The Effective Manager

by Mark Horstman

every direct brings to the relationship with you, the boss, all of his previous relationships with his previous bosses.

There are only TWO times to do phone O3s: (1) when your direct is not collocated with you, and (2) when a normally collocated direct is traveling or a manager is traveling, and a face-to-face O3 is not possible.

Primary Focus on the Team Member Regularly Scheduled Never Missed 30 Minutes (and the 10/10/10 rule) Take Notes

Every interruption is caused by the person being interrupted, when that person stops what she's doing.

focusing on Horstman's Law of Project Management: WHO does WHAT by WHEN.

General Eisenhower's philosophy: planning is everything; plans are nothing.

The second critical manager behavior that leads to results and retention is communicating about performance.

When the average manager gives feedback, the focus is on what happened.

The purpose of performance communications (and therefore feedback) is to encourage effective future behavior.

The Manager Tools Feedback Model has four simple steps: Step 1: Ask. Step 2: State the Behavior. Step 3: State the Impact of the Behavior. Step 4: Encourage Effective Future Behavior.

The direct needs to be able to listen and hear you in order for you to be sure that the direct will be at least able to understand what future behaviors you want him to engage in.

Step 2: State the Behavior

The Words You Say.

Your choice of words makes a difference in business results.

How You Say Those Words.

Your Facial Expressions.

Body Language.

Work Product. What you do and how well you do your job are behaviors as well.

Quality: How does your work compare to accepted standards of effectiveness and excellence? Quantity: How much work have you done?

Accuracy: Does your work require rework, or does it meet generally accepted practices in your profession? Timeliness: Do you meet deadlines?

Documents: You're responsible for the communication (and analysis and ideas) you present to others in written and electronic form.

Step 2 of the model always begins with the words, When you.

when I start step 2 with “when you” it makes it easier to focus on their behavior and the impact, and for me to be simple, casual, and quick. It forces me to stay away from telling a story or giving some background.

In step 3, we state the impact that the direct's behavior has had. These words form the effect part of cause and effect, the reaction part of action and reaction, and the response part of incident and response.

But effective feedback isn't about waiting until there's a pattern, and it doesn't get better with age.

Our guidance is to look for small impacts that happen every day.

Step 4: Encourage Effective Future Behavior

In step 4, we either ask for a change in behavior or say thank you for behavior that we want to encourage.

When we are giving negative feedback, we are asking the direct to behave differently. We're not punishing the past mistake, because we've already forgiven it.

The easiest way to ask the direct to do this is, “Can you change that?” All this requires from the direct is an affirmative answer. Once you and your directs are comfortable with the model, you can also use “What can you do differently?” This is a more difficult question, because it requires the direct to come up with an alternative right away. Here are some examples: “Could you change that?” “Can you do that differently?” “What can you do differently?” “How could that be better?”

Giving immediate feedback is ideal.

don't give feedback that's more than a week old. Why? The reason is that your ability to remember precisely by then has faded enough so that you may not get it right, and accuracy matters when you are giving feedback.

The anger is what's driving my desire, not my direct's effective future behavior.

If you're angry, don't give feedback. Period.

If your directs know you're angry, then the feedback is about you and not about them, and that violates the purpose of the feedback, both in terms of encouraging good behavior and in terms of changing bad behavior.

If your purpose is to remind your directs of their mistakes, again, that is not in alignment with the purpose of giving feedback. If you're giving feedback, then your purpose is to encourage effective future behavior.

We don't want to confuse the need for delivering feedback quickly with an emotional urge to do so.

Delay means you hold off giving feedback for a bit.

And let's go back to the purpose of feedback: encouraging effective future behavior. If your direct becomes defensive, he is being defensive about what happened, or why it happened, or that it didn't happen. These are all arguments about the past.

Once you've given the feedback and the direct has pushed back, pause, smile, apologize, and walk away. You've made your point. Don't let the direct try to win her argument simply because you've

If one of your directs is making mistakes in several different areas of behavior, give them feedback in those different areas.

Systemic feedback changes what you are talking to your direct about and raises the level of consequences associated with a continued failure to change.

Standard feedback is about small behaviors. Systemic feedback addresses the moral hazard of a direct committing to new behavior but then failing to follow through. We can tolerate directs who make mistakes. We cannot tolerate directs who repeatedly make commitments they don't keep.

You should use systemic feedback when you have already given six instances of standard feedback in a period of time that indicates a pattern, and the direct has not been engaging in the behavior they've committed to.

You use systemic feedback before you think about considering organizational sanctions, like a performance improvement plan.

Standard feedback is delivered lightly and professionally, without engaging in shows of power, anger, or fear, whereas systemic feedback is more serious. It is not appropriate to deliver systemic feedback in a casual way.

After 12 weeks of having One On Ones, you can start the process of delivering your performance communications in the Manager Tools Feedback Model.

Tell your directs that negative feedback isn't about punishment; it's about doing things better. It is about the future.

Give Only Positive Feedback for Eight Weeks Don't give any negative feedback as you're learning to use the feedback model.

shoot for one item of feedback to one direct per day as you start.