TEC Resource Center

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Create Safe Accountability in Your Organization

 

  1. Set clear and mutually agreed upon expectations with people in regard to both performance and behavior.  This reduces confusion, mixed messages, and judgments of non-performance.
  2. Share information openly and timely to avoid unnecessary surprises.  Develop a communications strategy for informing everyone about relevant and current information.
  3. Surface any conflict directly with the person involved.  Focus on ways to avoid conflict in the future. (This is far more effective than avoiding the person, telling everyone about the conflict, or blaming the person as the one who was wrong.)
  4. Provide encouragement, guidance and other forms of support to individuals who need to make a change but who may not realize the importance, or the process, of doing so.  Typically, we either ignore people who are struggling, or we sympathize with their discomfort and let them off the hook.
  5. Focus on functional roles and processes, rather than position and power, to accomplish outcomes.
  6. Support the development of people and systems in order to respond to the needs of tomorrow and to avoid reacting only to crisis.
  7. Monitor and measure the results of each team and individual so that people know exactly where they stand.  This is the only way to let people know of their successes and their need for improvement.
  8. Do not allow people to perform poorly without making it clear that their performance is unacceptable.  Skirting the issue only causes people to feel deceived and victimized.  No one benefits by carrying a poor performer.
  9. Follow up on commitments so that people can depend on your words and your consistency.  If you are unable to keep a commitment, let people know as soon as you know.
  10. Let others know the care, appreciation, and compassion you feel, instead of holding back.  Honor their humanity as well as your own.  When all is said and done, we are FIRST human beings with fears, needs and imperfections, and SECOND, employees hired to complete a job.

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Do you have the right people on the bus?

Do you have the right people on your team, and are they sitting in the right seats? Often managers find they have wonderful people working for them. They are dedicated and they work hard. Still, though, they are not getting the results they want from their team. The sad truth is that they may be wonderful, hardworking and dedicated, but they may not be right for the job.

I had a client that was so distraught over his hiring record. He said he always felt he picked the perfect person. His favorite saying was, “They looked so good on paper.” On the interview they seemed so gung ho. He felt hopeless.

Sometimes you meet a person who is really nice, the life of the party, and deep down a really good person, however, you don’t immediately move in together or get married. No matter how fun or well-meaning they are, you have to know you will be good together and work well together to build the life you want. I think this is how Match.com became so successful!

Your work relationships should be regarded in the same way and it starts before the interview process. Selecting the right people to help you build your business or run your department is key to YOUR success. You need to spend time in this process to avoid wasting time later. Here are some tips on how to improve your success rate in selecting the best candidate for your position:

Prepare for the hiring process:

Make sure you understand the Knowledge, Skill and Abilities (KSA’s) the candidate must possess to be successful in the job. Identify the MUST HAVES and the NICE TO HAVES. Write these things down so you can base your questions around them and then rate your candidates after each interview based on these areas. What attributes and values must the candidate embody to add to the overall culture of the organization? Look carefully at the team they will become a part of and understand the behavioral style that will best augment that team.

Review resumes:

I’m assuming you have a job description for the position, so first review it and see if it needs to be tweaked a bit. Review the resumes first to see that the candidate meets the qualifications keeping in mind the KSAs. If you are lucky enough to have too many resumes, start narrowing them down by the MUST HAVES and NICE TO HAVES. Then look for any red flags on the resume:

  • Overall appearance
  • Blanks and omissions
  • Gaps in time
  • Overlaps in time
  • Inconsistencies between education and experience

Create Powerful Questions

This is the most important piece in my opinion. Think about the interview as a time to get to know the person. You really want to see what they are made of. Did they really do the things they have listed on their resume? I’m not saying people lie, but…………. Powerful questions allow you to confirm what is on the resume, so make them count. Ask open ended questions that cannot be answered with a yes or a no. So don’t say, “Are you familiar with……” They know the answer you want is yes, and you really won’t be able to tell if they really have experience with it. Ask them something that will demonstrate knowledge, like, “Can you tell me the biggest issue you have experienced with……..”

Make your choice:

Ask the same questions to each applicant based on the KSAs and MUST HAVES and NICE TO HAVES. Your follow up questions will vary of course, based on their answers. Make yourself a little grid and rate how each candidate did on each base question. Then come up with a total rating. This will help you choose who is statistically best for the job, not who you like best.

Nobody’s perfect

On a personal note, this is obviously not fool proof. People have become very skilled at interviewing due to all the resources that are now readily available to them. But I’ll bet if you look back at some of your good and bad hires, you will find, YOU had a lot to do with the mistakes or the successes. I once hired someone for an administrative position. On my MUST HAVES I listed proofreading skills. After I hired this woman I liked very much, I realized proofreading was actually a weakness, not a skill of hers. I wondered what happened. I went back to my grid. Sure enough, I only rated her 3 out of 5 on proofreading based on what she told me. I didn’t follow my own advice! Here are 3 common errors people make when interviewing:

  • Leniency Error – You know the candidate or they were referred to you by someone you know. Tendency is to rate him/her higher than deserved.
  • Error of Contrast – Some interviewers tend to compare some traits shown by a candidate with their own traits. May be better to choose someone who has more of what you don’t!
  • Halo/Horn Effect – Initial impression about the candidate (good or bad) cloud the interview. I immediately connected with the person I mentioned above on a personal level. It made me overlook a very important qualification she did not have.

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Not Spending Enough Time Managing?

One of the greatest challenges for managers is having the time to manage. Everyone is busy. Managers are consistently being asked to do more with less. So what can you do to manage your time most efficiently? Here are a few tips to help save time and reduce stress!

Change your to-do list into a real time management plan:

Do you actually plan your days out? I know, what’s the use in planning, there’s always a fire to put out? There just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done anyway. Stop making excuses. You are right, you can’t add more hours to your day, and emergencies will come up, but having a real plan, allowing for time to put out fires will help. Start by listing everything you have to do and then prioritize your list to the things that absolutely must get done tomorrow. Then order them in a way that makes sense for you and the task. So if you work best in the morning, do the tough stuff first. If you are preparing for a 3PM meeting, clearly the prep time must be scheduled for before.   Figure out how much time you will need and make sure you schedule it well in advance. And I mean schedule it! Block out time on your calendar to prep for the meeting. We all put our meetings on our calendars, but how many of you block out time to prep? Prep time should not be scheduled for 5 minutes before the meeting.   As we know, emergencies do come up, but if you have scheduled your prep time well in advance, you will have time to attend to the emergency, and still be able to get back in time to prep before the meeting. I’m a big believer in Outlook or some type of electronic calendar. I’ve got reminders going off for everything, so nothing falls through the cracks. And I don’t dismiss something until it is complete. If I can’t do it right then, I’m committed to going back to my calendar and finding a place to reschedule it.

Minimize your “time robbers”:

Speaking of those emergencies and fires you have to put out…….stop thinking they are all unavoidable. Probably only about 1/3 of them are true emergencies. The others are what I call time robbers; the interruptions that come in many forms. They could be your staff that feel they can interrupt you anytime they have a question. They could be meetings that you really don’t need to be at. They could be time you spent looking for things because you are not as organized as you can be. And the list goes on. First identify your time robbers. Then think about ways to at least minimize them. Learn key phrases that encourage people to respect your time such as:

  • “Can you give me 30 minutes to finish up what I’m doing and then I’ll give you 100% of my attention.”
  • “How much time do you think we need to discuss this?”
  • “Can we agree to meet until 3PM and then schedule more time at a later date if we’re not done?”

 

All these phrases let people know, I want to help you, but I have other pressing things I need to take care of. If you respect your time, others will start to as well. For those real emergencies you have to attend to right away, start looking for patterns. Do the same things keep coming up day after day? Is there someone who can be a resource for these issues other than you? Is there a systemic problem that, if addressed, could decrease these types of emergencies from coming up?

Learn to delegate effectively:

Managers often forget one of the most effective time management tools – delegation. There are many reasons people don’t delegate, but many times it is because they are not successful (or are afraid they won’t be successful,) when they do it. Nine times out of ten, they fail because they did not delegate the task to the right person, or they did not give the person the support they needed to be successful. The first step it to change our mindset about delegation. It should not be you dumping your work on someone else. That’s not delegation. You should think of it as an opportunity for that person to learn something new, and to take something off your plate to leave you time to do other things your staff cannot do. Things that help move the department forward. Delegation should be a win / win and needs to be presented that way. People want to know what’s in it for them, so be prepared to tell them. Of course, you also need to be confident that the task will get done. Just because you delegated it, does not mean it is NOT your responsibility anymore. When you are a manager, the buck stops here. So take time to analyze the task and your staff competencies. Then determine, based on how much experience the person has with this task, the level of involvement you need to have with them. Remember the more time you put in in the beginning, the faster that task will truly be off your plate with minimum supervision needed. If you’re having trouble trying to think about the types of tasks to delegate, try some of these:

  • Clerical Tasks
  • Repetitive Tasks
  • Information Gathering
  • Representation in Meetings

They are the easiest types of tasks to delegate and can save you a good amount of time and stress in the long run.

E-Mail me to include your management challenges in our upcoming blogs – abbe@tecresourcecenter.com

 

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Five Things Strong Managers Know!

 

Managers are key contributors in an organization. They have many responsibilities, but here are 5 responsibilities that effective managers pay close attention to:

  1. Carry out assigned duties: Know and understand what is expected of you from your boss. That means asking questions, checking in, and making sure you are aligned with his/her priorities at all times.
  2. Keep your manager informed: There’s nothing worse than being blind sighted by someone who seems to know more about what is going on in your department than you do. Make sure you do not put your boss in that position. Let him/her know if something is going wrong and how you intend to handle it. If you’re not sure, ask to brainstorm together for possible solutions.
  3. Build employee morale: If your people are disgruntled, you need to address it immediately. One bad apple does spoil the whole bunch. It’s the manager’s responsibility to monitor what is going on in their department, including at the water cooler. If you hear something negative, don’t ignore it and hope it will blow over. Interject yourself. Get to the bottom of it and let the negative person know, that doesn’t fly with you. If they are uncomfortable or know they will be called out for negative behavior, it is less likely they will continue.
  4. Give clear instructions: Communication is a 2 way street. When you give a directive, you are responsible to make sure people really understand what you expect. Of course it’s clear to you; it’s in your brain. But everyone else doesn’t have the same brain. Instead of asking closed questions like, “You got it?” or “Any questions?” try open ended questions like, “So where do you think you’re going to start on this?” Or “What obstacles do you anticipate that might interfere with us completing this on time?” People tend to answer closed ended questions with the yes or no they think you are looking for. You really have no idea whether or not they understood and if you are going to get the results you want.
  5. Cooperate with other departments: Successful managers play nice in the sandbox, even if there’s a bratty kid in there. Focus on the issues and results you want, while keeping in mind that others have responsibilities and goals as well. Listen actively. Find the common ground. Work as a team.

Develop your Manager’s Toolbox by attending one of our public training classes!

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