Are Your People a Drag or a Sail?

We staff a lot of new initiatives. And we’re often brought in when executives want to rethink how they have staffed a position.

So I regularly hear how executives talk about the intersection of strategy and people. And some executives describe their current staff like a tractor pull–a powerful engine (strategy) is dragging a heavy sled behind it (the current staff).

Organizations often say “people are our most important asset” but people are also the source of most of your problems.  People often disappoint you. Top performers quit. Average performers often fail to deliver. Bottom performers threaten to sue. Departments go to war with each other. You spend less time than you want leading new initiatives and more time than you want refereeing internal squabbles. And when I see that, I usually see an understaffed, underfunded, underwhelming HR department awaiting further instructions from the executive team.

It does not have to be that way. In great organizations the culture fuels the strategy. The HR strategy supports the business strategy. Your systems, processes, expectations and rituals give lift and propulsion to your strategy, like a sail pulling you forward.

People are not your most important asset. People come and go. How you harness human achievement is your most important asset, and your only enduring source of competitive advantage.

The systems and processes of dealing with people are where the magic happens.

• How you attract great people, and how you recognize and deploy the internal talent you already have
• How you align the people to the mission.
• How you consistently inspire top performance from your people.
• How you retain the most valuable and drive away the least valuable.
• How you gracefully exit the people who no longer drive results.
• And how you do all this at a price you can afford.

Competent HR keeps you in compliance with the law. Great HR practices transform people from a drag into propulsion.

What Neuroscience Tells us About Employee Retention

Some people dismiss employee engagement research as ”too fuzzy.”   Not me.   We have successfully integrated key principles of employee engagement research into our recruiting process.   I know it works.    And naturally, as a headhunter, I’m also fascinated with how people make decisions, so I devour research on the neuroscience of decision-making.  

So when Scott Campbell used neuroscience research to validate the key findings from one of my favorite books on employee engagement, it was chocolate and peanut butter for me.  Do yourself a favor and read Scott’s post on Leader’s Beacon.  Here is a quick snapshot of his argument:

“Different (employee engagement) research organizations classify their findings in different ways. David Sirota’s formulation is a simple and useful model. His research suggests that there are three factors that, together, create strong engagement: the employee’s sense of (1) fair treatment, (2) achievement, and (3) camaraderie.[i]

Neuroscience has been making remarkable progress in helping us understand the workings of our mind and illuminating central truths about human nature. In some cases, the findings confirm the validity of existing leadership and organizational practices; in other cases it is turning them upside down. In this case, it confirms that Sirota’s three factors are real, universal, and fundamental in fostering a strong level of engagement in employees.”

David Sirota’s book,  ”The Enthusiastic Employee“  - is probably the most important book on HR that nobody has ever read.   That’s unfortunate because the authors really did their homework.  Over a decade, Sirota Consulting surveyed 2.5 million employees who worked for 237 organizations in 89 different countries.  If you want to know why your new hires just aren’t that into you anymore, read the book (or at least read my blog post about it).  

And now, coming from a completely different perspective, neuroscience is backing up Sirota’s findings.   Delicious.

The One Question to Ask About Performance Problems

Imagine you are working under a tight deadline.  You have a thousand other things to do and are relying on your employee Frank  to give you a key piece of information.  Your deadline passes and Frank has not given you what you asked for  …  and this is not the first time he’s disappointed you.  

If I only allowed you to ask one question to get at the root cause of Frank’s performance problem, what would your question be? 

Where you look to find solutions to performance problems reveals quite a bit about you.  Once I know where you reflexively look, I can predict both your business results and your employee turnover with almost clairvoyant accuracy.

While assumptions can simplify decision making, many assumptions about employee performance are really quite toxic to your workplace.   As Albert Einstein once said: “Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”   And I find that far too many common managerial assumptions are dead wrong.

For example: some managers reflexively assume that performance problems are caused by an employee character flaw.   They reflexively think that the offending person’s work ethic must be the root cause of the problem.   You can hear their assumptions yelled across the room.  “That lazy SOB Frank is trying to sabotage me.  He KNEW I needed the sales figures by Friday.  He sent them late on purpose!”  Their questions revolve around Frank’s motivations.  “Why is he so lazy? Is he trying to make me look bad?”     

More highly evolved managers ”never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by misunderstanding.”  So their assumptions and questions are different.  They assume he was doing the best he could under the circumstances, so he must have lacked the training or ability to do his job.  They ask “Did he not understand what I expected?  Was he not smart enough or not trained how to do his job?  Is he even in the right job in the first place?”

But these kindhearted souls also miss the mark.   Because they are still looking at Frank for the solution to the problem.

The most effective managers look beyond Frank and instead look at the work environment.   In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath observed that ”What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem … we have a systematic tendency to ignore the situations and forces that shape other people’s behavior … the error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.” 

Two years ago I wrote a post called “Why Won’t Your People Step Up” centered on my favorite quote from W. Edwards Deming:  ”A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

So when you have a performance problem, you need to ask the right question, the question that puts you at the very center of solving the problem once and for all:

“How have I created the environment to allow this failure to repeatedly occur?” 

How the CEO Should Manage Managers

An article in Inc.com, by Darren Dahl recommends that CEOs pay more attention to managing their management team.  The key is to set clear performance expectations, and then hold the person accountable. 

It sounds simple right? 

But what’s the best way to do that with managers? Here are some strategies to consider:

Set the Vision — Make sure your managers know what they’re managing toward.  Consider sharing clear short-term (one year) and long-term (three to five year) business plans.

Document the Details and Communicate — Make sure your managers have all the tools necessary to do their jobs well. Consider developing some kind of structured feedback regarding performance. You cannot over-communicate the vision, goals, and strategies for your business.

Measure Tasks — A key part of knowing how well a manager is doing is to establish straightforward quantitative measures based on the performance of their team, says Jenni Luke, national executive director of the Step Up Women’s Network, a national organization for women. Luke suggests looking at objective goals set in your business plan, such as:

• Is your manager achieving revenue targets?
• Are they operating on budget?
• Have they developed new customers?

But performance targets are not enough.

Dr. Alice Waagen, founder and president of Workforce Learning, a leadership development company in Washington, DC, says you can establish clear performance guidelines about what makes a good manager, such as:

1. A good manager creates short- and long-term goals for all staff.
2. A good manager sets realistic standards and targets to measure progress to plan.
3. A good manager provides specific, objective feedback on an ongoing basis, informing, enlightening and helping staff members improve their performance.

“For managers to succeed, they need time to learn to manage” Waagen says.  “And then, once they do, they need to be held accountable for their results.”

In my work, I often see managers held accountable for business outcomes, but rarely do I see them evaluated on the management fundamentals that lead to peak team performance.  Dr. Waagen is definitely on to something there.

Managers with Really “High Standards”

“I need to warn you, Mary has really high standards.”    You hear this kind of comment all the time in the workplace.   But what does it mean, really?   Is Mary some impossible-to-please overly demanding ogre?  A detail-obsessed punctillious, nitpicking micromanager?  Often the person issuing the “warning” secretly thinks so – Mary’s behavior is a mystery to them.

More often, in my experience, those “unrealistically high standards” are completely warranted – and absolutely necessary in order to achieve some kind of business imperative. 

Here’s a fact that may surprise you: 

Top performers are powerfully attracted to managers who know what they want to achieve – managers who hold people accountable to high performance standards. 

Demanding managers make you bring your “A” game to work every day.  They don’t tolerate “dead wood” – so they often have great people on their teams.  They quickly recognize good work.  And they often get things done in record time.  Top performers are very comfortable with clear expectations, and like accountability – they want to keep score.  They also recognize the fact that  that working for demanding managers is great for their career.

Often the manager with high standards is someone who sets very high expectations for their own personal performance, and is unwilling to accept mediocre performance from people around them.  Maybe the manager with “high standards” simply outworked everyone around them in order to achieve their  professional success, and made quite a few personal sacrifices along the way.   They cannot imagine working any other way, and simply cannot work well with people who have different values.

Maybe the manager with “high standards” knows exactly what is at stake, and what the true cost of errors or failure on the project would be – they are willing to be really demanding in order to achieve a worthy goal.  (When you are an engineer working on the moon launch, you want to be sure you did your math correctly).

In my experience,  the manager with high standards is rarely an unrealistic, self centered, egotistical jerk.  Far more often the person judging them is simply unaware why such high standards are so important.

Thank You for Quitting

Surveys indicate that 2010 is going to be a year filled with employee turnover.  And that is a great gift to every manager who is still not managing performance tightly.  Every time an average employee resigns, you have a chance to rethink who should be in the job, to upgrade the caliber of your team, to completely reset expectations.  You have a chance to make a fresh start, and take a big step forward toward your goals.  

And you would be wise to take advantage of that opportunity.  The national economic indicators show a long slow recovery from this devastating recession – we still have quite a bit of turbulence ahead of us. There will be no rising tide to lift all boats, instead we will all be lifting our own boats. 

So read this before you start hiring, and read this before you orient your new team members, and … remember to be grateful for the opportunity turnover has given you. 

Actually, while you are at it, is there anyone on your team you would not fight to retain if they were considering resigning?  Because anyone you would not fight to keep is probably someone you should think about replacing, or at least managing more tightly.

Why You Need to Keep Score

As human beings, we don’t like looking at our failures.  So we tend not to keep score, or create hard metrics for our own performance.  We’d rather not think about our mistakes and prefer to focus our attention on more pleasant things.  

And while not keeping score may be pleasant, it’s also very expensive.  Because hidden in your failures are some positively huge expenses, and some really valuable lessons about how to prevent similar mistakes in the future.

I recently helped a client analyze the cost of their hiring mistakes, and also the cost of their hiring delays.  It took a few weeks to go back and gather some data about hires, terminations, and lag times between various stages of the hiring process.  And it took a day or so to pull it all together and get it into a spreadsheet.  

We found hundreds of thousands of dollars in (preventable) lost profit.   We found more money than the entire annual budget for the HR department.   Much of the lost profit was in places that were not even considered a “problem area” before we rigorously looked at the numbers.   This is in no way unusual, in fact, I have yet to do one of these projects for a professional services organization where we did not find hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost profit.    Now my client knows exactly where to focus their attention to recover all that lost profit – and that’s great news.

Numbers matter.  So as a big fan of rigorous metrics, you’d think I’d be happy to look at my own data.    I’m not,  I prefer to avoid it.  So knowing that, I set up a process where I have to look at it.   Ellen, our Operations Manager, gathers and publishes our statistics regularly.  Everyone in the company can see the data, and when I look at it  I always find a surprise, some area where I can do better.   I always learn something that I would never have learned otherwise.  For me, failure is a great teacher.

So today, Ellen and I reviewed the retention statistics on our placements.  I must tell you, this is much less fun for me than it was before the recession because we count layoffs against our statistics.  (I think performance problems are often buried inside of layoffs, so we count them ‘against’ our numbers).

And although the search industry prefers to look at retention rates for 18 months, we look at them for 3 years - anything less just lets us off the hook too easily.   Our promise is to help our clients hire people who get results, and it’s devilishly hard to measure real results and long term contribution during an executive’s first eighteen months on the job.   So if we only counted retention rates at 6 months or a year, we would not learn much about how our placements actually contributed to our clients getting results.  

So here are the retention stats on our placements:

• 91% are still on the job at 12 months.
• 90% are still on the job at 18 months.
• 85% are still on the job at 3 years.

I must tell you, these numbers were much better last year, so this was painful to look at, but you know what?  I learned something by forcing myself to look at them.   By sharing them with you, I am challenging myself to further improve next year …. and that’s the real reason you can’t afford not to keep score – it’s fuel for improvement.

Your Best People Are Getting Calls

I just spoke with someone we placed last year.  The good news is that she is happy and thriving, likes the direction of her organization and sees a bright future for herself.  (Yeaa hiring process). 

But she also mentioned something you might consider bad news, or even find disturbing.  She said “I don’t know why, but I’m getting all these calls lately for people wanting me to interview for other jobs.” 

I don’t find this remotely disturbing.  And it does not surprise me one bit.  I already know your best people are getting calls from recruiters all the time. 

Your best people are routinely being enticed by your competition  – that’s just the reality of the workplace now.  And the trend is accelerating.  Top performers are always in demand, but sites like LinkedIn have now made it far easier for recruiters to find everyone.  Information just flows more freely now than it did 10 years ago.  

Ignore this shift at your peril.

Your top performers are weary, overworked and may be thinking it’s time for a change.   Some surveys say Gen X is most likely to leave first, many others say high performers are most vulnerable to leaving.  Either way, Fred Crandall, a senior consultant for Watson Wyatt says “There’s going to be a lot of churn” (turnover) as the economy improves.  I would have to agree, more turnover is coming.

So what are you doing to retain your key players?  How are you making them feel valuable?  What kind of performance feedback are you giving?  Studies show that most people want more feedback and many people feel ignored by their manager. 

If you accept this new reality that your best people are constantly being recruited, then you might want to check out what Les McKeown has to say.  He lists 7 Reasons Your Top Performers Are Likely to Leave in 2010, and 3 Things You Must Do Now to Retain Them.

Great Recruiting is Useless …

Many people think the reason to engage a search firm is to get help with recruiting.  Well, maybe that approach works in big companies, but in small firms great recruiting is nearly useless by itself. 

Hiring smart internal recruiters, engaging search firms, and even turning the recruiting process over to a Recruitment Process Outsourcing firm is usually a really bad idea for small organizations.  Recruiting support is absolutely useless to you …  if it is not integrated within a cohesive hiring and performance management process.  (NOTE: By cohesive, I do not mean expensive).

Do you ever wonder why so many companies are frustrated and disappointed by contingency search firms?  It’s because most contingency search firms do not see it as their “place” to suggest how organizations should run their internal hiring process.  So contingent search firms focus their efforts on recruiting.  But great hiring involves a lot more than recruiting.  And you can’t improve the whole until all the parts work together:

• Simply writing up a typical job description is useless … unless you first understand what performance is expected from the new hire and what competencies are necessary to drive that performance.
• Developing an interesting and complete job description and ideal candidate profile is useless … unless you reconcile your target hiring profile with market realities.  (You might find you have champagne tastes on a beer budget and may need to revise your performance expectations to fit the budget).
• Simply posting a job description on job boards is useless … unless you employ additional strategies to recruit less active job seekers.  You can’t make an intelligent hiring decision selecting from only those people who happened to see your ad.  Conversely, you should not avoid ads, they can be a good way to diversify and expand your candidate pool.  If you want great hires, it’s important not to limit your candidate pool to people found using any single recruiting method (including employee referrals).
• Simply recruiting more candidates (or paying an agency to recruit) is useless  … unless your hiring managers know how to interview and how to distinguish top performers from other candidates.  Research shows that most hiring managers do not use the best strategies to select top candidates.
• Simply doing a better job of selecting resumes and interviewing candidates is useless … unless you structure your interview sequence to provide a great experience for the candidates.   You can do more harm than good when your disorganized interview sequence reveals internal organizational conflict and indecision.
• Simply making the occasional good hire is nearly useless  … unless your managers have confidence that your hiring process can reliably produce great people “on demand.”   Until the hiring process is considered reliable, managers will always be reluctant to manage poor performers.  (When managers are confident they can “trade up” then performance management becomes much more effective.)
• Improving your hiring process is a fine start, but you will not be able to keep improving your process … until you follow-up on every hire to ensure that they achieved the business results you expected.   After all, getting business results is the whole point of hiring isn’t it? 

A great hiring process is a “force multiplier” for a great performance management process, and vice versa – both processes support and multiply the effectiveness of the other.  

But recruiting?  Don’t even think about spending money on recruiting until the rest of your hiring process warrants the investment – you will just be pouring fine champagne in a dirty, leaky, plastic cup.

Job Descriptions No Longer Describe Jobs

The most accurate part of many job descriptions is “other duties as assigned.”  The rest of it is just a dull list of responsibilities and qualifications lacking all context.  I read them all the time and can rarely understand what the job is really all about.

Any perceived relevance of the job description rarely survives contact with actual work – they are outdated the moment they are written. Rarely do they define the work to be accomplished, and they almost never define the goals to be achieved.  They are, quite simply, a relic of the industrial age.  In the Brand for Talent blog, Libby Sartain asks what’s next if the job description is no longer relevant?  She says:

“The changes of the past decade point to a different environment in which business must search for people. Instead of measuring talent needs by the number of jobs, the forward-thinking business thinks in terms of work—the incremental activities that it must successfully complete for the business to meet its obligations. The measurement of effort as work instead of jobs enables business to focus on output rather than on the input of people in specific roles.”

Hmmmm, measuring the outputs (results), instead of the inputs (activity) – that sounds like a Results-Only-Work Environment (ROWE) to me.  Are we finally moving from industrial age, activity-based time and motion studies and into the future of work –  managing for results?  I sure hope so.

We take this results-based approach in our consulting work with small to midsize enterprises.  At the start of each search engagement we ask the hiring manager what success looks like a year from today.  What will need to be accomplished in the next 12 months for the new hire to be considered a success?  What talents and abilities must someone have to drive those results?  What values fit well within the company culture?   We write it all up in a document we call a Hiring Blueprint.  But really, we could call it a “Results Description” – it’s what a job description could be (if it actually wanted to be relevant).  So how do we know our documents are actually relevant?  Because people refer to them frequently in performance management conversations.

In fact, one of the great joys in our consulting work is following up on the placements we’ve made.  During the first year, we check in with the hiring manager about every 3 months, asking not just ”How is Frank working out?” but ”What have you achieved together?”   We call and ask the candidate not just “How do you like the job?” but ”How does the job differ from your expectations going in to it?”   We judge our own performance by the accuracy of the performance expectations we set and the corresponding results that were achieved. 

Yes, we have an enviable track record of success on our placements, but this is not a “set it and forget it” approach – Results Descriptions change year to year.   Jobs change, unforeseen challenges emerge.  Growing businesses outgrow people, technology and market forces change the nature of the work, and eventually people outgrow jobs.  Work is not static, and job descriptions should not be static either.

If you agree with the following statements, it’s no wonder that very few firms hire effectively:

• The typical job description is useless in defining performance expectations.
• The typical resume is useless in predicting the job performance of the candidate.  

If the Job Description is no longer viable, let’s at least consider replacing it with the Results Description.  As to the resume, I have no idea what to replace it with… 

 (By the way, if you want to see a sample of our Results Descriptions, just take a look at our current searches).

Gap Creates a Results Only Work Environment

Businessweek reports that Gap headquarters followed the lead of Best Buy and went to a results only work environment, where you can work whenever, wherever you want – it’s only the results that count.   You can read more about ROWE here.

Obviously this kind of decision requires a culture with a high degree of trust, but just look at what they got in return:

“A post-pilot assessment conducted in February 2009 revealed that productivity increased 21 percent and quality improved 15 percent among the pilot group. Turnover plummeted 18 percent, down to 5 percent in 2008 over the year prior. Engagement scores spiked from 67 percent in 2007 to 86 percent in 2008, and work/life balance scores rose significantly from 72 percent to 82 percent”

This is the future of work. 

It’s time we moved past the management principles of the assembly line.   In this blog, I’ve posted articles on managing in a time of turbulence, the why old-school management fails in a recession, and why ideals are the new business models.  Thought leaders everywhere are proposing radical new models of management and leadership in response to the turbulence that has become our new normal.

ROWE is how employees want to work, and the initial evidence would seem to indicate it’s how you get the most work out of them.  So, if the results continue beyond media stories, we will surely see more employers going this way … Well, at least employers who want to be attractive to employees who take ownership of their results.  But, if you want to be like most employers whose poor management causes the morale of their new employees to plunge within 6 months, then feel free to ignore this idea.  It’s probably just a fad, like the internet.

Rock Stars, Glory Seekers, and Unicorns

Are you frustrated in facing a really complex problem?  Have all your attempts to solve it failed?  That is precisely when you must resist the temptation to hire a “rock star” or savior – someone who can magically solve all your problems simultaneously.   I often see companies who want someone to come in, understand a complex situation, create a strategy to solve it, then execute the strategy singlehandedly, then when it succeeds, hire a team to build on that success.  One magical person who takes all the risk, possesses all the knowledge, has a wide range of incredibly diverse skills, and gets results without rocking the boat, causing trouble or needing much help from anyone else in the firm.  They want a unicorn - a mythical creature that lives only in their mind’s eye.

Brandon Watson wrote a wonderful post “Under No Circumstances Should You Believe That You Need to Hire “Rock Stars.”  His point?  “You don’t need to hire the best employees, just the right ones.”  Brandon puts it this way:

“Hiring rock stars …  is inviting trouble because they are likely to be glory seekers who are thinking about their own personal rewards, and less likely to be thinking about the team.” 

(By the way, for more perspective on the hidden downside of hiring “rock stars” read BusinessWeek’s “Why Jerks are Bad Decision Makers“ profiling ex-luminaries like Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brother’s Dick Fuld,  AIG’s Joe Cassano, and Bear Stearns’ Jimmy Cayne).

So, if you want to lower your risk and increase your ability to solve complex problems, instead of trying to hire a unicorn/rock star, instead build a team of top performers - make sure every single job in your company is filled with a top performer.   Do that, and no rock star (with their toadying entourage of mediocre performers) will ever be able to compete with you.  So this begs the question of what, exactly,  is a top performer?  

“A top performer is someone who is capable of, and interested in, driving the business results you need – someone who will take responsibility for getting results within the norms of your company culture.”

So, now let’s come back to how, instead of hiring a rock star, you might go about solving your frustratingly complex problem, using your team of top performers.  Working together, one person might provide the context and institutional knowledge of the problem, another might develop the strategy, another might play the skeptic – challenging assumptions and flawed reasoning, another might focus on execution, and another might work on hiring the team and providing the project management oversight needed.   In short it probably takes the talents of several people … and that is a good thing.  Because the future is only going to move faster and be more complex than anything we have seen so far – and whatever problems you are facing now will look easy compared to the problems that are yet to come.  So you’re going to need that team, trained,  primed, experienced,  and ready to tackle your next challenge, and the one after that.

The Hidden Problem of Genial Generalists

Well rounded employees, we all like working with them.  They are the cheerful, upbeat, utility player – the kind of person you can put anywhere and they do well.  Often described as team players, self starters, and good all around generalists.  Small companies particularly love them.   Entrepreneurs like having people around who can “turn on a dime” and are not flustered when the company turns in a new direction. Utility players do not have job descriptions, but are more commonly doing a  hodge podge of unrelated tasks – making these people very hard to hold accountable – which is, of course, the hidden problem with hiring genial generalists.  Utility players are not very demanding to manage, but it’s hard to get spectacular results from them.

If you want to keep your small company small, hire lots of good generalists.  Give them a diverse blend of responsibilities.  Have them fill in the gaps when you launch new initiatives.  Have them cover for vacant positions, or help out underperforming workers.   Rely on their good nature to “roll with the punches” if you have not fully thought through a change initiative.   You’ll enjoy their cheerful demeanor when you move the goal posts. 

Just don’t plan to grow.

If you want to grow, to meet your business goals, then hire some people you can hold accountable.  Instead of hiring only genial generalists, hire some hard-driving, achievement oriented people - people who are really good at setting and achieving goals.   (Yes, there are plenty of results-oriented people who can still play well with others). 

When you hire top performers, you may not have as much fun when you change direction, you will get more “push back” when you muddle their responsibilities, and you will definitely have some explaining to do when you move the goal posts.   

But you will be much more likely to reach your goals.

Culture Matters

One of my most popular recent blog posts was about the importance of cultural fit in hiring.   And while it takes great effort to build a company culture, once built, it has a momentum of its own.  Culture is what keeps organizations moving even when managers are temporarily distracted doing other things.  Culture is like an immune system, it repels the foreign antibodies.  People who do not fit in are repelled – like a hairball from a cat.  Customers and business opportunities that do not fit are repelled, employee behavior that does not fit is repelled.

But what does it take to build and sustain a culture, and who has done a good job of it?  My colleague Doug Davidoff pointed out some outstanding work NetFlix has done in his recent post “Why Culture Matters.”  Here’s what Doug said:

“Netlfix is a darling.  Their customers love them – and so does Wall Street.  In the last five years the stock has more than doubled, while the S&P 500 has gone nowhere.  But let’s face it – Netflix should not have succeeded – Blockbuster should have.  Blockbuster had every advantage – they had the relationships, the cash and the marketing budget.  However, while Netflix has doubled, Blockbuster stock is worth less than 1/10th of what it was worth just 5 years ago.”

What did Netflix do?  You’ll be amazed.   Someone really gave their culture some serious thought.  There are no easy platitudes here, no easy 3 step magical fixes.  Just some seriously hard thought about who they want to be.   Read all about it here.

When Good People Behave Badly

Today’s guest post is by Pat Nichols,  who does business as Transition Leadership International, LLC. He serves civic sector organizations facing major strategic transitions–start-ups, turnarounds, mergers etc., as interim CEO or as a consultant.

These are tumultuous time and good people often behave badly in times of turmoil.  Some engage in back stabbing, rationalizing that someone else is about to stab them.  Some exclude key people on important issues because those others “would only obstruct progress.”  Some conduct whispering campaigns.  Some use anger as a weapon.  Almost universally, they impute the worst possible motives to one another with the claim that only a villain would behave in the way those others do.

The brief reflections here are based upon 14 years of leading nonprofit/NGO turnarounds, primarily as interim CEO. 

When a leader takes responsibility for calming the roiled seas and charting a new course, it seems to me s/he will derive great advantage from several key attributes and behaviors:

Listening:  People have to tell their tales, in part to justify behavior that they know is less than exemplary.  They need to vent and, then, to create new, better stories.

Calm:  People will try to draw the leader’s anxiety to the level of their own, as a sort of emotional vindication.  By exuding calm the leader can do much to reduce the turmoil. 

Rule setting:  I find it useful to ask people to tell their stories in ways that don’t point fingers at others.  Most won’t be able to do it, but the request sets a tone and gives the leader a way of tamping things down when the rhetoric becomes too intense.

Selective affirmation:  This is right out of Psychology 101.  It seems to me the leader needs to affirm the emotions without affirming the conclusions [e.g., “That must have been very hurtful to you. I wonder how the other person perceived it.”] 

 Discouraging attribution of motives:  People often want to reinforce their positions by ascribing evil intent to their adversaries (e.g. “the only reason she would have done that was that she is after me.”  Once those motives take on an aura of truth any bad behavior on the speaker’s part becomes an act of virtue—because fighting evil is inherently virtuous.  So, I think it is important to directly, if gently, confront this.  (I try to use phrases like, “I understand why, seeing the facts as you do, you would come to that conclusion.  But, isn’t it possible that his motive was…). 

Trust:  It is important that the leader not jump to conclusions, that s/he assume that each person involved is both well meaning and reasonable. 

Mitigate risks:  That said, some people will prove that they don’t deserve the trust.  If most people think that Blackbeard is a cut throat there’s a pretty good chance he is.  So, though, both Blackbeard and the organization may benefit from trust, nonetheless, it would be wise to think about how cut throat behavior might damage the organization.  The leader can, then, be prepared in advance to deal with it.

Tie everything to mission and values:  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, people, in working, want to identify with a mission and a set of values.  In turmoil, lots of other values and emotions get in the way.  It seems to me the leader should be constantly puling conversations back to the mission and the core (or aspirational) values of the organization.  (e.g “I understand why you did that, but if we’re committed to a transparent and supportive workplace aren’t there other approaches available?”).

Almost everyone actually wants to behave honorably, in my experience.  However, in situations of turmoil the models and expectations often get distorted and doing the right thing actually comes to seem inconsistent with the organizational norms.  Thus, treating others well can seem too risky. Approaches like the ones above have been useful for me in trying to build a healthy organizational culture.