simplerich

Back to work after a week of vacation and I think… no, I know I could have done with another week and still not wanted to go back. Mostly that’s because the weather is absolutely beautiful now and I don’t want to be inside because I know Old Man Winter is shuffling his way this direction.

If any of you manage anything/anybody I want to recommend a friend of mine, a super nice lady from Hawaii, Rosa Say. As the economy does what it’s doing and seems to steadily ignore what we want it to do Rosa’s post are encouraging. (When I say nice in this context I mean that as a compliment. She’s been encouraging and friendly to people all over the Internet and takes time from what I know is a busy schedule to encourage people whether she’ll ever meet them or not. This is a hugely good character trait in my book.)

http://talkingstory.org/2011/10/3-job-options-of-merit/

I am in favor of encouragement in the face of adversity for a couple of reasons.

1) If looking down the barrel of a bad situation being defeatist or negative won’t help at all. Just the opposite, hope, optimism, and mutual encouragement can make the going smoother even if they don’t address the problem at hand. Attitude is everything.

b) Sometimes weathering bad times isn’t a function of anything we do at all… sometimes big giant things happen to us, hurricanes for example, that we can’t really do anything about and we just have to wait for it to go away and there are times when being open to new ideas, optimistic, and encouraging foster and create an atmosphere where the community going through it all comes out the other side stronger because of the relationships or ideas formed during the hardship. It may be that sitting around a campfire in the devastation of a tornado brings up conversations that “When this is over we should…” and those things, those building blocks actually come to pass.

iii) Encouraging small behavioral changes, things we CAN do helps build things in areas we can change. I can’t personally impact the nation’s economy. What I can do is help my employees with savings and maybe with opportunities to increase their pay with sales incentives and bonus programs. I can’t help everybody, but I can help those I can help and just because it doesn’t stem the tide it does start a ripple that can add to other ripples and maybe that will be enough to change things… or at least moderate things a bit.

IV) Being pleasant to be around is a good thing.

There are a lot of opportunities out there to tear people down for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s just fun to be an ass. I’ve met people who sincerely believe that by bullying or threatening they can help a situation. I happen to really enjoy a debate online as long as nobody resorts to name-calling or takes it personally and starts acting bat-poop crazy. Can all situations be dealt with by applying a healthy dose of Pollyanna-juice? Not all, not all the time. But I can’t think of a situation where being a jerk or making threats was more helpful than being supportive or helpful and encouraging. Maybe it’s time to start a random act of kindness campaign if nothing else.

Take a minute, go check out Rosa’s blog and http://talkingstory.org/2011/10/3-job-options-of-merit/ think of what you can do to help the situation of yourself AND someone else.

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.

Twitter, 140 characters (letters, numbers, & spaces) to convey an idea has no trouble coming up with some great, short, one-liners.

sayalakai RT @aycangulez Mgrs aren’t hired 2 contribute a linear amount of work, they’re hired 2 amplify the value of those around them ~Scott Berkun

The hardest fire I ever had to do of a manager was not because he was a bad employee but because he was a terrible manager. I couldn’t convince him that doing the entire job himself was what I was after. I wanted him to have his employees help out around the store a little. After all, we were paying them to do more than show up and collect a check. He was always busy. He was the hardest working manager I had except he was never doing HIS job but always doing his employees’ jobs.

He wasn’t developing his employees or empowering them or allowing them to grow. He was creating a store full of place-holders and people who held the counter down during a shift. He never left them anything to do. He was an outstanding Sales Associate, but he was so afraid someone would challenge him he never challenged them.

When I lost him after doing everything I could to help him, honest, I tried to convince him to let them do their jobs, I didn’t lose the store. I lost one more employee after the manager. One person who had become so used to doing nothing that they were content to do just that and resented any opportunity to do more. The rest all stepped up with a degree of relief. They were waiting to be asked to step up and do something and when they were they were good.

None of them had stepped up when they weren’t asked to though. While there was a leadership vacuum none of them stepped up to fill it. While there was no to-do list and no delegated duties not a one of them consistently tried to shine or asked for more to do. None of them got the manager’s job. Managers are developers of other employees, but they must also be self-starters to a large degree. And while these employees turned out to be salvageable, they hadn’t shown the spark that said to me they were the right choice for management.

I was at someone’s house recently and it was time to eat and their son was playing a video game like Mario or something… it was a game with a save point. You couldn’t just save it wherever you were and if you turned it off you lost all your work since the last save point. I’m not a fan of those games and honestly wish they would make an emergency shut off function. The Mom, hereafter referred to as The Evil One, said it was time to eat, and within a minute walked up and turned off the console. The kid was really upset. I didn’t blame him. I reacted as if it’d been me that was kicked in the stomach. That was a massive loss of work and time on his part. The Evil One… she didn’t get it at all. I didn’t argue with her in front of her son. I’m not that stupid. But I did bring it up later. Her response was that it was just a game and he could do it again.

The part where he was doing everything he could to get to the save point, going backwards to save his progress was lost on her. The part where the game was something he cared about and put a lot of time, effort, and practice into didn’t matter because it was “just a game.” I got it though. I understood why he was upset and sullen through the meal. I kind of was too.

It’s just a job. She’s just a clerk. What she does doesn’t matter. If her boss gives her a project to do but doesn’t follow up on it, recognize her good work, and show areas where she could improve or maybe do it differently that would either make her job easier, faster, or more efficient she’s going to notice. She’s going to feel like her job doesn’t matter… like she doesn’t matter. All of that she agreed with, and when I put it in that context she understood that respecting a person’s time, effort, and work was important. She didn’t play video games, but recognized that it took skill, time, practice, and work to achieve anything.

The whole thing brought the idea of respect to me. Not respect for people over us or who have control over us. That can be fear as much as respect and it’s often something that people KNOW they are supposed to do. Respect for people who work for us, and over whom we have some power is vitally important for managers. I’m reminded of the USA Today article CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character. It’s one of my favorites. I have it saved as a file on my desktop to read once in a while. But it’s more than that.

My goto book for things when I’m formulating a post is often Managing with Aloha by Rosa Say. I read her take on it first and sometimes it kills a post because she’s already said it so well I’d just mess it up, or I find that I’m about to write a post that is almost just like something she has said so I don’t rather than appear to be plagiarizing her. To avoid that happening this time I didn’t refer to her book. I really wanted to make this post. What I did find on her website though, about respect, is a great list of things employees want from their employers, and I would argue it’s things that anybody would want from anybody else, and the core of the things is respect for them as a person, an employee, and for them and their work and time. Here’s the post on Rosa’s site. It’s certainly worth a read.

The Mom in the story above, I won’t really refer to her as The Evil One, did recognize that she could have asked him to switch off the TV, or get to a safe spot and turn off the sound and join us. She did recognize that she’d shown him disrespect, and that wasn’t a lesson she wanted to teach her six year old. She didn’t want him to feel like what he did didn’t matter. She didn’t like it as an employee, wife, or daughter, and didn’t even realize she was doing it to her son. She apologized to him and they hugged and it was very cool.

Pokemon Platinum does allow me to save it at any point, which is nice. I play it whenever I get a minute. No save spots for me!

In a recent post I suggested “This American Life” the podcast to any of you out there looking for a good podcast. As it happens it’s also a radio show that I can listen to on Iowa Public Radio. This week’s show, entitled “Ruining It for the Rest of Us.”about the whole “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch” concept. There was some scientific research done to determine the effect of a toxic co-worker on a group of employees and what the result was.

Unsurprisingly, it wound up being true that an annoying, negative, depressing, bad apple DID spoil the whole bunch. Something we all knew to be true backed by science.

Tonight I fire up my reader to catch up on the blogs I enjoy and found in Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching, a question from a reader that Rosa addresses. “How do I stay positive working in a place where most of the employees are so deeply negative? …” There was more, but that’s the important bit.

But is the corollary true? Can one really positive, helpful, outgoing, cheerful person bring up the level of performance? I think it can. While I think it’s easier to spoil something than it is to fix something, whether it’s soup or a work environment, I also believe that it’s possible for a person to be a catalyst for positive change. Wow… catalyst. That one jumped out at me.

There’s a really important aspect of a catalyst though that MUST be taken into consideration if you decide you want to be the catalyst for change in your negative office or work-space. In a catalytic converter the platinum or palladium are used over and over again to catalyze a reaction but they aren’t consumed in the process. They bring about the change, but they’re not consumed by the change or the work they do in the change.

If you’re killing yourself at work, burning the candle at both ends trying to be the one to keep the ship from going down in flames into a morass of psychic sludge — don’t do it. That’s right. I said it. Don’t. Do. It. You’re not being a catalyst then and you’re trying to do something, by yourself, that isn’t working. I’m not saying give up and be a Negative Nelly like everybody around you, but admit that you need help, and ask for it from co-workers and higher-ups. If you’re in management it may very well mean you have to fire quite competent people who are stinking up the joint with their cynicism and ugly attitude.

There’s a lot of behavior that can be trained, modified, and worked with, but not all of it can. Someone who carries a cloud of doom around with them in their own heads is an incredibly unhappy person and there’s a good chance they’re perfectly happy being perfectly miserable and inflicting it on everybody else. Prune them like a dead branch as soon as you find out that’s the problem. If they’re a chronic crêpe hanger wish them the best in their future endeavors, but for crying out loud don’t tie their anchor around your neck or the necks of your team. Their co-workers deserve better than that.