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The Apprentice, Management and Teamwork!

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I subscribe to my fair share of newsletters, RSS feeds and updates. Most of them I unsubscribe from pretty quickly as the content is so poor. However there are some notable exceptions – one of which is Gavin Ingham’s The Sales Apprentice: Sales Training Tips from the Hit TV Show. Each night after the show Gavin captures his thoughts and insights about candidates performance and e-mails them over night. One of the things I love about this is the immediacy. (Last nights was mailed at 01:48). Another is the observations of someone who watches the performance from a pure sales perspective. They notice things that those of us who are less sales obsessed simply don’t see. In last nights post Gavin offered the following:
Sales training tip for success: Learn how to work as part of a team.
I think what is really annoying me about this show is the fact that our Sales Apprentices are seemingly incapable of working together.

They spend so little time working as a team and so much working divisively.

Take a moment to look around your team and think of simple things that you can do to support and challenge each other.

The Apprentice is not a team competition. Co-operation is not the route to success. The prize will go to one person.

It is personal.

1 on 1.

It is about looking good, or hiding.

It is about undermining potential threats.

The behaviours and results that we see in the Apprentice are a direct consequence of the things that the leader, SAS, chooses to highlight, reward and punish.

As we lead – so shall they follow.

Unless a manager recognises this, effectively and publicly dealing with (in the context of this show – firing) those who focus on the Machiavellian side of management, these behaviours and the associated mediocre performance will persist. You can seek solutions in Balanced Scorecards, JIT, Lean or Systems Thinking – but the mediocrity will persist.

Now I would love to believe that ‘The Apprentice’ is not a fair representation of management at work. But so many organisations are just like this – competitions to climb a slippery pole rather than genuinely create value for the organisation. And many – perhaps most – managers are just not perceptive, skillful or brave enough to deal with it.

They focus so much on the task and the numbers – that they just don’t see the pain or the potential for improvement that lies in the process.

The Dreaded Business Meeting

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Are you fed up of attending meetings that achieve little or nothing?

What irritates you most about meetings?

Is it eager colleagues who answer their mobile phone when it rings, or tired employees who drift off during a presentation? If you notice these disturbances in your office, you’re not alone.

A recent study (Opinion Research USA) found that disorganised, rambling meetings topped the list of meeting annoyances at 27 percent.

Employees who interrupt their peers and try to dominate conversation during the meeting followed at 17 percent.

Interestingly, while mobile phone interruptions came in at 16 percent, frustrations over people checking BlackBerries only measured about 5 percent. Other pet irritations include people falling asleep in meetings, lack of refreshments and meetings without bathroom breaks.

I am surprised that late starts to meetings don’t feature in the survey – and even more surprised that meetings that over-run aren’t also higher up the list. Perhaps it is just that thing shave got so bad in this respect that people no longer notice or care? I was recently working with a medium sized organisation with a middle management team of about 20. It was obvious to me that the culture was to expect meetings to start late and end even later. People would drift in at the meeting start time and then make a cup of tea – or go on the mobile. When a meeting finally convened, typically at least 10 minutes after the planned start time a couple of stragglers would usually still arrive late.

I asked what might happen if at the very next meeting the Chief Exec ran, were she to start on time – regardless of who was in the room – and after the meeting gave every latecomer personal feedback about her expectations of timely start to meetings. The first person to respond said ‘I would think she was a bit of a plonker!’

There was a silence and then someone else said ‘Well I suppose it would be quite professional’.

In my book – not only would it be very professional – but also within a few days the entire culture of the organisation could be changed with respect to meetings.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog.html?id=178074

Why Feedback Does Not Work

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People often tell me that when they give feedback it just does not work the way they hope. Either the feedback is ignored, or it causes a while load of justifications, excuses and rationales leading to a heated debate and a deterioration in the relationship.

There are several reasons why feedback might not have the desired affect and cause more problems than it cures. By far the most common reason for feedback failure is that the relationship is not right. We only accept and act on feedback when it comes from someone we trust and respect.  Giving feedback to someone who does not trust and respect you is not only a waste of breathe – it is likely to make the situation, certainly your relationship, worse.

Before you can give effective feedback, you have to earn the right (and this is not about just being the boss).  As well as trust and respect it is important that the receiver of the feedback knows that your motivation for offering feedback is that you want them to suceed in doing a great job.  They have to know that you are not putting them down or playing power games – you are sincerely trying to help them do things well.

So the next time you have an opportunity to give feedback – ask yourself – does this person trust and respect me enough to value my feedback?

Secondly ask yourself whether your motivation to give feedback is to help them to get better at their job?

If the answer to either of these questions is no, then you are better off keeping the feedback to yourself.  Instead find a way to work on your relationship so that in future your  feedback will be welcomed and acted upon.

Making Values Live

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I helped to manage the production of a conference in Hull called Making Values Live – featuring the work of Mathew Smerdon and Geraldine Blake from Community Links. At the conference they provided an introduction to their report – Living Values: A report encouraging boldness in the third sector

The value-driven ethos of third-sector organisations is often cited as their distinguishing feature. But is this really the case?

The third sector has no monopoly on ‘values’. But are certain values more prevalent in the third sector than either the public or private sector? I have worked in all three sectors and from this personal experience – I doubt it.

Excellent organisations exist in all sectors. And excellent organisations always have strong values – a consistent set of values that runs through all of their work and helps to recruit, retain, and inspire talented people. The challenge is how to build an excellent passion and vision led organisation – regardless of its legal structure or the sectoral label it attracts.

The conference raised some further interesting questions – perhaps the main one for me being:

Is working explicitly with values worthwhile – or does it lead to hours of navel gazing with little real performance gain?

Can you work directly with something as abstract and ‘slippery’ as values?

How can you make the concepts involved more concrete and action oriented?

The best managers focus on working with behaviours, actions and results. Things that they can directly observe rather than infer. They then give affirmative feedback when these reinforce and express organisational values – or give adjusting feedback when they undermine them. This keeps the process of working with values very practical and action oriented.

In my experience though few managers give regular and rigorous feedback and many of those that do feel uncomfortable referring explicitly to values.

Management, Dragons and Apprentices – RealityTV

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It is no surprise that management and entrepreneurship ‘Reality’ TV (think ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Dragon’s Den’) is so dark. Good people being fired on the strength of their performance on one task; entrepreneurs being humiliated by ‘Dragons’ because they are not experts in their product or service AND in how it should be marketed AND in the financial history and planned future of their cherished business.

The truth is that programme makers are simply not able to make good management and entrepreneurship ‘dramatic’ enough to get win viewing figures. So instead they focus on the dark dramas that so many of us love to watch unfold.

What impact do these programmes have on our perception of what entrepreneurship and management are as professions? If viewers believe that ‘Reality TV’ portrays reality then it is little wonder that neither are seen as ‘‘careers’ of choice for many and that that levels of entrepreneurship remain stubbornly low.

Exhortations such as ‘we will work until we bleed and batter the hell out of everyone else’ are hardly a clarion call for effective recruitment.

In my day to day work I regularly meet managers who are at their happiest when they are dealing with a crisis, damping down a fire, or sacking underperforming staff – because they really believe that this is what good managers do to make things better – a belief that may be fuelled, at least in part, by ‘Reality TV’. The impact that they have on organisational culture and climate is disproportionate.

The truth is that good management, progressive management, is about the day to day development of professional working relationships.

    • It is about coaching and developing people so that they contribute more fully at work.

    • It is about giving and receiving feedback (NOT ‘You’re a shambles! You’re fired!’).

    • It is about developing and sharing values that can lead to sustainable success.

    • It is about managing underperformance in a way that is rigorous and caring, but not ruthless.

And the same is true for entrepreneurship.

Both are about building effective teams, where individuals can express their unique personality, skills and traits in support of a team endeavour. But this is a slow, beautiful, human and creative process – more like gardening – than the high drama of the Reality TV shows.

This is the work of the Progressive Manager.