Detoxing Your Team
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Performance, Talent Management, Values
Most of us can recall working with someone that had such a strong, negative impact on the work environment that you could t literally feel the emotional mood swing when this person walked into a meeting.
For some unknown reason, perhaps a karmic-imbalance in the universe, these toxic characters have the unnerving and disconcerting tendency to be great survivors. They rule their teams like Tony Soprano and they manage the higher-ups with diplomatic skills that would make a great politician proud. And they do all of this in broad daylight, while the people that work for and with them roll their eyes and hope not to fall into the toxic character’s line of sight.
While it is easy to intuit that toxic employees are value destroyers, we’ve been short on hard data about the true impact that these individuals have on the work environment. Until now.
The April 2009 Harvard Business Review summarizes a study by Christine Porath and Christina Pearson that offers insights into “How Toxic Colleagues Corrode Performance.” Porath and Pearson polled several thousand managers and employees from a variety of U.S. companies about the impact of toxic people at work, and the results affirm what we’ve long suspected. These people extract a costly toll on the rest of the employees and on overall performance.
Selected highlights when faced with toxic or rude co-workers:
- 48% decreased their work effort
- 47% decreased their time at work
- 66% said their performance declined
- 78% said their commitment to the organization declined.
And so on.
Art’s Observations:
The best advice that I ever learned the hard way took was “fire the politicians.” In one case earlier in my career, I was the enabler for this toxic individual, preferring to see only his strengths and talents and ignoring the havoc he created in the working environment.
Ultimately, I learned to fire toxic characters fast. The individuals that did not share and exhibit the values that we espoused or that ruled through intimidation were the first ones out the door, regardless of their capabilities.
I’ve never regretted firing a toxic employee.
Fair warning. Toxic employees don’t make it easy for you to fire them. The best of the worst actually frighten their bosses into inaction, not through overt intimidation or threats, but through more subtle approaches. Remember, these are skillful politicians with the hearts and minds of gangsters, and they’ve convinced a lot of people about how valuable they are to the organization. A conscientious manager may find herself swimming against the tide of popular opinion from her peers or higher ups on this issue.
Brace yourself for a fight, don’t be intimidated and stick to your guns. It’s easier to back down and the toxic employee is betting on this outcome. Like most thugs and bullies, they don’t expect people to stand-up to them and fight back.
I’m certain that I read “fire the politicians” somewhere, and I wish that I could provide attribution. Regardless, it’s good advice, especially in these tough times when teams are shrinking and those left behind must be capable of performing at a high level.
If you’re on the edge about who should go, you will be well served to get the toxicity out.
Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few People-It’s Time to Learn to Say No!
Filed under: Leadership, Making Decisions, Management Excellence Tips for Tough Times, Performance, Product Management, Project Management, Strategy
One of the themes that I hear consistently in workshops and in discussions with the professionals in my MBA classes is frustration over the propensity of a firm’s leaders to never say “No” to a project.
Lacking a viable mechanism to compare, evaluate and select and reject projects, decisions are made based on politics, gut feel and the squeaky customer wheel.
The net result of this lack of discipline is that the people doing the work end up overloaded and overwhelmed. They operate in compliance mode, focusing on surviving until the next deadline and adding little creative value or innovation to their activities.
This is a perfect formula to waste money, squander creative energy and decimate morale. This “we never met a project we didn’t like” approach is also the antithesis of the formula for performance excellence.
The current economic pressures amplify the need to create better screening mechanisms and to truly manage your investment in projects with rigor and discipline. You need to deliver the right projects effectively, and you need to learn to say “No” to some that seemed like a good idea last year and many that will jump out at you during the next year.
Take a look at the portfolio of projects that you and your colleagues are engaged with today and make each of these projects earn their way back into the portfolio. It’s OK and even healthy to challenge yesterday’s priorities as they bury people in today’s work.
Use these filters:
- Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?
- Is it a must-do or compliance initiative?
- Is it strategic? If yes, you should bounce it up against the current-state strategy and determine whether it is still relevant today. If not, kill it.
- Is it an operational improvement? If yes, can you connect the operational improvements to something that impacts strategy and customers…even through one or two degrees of separation? If you cannot connect it to something that allows you to serve customers (internal or external) more effectively, consider killing it.
- Do we have the right balance of strategic and operational initiatives?
- Are we evaluating projects based on a combination of objectively developed financial and non-financial criteria? Does our evaluation approach allow for reasonable comparison of alternatives?
If you struggle to answer these questions because your strategy is vague or out of date, you’ve got another problem that needs to be fixed. While some decry the usefulness of strategy in a time of crisis, I would argue that now more than ever is the time to create a robust, dynamic strategy and execution program. Instead of wandering aimlessly through the minefield of the economy, I want a team that is opportunistic, experimental and focused on finding and exploiting gaps and ignoring distractions. This is strategy.
The bottom-line:
Your organization executes strategy one project at a time. Too many leaders fail to support the creation of processes that effectively evaluate and manage the nearly endless list of options to work on. Start the process by refreshing on strategy and then work unceasingly to manage and cull the portfolio in support of the strategy. Learn to say, “No” and you’ll be shocked at how much great work your team will complete. You might even find them smiling as they work.
-
Podcast
-
Available Now!
-
Practical Lessons
-
e-book
e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance
