Trick yourself into seeing it for the first time… again.
When your biggest problem is your most senior employees then your biggest problem may be you! As a manager I’ve been fortunate to get crews that stick around and continue to work for me and then I have said to myself, “Well, they know what they’re doing. There’s no reason for me to nag them to do what I know they need to do.”
I think we all know where this is going. I, as their manager, have to find ways to keep those old dogs doing old tricks as well as new tricks… tricks they’ve done so often they can do them faster and better than I can in a lot of cases. They should be able to… they do them more frequently than I do. Well, they used to.
One way an employee starts slipping is when we, as their managers start slipping on noticing if they’re doing what they’re supposed to. We start not noticing, or start making excuses for them. “Well, Mongo missed his cleaning list last night, but I’m sure he’ll do it next time he works.” Once the long-time employee has his manager trained to make his excuses for him he’s golden. We have to notice when they do it exceedingly well and we need to notice when they do a bad job.
I don’t have the answers on how to keep all my employees motivated all the time. I can’t do that. I’m not a good pusher. I don’t lead well by nose-rings either. I’m better at, I think, getting people to want to do better because they want to. That for me is more important. The whole carrot/stick approach works if you know what carrot people want. Money isn’t the only carrot out there and it’s not the best carrot in my experience. That doesn’t mean I have never used it or that I’ll never use it again. Just that it’s not the only one out there.
One of the dirty tricks about management is that sometimes it’s more than just getting great results out of people. Sometimes it’s getting to watch someone go from being a fair employee to being a great employee… during that transition, when the employee is growing their manager is, to use an ugly word… manipulating that employee… tricking them to do things. There are a ton of books out there on the subject and I love reading them. Helping them help you keep them engaged is often as easy as just asking them to help you. They’re long-timers for a reason. They are typically the type who are willing to help.
Complacency is the danger on those long time employees. Lately I’ve been battering my head against that wall at a couple locations and have gone with the shake things up for the sake of shaking things up route. New checklists. New cleaning lists made by new people. New duty distribution. What used to be store front jobs now merging with store back jobs. Having the lifers… anybody here over five years has earned that title from me (January is 15 years for me)… having the lifers help make the lists, and having them intentionally trade jobs with other employees in other departments has been helpful.
None of this is new. None of this is earthshaking or digg fodder I know. But it’s important… and as a long time employee myself. I’d forgotten it until recently. I’d gotten used to seeing the same thing and seeing what I expected to see recently. My boss recognized it in me though. He didn’t come right out and accuse me of going through the motions, but he did point out that I was enjoying special projects more than day to day stuff and that I tended to do better on special projects than I was doing on the day to day. He never said I wasn’t doing well on the day to day stuff… just what areas I was doing better. Then he stopped talking and waited for it to bug me enough to come back to him.
So, look around… are you going through the motions? Are your employees doing it? I was. I’m better now. I’ve been very lucky with bosses lately.
Posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009
Under: Employees, Employers, Management | 2 Comments »