Send congruent messages. After successfully challenging your team’s limits, you need to send your team clear signals about the types of performance that you are looking for from them and then get out of their way. This is especially important when the performance expectations for your team are rapidly changing. When the messages you send to your team are unclear, ambiguous, or opaque, the result can be confusion, anxiety, and inefficiency. Ambiguous management behavior take a number of forms:

• Formally establishing quality improvement as your highest priority and then allowing wide fluctuations in quality standards to accommodate production pressures

• Telling team members to take greater initiative and then slap¬ping their hands the first time they overstep the invisible boundaries of their job descriptions

• Giving a pep talk in which you encourage members to confront problems honestly and to surface improvement opportunities and then publicly chastising a member for daring to challenge the efficiency of a procedure that you’ve put into place

• Stating that risk taking will be rewarded and then giving poor evaluations to employees who fail more often because they attempt to do more for the team, while rewarding employees who experience fewer failures simply because they lay low and accomplish little of value If you discover that your team is having trouble interpreting your behavior, you need to act quickly to correct the situation. A reasonable starting point is to pay attention to those subtle clues that indicate that your members are having difficulty interpreting your behavior, such as the following kinds of behavior:

1. Members hesitate to act on the decisions you’ve put into place or drag their feet in the completion of assignments.
2. Members frequently check with you for direction before going further. They have a need for confirmation and approval.
3. Members have difficulty sorting out priorities.
4. Members commit errors and do rework that could be traced to difficulties in interpreting directions.

Tags: strategy

This entry was posted on July 17, 2009 at 4:21 pm. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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