Business and Marketing

Loose cannons-individuals who have been given (or falsely assume they have) a broad degree of control over their jobs, even though their low competence level causes them to experience performance problems. These individuals cause senior managers to add additional controls and check points.

Strategically empower lose cannons through the following steps:
• Prior to your meeting, identify performance problems that have previously occurred because the member attempted to take actions that were beyond her skill level. Try to pinpoint the primary gaps between the individual’s competence level and the degree of independent action and authority she exhibits.
• Review these situations with the member. Ask the member to summarize how he views his performance in each situation and the actions that could have been taken to avoid these situations; then provide your feedback. Be prepared to encounter some resistance; the member is likely to provide a number of excuses for his problems and attempt to draw attention away from his skill deficiencies.
• Outline your performance expectations and clearly explain areas in which you feel the individual may be deficient.
• Discuss alternatives for building needful skills. If your own time is extremely limited, ask a competent member to serve as a coach to assist the member.
• At the same time, discuss putting in temporary safeguards to prevent additional performance problems during the skill-building process, such as teaming the individual with another, more competent employee; limiting the member’s decision-making authority until she has successfully demonstrated skill growth; and clearly identifying check-in points at which the member will receive work review and coaching.
• Discuss a time for follow-up discussion on the individual’s progress toward meeting her skill development goals.

The use of small wins and breakthrough projects is especially important when organizations are going through difficult times and teams feel overwhelmed by the changes. Through this tactic teams learn to redirect their energy toward factors that are directly within their scope of control and are better able to buffer themselves against stress.

When selecting a small-scale improvement project for your team, begin by identifying one major performance area that, if improved, would contribute substantially to your organization’s success and at the same time make your group feel like a winning team. To ensure success, select a goal that:
1. Is urgent and compelling-a real attention-getter.
2. Is a first-step goal achievable in a short period of time-in weeks rather than months.
3. Is a bottom-line result, discrete and measurable.
4. Is one the responsible participants feel ready, willing, and able to accomplish.
5. Can be achieved with available resources and authority.

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Celebrate each success. It’s important to provide ample opportunities to celebrate team successes. Teams suffering from a deficit of positive feedback can quickly become demoralized. Take, for example, the manager of an international sales force whose team was responsible for selling sophisticated computer networks in the European and Middle East markets. Often the proposal development and review time for these projects stretched out over eighteen months or more. In consulting with the team on steps they could take to improve their performance, I discovered that over time members had been putting less energy into their proposals.

According to members, one problem they faced was their manager’s insistence that proposal milestone were not causes for celebration. Whenever a milestone was successfully crossed, the manager would quickly remind his team, “This doesn’t mean anything until we’ve won the proposal. It’s still early in the bidding process. A lot can happen.” What an inspiring speech! It’s sort of like standing at the twelve-mile marker of a marathon race and telling a runner, “Don’t start feeling optimistic yet. You’re only halfway there. You have more than twelve grueling miles to run under the hot sun.” Many marathon runners would soon drop out after such a pep talk.

Remind your team of its past successes. During tough times, people become preoccupied with the difficulties they are facing and the setbacks they’ve experienced. The talk in the hallways and the company cafeteria begins to focus on the big contract that was just lost, rumors of impending layoffs, or the problems created by the latest budget restriction. Sometimes it seems as if nothing is going right in the organization.

To combat this fatalism and pessimism, it’s important for you to provide a vehicle that encourages your team members to focus their attention periodically on what they’ve done right and on the successes they’ve achieved in the last few weeks or months. This shift in attention is particularly important when you are first trying to encourage your group to swim upstream against the problems facing them and to tackle initial improvement projects.
• Create small, incremental successes. Help your team develop a can-do attitude by generating a series of small incremental successes.

This article is second one from previous article: model limit-busting

Set up a performance monitoring project. Select an important performance area that is not currently tracked (e.g., response time to customers, shipping schedules, quality of service calls). Ask members to give you a rough estimate of their performance in this area, then challenge them to track their performance for one month. Teams often significantly overestimate their actual performance. Watching a trend line veer away from an overly optimistic performance estimate can be sobering experience.

Conduct a performance analysis. In this tactic the steps of a work process are outlined on a flowchart and the team then identifies performance steps that are prone to errors and bottlenecks or are overly complicated. One reason that performance analysis is a great motivator is that it opens up processes to review by and feedback from a broad cross section of your organization. As a team motivational tool, performance analysis is particularly useful when:
• Members are stuck at a performance plateau because of poorly designed or overly cumbersome processes.
• Members have difficulty identifying performance problems because they are too close to & process. They have stopped paying attention to the problems created by inefficiencies and have fallen into the habit of working around ineffective processes.
• Problems are partially hidden because they occur at cross-over points-points where work flows across the boundaries between your team and other groups. Each team assumes that the problem is the other’s responsibility.

4. Take the wind out of the other person’s sails. People often enter into conflict discussions pumped up with a high degree of anger, a defense mechanism against anticipated hostility from the other party. To defuse hostility, send messages that will calm the other person and take the wind out of his sails. Offer the option of  meeting in his office or at your work area.

Avoid meeting in a public work area, because people are more likely to become ego-involved in conflicts when their peers or subordinates can overhear (ever watch children daring each other to fight in a playground?). Select a time when neither of you will feel rushed or pressured. During the discussion, avoid standing or leaning over the other person. Sit in a comfortable position, and try to relax your face and breathing. Avoid talking in a rushed or clipped manner. Offer the other person some coffee. Before responding, say to the other person, “Obviously you have a lot of strong feelings about this.

Before we go on, I want to make sure that I understand you correctly.” Often, at this point, the other party will quickly throw out a few angry points and then brace himself (you can see this in a tightening of the face and muscles) for your attack. Once again, take the wind out of his sails by summarizing what you’ve heard and then encouraging him to continue. Then briefly summarize the speaker’s key point.

5. Place disagreements within the context of agreement. During conflicts, people tend to focus on those areas on which they disagree without fully considering areas of agreement. Before commenting on any disagreement, quickly list those points on which you and your partner agree, then lead into your area of disagreement. Say something like “I feel that we are in agreement on several points,” and then list them and say, “The one area where we seem to disagree is …You seem to feel …whereas I believe that …Is that the way you see things?”

Next article is Stress Situations Guide -3

Model limit-busting in your own life. If you want your team members to raise their own performance expectations, you must be able to show them you are willing to take risks and challenge performance limits in your own life.

To model limit-busting for your team, do the following:
1. Set challenging goals for your performance. During the next month, create a wall chart for tracking your personal performance in a selected area and include on the chart a clearly delineated performance goal. Share your goal with your team, and be honest in conveying your progress toward the goal. If you find that to reach your goal you have to put in additional effort or modify your procedures, share this with your team. When your team sees that you are testing your own limits, it will be more willing to follow suit.
2. Use the language of success. I’ve found that the language you use shapes your personal perception of the world. If you use words that convey powerlessness and hopelessness, you weaken yourself. On the other hand, language can be used to empower yourself and strengthen your team.
3. Volunteer to temporarily perform the jobs of your team members. This technique provides a number of benefits.

First, it shows employees that you are trying to see through their eyes the problems and difficulties they encounter on a daily basis.

Second, if you aren’t well acquainted with the jobs they perform, this approach shows that you are willing to shift, when needed, from the role of skilled expert to novice. It shows your team that you are willing to deal with the uncertainty of working outside your comfort zone.

Provide periods of concentrated effort. During high-stress periods people usually find it more difficult to concentrate on the work in front of them. These are the times that phones ring off the hook and people find themselves overrun by walk-in visitors. One technique for creating a stress-managed environment is to meet with your team to determine the most quiet, uninterrupted location in your facility.

This might be an unused conference room, the company cafeteria (morning or late afternoon), or even an isolated corner of your office. In addition, see if your group is willing to set up a schedule which will enable members to cover each others’ phones and handle walk-in interruptions. The goal should be to provide each member with one or two hours of uninterrupted, concentrated effort each day. This will enable them to follow through on difficult projects, concentrate more effec¬tively on their work, and have a re-energizing period during the day.

Focus on the controllable. One of the biggest factors in work stress is the fear of being overwhelmed by factors outside one’s control. For your group, this means dealing with large-scale changes that are perceived as unknown, uncontrollable, and potentially dangerous. Look for ways to keep your group apprised of important changes and redirect its focus to those aspects of change that are within its control.

If you are experiencing stress yourself, you might find it hard to listen to members because your attention level will continually wander to other subjects. You can correct this problem by restricting your standard open-door policy, instead setting aside times in which you are able to give members your full attention. Also, ask members to avoid engaging you in hit-and-run conversations in the hallways. If you feel that it will be impossible to enforce this rule, keep a pad with you at all times to take notes (no matter how simple the discussion) on what is said and on required follow-up actions.
Before meeting with a member who wishes to air concerns:
• Clear your desk of any projects that could distract you from the discussion.
• Ask other members not to barge in on you unless there is an emergency.
• Have someone cover calls for you to avoid additional distractions.
• Provide a clear mental focus point for the discussion by summarizing during the first few minutes of the discussion (1) the team member’s key purpose for talking with you, (2) the type of help or assistance that the member is requesting from you, and (3) how long the discussion will last.
• Take notes during, pot after, the discussion. If you have a computer, create a Team Concerns File, and enter notes directly into this file during the discussion. This will eliminate wasting time later on searching for notes and will provide a single focal point for referencing team concerns.
• If, during the discussion, your attention wanders to other important subjects, ask the speaker to stop for a second while you make a quick memory-jogger note for later reference. If you find yourself unable to concentrate on the subject at hand, honestly explain that you are having trouble focusing on the discussion and reschedule the discussion for a later time. Avoid one of the most common mistakes made by stressed-out managers-trying to be two places at once.