I Wanna Be a Rockette!

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Like millions of Americans I started my Thanksgiving watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I love the floats, the bands, the balloons and my favorite part, The Radio City Rockettes. Their precision, their style, their dancing, it’s all perfection. I never get tired of it.

I started thinking about the Rockettes. They are all superb dancers. You don’t get to be a Rockette if you’re just good. You have to be more. Any one of them could probably be dancing on Broadway, with one of the world’s major dance companies or in the ballet. You have to be able to do it all to be a Rockette. But these incredible artists give up their individual dreams to be part of something greater. They are part of the world’s foremost precision dance company. They give up a lot.

Are your employees willing to make that kind of sacrifice? Managers I’m working with often tell me they want their employees to be “team players.” I respond by asking, “what does that mean?” What does it mean to be a team player in your organization? To me a team player is someone who’s willing to sacrifice. Someone willing to let their colleagues shine. Someone willing to sublimate personal success and recognition for the good of the department or the organization. It’s a sacrifice fewer and fewer people are willing to make these days. It seems everybody wants to shine, to get their 15 minutes of fame.

Except the Rockettes. They understand the value of belonging to this elite group. They take pride in being part of a tradition that extends back almost 100 years. They feel a responsibility to themselves, the group and to each other to never be out of step. Sure, I’ll bet there’s one who can kick higher than any other. But you’ll never see that happen in a performance. The performance of the group is more important that any one person’s glory. Your job as a manager is to instill the same feeling in your team. Next post I’ll offer a few ways how.

Standards Matter

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Adam Tang circumnavigated the island of Manhattan in 24 minutes.
Almost anyone who’s driven in New York City knows this is impossible. I personally have spent 24 minutes trying to go one block at 5 PM in midtown.

Adam is a skilled driver who wanted to set a speed record for driving around the entire island of Manhattan. He has talent. He has nerve. He has a fast car. He posted a video of his trip on YouTube that got him a lot of attention. He expected to get a speeding ticket when his escapade came to light and he freely admitted that he’d violated traffic laws. What he didn’t expect was to be given a jail sentence of up to one year in prison for reckless endangerment. He maintains his innocence on this charge. He says he didn’t endanger anyone and points to the fact the neither he nor anyone else had an automobile accident as a result of his stunt. The jury felt otherwise. They said, “he had disregarded the safety of others, particularly as he sped across the Cross Bronx Expressway and raced down the crowded Harlem River Drive, toward the end of his circuit. There he tailgated cars and sliced in and out of lanes, cutting off other drivers.” You can see this for yourself on the video.

Adam missed the point. It’s not just the results that matters but the standards you meet as you achieve the result. It’s the same when managers set objectives for their employees. It’s not just what they do, it’s how they do it. How you achieve the goal is equally as important as the goal itself.

And the truth is, Adam didn’t achieve his goal. He said he wanted to drive around the entire island of Manhattan. But on his northbound loop he cut across Manhattan at 178th Street. Any born and bred New Yorker (like me) knows that Manhattan extends all the way up to 220th Street. And any tough NYC manager  (like me) would say to Adam, “You failed to meet the standards AND your goal.” And as another tough New York manager would say, “You’re fired!” 

Do we want Clones?

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I saw a job posting today that I think was a new form of typo or misguided thinking. The heading was for a “Clone of Media Supervisor.” I can only imagine the meeting in the recruiting or manager’s office when they were trying to come up with the requirements of the position to include. Finally, someone, sounding rather exasperated, blurted out, “Can’t we just clone the Media Supervisor we just lost?” And, boom, a new title was born.

Nowhere in the posting did the word “clone” ever appear. What did appear was a vague, generic description of the requirements of the position. Things like, “Become actively involved in projects”, “Serve as the main point of contact for vendors”, “Present recommendations”, “prepare reports, day-to-day administration,” and other terms that conveyed nothing about the true expectations of the position. This same organization will wonder why they’re having trouble filling the position. They’ll likely be swamped with inappropriate resumes. Or they will fill it quickly with a completely unprepared or soon-to-be bewildered applicant.

Too many organizations still think of recruiting as “entry level HR”  and fail to recognize the importance of carefully reviewing every vacancy before trying to fill it.

Do we need to replace this person? How has the position changed? What new skills are required to be successful in the role? These and many other questions must be asked each and every time we have an opportunity to add a new team member. We can’t just clone the previous incumbent because then we doom the organization to “same old, same old.” And the acronym for that is So-So and that’s something no organization can afford to be.

Are you stressed yet?

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We’re coming up on Halloween so here’s a scary story for you.

In the past few months I’ve seen numerous articles about the effect of the workplace on worker’s mental health. This is a serious problem that’s spiraling out of control with no end in sight. And it’s costing organizations big bucks. According to the article in HR Magazine, “The indirect cost of untreated mental illness to employers is estimated to be as high as $100 billion a year in the U.S. alone, according to the National Business Group on Health.” In Workforce it’s estimated at over $80 billion. Yet rarely in any of the articles do they talk about the root cause of all the stress and anxiety. The focus was more on how organizations need to address this erupting dilemma.

I think the cause is the ever present strain on workers to produce more with less.

The fear of losing your job, especially for those over 50 years of age. The stress to keep up with every emerging technology, the fear of falling behind even a millimeter.

I’ve seen skilled employees thrust into manager roles with virtually little or no training on how to manage a team.

I’ve seen managers have their staff size cut in half or worse with the expectation that they will continue to produce at the same volume with no drop in quality.

I’ve seen people given manager titles without staff. And these “managers” are told to lead projects with borrowed resources whose allegiance and interests are elsewhere.

I seen recognition programs slashed. Increase budgets frozen. Senior management treating employees with an HTHJ (Happy To Have Job) mentality.

Until management realizes that its workers really are their most valuable assets, the prime differentiator among organizations, and stop treating them like interchangeable parts, the cost and frequency of days lost to mental health issues will surely continue.

So look around. How many of the things I described above have taken place at your office?

Your thought, comments or horror stories are welcome.

 

More Failure

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Managers need the courage to fail. Without failure, there is no success.

Ships in harbor are safe, but that’s not what ships are built for. We need managers unafraid to step outside their comfort zone. Billy Martin, when managing the NY Yankees, would fine players who didn’t get picked off first base at least once during spring training, when the games didn’t count. It’s not that he wanted them to fail, he wanted them to learn the extent of their abilities.

We learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. The manager who fails to point out an error to an employee has just doomed that employee to repeated failure. And the manager usually gets pretty steamed when the person keeps making the same mistake. The second, and perhaps third, fourth and fifth, error belong to the manager. The manager didn’t have the courage to give that person the feedback necessary to correct the error. Please don’t give me the excuses for not giving feedback, I’ve heard them all more times than reality TV show judges say, “Wow!”.

Whether it’s giving feedback or trying a new strategy, managers must have the courage to fail if they are ever to succeed. After you’ve landed face down in the dirt a few times you’ll have both the knowledge and the resolve not to let that happen again.

Warren Bennis, a tower of leadership

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Warren Bennis, one of the premier thinkers on leadership passed away this month. I remember reading, “On Becoming a Leader” almost 25 years ago and his words still resonate today. Bennis said, “The leader wonders about everything, wants to learn as much as he can, is willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. He does not worry about failure but embraces errors, knowing he will learn from them.”

Bennis was talking about managers and leaders having courage, a willingness to fail as a  steppingstone to improvement. He believed in leadership, and he believed in the future leaders of our world and our economy. He counseled presidents, CEO’s and students.  He was an optimist who saw improvement as the goal and was unwilling to accept mediocrity. He had faith in the next generation of leaders and he will be missed.

 

The Cost of No Courage? You’d be amazed!

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Did you know there’s a quantifiable cost of bad management? And it’s a lot of money.

According to Forbes and Michelle McQuaid poor management is costing the U.S.
economy $360 billion in lost productivity each year. Bad bosses can destroy your health, undermine your success and cost your employer money. Those are three pretty strong reasons to advocate for more courage when managing people.

 

Let’s face it, no manager does the job alone. The very basis of being a manager means you’re working with people. So let’s find ways to get better at doing this, and it starts with showing more courage and a willingness to figure out the best ways to manage the people who are critical to a manager’s success. When it comes to managing, one size definitely does not fit all. You don’t get to manage the way you want to manage, you have to manage the way your people need to be managed.

Would You Do This?

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Stepping away from tales of courage for a moment, this falls into another category, I’ll let you decide which.

I saw a story in HRExecutive about people getting tattoos of their company logo. Now I’m not one for tattoos in the first place, but really? In this day and age I question the wisdom of getting any company’s logo permanently etched on my body. Maybe I’ve counseled too many people who’ve been told their positions have been eliminated but haven’t these people heard that the days of lifetime employment are over?

In the article it does say getting the ink is not mandatory or even necessarily encouraged. But there are monetary incentives for doing it at one company. At another the people feel that showing their commitment enhances the likelihood that they’ll be with that company for the long haul.

I can’t say what the managers at those companies are thinking, but I doubt that having the company logo on your body would persuade me to keep you if your performance didn’t merit it.

So please weigh in on what you’d do. Would you consider getting branded with your company’s logo? Is doing this a savvy strategy to keep your job or close to crazy in the current business environment? I’m looking forward to reading your opinion.

Only the best,
Ron

You can also cut and paste this URL into your browser if the link above doesn’t work. http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/view/story.jhtml?id=534357248&ss=Indelible+commitment

More Courage

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More courage from managers is what I’ve been saying we need. Sometimes, it’s the courage to perhaps look foolish as you lead by example. A willingness to do what others might question.

If you know anything about the Upper East Side of Manhattan, you know it’s a pretty affluent area. Many of the clientele in stores are rather well-off women with the kinds of dogs that you can fit in a purse. Well, one time a well-thought-of client’s poodle left a puddle when he piddled. Okay, you’re the manager, what do you do? Ask someone to take care of it? Order someone to clean that up? A manager whom I know took care of it this way. He cleaned it up himself. Sure, he could have asked, or ordered, a staff person to do it. He cleaned it up himself. He would never ask someone on his staff to do something he wouldn’t do himself.

Maybe he looked foolish on his hands and knees in his suit cleaning up after a little dog. Maybe other customers thought it looked odd to see the manager cleaning up a dog’s accident. I think he impressed the customer whose dog it was and it cemented her loyalty to the place. And I know it said an awful lot to the staff. How could they say, “No” to anything the manager might ask them to do?  Not after he’d courageously led by example. He’d cemented his position as their manager, and had cemented their loyalty to him.

Having the courage to do what others might not, or might not think is something a manager ought to do, is a big part of leading by example. And it takes courage.

Managerial Courage

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Lately I’ve been thinking about courage. Not the kind soldiers or single mothers have. Managerial courage. The courage to do the right thing even when you’re not sure how it will turn out or how your actions will be perceived. The courage to tell an underperforming employee that he needs to do better. The courage to tell someone that she needs to start showing up on time or not to talk back to irritating customers. I know, it’s common sense. People ought to know that they should do their jobs, show up when scheduled and don’t give lip to customers. And if they did, a manager’s job would be a lot easier. Sadly that’s not the case. And that’s where courage comes in.

No one likes to inherit deadwood. Think of a time when you took over a new team or department. What did you find? Some excellent workers doing exactly as you would hope and expect. And then the deadwood. A few people whom you can’t understand how they still have their jobs. How did the last manager let them get away with this level of performance?

Courage. The last manager lacked courage. For whatever reason, and I’ve probably heard them all, he did nothing and left this mess for you to clean up.

Do you want to be “that guy?” The one who leaves the deadwood behind. Is that the reputation you want?  Jobs are fluid nowadays, but reputations are fragile. Maybe the last manager didn’t handle the under-performer because he figured he’d be working somewhere else soon enough so why bother? The reputation he leaves behind though will follow him throughout his career.

Don’t be “That Guy.” Have courage. The rest of your staff are watching you. If you fail to manage your lesser performers, you will lose the ability, and possibly the right, to manage anyone.

I’ve got a few more thoughts on this so look for more example and thoughts on courage. And of course I welcome your examples. Let’s hear ’em!