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When Helping Is Not Helpful: Making Assumptions

When Helping Is Not Helpful: Making Assumptions

As a newly minted first line manager, I was eager to help my team. As I met with each person on the team, each one explained what he or she was working on. I asked a series of questions. Those questions were usually asked with the unspoken assumption that the employee hadn’t done something or considered something important in doing their job. After all, I was helping!

In one of these meetings, an employee said to me, “You know, it would be much more productive if you asked me if I did those things already instead of assuming I haven’t.” Oh. She didn’t say, ‘trust me to do those things,’ but that’s what I heard. I’ve always wanted my employees to trust me and here I was – not trusting them to do their jobs.

 Never make assumptions.

At some point in our careers, we all enjoy (not!) the manager that doesn’t trust his staff. You know the one. The one who assumes you haven’t done the simple things already and instead tells you to do them never asking if you already have.

Here I was, being that manager. Argh.assumptions

I didn’t think I was being an assuming type of manager. I really believed it was helpful to ask those questions. I still slip up every now and then and ask assuming questions. Sometimes I catch myself and respond with, “But I know you probably already considered that, right?” It’s how I try to recover from making assumptions. Why take the time to recover? Because making assumptions can damage the relationship I have with my employee.

So when talking to your employees remember what it feels like to have your manager make assumptions about you. Holding that thought in place, ask your employee what has already been considered or done. This is so much more respectful of your employees and you might end up very surprised by their answers.

The Hard Truth: Not all Your Ideas are Great

The Hard Truth: Not all Your Ideas are Great

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At a staff meeting, I very enthusiastically shared my great idea to improve productivity. It was such a great idea! I divvied up responsibilities to implement this great idea and left the meeting thinking how brilliant I was. I had recently been promoted to a director level position and I was eager to show what I could do.

Now, there are lots of ways to improve productivity. I had ideas, sure. But I failed to realize that my managers and their team members might have some input too. Nope. I charged ahead with my “great” idea. I didn’t pause to ask for feedback because I was so sure it was such a great idea.

A few days later, after investigating how to implement my great idea, one of my managers came into my office, shut the door and started questioning me about my great idea. I found this irritating. She was questioning me about my obviously great idea! 

 Maybe my idea wasn’t so great.

She kept asking what outcome I expected and how that outcome could be achieved if we implemented my great idea. At that point, I paused and looked at her. It finally struck me that my great idea might be a bad idea. I

idea-badrealized to really manage a successful team, I had to be willing to hear from my employees that what I thought was a brilliantly great idea – might not be so brilliant. That’s tough especially if I’m really attached to the idea and really do believe it is brilliant.

This manager then went on to propose another way to improve productivity and how it could be implemented and tracked. Her proposal was a better proposal than mine. I had a choice: refuse her proposal and continue with my great idea or go with her proposal. If I continued with my great idea, that I now knew had some serious downsides, this would signal to her and the entire organization that I was unwilling to consider other people’s ideas. This action could result in closing down creativity and innovation. Or, I could swallow my pride and choose a better idea than mine.

I told her I would think about her proposal and get back to her. I thought through the two proposals long and hard; clearly her proposal was a better one than mine. I decided to go with her proposal. What I didn’t realize at the time was my decision not only gave folks the freedom to propose new ideas but it also told them I trusted them.

Since that time, I’ve proposed new things and my team members have proposed new things. By making it a reciprocal conversation with lots of back and forth, I get buy-in and signal to the team that I respect and trust their input. I’m not saying I don’t at times decline their proposals. I do. But only after listening and weighing the pros and cons of each proposal. In this way, the door to creativity and innovation is left wide open.

Worse Line Ever From a Manager: “You all are like my children.”

Worse Line Ever From a Manager: “You all are like my children.”

“You all are like my children,” my manager said to me.

I just stared at him. I was offended on so many levels. I was NOT his child in any sense of the word. However, as this was my first professional job, I didn’t say anything in response though I could feel my body constricting in anger. He then went on to elaborate just why he thought his direct reports were like his children: We didn’t always agree, some team members get upset with other team members. And so on.

If what he really meant to say is we are all human beings that at times disagree with a direction or a decision, or that we can be offended by what we think are inappropriate remarks, then yes, we are all like children. And sometimes, that’s ok.

The most amazing, and appalling, piece of this point of view is that my manager clearly thought he was the only reasonable adult person at work. Wow. Pretty arrogant – and definitely wrong.

All of us, including those managers who think their employees are their children, have experienced frustration, disagreements, and yes, squabbling, at work. It’s called being human! Instead of responding by thinking people are acting like children, a good manager assesses the situation and takes appropriate action. He does not treat his employees like children.

Childish behavior at work is usually encouraged by the manager.

 

If you think you are the only adult at work, then you must be doing something wrong. If you treat people like your children, you will get childish behavior from some and others will leave your organization. This is why the real solution is to raise the bar on behavior.

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I treat those that work for me like I want to be treated: as an adult. I find it is more respectful and rarely does behavior degenerate into childish behavior. Especially since they know I expect professional, respectful behavior.

Compliments

Compliments

way to go, good job, well done, you're the man, thumbs up, you rock - a set of isolated sticky notes with positive affirmation words

 

“I think how you handled that situation was just perfect!”

 

It’s wonderful to hear how great I am. Compliments are so nice. This employee was always telling me how great that idea was or how that decision I made was the right one. He never disagreed with me or asked me questions about anything I did. When I realized that all he was giving me was positive feedback, I knew I had fallen for the seductiveness of positive feedback and compliments.

Positive feedback and compliments are seductive because there is a temptation as a manager to believe that everything I do is perfect. This can lull me into becoming a complacent manager and complacency only leads to bad outcomes. I’m human; I make mistakes. If all I hear is how great I am, I may make more mistakes instead of less because I’m not listening, not aware of bad decisions, and / or entirely missing critical data.

I’m not saying employees try to manipulate by giving me compliments. Maybe sometimes that’s true, but many times the person is just being nice. They want to hear positive feedback so they give me positive feedback. What I want is balanced feedback. I want employees to question, offer other alternatives, and yes, challenge me. I’m comfortable enough that being challenged doesn’t threaten me. It’s a good place to be.

I like compliments, however I love questions that allow me to consider things I wouldn’t otherwise. I love to see employees coming up with even better solutions or ideas than I have because they are comfortable with challenging me.

When I receive compliments at work, I very carefully consider the compliment. Sometimes, it is deserved. But other times, that compliment raises a suspicion that I might need to re-evaluate what I’ve done.

To Lead is to Let Go of Control

To Lead is to Let Go of Control

What makes a good leader? I’ve given this much thought during the years I’ve been managing. I don’t believe any person in a leadership role sets out to be a bad leader – and bad leaders, unfortunately, usually think they’re good leaders.

What exactly does “leader” mean? I looked it up and one definition is “the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country.”* It also means “a short strip of nonfunctioning material at each end of a reel of film or recording tape for connections to a spool.” *

While some may think of their current leader as bearing a great deal of resemblance to a nonfunctioning material, I’m going with the first definition of leadership and assume we’re talking about “the action of leading a group of people or an organization.” I also looked up the word management and here’s the definition I found: “the process of dealing with or controlling things or groups of people.”*

So, in looking at these definitions, I do manage people, but I also lead people. Leading is different from managing because as a leader, my intention is to inspire, motivate and provoke a desire for excellence from a large group of people, some of whom I will never meet.

You can’t control everything.

 

It’s true, I do manage my direct staff, and managing includes controlling things like budgets, but I can’t control everything. I have to depend on my leadership skills to inspire the organization to reach its goals and do some of the work of controlling things.

For me, a good leader understands he can’t control everything in the organization; he has to trust the peopleAdobeStock_100113673-3 working for him. To achieve organizational goals, a leader needs to motivate and inspire their teams. To encourage innovation, a good leader knows he has to trust the people working for him to be creative and to think of new approaches for products, issues, or problems.

In one group I led, we had software quality issues. Not minor ones either. Some of the quality issues were because management wanted to hit certain deadlines and corners were cut. In other cases, it was bad development practices. So each vice-president had a goal for their organizations to decrease the backlog of defects as a starting place for addressing product quality.

We all decided on a certain percentage to hit and then told the teams to fix all of the high priority defects to hit that percentage. Things were going great! Most every team was on track to hit that percentage. We were slapping ourselves on the back in congratulating each other in hitting our goal.

But then I met with a developer. You see, I often do skip-level meetings with staff . These skip-level meetings often begin with some discussion on how things are going and general chit chat, but sometimes someone will say something quite stunning.

This developer, after about ten minutes of the general chit chat, paused, looked me in the eye and asked, “Why is this goal in fixing defects focused only on the high priority defects? Wouldn’t a better approach be to determine where all the defects are in the code and then tackle the code that seems so problematic?”

I was stunned. I looked at her before replying because I was thinking, duh, should have thought of that! We did meet that year’s goal of fixing a percentage of high priority defects, but the next year? We did exactly as she recommended. And the team found there were a couple of areas in the code base that needed to be reworked or refactored thereby resolving most of the software quality issues.

I learned from this experience that as a leader, I shouldn’t try to control what everyone does – and I don’t want to control every single thing. That’s not my job. My job is to trust my employees to hear what I think is an issue or problem. Then I listen to what they suggest before I make decrees. The results are often far better than I expect.

*New Oxford American Dictionary