Are you aware of what
is really driving your behaviour, or the behaviour of your people? I’ve recently had a number of discussions
about how to address the unwanted behaviour of staff as it can be awkward if
you don’t have solid foundations to stand on.
Giving feedback on
under-performance can be tricky at the best of times, but giving feedback on
unwanted behaviour can be very awkward because it is often difficult to put
into words. This means that many managers tolerate it and damage the morale of
their teams. So, how do you get someone
who is often brusque and surly with colleagues to acknowledge it and change
their behaviour? How do you get a
manager who is neglecting their staff, by not conducting Appraisals or Job
Chats, to recognise the importance of these vital conversations? You need some clear reference points to use
as a basis for explaining what you want and emphasising what’s most important.
Discovering
what is most important
Let’s
take an example of Emma, a competent Trainer and Facilitator. She is due to run a pilot Time Management
Workshop for a new and potentially very big client with a lot of follow up work. A combination of factors means that she’s
running late but there is just enough time to get set up and prepared for the Workshop. However, just as she’s approaching the
client’s premises an elderly lady on the other side of the road falls and cuts
her forehead quite badly. Emma is a
qualified first-aider and it looks like the lady will need some help, she may
even have concussion, but if Emma stops she’ll be late for her client and it is
not good to arrive late for a new client especially when delivering a training
course on Time Management!
So,
Emma has a dilemma, a values conflict.
It’s important to her to make a good first impression and to demonstrate
that she can ‘walk the talk’ when it comes to effective time management, but it
is also important to her to help others, especially when they are hurt and her
first aid skills will make a difference and may even prevent more serious
injury or harm.
What
should Emma do?
It’s
interesting to explore how your answer is dictated by your ‘Values’ - what you
think is most important in a specific context.
What you decide she should do next is actually based on your personal
hierarchy of values; an often below-conscious process that we use to guide our
behaviour in any given context.
Let’s
look at how Emma could develop or damage her credibility and levels of trust
with her new client, how she will maintain congruence and personal
effectiveness . . . or not.
If
Emma attends to the injured lady but is worrying and distracted about what the
client will think about her poor punctuality, she will be conflicted and will
not be as helpful and caring as she intended to be. This will cause her frustration, and when she
arrives late she will be stressed because of what she thinks the client may be
thinking. Her agitated state will probably
prevent her from delivering a good session . . . and she may lose the client.
However,
if Emma ignores the lady and gets to the client on time to set up, she may
still have a conflict because she is distracted by all the ‘What if’s’ about
the lady and that she should have, at least, checked that she was OK. This will mean she is not concentrating on
the Workshop and will come across as distant and not fully engaged with the
participants . . . and she may lose the client.
Powerful
Awareness
Let’s
just say that Emma is clear about her Values of ‘Helping others’, ‘Providing great
learning experiences’ and ‘Taking a realistic and pragmatic approach to what
she trains’. The fact that ‘Helping
others ‘ is very high on her list of values means it encompasses helping them
physically if injured and helping them understand the principles of managing
time effectively. She is quickly able to
see that this incident will make a great example of how values dictate our
behaviour and how having a conflict can damage our congruence and our power to engage
with, and influence others. She knows
that this incident will provide a perfect real-life example.
So
she calls ahead to explain that the group are in for a very special learning
experience and that while they are waiting for her to arrive they need to write
a list of the ten things that are most important to them and put them in order
with the most important at the top. When
she arrives Emma is calm and confident about the incident and how she can
incorporate it into the Workshop. The
participants are highly engaged with her energy and passion for the
material. They feel she is very genuine.
They have a great learning experience and she gets excellent feedback with no
mention of the late start. She will
probably win the contract for more Training.
Agreeing what
is most important
Whenever we are
feeling upset it is because our values are being neglected, whenever we feel
good it is because our values are being respected. The trouble is most of us don’t even
consciously know what our values are. By
acknowledging them we can become much clearer about why we are feeling the way
we do, and choose the most appropriate and constructive response - rather than
just getting angry which prevents us from being rational. This sounds easy but it requires some
conscious effort to think about our thinking.
I do a lot of work
with senior teams and their values. One
of the exercises I do with them is to get each person in the team to list what
is most important to them about working in the senior team. The most interesting aspect of facilitating
the exercise is teasing out all the different meanings that people often have
for common values like Professionalism, Communication, Support or Teamwork and
more abstract values like Trust, Respect and Honesty. It is
not unusual for three or four people to put up the same word but to have a very
different meaning for it. Facilitating a
discussion about it can be very powerful for everyone in the room. The discussion often gets heated when the
team start to put the list of values into a hierarchy because people’s personal
values start to come to the surface. It is very powerful, when the team decide
on what they consider to be most important in order to work together to achieve
the business objectives. However, it all becomes meaningless if there is no accountability.
Addressing
unwanted behaviour
When a team or
business has a clear and agreed set of values they need to be explained to
everyone in the business in very practical terms, and senior managers need to
demonstrate their alignment with the values in their day to day behaviour. People need constant reminding about how the
values can be used to influence behaviour and Managers, including Directors,
need to be held to account if they don’t set a good example. This is where real leadership shows up . . .
or not!
I was recently
facilitating a workshop with a large group of managers about the principles of setting
clear expectations and giving objective feedback. It was interesting to see the managers recognise
the importance of some fundamental things like clear targets or Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) and unambiguous outcome based Job Descriptions so they could
use them as objective reference points.
However, the piece
that most managers got stuck on was setting a SMART objective or standard for
improving someone’s ‘poor attitude’. They
struggled to find the right words to be specific, measurable and
objective. While they were often clear about
what they didn’t want, they actually struggled to define what they actually
wanted.
For example, one
manager was complaining about 2 members of a team who are always bickering and
‘just can’t seem to get along’, and when I asked her what she wanted instead
she found it difficult to put it into specific, measureable and objective
terms. Another manager was complaining
about supervisors being impatient and dismissive of junior staff, but was
unable to come up with a clear statement of what he wanted.
The solution was actually readily available but the Managers did not see it . . . yet. It’s about defining behaviour – don’t focus on ‘Attitude’ – just the specific behaviours you can observe. There needs to be a conversation with the member of staff about what is important to the business in terms of behaviour, and how their behaviour is not aligned to it. The business had recently developed a very comprehensive set of Values and it was interesting to point out how all the behavioural issues mentioned by the managers, could be addressed very effectively by having a conversation about the values and what they mean, especially in the examples of team working, and developing junior staff.
A clear set of agreed
values can be a very rich resource for managers who know how to use them
properly. But if there are no consequences
for people who don’t demonstrate the required behaviours they become
meaningless.
Food for thought
- How are you addressing the unwanted behaviour in your business or team?
- If you have an agreed set of Values are you using them effectively? Are you discussing them on a regular basis, especially when there are problems?
- If you don’t have an agreed set of Values, you may want to explore the exercise mentioned above: You can get the exercise from our ‘Useful Resources’ page, just click on this link and go to the ‘Templates’ tab, then scroll to the very bottom and download the ‘Values Exercise (Indv & Team)’.
Further
resources:
- For a good overview
of how to give feedback in a way that it can be heard, see my previous Blog
on the subject.- Beware of telling people what you ‘don’t want’, because the latest research in brain science now proves that the more you give people negative instructions the less likely you are to get what you do want. (For more on this see the blog 'Are you giving negative instructions?')
If you have any
questions or comments about any of the above don’t hesitate to contact me.
Remember
. . . Stay Curious!
With best regards
David
Klaasen www.InspiredWorking.com
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