simplerich

Surprisingly the hardest part of managing people for me isn’t the big mistakes members of the crew make. It’s the little things. On a day to day basis the big mistakes are pretty rare. It’s not often that something huge comes up. What does happen is that little things build up and they’re little, trivial things that don’t matter so I forget to mention them by the time I see the crewmember next. Then they do it again… and again… and again. Eventually there comes a point when I find that I’m dreading working after that employee because of the laundry list of things they “keep doing wrong to drive me nuts.”

Taken on their own none of the things are rule violations or deal breakers. I deal with those pretty quickly. Leaving the cash drawer not ready for the next shift. That’s inconsiderate but not a rule violation. Leaving the dusting/cleaning stuff out where it doesn’t go. It’s not a rule’s violation, but it’s frustrating. I feel like I have to clean up after them. The problem is I don’t notice right away. Let me be up front about this. It’s MY problem. If I noticed sooner I could point out what they’re doing and ask them to do it differently and I’m positive they would.  But, by the time I notice I’ve noticed EVERY LITTLE THING they do that gets under my skin and it seems like they do it on purpose. Some of this is because I’ve had people do it on purpose to tweak my nose. This isn’t usually the case though.

A long time ago, the first time I quit smoking the head of Human Resources called me to see if I was OK; to ask what was going on in my life. I said nothing and wondered aloud why he asked. He said he’d gotten more write-ups for little things in the past week than he’d gotten from me for real things in the past year. I blushingly asked if he’d throw them away for me and I’d apologize to the crew and we’d talk about things. So, he did and we did.

If I were to be honest with myself I’d say I’m there now. Outside stressors are impacting not just my work, but my perception of my employee’s work as well. So, I’ve got to find a way to talk to them about the things they’re doing that are inconsiderate and that are real, not just perceived wrongs on my part. Leaving the paper towel dispenser empty after your shift is real. It’s not good. Leaving food on the counter after you work is real. That’s messy, inconsiderate, and gross; with spring coming on it’s an invitation to infestation. Having bills facing weird directions in the drawer isn’t real but it drives me nuts.

I suspect a crew meeting will be the best time to go over a bunch of the stuff. We’re over due anyway and I can make sure I catch everybody at once. It’ll be quick, not beat anybody up for little things, and it can tie in with the new checklists we’re supposed to be implementing next month so it won’t be just me holding a gripe session.

Will I remember to catch these things earlier next time or will I just let them build up until I have an employee I don’t want to work after because they’re driving me nuts with their thousand little things that they’re doing “just to irritate me?” I’d like to say I’ve learned from past mistakes on my part and I’ll nip it in the bud before it gets too bad. I’m pretty sure I’ve said that before too.

Here’s the funniest part of all this and then I’ll let you go back to whatever you were doing before this popped up on your radar. I actually DO talk to my employees. I talk to them every day. We talk about a lot of stuff. And one of the things they almost always ask is, “Is there anything I should be doing better or differently?” or “Is there any change in the way things happen that I need to know about?” It’s probably asked in one way or another 4 out of 5 times we talk and at no point have I EVER remembered to talk about the things I’m talking about now. They really are minor and maybe if they weren’t happening just as I was getting going on the work day they wouldn’t be so much like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. If I were to say to them when they ask, “Say, could you remember to X.” They’d smile and nod and probably not do it again. I don’t remember until it’s too late though and now the list is too long… it’d feel to them like I was beating them up and that’s not fair. Again… as you read this please remember I KNOW this is my fault. It’s not my biggest challenge with managing others. It’s my biggest problem with managing myself.

I’m a manager. I’ve been a manager for a lot of years. One of the things I hear all the time is how we shouldn’t strive for fair. We should work to be consistent. We should treat all employees the same. We aren’t supposed to do things differently for different people as that makes things unfair for the rest of the crew.

Human Resources loves to beat that drum. The human resources department at the company I work for now worships at that altar to the point where if they add a form to the new hire pack for California it goes in every state’s new hire pack, Connecticut get a new form? So do the rest of us… our new hire pack is currently very consistent… it’s also fifty five pages. I joined and left the Navy with less paperwork.

Discretion is the difference between a good manager and a great manager. Any manager-by-binder can treat every employee the same in the  name of consistency. Heck! The modern day class room allegedly teaches at the pace of the slowest student so that they are consistent and all students get the same exposure. Teaching and managing to the lowest common denominator gets you loads of low denominators. Blech. Who wants that? No denominators left behind indeed!

Needless to say I was amazed to see Rosa over at Talking Story putting on the Consistency is King bugbear costume. And not doing it ironically either, she appeared to mean it. You could have pushed me over with a new hire pack! (That’s not as hard as you’d think. You roll that bad boy up and you’ve got a sheaf of papers to be reckoned with!)

Employees aren’t the same. To treat them the same is a weird, lazy way of doing things. Heck! I’m an employee myself and I hate it when I’m treated like everybody else. If you treat me with my 15 years with the company experience the same way you treat a manager that’s been on the job for a week you’re going to get on my very last nerve… and waste a lot of both of our times. But it happens… all in the name of being consistent.

Once upon a time I hired a guy I didn’t know was dyslexic. Treat him like everybody else? Sure! Fire him in no time for it too. It’s amazing how his mistakes would pile up when reading was required. Oh wait… that’s illegal. We’re supposed to try and work with handicaps. I did. Not because I had to to comply with the law, but because he was a great customer service type person. He wound up working with a keyboard with colors all over it. He became an excellent Sales Associate and didn’t do much the same way anybody else did things. We adapted the job in a lot of ways to work with him. Again, not because it was the law but because it was best for the store. Some things I didn’t require of him that were part of his job. How to fill out membership applications when he could neither read nor write? I had him have the customer fill them out (specifically verboten in our handbook at the time), explaining to them that he’d forgotten his glasses that day and if they could do it for him it’d be a great help. That’s just one example, and it’s only a big deal if you knew what a big deal was made of it in the handbook to not do that.

I once had an assistant manager who was excellent in every regard, except he would come in late to work more than was acceptable. The only person who would know was me. He only ever relieved me. So, I let him. One day when I was on vacation he wrote an employee up for being late to work. When I returned and saw it I was beside myself. How can he hold them to a standard he couldn’t meet with any regularity? From that day forward I held him to the standard he had held them to. He lasted another month before I fired him for breaking the rule he himself had set when he wrote up the person for being late. In the next 10 years they never had an assistant manager as good as he was. We both lost out on that one. (I’m was a new manager at the time and allowed him to get away with that… I’m not sure how I’d react to that today.) We’re still in touch these years later and he agrees he shouldn’t have done what he did since he was setting up a situation where he wasn’t living by the rules he set and that was what’d irritated me so much. I don’t let managers have a set of rules for themselves that are more lax than the rules they have for their employees. That’s no good.

Expectations are important. We have an eval form that scores people from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). If I’m evaluating a manager who has been with the company for three months will their level of ability be the same as the manager who has been here for five years? Are my expectations the same? If both managers performed at exactly the same level would they get exactly the same score? To be consistent probably… but that’s either brutally unfair to the newer person, or profoundly not expecting much out of the one that’s been doing it forever. My first set of evaluations I do for new managers when I was a district manager was based on where I thought they should be with the experience they had. My expectations for a long-time manager were different than for someone new to the job.

Attendance is something we look at as well. What’s an excessive pattern of absences? I’m a single guy with no kids. I rarely miss work. What if I were a single parent with two kids, a pre-schooler and one in first grade? Those little germ factories get sick all the time, and once they’ve got a fever good luck getting a sitter to take them! That means missed work. Sure, the family medical law protects parents from discrimination for taking care of their kids, and it should! But if I’ve got two otherwise equally qualified employees, one with kids who cause them to miss work and one with no kids who never misses work… what’s the answer there? Who gets the promotion? What if they both want it? What is the right answer? No clue. Luckily I haven’t been in that position.

If I get an employee I see potential for I’m going to nurture that potential. I’m going to ask more of them. I’m going to give them as much room to grow as they want and I’m going to let them. If I’ve got someone working until the next semester starts… someone marking time in a position to get some money before their next round of courses starts up and they leave… how could I possible be consistent with them? One’s looking at learning, growing, and getting their own store one day, and one’s waiting for a new pair of shoes before they cut and run. There are places for both types of employees as well. As long as they perform the work well I don’t expect every employee at an entry level position to be looking to be CEO in 20 years. I’ve taken jobs I needed just for a while, and I did my level best at them while I had them. That’s OK!

In Rosa’s article she talks about the manager being consistent with their values and the employees knowing what the manager’s decisions will be based on. They’ll be based on a well stated value-system that everybody knows. I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. She doesn’t say “consistent=same” I should point that out before she blows up my comments… that’s not her, that’s an HR Dept. person somewhere else saying that.

So, consistency making me crazy? Only when it’s misapplied. There are scads of reasons we should treat people consistently, and there are scads of reasons we should not. There are reasons there are different rules for different people. It’s not the same to say consistent = same. I’ve done it and railed against it for a long time here. But the thing with consistency is people want to know what to expect. That’s what’s great about consistency. If they expect you to behave in a way that moves you towards your stated goals THAT’S a consistency I can get behind. It moves you forward. It’s acceptable to the employees who get to deal with and live with your decisions. The objections to rules not being the same is when it is possible for other employees to cry “favoritism” and that’s what makes HR’s hair stand on end when consistency isn’t the same as… well, as same. If an employee feels like another employee is being favored that’s dangerous. When they feel like they’re being discriminated against then that’s not good either. But if they know the reason the ball bounced the way it did in advance, and know that it would bounce that way every time based on values-based decisions that they’re aware of… then they know how to get the ball to bounce their way. That sort of thing is, I think, OK. It’s a playing field that everybody can play on. It’s one in which we all have a chance at succeeding, thriving, growing, and moving forward.

So, yeah… consistency does make me crazy when it’s used interchangeably with “the same.”  But consistency that is based on clearly defined rules and expectations, that’s just fine. That’s how chess is played. All pieces don’t move the same way and yet nobody claims the bishops are unfairly advantaged over the pawns. Sometimes the rules are different, and as long as everybody knows ahead of time what the rules are and how they’re applied, that’s consistent and fair without being the same. That doesn’t make me crazy, that’s not the hobgoblin of the manager-by-binder. That’s just fair. I can live with fairness… as long as it’s consistent.

A friend of mine sent me this and it is/was timely and sums up how I felt about New Year’s Resolutions this year.

I didn’t make any resolutions this year. I instead thought I should work on personal improvement overall… Not one area, but generally. I wasn’t clear on a process but it was starting with better health, and I started eating more in line with that. More vegetables, less eating out, more cooking from fresh, less meat, and smaller portions. I quit my gym membership, but that was a money thing. I wasn’t using it any more so paying was stupid. I’ve got home gym stuff I can use and it’s already paid for. I plan to continue the work on my NaNoWriMo novel, it needs work. Just lots of stuff to do, but no plan. I know me and that was, already a recipe for failure. If I don’t have a plan of attack I tend to flounder. It’s why I was so successful learning to run with the Couch to 5k Program. It was very structured. I do well with structure.

Enter Train your Monkeys.

An inner “monkey” is a drastically undeveloped part of yourself. You may think at it like a long term goal which was never attained. Or like a deeply buried dream you never dared to dream until the end. Or something you declared to yourself you’re going to follow up through, but never did.

A “monkey” is a goal frozen in its evolution. Like a genome which was never able to reach the human form. It was only strong enough to mimic its human shape but at the core level it’s just an unfinished project.

That is perfect! He’s got a previous post where he is going to Train 12 Monkeys this year, one a month. That’s a little more erm… that time line won’t work for what I’m going for with some of them, but I like the idea. I also like the idea that if I can pick a certain number and areas I can post progress as it happens… some sort of bloggy-accountability. So, look for me to be listing my monkeys soon.

One tool I know I’ll be using is the Seinfeld Calendar. First — I need to get a calendar. This is one where online isn’t as good. I want it on the wall and I want the big visible to everybody checks on it.

I’m excited. I’ve gone from vague numinous thoughts to something a little more concrete. Yeah. I know we’re all supposed to start on January 1st, but I was so incredibly sick then… it wasn’t a good time to start. I want this to be well thought out. So, first step is to name the Monkeys and post to you guys what my goals are and how I hope to measure them. I may or may not give the metrics and time lines on some of them… I haven’t decided yet. What I will do is have the post where I name the monkeys done by next Monday. Come back and see what the monkeys are.

You got any monkeys that need training? Let me know!  I’d love to hear about them!

I haven’t blogged in ages. During November it was because I was participating in 2010′s NaNoWriMo event in which writers all over the world attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the 30 days of November. I managed to complete the word count in the time… but I don’t feel like the story’s finished. Rather than re-hash the whole idea I’ll aim you towards the post where I talk about that over at simple-writing. I encourage you to go read the most recent post if you’ve read the previous posts there and are wondering what happened next.

Work since the step down, I hesitate to use the word demotion as it was only in title and pay, but in personal and professional satisfaction I’m much happier now. I believe I was promoted to a place of increased happiness by stepping down from a place of increased stress, what was I saying again? Ah yes… Work since the change in position has been interesting in the Chinese sense of the word. “May you live in interesting times.” I lost an employee. I gained an amazing employee as my assistant manager. He’s every bit as good as I am when it comes to salesmanship. For the first time ever I’ve got an employee who can beat me in $/ticket. (That’s how much each receipt is worth and is used to measure the sales associate’s salesmanship along with the items/ticket.) It took him two months to catch me, and in his third month here, this past month, he passed me. I was elated. So was he.

Other employees watched and one wondered aloud if I wasn’t threatened by him. “Aren’t you afraid he wants your job?” I was asked.

“Not at all! I KNOW he wants my job. I also know that I’m not a sales person. I’m the manager who also sells. So just being a great salesman doesn’t automatically make him a great manager, or even a good one.”

“I’d be afraid of him if I were you.”

“You’d be nuts if you were. I hope he keeps trying to beat me. It makes both of us better. Makes both of us try harder.”

We had a sales contest, just a local one at the store I put on. See who can sell the most of a product that’s a good product at a good price, easy add-on material. We tied. He was crushed. The other employees were elated. They were scared to death he’d win and I’d be crushed. So, when we got more in (we stopped the contest only because we sold 4x more than our stocking level in a week and ran out.) he started a “Sudden Death” re-match to see who would win. He couldn’t abide a tie. He won and has been very gracious about it, but he’s thrilled. It’s so exciting to see an employee so excited to sell, to excel, and to want to be better than me rather than just saying, as many have, “He’s the best. Just let him do it. I can’t ever be that good.” He’s a breath of fresh air.

I’m thrilled to have him on my crew.

I’ve been manager here for three weeks now and I think the number one thing that’s made a difference in the crew hasn’t been inspiring speeches, reams of paperwork filled out on them, or the wealth of memos and written instructions I’ve left, but is instead, the example I set. Surprisingly this most basic piece of management advice was Rosa Say’s most recent blog topic over at Talking Story:

It’s advice all managers hear, and will never question, for it sounds so sensible, so right. “Set a good example.”

As I inherited this crew from the previous manager there were a lot of cultural things that were different from the way I do things and the way I wanted things done. The previous manager wasn’t doing things wrong necessarily, just differently. I wanted things done MY way. Not out of a power trip thing, but out of an “I do things differently” sort of sensibility. 

We have a book we use every shift at the start and ending of shift change. It would wind up wherever it wound up. There was no place for it. So, every shift change started with looking for the book. It was a minor time-waster, and a minor aggravation, but it was unnecessary. So, I made a place for it. I made a place for almost everything behind the counter and at the meeting I walked through the importance of being able to find things to looking competent and feeling confident behind the counter. It’s frustrating to be looking for the stapler when there’s a line. So, after going over it and talking about how important it was to me. (Yeah, I know, doesn’t sound important, but it’s a safe/easy example.) Then after that I made sure I put everything back where it went every time I used it. If I found it somewhere else I put it where it went. I didn’t say anything to them, I just moved it. If I saw them put it somewhere else, almost everybody had a favorite place to put it but no two favorite places matched up, I would, while talking to them about something so I know I had their attention, move it back where I wanted it. I’d put it there and extend my hand as if I were saying “Stay!” to a dog. In under a week everything stayed where it was supposed to be.

This sort of thing is minor I know, but I’ve applied the same way of doing things to everything I want changed, steady, unrelenting pressure by example. I greet every customer every time. I make sure to BE the behavior I want to see. I make sure they see it. I make sure I don’t take any “warm body” days right now. (A warm body day is one of those days when you’re just not feeling it so you sort of coast through the day as a warm body, not bringing your A game, but you’re there so it counts right? No, not really.) 

How’s it going? I think the store’s numbers show that it’s working.  Customer service is improving, the store’s appearance is improving, and it’s happening by my making sure I’m modeling the behavior I want to see more of. If I forget to do something I apologize to them and fix it. I draw attention to where I dropped the ball, and they’re not stupid, they get it that if I’ll point out where I made a mistake I’ll certainly notice where they did. This also means to them that I don’t have a set of rules for them and one for me.

Some managers do the “do as I say, not as I do,” thing when managing. They’ll take short-cuts or leave out steps they want their employees to follow, and I’ll admit to having done it in the past, but not when I’ll get caught. I know. That sounds terrible. Just like a parent can drop the F-bomb when they’re in the car alone if they do it when the kids in the car it’d be pretty disingenuous of them to think the kids wouldn’t pick up on it. So, the more I make sure I do it right all the time, the more likely I am to always do it right as well. It becomes a habit, and my habits will, hopefully be the habits my employees pick up on as well. 

So hats off to Rosa for her timely post. And all you managers out there… if you do as you say too things will go better for everybody!