Ask Your Direct Reports Their Opinion and They May Hate You Less

Probably your direct reports don't hate you, Things are not that bad. It might be mild discontent. But, what could explain the fact that they don't seem to get it. If only they could stop driving you crazy and just do their job like they are supposed to. Is that the attitude you had when they first joined your team?

"Just do your job and don't drive me crazy and we will get along fine."

If this has been your general approach toward your employees, I urge you to consider pursuing a role as an individual contributor, not a leader. It will serve everyone better.

When an employee first joined your organization (or you took the reins of an existing team), you shared expectations, communication preferences, point of view, and boundaries. All with hopeful anticipation and valued camaraderie. "Welcome to the team," you likely said.

So what happened?

Over time, things got sloppy. Perhaps you got used to each other and replaced communication with assumption.

"She's been here long enough, she knows what I mean."

The layman's term for this is, 'lazy'. It can happen even when everything is humming along; costs contained, profits up, technology has magically fixed your problems, and you are getting home at a decent hour. The effective leader knows; the garden still has to be tended with a diligent and caring eye.

Although they seldom like to hear it, I frequently remind clients, "Your manager knows more than you." This has nothing to do with intelligence or common sense. It is about perspective. Your manager attends different meetings than you, receives different reports, is under different scrutiny, and is responsible for more. These are not things a leader should tell their direct reports because at best it comes across as a humble brag, at worst it is sanctimonious.

It is rare for your direct reports to see things from your vantage point. They view the world from their perspective, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn the reverse is also true. Your direct reports know more than you. They are closer to the end-user. They get the latest tactical information in real time, well before your excel spreadsheet turns from yellow to red. Every day they see successes and failures that you never do, or if you once did, you've long since forgotten.

When you stop communicating, collaborating, and soliciting opinions, you break an implicit compact. The point of a team is the realization of a strategic imperative. It is the recognition that the accomplishment of something important cannot be successful without the diversity of thought, experience, skill, and perspective. Without that you do not have a high-performing team, you have a group of people who barely tolerate each other, and there is no strategic benefit to that.

So, go ask your direct reports their opinion. Let them know ahead of time that you may or may not agree with or act on what they share, but you still want to hear their opinion because you value their perspective.

Written by

Karl Bimshas

leadership consultant who collaborates with busy executives to improve the working relationships with their direct reports and collegeuges to create high performing teams. He’s the author of “How to Stay When You Want to Quit;Strategies to get over yourself“.

Timeless Business Lessons from Don Draper

Ignore everything you see on "Mad Men" ... except these two smart solutions.

Everett Collection

 

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Catch an episode of "Mad Men," the award-winning cable drama about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1960s, and you’ll see dozens of lessons about what not to do in business today. Womanizing, heavy day drinking, indoor smoking, and lying about your identity aren’t things to emulate.

Still, as I watched the most recent season, I was reminded of the business lessons that still ring true. Here are two that stand out.

Lesson No. 1: Solve the Real Problem
I won’t spoil anything for you, but in a recent episode, the firm is presented with a challenge when trying to reel in Chevy as a new client. In the eyes of Chevy, the small firm doesn’t have the resources to land the business. Don Draper’s firm manages to figure out what the real problem is for their clients and offer a solution.

Understand your prospect’s real, underlying objection … and then come up with a creative way to tackle it. True innovation often comes in the way of an insight into what problem you’re trying to solve, which isn’t always the one that’s stated.

Lesson No. 2: Don’t Forget Face Time
Given the setting of the show--1960s New York City--communication options were more limited. Without email, texting or cell phones, it was necessary to sit down with people and engage them on a personal level.

In-person meetings still matter. Now, I’m not recommending that anyone take clients or potential clients out on the town the way they do on "Mad Men." But despite all the new digital communication options, there’s no substitute for actually meeting someone face-to-face.

I remember, in the early days of SurePayroll, traveling around the country to meet with partners. We’d always sit down for a nice dinner and talk about things outside of work. When problems came up, knowing the people we did business with really counted. A personal relationship makes it much easier to handle a crisis.

If you watch the account men on "Mad Men," you’ll see that they’re classic relationship managers. And while we certainly don’t want to go back to a 1960s mindset--there are many deeply objectionable parts of the show--it’s a good reminder of the value in knowing our customers and understanding how we can give them what they want.

Michael Alter is president of SurePayroll, America’s leading online payroll service. He received an MBA from the Harvard Business School and holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Northwestern University. @michaelalter

Four simple principles for highly effective teams

 

The only principles that make a difference are the ones you know by heart, swear by, and live by. Everything else is just blather.

For a long time, I've been fascinated from afar by Agile programming practices, which have proven themselves on all these levels. I've wondered why they haven't been adapted for use by all types of teams, because they hold the potential to make teams far more flexible, innovative and productive.

So here's my shot at adapting those practices into four simple principles that all business teams can use. My hope is that they can help teams both execute and innovate in an excellent manner. I'd also like to acknowledge that Toria Thompson helped me develop some of these ideas.

This is a work in progress - I welcome your comments and will be happy to embrace any suggestions you have that further strengthen this approach:

Value the value: Too many teams operate without clear metrics, and thus they end up making fuzzy decisions. This is a slippery slope to disappointing results. Instead, teams should assign a tangible value to every deliverable, and – this is the important part – teams should track and validate these projections as work goes on. In this manner, team members can’t game the system, inflating values to give their pet projects priority treatment.

The philosophy underlying this principle is simple: businesses exist to make money, and if a project doesn’t support that goal in a tangible way, the team shouldn’t be doing it.

• State the value of each project.
• Create metrics that quantify the stated value.
• Validate the value actually delivered, and reward team members for it.

Be open and honest: Keep all team communications, facts and status reports in the open and highly visible.

Look at the way your team currently operates. Is the purpose of every action crystal clear? Do you know why Lisa has been locked in her office for three days, or why John is conducting 32 interviews this week?

Clear and open communications have immense benefits. It should be obvious to everyone who is doing what, and why. When team members get stuck, they get help faster. When they succeed, others follow faster.

• Avoid private communications.
• Conduct disciplined weekly progress report sessions.
• Hold daily “stand-up” sessions (you stand to keep them short).
• Use images, mockups, etc. to make things clearer.
• Make it easy to understand the purpose of every work product.

Shorten workplans: Break deliverables into smaller pieces that can be finished in shorter time periods.

The longer a team works before delivering a tangible result, the more likely the deliverable is to fall short of expectations. A far better approach is to break large projects down into smaller pieces, and to regularly complete deliverables.

By shortening workplans, teams also make it easier for team members to explore new strategies and take risks. This is because the cost of taking a risk and failing is minimized; you lose a week instead of six months. This tactic also maximizes flexibility, because at the end of each project the team can decide what to do next.

• Shorten the length of time between deliverables.
• Try to make every deliverable useable and functioning, rather than just a description of something that still needs to be done.
• Whenever possible, make processes and deliverables reusable and adaptable for other purposes

Create interdependence: No one wins unless everyone wins. Period.

This is the best way to get a team to function like, well, a team. It also fosters insights, flexibility, and resilience.

• Create shared metrics.
• Partner team members from different disciplines.
• Have members with similar skills swap tasks often, even in the middle of working on a deliverable.
• Share responsibilities, ideas, concerns and alternatives.

If these principles make sense to you, you might want to give them a try. But I'd like to suggest you do so only on one condition: that all team members voluntarily want to adopt these principles.

Bruce Kasanoff is a writer and speaker.

Image credit: photo by Flickr member VisualPanic.

   
by:Bruce Kasanoff

How Consumers Are Using Their Phones, And What It Means

By: Josh Luger

dMobile is no longer a communications utility, but a media distribution hub. According to eMarketer, mobile now accounts for 12 percent of Americans' media consumption time, triple its share in 2009.

Where is this consumer attention being focused?

The biggest beneficiaries have been mobile apps. Time spent on apps dwarfs time spent on the mobile Web, and smartphone owners now spend 127 minutes per day in mobile apps.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we analyze the main mobile usage trends developers and publishers should consider to be successful in mobile, detail how users are consuming content on their mobile devices, take a look at the most popular mobile activities, and examine how mobile usage is an additive activity.

Here's an overview of the four usage trends developers and publishers should consider: 

The rise of gaming: Games are the largest mobile app category and the biggest money-maker in the app stores, accounting for 70% of Apple's top-grossing apps. However, even with the most addictive games, consumers' attention is fleeting and companies run the risk of becoming "one-hit wonders." 

Mobile-social synergies: Social networking apps are the second largest time bucket for mobile users. 39% of mobile users access social networks. This includes mobile versions of desktop favorites, as well as mobile-first networks like Instagram. Mobile holds promise for the social category, but monetization is far from a sure thing. 

The piggyback rule: The only tried-and-true way for a mobile success is to take a popular usage category and build a product that piggybacks on that activity to provide a unique mobile-native experience. Instagram did it with photos, "Angry Birds" with games, but other usage categories — news, weather, travel, video etc. — are waiting for a similar hit.

Portal erosion: Mobile is a fragmented space, and consumers seem to like it that way. No one has succeeded aggregating services via a single app or mobile website. The desktop portal is fading with the advent of mobile. Yahoo Mail Traffic declined 12% in the 12 months leading up to December 2012. Carrier attempts to build mobile portals have failed miserably. 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-consumers-are-using-their-phones-2013-5#ixzz2UDokhvuB

The Ripple Effects You Create as a Manager

 Each one of us holds a set of beliefs and attitudes — a mindset — that determines how we interpret and respond to situations. That mindset shapes how we interact with others, and therefore it also affects the people we work with — in ways both subtle and profound. A person with a distrustful mindset, for example, views situations at work as competitive and acts to advance his own interest at others' expense by politicking: shifting allegiances, taking credit, assigning blame, withholding or distorting information. These behaviors drive up stress and burnout in others, and undermine organizational effectiveness. On the other hand, a mindset of openness, trust, and generosity promotes behaviors that have beneficial effects on others. In his new book Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant marshals an impressive body of scientific evidence to show how a mindset of generosity radiates to yield broad gains. Here's one powerful research example: a 20-year longitudinal study of healthy employees found that people with social support from coworkers were two and a half times less likely to die prematurely than those without. So it's not an exaggeration to say that by being supportive of people at work, you're not just brightening their day — you're literally helping to save lives. 

What you might not appreciate is that the socially-transmitted impact of your mindset extends well beyond those people with whom you interact directly in the workplace. It also touches those to whom they are connected — most notably their partners and family members, but also their larger networks and communities. A growing body of research confirms that the stress employees experience at work crosses over to and impairs the functioning and well-being of family members, even impacting children's performance in school. This chain may unfold as follows: a manager who believes that the best way to manage employees is to "keep them on their toes" habitually makes unreasonable demands, confronts employees publicly, provides little positive feedback, and withholds information. These behaviors cause stress in the employees who are subject to them. When they come home from work at night, the employees are more likely to display anger and impatience. Their spouses' stress levels rise and marital quality declines. Their children learn to leave the parent alone in the evening rather than risk getting yelled at, and their psychological adjustment suffers. And so on, into schools and communities. 

 Happily, positive relationships in the workplace also have strong ripple effects. The person with a positive, open, and trusting mindset acts in ways that build emotional resources among work colleagues, which in turn enrich the well-being and good functioning of their families.

Let's look at how a fairly common mindset plays out in the workplace and beyond. For years, many managers have believed that a mark of a competent, committed employee is that he or she is able to leave family and personal life at the office door and, while "on the clock," focus 100% on work. This assumption is powerful; it shapes expectations about what it takes to succeed in a career, how companies assess their employees' value and performance, and the way managers behave. 

The problem is, it's also flawed. Way back in 1977, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter coined the phrase "the myth of separate spheres" to describe the problematic way in which managers thought about the interface of employees' work and personal lives. It was a myth then, and it's a myth now. Human beings can't completely segment their lives; expecting them to do so both increases strain and diminishes the gains that can be realized by deliberately seeking wins across multiple areas of life. While companies are increasingly awakening to awareness of the mutual gains of work-life integration, the separate spheres mindset still persists.

What do separate spheres and integration/mutual gain mindsets look like in action? Two starkly contrasting examples from the early years of my own career come to mind. I spent five years in my twenties working for an organization, the first two in one department and the subsequent three in another. Although the departments were located right next to each other and performed related work, they differed considerably in terms of management style and culture. I recall a particular meeting in the first. During a few minutes of small talk while people entered the conference room and settled around the table, I chatted with a colleague whose wife was shortly expecting their first baby. Being a new mother myself, I commiserated with him about late-stage pregnancy and the anxieties leading up to birth. "Will you take paternity leave when the baby is born?" I asked this question knowing that the organization had a policy in place that offered new fathers a week off with pay upon the birth of a child. He smiled and hesitated for a moment before his boss scoffed from the other side of the table, "Paternity leave? I'll give you your paternity leave: a box of cigars." And just like that, the door was shut, not only for the expectant father, but also for anyone else who may have wanted to use the policy. Like many work-life policies, the paternity leave was subject to supervisor approval. But this manager's separate-spheres mindset precluded consideration of what might have been gained by a valued employee, his family, and ultimately by the organization in exchange for a single week off work.

Two years later, when my second child was born, I went back to work full-time after six weeks of maternity leave. I was exhausted and found it stressful to be away from my very young baby for so much time. It was apparent to me that much of the work I performed could be done from home with equal or greater efficiency and no adverse impact on anyone at my office. I decided to approach my boss and request to work from home two days per week for the next six months.

 Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed. The fact that my manager was open and responded with trust and a willingness to experiment in order to meet both my needs and those of the department was transformative, not just for me, but for my family too. I cherished the opportunity to spend two extra days of each week with my baby. I was much happier and healthier. With my stress reduced, I approached my work with renewed enthusiasm. My husband, then a full-time student, had more time for studying and less work-life conflict. Importantly, I saw my manager as more multifaceted than I had previously appreciated, my respect for him deepened, and I felt a greater sense of commitment to the organization. 

 

So what can you do to radiate positive, productive energy through employees at your workplace and out through their work-life networks? Here are a few ways:

• Be a role model for work-life integration. Be open about your own challenges and strategies for fitting together your work, family, and personal life. Let your employees see you as a whole person.


• Appreciate others as whole people. The fact that everyone you work with has a life beyond work means that the team and the organization is embedded in a larger network of valuable relationships and shared goals. Appreciating the commitments that others have beyond work creates openness to looking for ways to create mutual work-life gains.


• Be willing to experiment. Keep the focus on what your team or organization is trying to achieve and how each person can best contribute to those results. Ask people what would help boost their ability to achieve desired work results while also increasing their well-being beyond work. When employees are involved in designing and implementing solutions, their commitment to making them work is strong.


• Offer socio-emotional support. Understanding of work-life challenges, sensitivity to how work can impact personal life, demonstrating respect, and offering encouragement go a long way in fostering positive relationships that help employees perform while keeping work-life conflict to a minimum.


• Be an advocate for work-life integration in your organization. Promote the cause of work-life integration. Talk about why you believe it's important to recognize and respond to employees' work-life challenges. Share success stories and examples with other managers to help decision-makers in the organization understand how to provide work-life support.

It can be difficult to recognize and change one's own mindset (in fact, this goal is at the heart of the leadership development industry). One way to approach an examination of your mindset is by asking this question: what kind of social influence would you like to have? Whether you realize it or not, each person you supervise or work with connects you to their work-life network — initially to their immediate family, but ultimately to communities and to society. What you must decide is what kind of ripples you want to transmit through these networks, because one way or another, you will create them.
   

Monique Valcour

Monique Valcour is a professor of management at EDHEC Business School in France. Her research, teaching, and consulting focuses on helping companies and individuals craft high-performance, meaningful jobs, careers, workplaces, and lives. Follow her on Twitter @moniquevalcour.