledge how they contributed to the problem.Focus on fixing processes, not punishing people.
Creating a culture of accountability and high performance starts at the top. You can’t inspire accountability in others until you model it yourself.
Accountable leadership is the keystone of a culture of excellence and high performance. When leaders don’t model accountability, organizations collapse on themselves under the strain of finger pointing, excuses, and no progress. But when they do, the whole organization is strengthened as everyone becomes more willing to take ownership of problems and solutions.
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November 27, 2023
How to Manage a Poor Performer and Elevate Every Employee’s Performance
What’s a manager supposed to do when a team member doesn’t follow proper procedures, puts the company at risk, then lies about it or refuses to accept responsibility?
Most managers would say, “Fire them!” However, could certain leadership practices prevent the situation from reaching that point? Let’s investigate.
A construction client told me about a problem employee whom we’ll call Frank. Frank would routinely write technical reports and send them directly to the client without having them reviewed by someone else, which was against company policy. Not only would he circumvent the policy, sometimes he would add someone else’s digital signature to make it appear like they had reviewed it. Frank would use language in the report such as “always” or “guaranteed,” which could become a serious legal liability for the company. He would even make a point of saving the reports on his own personal drive instead of the common drive where they were supposed to be saved, presumably to hide what he was doing. Moreover, when his manager confronted him with discrepancies between his report and what was actually occurring on the job site, he wouldn’t admit to any wrongdoing and would sometimes even lie to cover his tracks.
Frank’s manager had been dealing with Frank’s deceitful, dodgy behavior for years when her manager intervened. He addressed his concerns to Frank in an email and demanded that Frank confirm when these changes would be made. Frank didn’t like being taken to task, so he quit and left his manager to clean up the huge mess he left.
Clearly, Frank should have been fired long ago, but did things have to reach this point? Is there anything Frank’s managers could have done to turn Frank’s performance around or make it easier to fire him much sooner?
Here are three practices that managers can apply now to not only address poor performance, but also to help elevate the performance of all employees.
1. Agree on Expectations of Each OtherVirtually every relationship breakdown—at work or otherwise—can be traced back to unmet expectations. Managers become frustrated with employees who don’t meet their expectations, but often it’s because those expectations were never clearly articulated.
Likewise, employees who feel their manager or employer aren’t living up to their expectations of fair and respectful treatment may retaliate in passive-aggressive ways.
Unmet expectations break relationships.
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix! Managers can avoid a lot of disappointment and friction if they simply meet with each of their direct reports to discuss expectations. The question each person should ask the other is:
“What do you need from me to be successful and enjoy your work?”
Here are some example expectations a manager and an employee might agree to.
MANAGER EXPECTATIONS
EMPLOYEE EXPECTATIONS
· Meet Deadlines. Once you agree to a deadline, I expect you to do everything you can to meet it. If you don’t think you can meet a deadline, tell me well ahead of time, so we can work together to try to make it.
· Follow Procedures. Some tasks are so important that we established procedures to reduce the chance of error. Follow them every time. If a procedure isn’t working for you, tell me, so we can try to improve it.
· Take Ownership. Follow through on your assignments. My job is to help you work through obstacles, not take over. Admit your mistakes, so you can learn from them. It’s fine to acknowledge constraints, but focus on solutions.
· Feedback. I expect you to tell me if you see me doing something that is counterproductive or if I do something that bothers you. I will never reprimand you for trying to help me improve or to improve our relationship.
· Clear Direction. Explain the “why” behind requests. Set clear timelines and standards of performance.
· Training. Don’t expect me to know how to do things I’ve never done before. Give me proper training if you want me to achieve desired outcomes. Provide examples, templates, or procedures for important tasks.
· Autonomy. Specify my decision-making authority and be flexible about when and where I do my work. Then trust me to use my time wisely to get it done.
· Increasing Responsibility. If I am getting my work done well, keep giving me more challenging work to advance my career, and help me move less challenging work elsewhere.
· Feedback/Recognition. Please tell me how you truly feel about my work, and make sure to recognize good performance so I can know what to aim for next time.
When managers and employees agree to expectations such as the ones above, it makes it easier to address unmet expectations. Here’s the key: expectations must be written and kept in a shared location for them to be of use. It’s impossible to rely on expectations when you are going by memory.
In Frank’s case, when he kept circumventing procedures, there should have been consequences. A question his manager might have asked is, “What should happen, Frank, if you don’t follow proper procedures again?” Like a good parent, managers must discuss consequences in advance and then follow through with them.
Any behavior that looks sneaky or dishonest should be immediately called out as such. Repeated breaches of trust should be dealt with quickly, directly, and firmly.
Many managers and HR professionals only think to clarify expectations with employees once a problem occurs. When managers clarify expectations up front and give team members the opportunity to do the same, it facilitates feedback and mitigates friction points before they happen.
2. Meet Regularly One on OneYou can’t hold others accountable for results if you don’t meet with them regularly. The word “regularly” means a recurring meeting in the calendar, not the usual day-to-day communication to ask and answer questions. In-person one on ones are ideal, but virtual works great too when in-person isn’t practical.
There’s a big difference between day-to-day communication and regular one on ones. Here are a few things that can happen during regular one on ones that don’t happen during everyday communication.
1. Follow-up. When an employee knows they must provide a face-to-face status update on assignments by a certain date, something magical happens: stuff gets done. Deadlines and face-to-face communication are great motivators.
2. Process Improvement. Discuss the root cause of problems instead of just fighting fires. Brainstorm ways to work smarter and improve processes to reduce errors and achieve better results.
3. Feedback. Provide each other with feedback about how well you are meeting each other’s expectations.
4. Celebrate Successes. Take a moment to reflect on recent wins and achievements. Point out the specific things the team member did that contributed to the success. Ask them what they learned from the experience.
5. Coaching. Team members who keep struggling with a certain task or responsibility need a manager who cares about them enough to investigate it together. When managers approach potential performance problems with patience and without judgment, they usually discover that all that’s required is a little training, demonstration, or discussing how to approach the problem next time. Carving out time for one-on-one coaching can save countless wasted hours fixing preventable mistakes or dealing with unnecessary turnover.
6. Wellness Check-in. Most managers are blindsided when an employee drops a resignation letter on their desk. But when managers take a moment to ask their team members how they are doing physically and emotionally, they might receive a response that they can do something about. Nothing else matters if an employee isn’t physically or emotionally well. Their work will inevitably suffer as a result.
These items don’t need to be addressed during each meeting, but they should be discussed regularly.
Find a consistent time that works for both of you, then put it on the calendar. Do your best not to cancel or be late; otherwise, you are sending a clear message that the other person is a low priority.
Ideally, managers should spend thirty minutes of scheduled one on one time with each team member each week. However, managers with larger teams may need to meet with each employee every two weeks. Managers with more than ten team members should consider reducing their scope so they can spend more time leading and less time fighting fires.
It’s unlikely Frank would have gotten so far off track for so long if he met regularly one on one with his manager.
Check out my FREE whitepaper on one-on-one meetings.
3. Address Performance Problems Face to FaceNever address potential performance problems or friction points in an email or a text. This is a sure way of making the problem worse.
A retail client recently told me that a store manager emailed their human resources manager to tell them they wanted to fire an employee. The HR manager replied that the store manager didn’t provide a sufficient explanation for the request. This infuriated the store manager, who escalated the issue. After an onslaught of increasingly disrespectful emails, five people ended up meeting to sort out the mess. This wasted time and the ensuing bruised egos could have been avoided if the store manager or the HR manager had picked up the phone to discuss the issue instead of firing emails at each other.
Here is one rule that will dramatically improve workplace culture and performance:
Don’t give negative feedback in emails.
If you think someone might not like to hear what you want to tell them, speak to them face to face. A phone call may also work if an in-person or virtual meeting isn’t possible.
It’s that simple.
The reason people prefer addressing conflict through email is because it feels safer. Its one-way communication designed to avoid dialogue. Emails about friction points usually include assumptions and don’t give the other party the opportunity to correct misunderstandings. Furthermore, people feel comfortable putting nasty comments in emails that they would never say to another person’s face.
The reason Frank quit is because he felt disrespected. Although Frank’s behavior is inexcusable, I can imagine he was feeling like, “You won’t discuss this with me in person because you don’t want to hear my side of the story.”
Email is great for some types of communication, but addressing friction points isn’t one of them.
For more on the subject, check out my article, No Negative Feedback in Emails.
Great Leadership Is About Habits & PracticesA lot of leadership literature focuses on personality characteristics or lofty, abstract concepts. In my experience, great leadership begins with one-on-one relationships and is demonstrated through a handful of powerful habits and practices.
1. Agree on Expectations of Each Other
2. Meet Regularly One on One
3. Address Performance Problems Face to Face
Do these three things, and watch the performance of those you lead improve, no matter how well they are currently performing.
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November 2, 2023
Why Leadership Development Fails and How To Make It Stick
Have you ever attended leadership training and then realized a few months later that you aren’t really using any of it? If so, you’re not alone.
Surveys show that most executives don’t think leadership training has made a lasting impact in their organization. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The reason leadership development fails to change behavior has less to do with managers’ willingness to learn and more to do with our outdated ideas about the way leadership training ought to be delivered. If you want your managers to adopt better leadership habits, you must be willing to change your approach to delivering leadership training.
Check out the following video to learn three ways to make leadership development far more effective.
Keep elevating others!
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September 26, 2023
How To Reduce Communication Overload
If you took some time off this summer, odds are you came back to an overflowing inbox. Tons of emails aren’t just annoying, they waste countless hours in a time when most organizations are struggling to keep up and employees are already stretched to the max.
In the following video, I share a few tips that every organization can implement to reduce the communication burden within your workplace and give you some precious time back. This video is an excerpt from a recent webinar I presented about time saving tips for managers.
Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel while you are there for more leadership content!
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September 15, 2023
How Delegating Can Save You 15 Hours A Week
If you’ve ever felt that you don’t have time to do the strategic work you should be doing, then this is for you.
I am excited to share a video clip with you from my latest webinar, “Doing More With Less,” about the crucial topic of delegation and its impact on individual and organizational success.
Did you know that managers spend a staggering 35% – 40% of their time on tasks that could be easily handled by someone with less experience? Just imagine what you could achieve with an additional 15 hours every week!
If you think saving time is the only reason to delegate, think again. That’s just one of many benefits of delegating, which I share in this video, that you, your team, and your organization could be receiving.
The video below provides some insights and a reminder that leveraging this powerful leadership responsibility and skill will make everyone’s work more enriching and engaging.
Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel while you are there for more leadership content!
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June 19, 2023
How to Engineer Solutions to Your Biggest Problems
Believe it or not, your brain often unknowingly walks past many of the real causes of your problems when it is searching for solutions. It’s true; we’re all wired to “jump to conclusions.”
We have a glitch in our mental wiring called the fundamental attribution error. Researchers have discovered that when we see a problem, we tend to ignore situational factors that contribute to it and instead focus on the person closest to the problem and blame them.
For example, when I see you slip on a floor, I conclude that you must be clumsy. Never mind that the floor was wet. You should have been more careful.
This is why when we hear about major disasters, the first response from reporters and people in authority is usually to “find the person responsible.” We tend to look for people to blame instead of looking for situational or systemic factors that contributed to the problem.
When two Boeing 737 Max 8’s crashed less than five months apart, the immediate and overwhelming response from media, politicians, and the business community was to blame the crashes on the presumably lower standard of training that the pilots of the doomed Indonesian and Ethiopian-based airlines received. Never mind that:
A captain of one of the ill-fated flights received his training in California.Boeing intentionally omitted a backup for the type of sensor that failed on both planes because it would require additional pilot training and delay production.To solve a design dilemma, Boeing installed a computer program no one knew about that could take control of the plane. The sensor failures erroneously triggered this program, which crashed both planes.Our brains are wired to blame people for problems instead of considering situational or systemic factors. To solve our most important problems, we must adopt a new model of thinking that prevents us from jumping to inaccurate or incomplete conclusions.
The Systems ApproachThere are basically two ways of explaining human-related problems: the person approach and the systems approach.
The person approach assumes that people-related problems happen because people are careless, lazy, and/or incompetent. This is our default approach. Consequently, our natural response is to blame, shame, and punish people and then forcibly provide more training.
The problem is, these methods can’t cure human fallibility. Even the most competent people get tired, distracted, and forget things they shouldn’t because of our physical and cognitive limitations.
The alternative to the person approach is the systems approach. The premise of the systems approach is that people are more likely to make mistakes when their environment doesn’t support the right behaviors.
The systems approach acknowledges that human beings make mistakes and will always make mistakes. That is a given. With this in mind, who is truly responsible when someone makes a mistake, the person who made the mistake or the person who designed a process that assumed people wouldn’t make mistakes?
Changing other people is hard. Changing the process, the environment, the system, or your own behavior is far easier because you have much more control over them. This is what it means to engineer the solution.
Engineers solve problems by fixing things; they do not try to fix people. Engineers design processes and products to account for human fallibility. They don’t assume people will follow the instructions 100 percent of the time, so smart engineers build fail-safes into their products to make it difficult for people to get the wrong results and make it easier for people to get the right results.
Person-centered solutions are like an auto manufacturer trying to get people to wear seatbelts by putting a sticker on the car dashboard that reads “Put on your seatbelt.” Sooner or later, people will stop noticing the sticker and forget to put on their seatbelt. The results would be deadly. A systems solution is to program cars to produce an annoying beeping sound if the driver’s seatbelt is unbuckled when the car is moving.
Four Strategies to Engineer the SolutionEngineered solutions address the root cause of problems. Person-centered solutions simply hack at the branches and ignore the inevitability of human fallibility.
Here are four strategies to engineer sustainable solutions to your problems.
Make reality transparent.Clarify the critical steps.Automate the right behaviors.Design the environment. Make Reality TransparentImplement feedback mechanisms to help people adjust their behavior to get better results.
We often don’t get the right results because we don’t know that we’re off course. Here are some examples of making reality transparent.
Outdated Production Report
Problem: Production data changes every hour, but production reports are produced once a week. Production meetings take twice as long because most of the meeting is spent adjusting and updating the data.Person-approach solution: Ask the person creating the report not to do it until right before the meeting. Hope they don’t complete it too early or too late and don’t ever get sick.Systems-approach solution: Create a real-time production board with batches represented as cards and production stages represented in columns. Each time someone finishes a batch, they move their batch card to the next production stage so production data is always visible and up to date.Identifying & Influencing the Source of Employee Performance
Problem: Low employee engagement and productivity and high turnover.Person-approach solution: Blame employees for being lazy and having unrealistic expectations.Systems-approach solution: Assess the quality of each manager by asking employees to complete an anonymous evaluation of their manager. Provide managers with the feedback. Assess managers again six months later. Compare the improvement in managers’ scores with the change in employee engagement, productivity, and turnover data. Clarify the Critical StepsCreate simple, clear standard operating procedures for anything you want done flawlessly.
We often make mistakes because we can’t remember every step in a given process. Here are some examples of clarifying the critical steps.
New Employee Keeps Making Mistakes
Problem: When the senior technician is off sick or on vacation, the new employee keeps making mistakes that delay production.Person-approach solution: Tell the new employee “You should know how to do this by now.” Consider firing the new employee.Systems-approach solution: Create a simple standard operating procedure for each critical process that includes essential steps and pictures/screenshots.Poor Social Media Judgment
Problem: A marketing coordinator published an untasteful post on the corporate social media account.Person-approach solution: Tell them to use better judgment next time.Systems-approach solution: Create social media guidelines and a policy that at least two people must confirm the post meets these guidelines before it’s published. Automate the Right BehaviorsEstablish triggers that remind people of the right thing to do.
Our cognitive ability is limited, and our world throws too much information at us to retain and act on. How can we remember to do everything we should?
Here are some examples of how to automate the right behaviors.
Late to Pick up Your Child
Problem: Getting distracted and forgetting to leave work on time to pick up your child from soccer practice.Person-approach solution: Endure shaming from spouse.Systems-approach solution: Put a reminder in your calendar or phone for every meeting you need to attend and for every personal commitment you make.Poor Career Development and Succession Planning
Problem: Poor career development and succession planning leads to hardly any promotions, disengagement, and turnover of succession candidates.Person-approach solution: Commit to discuss the career development of succession candidates with the executive team when we are all less busy.Systems-approach solution: Create a recurring quarterly meeting that all executives are expected to attend to discuss how to facilitate the career development of succession candidates. Design the EnvironmentDesign workflows that make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.
Grocery stores place coolers in the back of the store that contain the most perishable and most frequently purchased items, such as milk and eggs, to increase the chances that customers will purchase other items on their way to the coolers. Pretty smart, huh?
Have you wondered if the design of your home and work processes are working for or against you? Here are some examples of how to design your environment to maximize success and productivity.
Accidentally Deleting a Template
Problem: An employee accidentally deleted a template for which there was no backup.Person-approach solution: Tell the employee not to be so careless. Train them on the difference between templates and work in progress.Systems-approach solution: Create a folder named “Templates” in which to store templates and another folder named “Work in Progress” in which to store work in progress, so templates cannot be confused for working documents.Increase Online Sales
Problem: Data shows that only 10% of visitors to the company’s revenue pages make a purchase.Person-approach solution: More advertising to increase the number of visitors.Systems-approach Solution: Streamline the checkout process, and switch to a one click checkout process for return customers. Fight Your Bias; Make Your Life EasierModern life is challenging, but it can be much easier.
First, resist your natural inclination to blame problems on the people closest to the mess. Then put your systems thinking hat on, and use one or more of the above strategies to engineer solutions to your problems.
If you do this, three things will happen:
You will get better results.The people you lead will get better results.Your relationships will improve.Skill-testing question: which strategy was used to create the beeping seat belt reminder?
This article is a brief summary of “Engineer the Solution” in the book How Leaders Can Inspire Accountability .
The post How to Engineer Solutions to Your Biggest Problems appeared first on Michael Timms.
April 18, 2023
One Rule That Will Dramatically Improve Your Workplace Culture
Sandi is an up-and-coming marketing manager at a big tech company—at least she thought she was. Then she started receiving negative feedback in emails from her manager. Things began to go south when Sandi had what she thought was a typical one-on-one meeting with her manager. Shortly after she returned to her office, Sandi received a recap email from her manager that included improvement feedback that wasn’t discussed at the meeting.
Over the next few weeks, Sandi received several other emails with negative feedback from her manager, most of which she felt was incorrect, unjustified, or nitpicky. Suspecting that her manager was creating a paper trail to put her on a performance improvement plan, Sandi decided to stand up for herself.
She sent a reply to the latest critical email from her boss and refuted each point her manager had made, including screenshots of her work to prove her case.
This was only Sandi’s first retaliatory strike. Shortly after that, Sandi told her story of unfair treatment to a writer for a major business news outlet, who published her ordeal to millions of readers, naming Sandi’s employer.
The article didn’t indicate what Sandi planned to do next, but we can safely assume it is one of two things: she either quit soon after the article was published, or she is spending most of her working time plotting her next move against her employer.
Blame Bombs Are a Culture KillerSending negative feedback via email is a coward’s way of avoiding difficult conversations. It is toxic to relationships because it feels like an attack—like a bomb being dropped out of nowhere.
It’s not just terrible bosses who send negative feedback via email. It’s also the most common passive-aggressive tactic used by coworkers to blame each other for problems, particularly across department lines.
Blame is the number one culture killer, and email is blame’s safest delivery vehicle. It strikes from a distance, so the attacker doesn’t have to look the enemy in the eye.
Employee engagement is the first casualty of a culture that tolerates blame. Blame bombs not only destroy relationships and teamwork, but they also waste a massive amount of time and energy as the vicious cycle described in the story above escalates and repeats.
Turnover is another casualty of blame culture. Employees might cite other reasons for their departure in their exit interviews, but many people leave because they are simply tired of the battle and having to remain constantly vigilant to protect themselves. There is a reason why the word “attrition” is used to describe the loss of people in both war and business.
Can your organization afford to lose even one person to blame bombs?
The Best Defence SystemThis type of passive-aggressive behavior may happen in some organizations more than others, but it happens to some degree in every workplace that doesn’t institute the following rule:
Don’t give negative feedback in emails.If you think someone might not like to hear what you want to tell them, speak to them face to face or via a video chat or a phone call if a face-to-face meeting isn’t possible.
It really is that simple.
The only exception to this rule is when one person asks another to review their work. In that case, the feedback is requested, expected, and is often best provided in writing.
Insecure people hide behind texts and emails, and their relationships suffer as a result.
Strong people pick up the phone or wait for the next scheduled one-on-one meeting to discuss potential friction points.
For more tips about how to give and receive feedback, check out my blog, or contact me about my workshops for management teams.
Michael Timms
Originally published March 7, 2023 on LinkedIn.
The post One Rule That Will Dramatically Improve Your Workplace Culture appeared first on Michael Timms.
March 28, 2023
Should I Write Up My Employee?
Do you have an employee with performance problems?
Every manager will have to deal with a difficult or struggling employee many times throughout their career. Many business professionals refer to this as “performance management.” I call it “leadership,” because its in these situations that a manager’s leadership is truly tested and revealed.
Leadership isn’t necessary if everyone who reports to you intuitively does exactly what you want them to do all the time.
A senior manager at a client organization recently asked me whether he should write up an employee for performance problems. I recorded my answer to his question in the following 3-min video. My suggestions are primarily intended for a non-unionized workplace, but the principles about trust and relationships apply in any context.
Although I can’t tell you how to solve your employee performance problems in a single video, I’d like to share some important tips that will save you a lot of grief.
Click the image below to hear my suggestions.
YouTube - Michael Timms I sincerely appreciate the manager who asked this question, and I encourage you to ask me questions in the comments section or simply reply to this email.
If you would like your management team to learn better ways to deal with employee performance problems (and prevent them in the first place!) you should check out the Creating Accountability Workshop Series.
I’d be happy to connect with you to discuss ideas about how you can help your managers increase employee engagement, reduce turnover, and achieve their goals more consistently.
Keep elevating others!
Michael Timms
The post Should I Write Up My Employee? appeared first on Michael Timms.
September 6, 2022
Why Leaders Should Build Confidence in Those They Lead
When I joined a construction company as the head of their new human resources department, I was full of confidence. I had successfully built an HR department earlier in my career and had just finished a stint at a top consulting firm that gave me exposure to cutting-edge tools and practices. I was brimming with ideas and enthusiasm.
A few years later, I left that company completely demoralized, my confidence and my work performance at an all-time low. What happened during that time? My boss systematically destroyed my confidence. He blamed me for problems, rubbed my nose in my mistakes, raised his voice at me, reduced my decision-making scope, and never complimented my work or recognized my contributions. My self-confidence began to erode, which triggered a vicious cycle of low performance and even lower confidence, each reinforcing the other. I felt like I couldn’t do anything right, so I focused on trying not to make any mistakes, which, of course, increased the mistakes I made and took my focus off of producing results. I would overthink assignments, miss deadlines, speak timidly, and generally appeared incompetent, which reinforced my boss’s belief that I was incompetent.
Have you ever felt like that?
Could you be causing someone who reports to you to feel like that?
Whenever you notice repeated poor performance in yourself or others, there’s a good chance that low confidence is a contributing factor.
True Confidence: The Ultimate Performance EnhancerConfidence is your belief about your chance of successfully completing a task. Confidence is not the same as self-esteem. Self-esteem is how much value you place on yourself. Unlike confidence, self-esteem isn’t necessarily based on any valid criteria and is not the cure for society’s problems, as it was once thought to be.
Confidence, on the other hand, usually comes from successfully completing a certain task. Past success supplies your brain with hard proof that you are good at something. This knowledge motivates you to set higher goals and continue to improve that ability, even in the face of adversity and setbacks. This means a little confidence can lead to greater success and even more confidence, igniting a virtuous cycle of high performance.
Believing you are good at something is the single greatest predictor of success after ability. Studies have consistently shown that knowing you are good at something increases your odds of success in that activity and that, conversely, proven skills can be overruled by self-doubt. Confident people outperform insecure people in virtually every context, including chess tournaments, on sports fields, on sales teams, and in management decision-making.
True confidence is based on self-awareness and a desire to improve. When you know what you are good at and want to get even better, you tend to be more willing to acknowledge your weaknesses and admit mistakes, which, ironically, is the surest path to even greater success. In fact, only confident people can accept critical feedback and acknowledge their mistakes without it shattering their self-esteem.
Conversely, overconfidence is having an unfounded or inflated belief in your ability to accomplish a certain task. Overconfidence is usually detrimental to performance because an inaccurate view of our abilities leads us to make unwise decisions, such as under preparing for challenges or taking foolish risks.
Leaders Elevate OthersThroughout my career of helping managers become better leaders, I’ve heard numerous managers say something like, “I don’t want to give too much positive feedback to my staff because I don’t want them to get a big head and ask for a raise.” This is one of the stupidest things a manager can think or say given what we know about how confidence affects performance.
Of course, we don’t want to produce more narcissistic egomaniacs than we already have in the world. However, leaders build true confidence in those they lead and improve their performance by doing the following four things.
1. Resist the Urge to Blame When Things Go WrongDoctors understand the responsibility that society entrusts to them, so they take the Hippocratic Oath to “first do no harm.” Unfortunately, managers do not take a similar oath to care for and elevate those they lead, but they should. Many managers unwittingly destroy their employees’ confidence and subsequent performance by the way they respond to problems.
Nothing kills confidence, initiative, and trust faster than blame. Our brains interpret blame the same way they interpret a physical attack, focusing all our energy on defending ourselves instead of on solving problems.
Leaders can address problems directly without blaming by asking, “Where did the process break down?” This question implies that most problems are caused by several factors, including flawed processes, and makes it far more likely that others will acknowledge their role in the problem.
2. Delegate Like It’s Your Most Important Job, Because It IsBecause managers are so busy, we tend to delegate in a hurry and frequently forget to communicate important information and provide sufficient support. When the completed assignment doesn’t meet our expectations, we often fail to notice how our sloppy delegating set the delegate up to fail. Failure hurts self-confidence, damages trust between managers and subordinates, and leads to even worse performance. This is one of the most common sources of fractured employment relationships and turnover.
Delegation is the essence of leadership and should be regarded as a manager’s most important responsibility. There are certain tried and true steps of effective delegation, including clearly defining the desired results, providing resources such as templates and checklists, and meeting regularly to review progress and to provide coaching and encouragement.
Effective delegators encourage those they lead to make decisions by clarifying the types of decisions they should make on their own and the types of decisions they should discuss first. If they don’t, delegates are likely to assume they can’t make any decisions. Great delegators regularly ask, “What do you think we should do?”, to help others build their decision-making skills and confidence.
3. Align Work with StrengthsEffective leaders learn the strengths of the people on their team and do their best to tailor work assignments to leverage people’s strengths and work around their weaknesses. When managers create a strengths-based work environment, they don’t try to shoehorn employees into rigid, static job descriptions; they modify job descriptions to fit each team member’s strengths.
This is precisely what sports coaches do—organize players to maximize individual talents and compensate for each other’s weaknesses.
Nobody wants to go to work to fail, but that’s exactly what managers set their people up to do if they don’t take the time to uncover their strengths and align their work to their abilities.
4. Foster a Culture of LearningThe belief in your ability to learn and grow is the only reliable and sustainable source of confidence. When your confidence is based on how smart you are or how good you are at something, it will be shattered the moment you are proven wrong or fail. However, when your confidence is based on your ability to learn, your mistakes and failures make you stronger and wiser, and you know it.
Unfortunately, many corporate cultures stifle learning by focusing exclusively on “hitting the numbers” and treating failure as a career death sentence. Consequently, studies and experience show that employees hide their mistakes, making it impossible for them or others to learn from them and improve.
The most powerful way to foster a culture of learning is for leaders to share corrective feedback that they have received or mistakes they have made and how it helped them. Only truly confident leaders do this. Not only does doing so make it safe for others to accept critical feedback and admit mistakes, it also showcases how feedback and mistakes can lead to higher achievement.
Great leaders and organizations institutionalize learning by implementing lessons-learned debriefs at regular intervals or at the conclusion of every project. The purpose of debriefs is to extract lessons learned to identify what went well and why, and discuss what didn’t go well and why. These lessons can then be infused into the organization’s DNA by sharing them with the rest of the organization and by changing standard operating procedures to increase the odds of future success and reduce the chance of errors.
Be the Leader You Wish You HadTrue confidence is the quiet assurance that comes from knowing your strengths and being determined to learn from your mistakes to become even stronger.
If you want to increase the confidence and performance of those you lead, set them up for success when delegating an assignment, align their work with their strengths, and create an environment that fosters learning. But first, avoid damaging their trust and confidence by resisting the urge to blame.
As you help those you lead build their confidence, their performance will increase, they will find greater success, and they will become more willing to learn from their mistakes and find even greater success.
The post Why Leaders Should Build Confidence in Those They Lead appeared first on Michael Timms.
