Jogging someone into action
Sometimes it’s tough to motivate people to do something, even if it’s a goal they’ve set for themselves. For whatever reason, they’re avoiding it or they’re just tired at the prospect of doing anything about it. If they report to you, or if you’re affected by their inaction, it makes it pretty tough on you too.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could jog them into action with a simple sentence, without having to do lots of cheerleading or nagging?
Here’s a nice little example from a couple of weeks ago. I have to disguise it a bit, since this was part of a confidential management skills course that I was helping to run. But the tale is true.
I asked one of the participants “okay, the course is nearly over. What’s the next step for you? What do you want to work on back in the office?”
It was a bit of a struggle. He made that face you make when you can’t think of a single thing to say but you want to look like you’re trading off various complex ideas in your head.
Eventually he said, without much enthusiasm: “well, I suppose I’d like to get better at asking clients for more background information”.
Now, normally I would have leapt ahead and explored why it was important to ask clients for information. Then I would have gone on to ask why it was difficult, and then we would have brainstormed various ways to get round those difficulties. Obvious stuff.
The trouble is, it would have been me pushing him uphill all the way. I could nag him into exploring lots of ways to address that challenge, but likely as not, he’d forget about it the next day.
So on this occasion I didn’t do that.
Instead I asked him “so you’re not as good as you’d like to be at asking clients for more background information. What’s that costing you?”
A simple question: what’s that costing you? Four words. But believe me, it was like opening a rusty tap. At first, the answers dripped out slowly. Then came the flood.
“Er, well. Sometimes I don’t get all the background I need to do the work properly…
“So, er, I really ought to call back but that would make me look stupid. So it takes me longer to do the work…
“I don’t feel like I can delegate it to anyone because they might ask me a obvious question that I don’t know the answer to. So I do it myself. One time last week, that meant staying at the office and working late into the night. And I still wasn’t sure if I was working on the right problem. Anyhow, I’ll go back to the client – often late – and sometimes it’s okay but another time I’d basically misunderstood something really fundamental, and he was pretty irritated, and it make me feel stupid and depressed…”
Wow, I thought. “So – late nights, feeling stupid, irritated clients, depression… shall we chat about how to ask for some background?”
“You bet” he said.
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The great thing here was that a simple question did all the work for me, and put him in a place where he really wanted to take the next step.
A great question to get someone motivated to change.
Trying advice
I am losing count of the number of times people quote Yoda’s advice: “do, or do not, there is no try”. We are in danger that this unhelpful phrase will come to define our approach to business in this decade.
I will not stoop to ad hominem attacks on Yoda (beyond pointing out that he is FICTIONAL. He’s a PUPPET. Actually, given that he was voiced and operated by Frank Oz, he sort of counts as a MUPPET. And if he’s so smart, how come SPEAK PROPERLY HE CAN’T?)
Instead, I’d like to go to the heart of his statement: there is no try. This is blatant nonsense. Anything worth doing well requires us to try. It’s called practice.
Yoda, my little grey-green friend (and anyone quoting him): may I strongly recommend a book called “Bounce” by Matthew Syed? He elaborates on the theory that real excellence requires ten thousand hours of practice. As a former UK table tennis champion, he knows what he’s writing about.
Syed is a proponent of “purposeful practice”. If you or your organisation want to become good at something, then practice practice practice. This could include all sorts of things – cold calling, delegating, prototyping, negotiating – basically anything non-linear.
The conditions for good purposeful practice are:
- be very clear about what you want to achieve
- break it down into chunks of individual activity
- choose a chunk that stretches you
- try it and see what happens
- adjust and repeat
- adjust and repeat
- adjust and repeat
So an amateur golfer will go round a course, hitting the ball about 80 times, and call it practice.
But a pro will try a specific shot, and try it many times, each time noticing the result (maybe with the help of a caddy or video), and adjusting some of the inputs – club, aim, grip, stance, swing. This is purposeful practice.
I’ve followed this approach myself with a client, with great results. Click here to find out how.
It’s worth trying.
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P.S. It is interesting to note that the Star Wars Databank describes Yoda as being of “a species unknown”. This is Yoda-speak for “an unknown species”. Once you start speaking Yoda, stop you can’t.
Good management, Google-style
Google – the organisation rather than the search engine – has done some interesting work on the behaviours of a good manager. As you’d expect from Google, it’s drawn from a massive database. But in this case, the database is their own HR records.
At first blush, their list of conclusions is obvious, but the interesting thing is that it is ranked, in order of impact. Most new managers worry about number 8 – technical skills. They are labouring under a misapprehension – that they need to understand technical issues better than their team does. At Google anyway, a manager’s technical skills are far, far less important than many other softer skills, like coaching and empowering the team.
In fact, I still think this is blindingly obvious. But now there’s data to support it.
Here’s the list:
1.) Be a good coach. Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive. Have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employees’ specific strengths.
2.) Empower your team and don’t micromanage. Balance giving freedom to your employees, while still being available for advice. Make “stretch” assignments to help the team tackle big problems.
3.) Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being. Get to know your employees as people, with lives outside of work. Make new members of your team feel welcome and help ease their transition.
4.) Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented. Focus on what employees want the team to achieve and how they can help achieve it. Help the team prioritise work and use seniority to remove roadblocks.
5.) Be a good communicator and listen to your team. Communication is two-way: you both listen and share information. Hold all-hands meetings and be straightforward about the messages and goals of the team. Help the team connect the dots. Encourage open dialogue and listen to the issues and concerns of your employees.
6.) Help your employees with career development.
7.) Have a clear vision and strategy for the team. Even in the midst of turmoil, keep the team focused on goals and strategy. Involve the team in setting and evolving the team’s vision and making progress toward it.
8.) Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team. Roll up your sleeves and conduct work side by side with the team, when needed. Understand the specific challenges of the work.
This list has been re-published widely, by several newspapers, magazines and websites. Most readers will just glance at it and move on.
But how about taking this list and having a go at ranking it yourself? And then inviting your team to rank it. And comparing the results. What’s true at Google may or may not be true for your team or in your organisation. If you’re brave, you could ask them to score how well you’re doing…
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The other interesting thing is that Google listed three bear-traps for managers. Here they are:
Pitfall 1: failing to make a transition into management. Sometimes, fantastic individual contributors are promoted to managers without the necessary skills [or training, Google!] to lead people. And people hired from outside may fail to appreciate the unique aspects of managing at Google [which may detract from the claimed usefulness of this research!]
Pitfall 2: lacking a consistent approach to performance management and career development. Not helping employees understand how these work, and not coaching them on their options to develop and stretch. Not being pro-active but rather waiting for employees to come to them.
Pitfall 3: spending too little time managing and communicating.
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Once again, this is a pretty obvious list. But the question is not “don’t I know this already?” but “am I actually following these guidelines?” Also, there is a joint responsibility with the wider organisation, who should ensure that managers are trained, and that they have performance management tools and career development pathways in place, and that they genuinely help managers to manage.
Fall of the Robots
I am delighted to learn that robots are to get their own internet. It will probably be a pretty cool place to hang out, certainly more intelligent than large swathes of our own net. You can’t imagine Marvin the Paranoid Android posting a video of a cat playing the accordion. Nor would C3-PO respond “Awesome LOL!!!1!!11!!”
Even better, it’s probably the end of our apocalyptic fears of the machines rising up against their creators. The Terminator will be too busy illegally downloading Metallica albums. The Cylons will be playing the Sims Online. Yul Brynner the robot cowboy will secretly spend all his working hours on Faceplatebook.
And spare a thought for Wall*e, trying for centuries to find an undamaged router cable so that he can finally, finally, log on.
Far from destroying us, the robots will be sucked, like us, into the wonderful infinite time-sink that is the internet.
Words of the next decade
The business agenda over the last decade has included words such as ‘globalisation’, ‘social media’ and ‘transformation’. If you owned shares in those words, you’d probably have made a very good return.
But if you had to choose one word which dominated the thought processes of business people over the last ten years, it would probably be ‘authenticity’. Businesses were desperate not to be thought of as fake. They realised that trust was a vital asset. They feared that customers, overwhelmed by choice, would reject anything that they thought was false or hollow. And thus they spent fortunes on re-branding to make themselves more authentic. Sometimes this was done well; other times it was merely a re-positioning exercise. Oh the irony.
What word or idea will dominate the next ten years? I have a couple of candidates, plus a dark horse.
The first is engagement. Businesses have increasingly realised that it’s not enough to attract, retain and motivate employees. The best employees have an emotional attachment to their organisation and an enthusiasm for their job; employers would love to bottle this. The challenge is that creating the circumstances for more engagement often needs senior people to change and give up control.
The second is well-being. Economic growth seems to help standard of living but not quality of life. Beyond a basic inflection point, greater GDP doesn’t foster much happiness; it creates nearly as many worries as it solves. So the lack of well-being is a problem (affecting consumers and employees). Businesses will look for new ways to cater for that problem.
The dark horse, which I would love to see more of, is candour. Individuals, teams and organisations need much more in the way of open, honest and direct conversation. The fear of speaking frankly cripples many relationships. People are scared of pointing out basic truths. Some businesses still shoot the messenger or punish whistleblowers. However, those organisations which make it comfortable to voice uncomfortable truths will learn much faster, and thus have a competitive edge.
What about you? What’s your prediction for the word of the next decade?