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Wally Bock has written a great post on the power of praise in management. It includes sections on:
If you find giving affirming feedback difficult – or just want to get better at it then have a look at his post.
Tom Peters encourages managers to obsess on R.O.I.R – the Return on Investment in Relationships.
ROIR through 121s comes in many forms:
Most people are looking (consciously or not) for a number of things from their work. These include:
In this situation managers can use 121s to establish dynamic relationships with team members that helps them to look for and find these things in the workplace. People develop, talent flourishes, relationships improve and performance excels. This group of people usually respond very well to the introduction of 121s as they offer a vehicle for accelerating progress.
However some people are not looking for any of this. They do not want freedom, or responsibility. They want instructions, structure and clarity. They want other people to do the thinking and the creativity. They want to be the foot soldiers – doing an honest days work for an honest days pay. They do not see work as a vehicle either for their own self development or creative expression. They are not looking for self-actualisation but security and control. This group can be very resistant to 121s, seeing them as an intrusion. They are likely to resist development in their roles and accept delegation and change grudgingly, if at all.
There are several things to consider here:
Go to the people
Live with them
Learn from them
Love them
Start with what they know
Build with what they have
But with the best leaders
When the work is done
The task accomplished
The people will say
“We have done this ourselves.”
Lao Tsu (700 BC)
“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them – the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
Dostoyevsky
This is a great quote that reminds us that management, especially progressive management, is not so much about techniques and tools but about our basic stance in relation to those we manage.
Certainly in sports management the role of the manager is to help each individual to perform to the maximum of their potential. In business I think it is a minority of managers who see this as their job. Instead they see it as about keeping people working in boxes on organisation charts – sometimes supressing their development order to retain them.
In my first post in Understanding your Organisation I presented a really simple image that helps to understand the relationship between strategy (concerned with future well-being), operations (concerned with the delivery of service/product to current customers) and management as the function that integrates strategy and operations. Scarily simple – but I have found it to be a powerful framework for understanding organisations of all sorts – and for quickly spotting the root cause of under-performance.
I have found several different types of problem using this simple model. Firstly we have what I call the ‘Destruction of Management’. This is caused by the different priorities and drives of operations and strategy. The Ops folks are focused on systems and processes that are designed to service current customers efficiently and effectively. They are fiercely ‘customer facing’ and push management for time and other resources to improve current operations to meet customer needs. All well and good. Just as it should be. Their perspective can be described as predominantly looking ‘inward’ (how do we improve what we have got) and down – towards the front-line.
Now the strategy folks have a different set of interests. They are interested in the art of possibility.
Their eyes are set on the technology and markets of the future. They are fiercely ‘future’ and ‘change’ oriented. Their perspective can be described as outward (what is happening ‘out there’ – technology, market demographics, prices etc) and forward looking (how do we get what we need in terms of knowledge, technology and processes to compete in the future?). They pressure management to dedicate resources to bringing this new future a step closer.
So management is caught between operations pulling ‘inward and down’ and strategy pulling ‘forward and out’.
OUCH!
Most management finds it difficult to resolve these tensions between strategy and operations.
In some organisations the strategy folks win (they usually have more positional power in the organisation) and the ops teams become jaded and cynical as they are asked to engage with strategic initiative after strategic initiative – continually engaging in change that rarely seems to make things better in the ‘here and now’ – and often pulls them away from doing good work at the front-line. They start to seriously doubt whether anyone in the boardroom really knows what the business is about.
In other organisations the strategy side is very weak and the organisation becomes myopically focused on the ‘here and now’.
In other organisations (and in my experience this is the most common situation) both strategy and operations are relatively powerful forces in the organisation and management is just not strong enough to hold the forces together. Neither great operational improvements nor insightful strategy gets executed as ‘weak’ management uses the opposing forces to negotiate a mediocre status quo.