Leadership Caffeine: For Better Results, Quit Telling and Start Letting Go
The odd quirk that seems to bedevil so many who occupy roles of responsibility for others is their overwhelming urge to tell other people what to do. While a certain amount of “telling” is OK, particularly during crises and anything involving safety or security, for the most part, your communication efforts should focus on listening and asking.
Starting this year, shift the focus to you and your role and your daily habits, and for everyone’s sake, quit telling people how to do their jobs. No one loves a micro-manager, and trust me, this includes those being micro-managed and those above you looking for talented leaders to promote into positions of increasing responsibility.
When You Talk, Make Certain It Counts:
Yes, you certainly owe guidance, encouragement, constructive and positive feedback and help with direction setting and development planning. You also are responsible in many instances for teaching…directly and indirectly. However, the talking stops…or at least the telling stops when it comes to people doing their daily jobs.
Change Your Thinking on the Capabilities of Your Team:
We all know that you think they won’t get it right or that your involvement will ensure optimum results. We’ve all also heard you complain about how frustrated you are that you have to be involved with every little detail and how little time you have for other elements of your job.
Overheard:
Nothing gets done right if I’m not involved.
I can’t trust them to do the work without checking the quality.
Or my (least) favorite:
If my team substituted brains for gunpowder, they wouldn’t have a firecracker between them.
While your own phrases might be different (and much softer), if the sentiments about your team are similar, it’s time to take a close look in the mirror and then to shift the focus of your micro-managing to the person staring back at you. (Of course, if the sentiments are genuine, you need a new team, and no amount of micro-managing the wrong people will solve the problem.)
Nine Ideas for Letting Go to Promote Better Results:
1. Provide direction not instructions. There’s a profound difference.
2. Ask for input on performance targets and work to understand and resolve differences between your views and theirs.
3. Deliberately reduce your direct contact time with your team members. Yes, call this MBNWASM (Management by Not Walking Around So Much.) Give people some room. Everyone will benefit.
4. Recognize that you’ve conditioned everyone to wait for your commands, and that you will need to encourage them to take initiative on their own. This takes some time to sink in for people who have been on auto-pilot for a long time.
5. When the inevitable happens and someone mucks up, count to 10,000 and then have the following discussion: “What did you learn?” “How will you improve next time?” And then say, “Good, go do it.” And shut up.
6. During trouble-shooting situations, talk last. Ask questions, solicit input and if required, offer ideas, but don’t strong-arm people into doing it your way.
7. Start asking people what they need from you in terms of support and resources to help them execute their jobs. And then do something with the input!
8. Try rotating responsibility between team members for elements of operations and quality meetings. You can approve the agenda, but teach others how to lead sessions like this and watch the value of the events go up tremendously.
9. Spend more time figuring out how to help your boss. Seriously.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Just like “telling ain’t teaching,” it’s not managing either. Your primary job is to develop others capable of free thought and independent action in pursuit of supporting firm/team goals. While you might perceive they’re not up to it, more often than not, it’s you that’s the problem. Starting this year, fix the problem!
Note: because most chronic micro-managers spend little time reading about professional development, this post might make a nice print-out and leave-behind! I’ll let you decide whether it’s an anonymous leave-behind.
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Art Petty is a developer of leaders and a strategy consultant. Art frequently speaks on leadership and management, and his work is reflected in two books (Practical Lessons in Leadership and Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development) and over 1-million words published at The Management Excellence blog. You can reach Art via e-mail to learn more about his leadership development, speaking and management consulting services.
Leadership Caffeine for the Week: Coffee, Your Health and 8 Suggestions to Improve Your Team’s Problem Solving Skills
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth
Great news! Reading this weekly blog feature with your favorite cup of coffee might actually be proving beneficial to your health. At least the coffee part, that is.
In “Good News for Coffee Addicts” in the June, 2009 Harvard Business Review, Dr. Thomas Lee cites a number of long running studies that indicate that “drinking coffee cuts the risk of dying early from a heart attack or stroke. Coffee also appears to offer some small protection against Type 2 diabetes, gallstones and Parkinson’s disease.”
Dr. Lee offers up additional findings on coffee’s impact on productivity and emotions, with “Controlled laboratory experiments indicate that it (coffee) causes feelings of well-being and increases energy, alertness and motivation.”
That’s enough to convince me that it was serendipitous to name this weekly post, “Leadership Caffeine.” It’s time to improve your feelings of well-being and jack up your productivity, so grab another cup of black coffee (the benefits wane with sugar and cream) and read on.
Leaders and the Problems with Problems:
The best learning opportunities in the workplace occur when individuals or teams come face to face with a vexing problem. These situations provide outstanding growth opportunities and a great chance to generate and implement innovative and creative solutions. Of course, the manager has to play by the rules.
Unfortunately, there are still a few managers and leaders out there that insist on spoiling these ripe learning opportunities by requiring you to follow a specific approach or steps in solving a problem. This is micromanaging primed. A good micromanager (oxymoron by design!) focuses on what you are doing, but a great one takes it a step further and requires you to do it his way. It is his way or the highway.
This approach squelches any opportunities for creativity and personal development and reduces the health of the overall working environment to something that no amount of coffee could repair.
Some Sharp People Suffer from this Malady:
While you might read this and quickly scoff at the notion that you would ever dictate to people how to do things, it is more common than you might think.
I see this issue frequently in technical environments where brilliant architects and developers are promoted to lead teams and lacking the insight, experience or even mentoring from above; they proceed to define their job as “telling people how to develop.” To these individuals, this is almost logical, since in their minds, they were promoted based on the strength of their technical acumen.
Oh, and you sales pros are not immune either. Similar circumstances. Someone in their infinite wisdom promotes the top sales rep into a regional or district manager role with several more junior reps reporting to them, and the same process ensues.
8 Suggestions for Improving Your Support of Problem-Solving as a Leader:
1. Under ordinary circumstances, you should not tell people how to solve a problem. Work hard to avoid being prescriptive. Of course, under extraordinary circumstances such as a life or death situation, this might not be possible.
2. Do focus on framing a problem and ensuring that everyone understands the gravity of the issue and the goals of a solution.
3. Don’t shoot down ideas and solutions that are different than what you would prescribe. Instead ask questions, seek to understand how the approach will meet the goals.
4. Challenge assumptions, not methods.
5. Encourage individuals and groups to gain external input and/or to compare their proposed solutions to those already in place in the market. For product, service or market problems, benchmarking against competitors can quickly uncover mundane, me-too solutions.
6. Encourage individuals and teams to look in non-traditional places for ideas. A famous example is how managers at Toyota studied the U.S. Supermarket industry to gain ideas on just-in-time inventory and production techniques.
7. Screw up the courage to let people try things radically different than how you would have done it. Provide support, and if failure occurs, see the next point.
8. Recognize that failure is part of the path to getting it right. Instead of prosecuting for failures, figure out how to leverage the experience for learning and improvement.
The Bottom-line for Now:
Seek to enculturate effective, collaborative and creative problem solving that does not involve you at the epicenter of every solution. When problems start getting solved without your involvement, you are starting to succeed as a leader.
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