realisedevelopment.net

Just another WordPress site

Archives for June 2007

The Fat Cat, Improving Performance, Office Hours and 121s

by

Office Hours

One of the bedrock management processes should be documented, 121 meetings, for 30 minutes every week, structured and planned well in advance with each and every direct report.

These save time and massively improve the quality of both the working and personal relationship as well as providing a platform for coaching, feedback, performance management and accountability.

In this article Paige Arnoff-Fenn learns a similar lesson. First she describes the scenario – a senior manager at work.

“He spends his entire day in meetings, walking between conference rooms or driving to his next appointment. He gets stopped in the hallways or gets messages through his Blackberry from his team to answer questions and make real-time decisions that keep their projects moving forward until he returns to his office after 5 p.m.

He eyeballs his e-mail throughout the day, multitasking in meetings, and checks voice mail during bio breaks, but he’s virtually never in his office during “normal business hours” whatever that even means anymore. There’s no “think time” to reflect and process information today, and we’re being inundated with more data and information than ever before.”

This manager decided to start holding ‘office hours’ for three hours each week.

He sent his team an e-mail to announce his plan and he arrived at his office at the scheduled time on the designated day. To his delight and surprise, members of his team stopped by all afternoon. Employees were thrilled to know they were guaranteed to find him sitting at his desk.

I have no doubt that the volume of e-mail from his team declined significantly. Because his team members perceive that he has power over them and their careers they find reasons to remind him that they are there and that they are doing good work – through his e-mail. If they know that they will get face to face time then this need to be ‘heard’ falls away.

Now I would not recommend a manager to implement ‘office hours’ in the way that this manager did it. I can imagine it being like a doctors waiting room when the office hours start. Or like a shoe shop on a busy day – please take a ticket and wait your turn. The lack of structure and purpose too would drive me mad. But with a little adjustment we would have a great system of 121s and a significant step towards becoming a high performing team would be taken.

If you would like to learn how to use 121s to improve performance in your team then please get in touch or attend one of our training sessions.

PS Take another look at the opening hours sign. Did you think that the Fat Cat was a Free House?

Moving To A Single Solution – why brainstorming is hard!

by

I often get to witness meetings where a group of people are trying to solve a problem.  On a good day perhaps two or three options will be generated before one emerges and starts to be refined as ‘the solution’.  This is the managerial mindset – moving quickly to a preferred solution – and moving on to the next problem.

Which is why so many managers and their teams find brainstorming hard.

Brainstorming is not about finding a preferred solution.  It is about finding as many potential solutions and ideas as possible.

It is about quantity.

Quality and refinement can come later.

It is about generating ideas collectively.

Feeding off each others creativity.

Allowing one persons thinking to fuel another’s.

Having fun.

Perhaps it is what work should be like more of the time?

Are They Coachable?

by

“Years ago, at the great Bolshoi Ballet, auditions for the troupe were conducted among 8 year old girls. That’s because it took ten years to become great. How did the auditions work? The teachers weren’t looking for the best dancers. They were looking for the dancers who took coaching the best. The rest would come with time.”

This from marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog is well worth a read.

Not that I agree with all of it. For example, challenging the coach’s credentials makes a lot of sense to me. It is a sure fire sign that the coach is advising (if your gonna tell me what I should be doing you had better be an expert) rather than coaching – which is a process that helps the learner to find their own path to improvement. Of course occasionally a coach might go into ‘prescriptive’ mode – but not often.

The quality we should be looking in people who will operate at the highest level is not ‘coachability’ but ‘learnability’. How good are they at learning? How curious are they? How much new stuff will they try? Will they try it for long enough to see if it really works. Will they learn something even if it is not made conveniently packaged in their ‘preferred learning style’?

It is this hunger for performance improvement that really gives the edge.

How do you recruit for it?

How do your management practices nurture it?

How do you model it?

How do you manage those who have lost it?

Lead me, follow me or get out of my way!

by

David Greer is deputy CEO of Royal Dutch Shell’s Sakhalin Energy Investment Company. Now this is a business that is navigating tricky waters – and Mr Greer smartly recognised that staff motivation had taken a dip and needed lifting. A familiar problem to most managers.

So Mr Greer (or one of his staff perhaps) scans a copy of ‘Great Speeches from History’ and finds General Patton’s speech to the troops given the morning before the D-day landings. Here is some prose that will surely put the fire back in their bellies. With some careful updating and other contextual adjustments (including delivery via e-mail rather than face to face), a great, if derivative, motivational e-mail is sent to employees. It is soon recognised for what it is, leaked to the media, and Mr Greer’s problem is 10 times worse. Not only has he now got a de-motivated workforce – he has lost credibility into the bargain.
Most of the criticism that Mr Greer has attracted has been about his failure to find his own words.  His decision not to speak authentically – but to borrow from history.
I think this misses the point.
In modern businesses motivation and inspiration cannot come in the form of the occasional missive from the top.  It has to emerge from the day to day interactions of team members and managers who understand that they are doing something worthwhile. Something that matters.  Who respect and trust each other as members of the team.  Who stay in touch with the purpose and meaning of their endeavour.
In the words of Zig Ziglar:

‘People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily’.

If Mr Greer had presided over an organisation where every manager talked regularly with their team members about why the work mattered, about the importance of what they were doing, about what they as team members really wanted to achieve – his desperate clarion call from the Executive Suite may not have been necessary at all.