Do you have any gloomy people on your team, folks that really bring your whole team down in the dumps?

Do you wonder why these folks won’t just quit…or won’t just “get with the program” and be HAPPY. I mean, come on, this economy stinks. They should just be happy to have a paycheck, right?

WRONG!

But maybe you do need to improve your team’s attitude, and you’re wondering how to do it.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: You can’t improve your team’s attitude.

Nope, you CAN’T improve your team’s attitude!

Which attitude works for you? Credit to Jakob Botter

Hold on, I’m not done yet. I’m not going to leave you hanging with this statement, and not tell you something you CAN do.

That just wouldn’t be right.

You CAN improve behaviors.

That’s right, you can improve behaviors, which drive the attitudes you’re looking to improve.

You have to be specific about the behavior you want to improve, and you have to be specific about HOW you want it improved.

Situation: John has what you think is a bad attitude, and so do many of the folks who work with him.

Example of ineffective coaching: “John, you need to have a better attitude. Everyone around you says your attitude stinks. You got it?”

How do you think that would work? It wouldn’t, right?

Example of effective coaching: “John, when Sally asks you for help, your tone of voice is harsher than the one you take when you talk to the other people on the team. You probably didn’t realize this, and I know you wouldn’t want to be harsh with one of your co-workers. Can you please take a little kinder tone with Sally the next time she asks you for assistance?”

Unless John is a doofus who WANTS to mean to his co-workers, John will probably be much nicer to Sally the next time she asks for help…and maybe John will be kinder to the rest of your team too.

You may even want to ask Sally to let John know she feels he’s behaving strongly with her. Sometimes simple awareness is enough to fix a problem.

Not knowing can be more than half the battle.

How do YOU improve your team’s attitude?

Current Chicago Cubs outfielder Milton Bradley insists today in an article ESPN shared that the umpires are “out to get him” and are widening the strike zone because he argued vehemently with another umpire last month. Quoting Bradley: “I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong. There’s a lot involved, and it’s a lot of politics where there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Here’s a picture of the man who says he doesn’t do anything wrong, after striking out with a former team.

NOTE: Typically Bradley strikes out 100 or more times a year. While this is an extreme case, would you believe someone who let his temper cause him to bust a bat over his knee after 1 of 100 strike outs? I wouldn’t.

My advice to Milton Bradley:

SHUT UP! Let your playing talk speak for you. That’s the best way to retaliate against what you deem is unfair treatment.

This reminds me of someone I used to work with. This person had a problem with everyone on the team. This person was always picking on him, this person always assigned him the hard tasks, this person did this, this person did that. If everyone on your team and in the world has a problem with you, the problem is simple:

YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!

How to overcome being labeled a whiner:

• Shut up and stop whining
• Perform at a high level for a LONG period of time
• Do more than anyone else does
• Get out and network in your field, quietly, so folks can make their own decisions about you
• Get a new job
• Keep shutting up
• Keep doing a great job
• Keep performing at a higher level
• NEVER whine again

Bradley did this for a while, but as soon as things go south, he opens his mouth and he whines some more.

What advice do YOU have for someone who’s been branded as a whiner?

Milton Bradley photo courtesy of SD Dirk

I’ve been working since I was 12 years old.  That’s 23 years if you’re counting at home. In all my time working, I’ve come to realize 1 major truth:

I’ve only quit my managers, not any companies.

I said it, and I feel a little better.

So what does that mean, quitting a manager?

Quite simply, it means if a manager hasn’t done a good job of managing me, of getting to know about me, about caring about me as a person AND as an employee, I’ve quit on them.

No, I haven’t formally quit every job. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what I did.

I’d like to apologize for every manager I’ve quit on and kept drawing a paycheck.

Has this ever happened to you or someone you know?

Here’s a few hopefully not close to home examples…

• Think about the employee who took the exact same job at another company…for LESS pay.
• Or the employee who took a lesser position to work for somewhere they felt they’d be a “better fit”
• Or the employee and the manager who consistently butted heads, and of course, the manager won, so the employee left, citing “philosophical differences.”

Put another way, if someone has left my team for a non-better job, it was probably MY FAULT they left.

A few years ago, the employees of Blenz Coffee put up a sign on the door telling their manager they quit. Talk about a public display of hating their manager! Wow!

Sound familiar? Please share your stories of quitting on the boss below.

This month I’m working on mid-year reviews for my team, and I thought it might be helpful to share the Mid-Year Review Form I use with my team. I like to keep the meetings at 30-45 minutes, and I like to make things clear, concise, and simple to complete. If you do a good job discussing things the first 6 months of the year on our one-on-one weekly reviews, this form should be very easy to complete.

About the form:

There are 2 sections, with 3 parts in each section:

Section 1 is completed by the associates that report to me.

1. Goals - I ask for updates on each goal they might be working on, and what they are doing to ensure they complete them by year end. My team sets up to 3 personal goals at the beginning of the year and I want an update letting me know how progress is coming.
2. What went went well - Anything they did that was above and beyond, I want to be reminded of at mid-year. These are things like special projects volunteered for, extra shifts covered, customer kudos, and any training completed.
3. What do you need from me to ensure a successful second half - As their manager, it’s up to me to provide the necessary resources they need to get the job done. If anyone is working on a goal they need my help on, this is their opportunity to let me know. Additionally, this is a good reminder that if you don’t ask, you don’t get what you want, at least not on purpose. Of course they can come to me throughout the year to let me know what they need, but the formality of doing this at mid-year is a good check-in.

Section 2 is completed by me.

1. Looking back - What did I see went well for the first half of the year. What did I see that needed improvement over the first half of the year. These are typically repeats of themes we’ve talked about at their weekly meetings, so this isn’t a surprise to anyone.
2. Looking ahead - What do I see coming down for the second half of the year. This may be a project I see that aligns with one of their goals, it may be a training course they need to sign up for, or it may be a team-wide item that I need them to focus on for our team to win for the next 6 months.
3. Other news and notes - This would be any special announcements that I need to share, any hiring updates, any things that need just a little more tweaking in order to be hugely successful for the second half of the year.

I ask my team to complete section 1 before they meet with me, and I put the onus on them to schedule their mid-year review when they are ready to discuss things, no later than July 31st. We completed our last mid-year review on July 18th, almost 2 weeks ahead of schedule.

You’re welcome to copy and paste the questions above into a Word document, or feel free to download my Mid-Year Review Form.

Questions for you:

Do you do mid-year reviews with your team and/or your manager?

What questions do you find most helpful? Least helpful?

What would be on your ideal mid-year review sheet?

NOTE: You can do whatever you want with the Mid-Year Review Form I created. I’d appreciate if you share any updated forms with me and the readers here, it’s not necessary you do so in order to download the form.

Miki Saxon made a very kind offer to everyone who reads Slacker Manager: a free phone consultat for anyone looking for coaching on how to hire great people. Here’s what Miki shared with us about hiring in her comment on a recent post:

Hi Phil, I think that turnover through no fault of your own is the hardest to accept because there’s nothing you can do or change to prevent it. However, bringing on new people is far easier if you use a team approach and extensive phone interviews. I’ve written a lot of how-to’s about this at http://www.MAPpingCompanySuccess.com. I’d love to offer you some free coaching if you’re interested. In fact, I’ll extend that offer to any of your readers who want to take advantage of it. You can reach me at 866.265.7267 or miki@rampupsolutions.com.

Folks, if you are having trouble with hiring, Miki is outstanding! I’ve spoken with her on a few topics, and have enjoyed her articles at Leadership Turn and at MAPping Company Success, and she is top notch. I’m going to give her a call next week to talk about my troubles, if you don’t fill up her phone lines first. Miki didn’t ask me to pull this out of the comment box, I’d be doing you a disservice by not telling you about it.

Lisa Haneberg recently shared a brilliant list of 5 simple reasons managers fail. #1 came as no surprise to me.

Fail to build positive and trusting relationships.

So simple, yet often completely missed by many managers. Management is a team sport folks, and if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be a manager.

If you get that point, then let’s talk about this a little more. Who should you build relationships with, and how should you build them?

Here’s a few ideas on how to build positive and trusting relationships. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

First, build a relationship with each person on your team. The folks that report to you are the most important people in the world, whether you manage a team of 1 or a team of 1000. How? Take the time ask a few questions to better understand what makes your team tick, at work and at home. Ask them first, and then figure out how you can help them get what they want most, and you’ll lead a much more successful team.

Next, build a relationship with your manager. When I was first promoted 5 years ago, I had no idea what my manager liked or didn’t like, and I barely knew she was married with a child and that she started out on my team some 15 years prior. I had to figure out what was important to my manager, and you need to find out what is important to your manager. What are those big, hairy audacious goals is she working on this year, next year, and long term? Ask her, and she’ll tell you. Then deliver the goods and set your goals around her important goals. Make sure and share your BHAGs too, and ask how she can help you achieve them.

Last but not least, you must build a relationship with your peers. I work in an IT department with 10 folks at my level of management/leadership. Some people, including some of my team, see our team as a launch pad to other opportunities in the department.  I realized early on that I had a choice on how I viewed my peers: I could view them as my competition, as folks who want to steal my best people as soon as they become competent enough to move to the next level; or I could view them as partners in getting our IT team mission done. I chose the latter, and though it might mean my best people get promoted to another team, I see the folks who leave my team as advocates for us, sharing my vision with other teams of the world’s greatest IT customer service organization.

I ask my peers what their goals are, and how my team can help them achieve them more rapidly. This cross-functional teamwork gives my folks exposure to things they’d never see or do without these relationships. Additionally, these groups will come to trust your team more, and be more forgiving of the occasional mistake, if they have a relationship with you, and eventually, with your team.

Who else do you need to build a relationship with in order to be a successful manager, and how can you do that?

Photo credit to http://www.lumaxart.com/

I frequently am asked by my team to help them solve difficult problems with customers, and this week I stepped out of my head and thought about what questions I ask that help get the problem fixed fastest.

• What is the real problem? Are you sure you understand the full scope of the problem? If not, go back to the customer and ask some more probing questions to understand the real problem.
• Have you thoroughly researched the question? Is everything you need to solve the problem there, only you just can’t find the answer, or is there more information you can gather that would help find a solution, or at least document it enough so we can ask someone else for help solving it? For my team, this means looking through our ticket tracking system, the help file, our wiki, Google Groups, and the entire Internet. This is why documenting the right things is a key to our success.
• What CAN you do? Customers hate to hear no, so think of 3 things you can do to help with the problem.
• Offer a choice of things you can do to the customer. If someone asks you to help them fly, and you know you can’t fly, focus on choices that work. If you can’t do something, and you offer that for a choice, you’re going to frustrate them when you say no, I can’t do that.

Typically these 4 things help get to the root of a problem and offer enough information that we can move forward to ask another team for help. We’ve exhausted all our resources, and we’re ready to escalate to another team.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of authority, in which case I ask them 1 more question:

• How can I help you fix this problem?

If we’ve been through all of these, and we’re still without an acceptable answer, then it’s time to get someone else involved.

What steps do you take with your team when they come to you with questions?

Are these methods effective?

Can you help me improve them?

Photo credit to amanky

As a manager, I have weekly reviews with each member of my team. We talk about 3 things:

1. What’s gone well (and how can we do more of that)
2. What needs improvement (and how can we improve faster)
3. What’s the general feeling of how things are going in relation to your goals and the rest of the team.

3 simple questions, but they get right to the heart of what we try to focus on, and that is living our strengths, shoring up the weaknesses enough that they don’t bring our strengths down, and how do we FEEL things are going.

During a weekly review, one of my folks said to me, “Sometimes I feel like I’m doing more work than Fred. And it’s not fair. Fred should work harder. It’s not fair. Why don’t you make Fred work harder.”

Here was the thinking from my associate: If Fred and I are on a team, shouldn’t Fred pull the same amount of weight as me? Hey manager, don’t you expect that Fred, Sally and Steve all are going to produce 500 widgets a day, take 500 calls a day, or sell 500 shingles a day?”

NO WAY!

I firmly believe we are each uniquely gifted with a special mix that’s ours and ours alone. Sure, I expect some the basics to be the same for each person, but I don’t expect the same for each person. Each person on my team started at a different day, has different collateral duties, and doesn’t produce the same number every day. On a month over month comparison, it always ends up with everyone having numbers that are pretty close. Often, as soon as they see they seem to be producing more than another person, they slow down and let everyone catch them. And that makes them look painfully average and in the mean with their stats. And as we all know, stats don’t tell the whole story for performance.

If you’re one of those people who slow down as soon as you get a few steps ahead, I’d like to offer you a better way.

Play full out

You are your only competition. If you’re worried about how much Sally is doing every day, how much Fred is doing every day, why Tina gets to do x and Jimmy gets to do y, STOP RIGHT NOW.

Start by thinking about doing YOUR personal best, every single day. Play full out for a month. If you really are head and shoulders better than your competition (if you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve already shown you’re smarter than the rest of your team), play full out for a month and really set yourself apart from your peers. See what your personal best can be. Ultimately that’s what you’re getting paid to do, is to improve YOUR best numbers, every year, every month, every week, every day.

Play full out and let the numbers speak for themselves. You have no idea what you’re really capable of, and unless you’re a fully commissioned sales person with 100% transparency of numbers, you have no idea what everyone else is getting paid to do the job they do. You are your only competition, so start acting like it. Make today a better day, a greater day, by competing with you, and only you.

What do you think? Am I being fair, or is there a better way?

Flickr photo credit to A.www.viajar24h.com, original found here.

I have a problem, and I need the smart folks who read Slacker Manager to help me.

This year I have already lost 3 people on my team, 1 to a promotion within the company and 2 externally to a different (more technical) position in other firms. Another is leaving at the end of summer, and 2 others that have made it clear they want to get promoted or they will probably leave by year end. If this happens, I’ll have 1 person left that I started the year with.

Why are they leaving? Because we are a flat organization, and we don’t promote from within as much as folks would like. The business unit pressures require us to have senior people in the organization, making it VERY difficult to promote to a different role for junior people. It’s not a question of culture or of fit, but rather of business need.

My 1 senior person, the one who will probably still be around when all is said and done, is concerned organizationally that this is a problem, and wants to know what I, as her manager, can do to force the organization’s hand and find ways to create positions that don’t currently exist, so we can stop the exodus of people.

The past few years have given us amazing growth and amazing profits, and we have been nationally (and locally) recognized as a great place to work for the past 5 years. This (coincidentally) happened right about the time we stopped promoting from within in our department.

My question is this: As a front line manager, how can I help my organization understand it’s in its best interests to spend a little more money to create junior positions even if it makes the business temporarily less efficient?

I’d love any suggestions on how to approach this so I can have a great conversation with my direct report.

Photo credit to alexanderdrachmann

Thanks to Jodee Bock for sharing this in the comments on Hear See Do Training. It was very helpful for me to think about. So helpful that it deserves to be showcased as a separate article for those who might have missed it. Thanks Jodee!

I am a certified trainer for Job Relations Training (JRT) which is part of the TWI Program (Training Within Industry) which was developed by the US Government during WWII. Although it is now nearly 70 years old, it is still very effective. I teach the JR part, which is a 4-step method for solving problems with people (1-Get the Facts; 2-Weigh and Decide; 3-Take Action; 4-Check Results) but it sounds like when they designed the Job Instruction part they learned what you’ve talked about here.

The 4 steps for JI are: 1-Prepare the Worker; 2-Present the Operation; 3-Try Out Performance and 4-Follow Up. During one part of the training the instructor merely demonstrates tying a certain kind of knot and then asks someone in the class to do it. They can’t. Then the instructor merely tells the class how to do it without showing them and asks for a volunteer. They still can’t do it, because of what you’ve described here.

For the third part of TWI, Job Methods, the 4-step method helps workers learn how to improve the job. Those 4 steps are: 1-Break down the job; 2-Question every detail; 3-Develop the new method; 4-Apply the new method.

All of these components work together to create the best possible work environment. Although originally designed for the manufacturing industry, they are wonderful foundations for really ensuring that workers understand new instructions and get familiar with the culture of the organization so they can offer suggestions to make the workplace even better. The Hear-See-Do model you’ve described fits perfectly.