You know what it is like to hide behind a weakness. We all have them and many of us try to hide them at all costs when you are trying to impress workplace leaders or perhaps just keep your job. Everyone on the team you are leading right now has plenty of weaknesses. The good thing is that they don’t usually affect their job performance because their role has them working in an area of strength or they have learned to compensate for their limitations in some way. In a recent webinar I was conducting on trust building, a participant asked, “How should we deal with weaknesses?” She was referring to addressing the weaknesses of team members and unfortunately there wasn’t a quick and easy answer for her so I have decided to write about it here. Years ago when I was backpacking around New Zealand, I got a job in an apple orchard picking apples. A few weeks prior I was working in a mandarin orange orchard, working a job that had me ‘thinning’ the mandarins, which means picking a few off each branch so the others had room to grow. Having previous picking experience, I figured apple picking couldn’t be that hard and there was a chance to make more money as I was paid by the bin full. I was fit and not afraid of hard work. I was going to cash in. I was surprised to learn on the first day of my job that apple picking wasn’t just about hauling your ladder up to the tree and picking all the apples off as fast...
The main reason poor performers persist within teams is their leaders are scared to talk to them about their performance concerns. You don’t want to hurt their feelings, get into an argument, or have them take revenge on you or the team. It can be an uncomfortable situation for everyone involved. Here are 5 tactics to initiate the conversation to get the dialogue off to a productive start: Schedule Regular Check-Ins: Feedback and feedforward (The Ultimate Feedback Technique of Today’s Leaders) needs to happen on a regular basis to be effective. Daily or weekly check-ins with direct reports is ideal. Having regular check-in builds the relationship and allows the feedback process to become a normal part of your interactions. Randomly calling people into a meeting to deliver constructive feedback will start to build an apprehensive feeling within the team anytime you ask for a one-on-one meeting. Ask for Self-Evaluation: The easiest and one of the most effective ways to initiate a conversation about poor performance is to have the person identify the area of poor performance by asking them key questions such as “how do you feel you are performing in so and so areas”. Most times people are aware of their lack of performance and will give an explanation. Their self-evaluation and explanation may not be totally accurate from your perspective but that’s ok for now. The conversation has been started with you taking on the non-aggressive role of a learner. Tip the Balance – Don’t Sandwich: In any feedback conversation, there needs to be more positive constructive feedback delivered (yes, even for poor performers). A base...
As a leader, you set goals (at least I hope you do). If you are a really good leader, you write your goals down and perhaps tell a few people about them for accountability. But even the most outstanding leaders don’t achieve all their goals. So, then what happens to those unachieved goals? Are unachieved goals recycled, forgotten about, or unimportant? Is goal setting really all about shooting for the stars and be happy with the moon type of thinking? Sometimes, my tendency for literal thinking takes over and I feel every list and goal needs a checkbox next to it indicating whether you completed it or not. Well I have realized over the years that goals don’t have to be literal as great learning and growth can be achieved without completing 100% of the goal. As the famous quote says “it’s not about the destination, it’s the journey”. I know this is a cliché but it is actually true in the pursuit of goal achievement. The goals you set and the rewards you achieve in reaching them are merely the carrot (or ice cream) that takes you on the journey. The journey is where the growth happens, but without the goal, the journey often never happens. Easy examples of the journey being more important than the goal come from my mountaineering expeditions and running marathons. When I tried to climb Mt. Logan, Canada’s highest mountain at 19,551 ft., I fell just short of the goal of standing on the summit of Canada. After 21 days of climbing, our team decided to stop 500 ft. short of the summit....
Failing sucks! There is nothing fun about it and no one wants to be apart of it. But the sucking part of it doesn’t need to last and many times failure leads to the biggest and best breakthroughs. Admitting a mistake shows you are wiser than you once were, don’t be afraid to admit. I have failed many times and I am sure will fail many more, only in the future I hope to fail faster so I can learn from the experience and move on to the next goal. Too often we let failure drag itself out over months if not years. You may be leading a project you believe is doomed from the beginning for a multitude of reasons or you could be in a leadership position that you are not the right fit for because of your experience level and interest. It is human nature not to want to admit failure so we push on; enduring sub par performance and results with the fleeting hope things will work out. I am not telling you not to stretch yourself and push your comfort zone taking on challenging projects, positions and goals. What I am suggesting is that as you stretch yourself or dive into leading challenging projects you set realistic boundaries that, if crossed, lead you to admit failure. This could be a date, a dollar figure, closure of a knowledge gap, level of progress. The faster you admit failure the faster you can learn from the experience and move on to inching your way to success. Proper failure is a speed bump, useless failure is a...
Where Do You Keep The Ketchup? Have you have struggled with the diversity vs. skill debate when building and working in teams? I know I have, along with countless Human Resource managers. Why can teams find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity: not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. On a recent Reply All podcast, a form of diversity unrelated to race, gender or age was discussed: the diversity of thought. It turns out diversity of thought may be the most important factor a team faces with solving problems. Unfortunately, as Lauren Rivera from the Kellogg School of Management points out in her research, managers like to hire people like themselves, leading to little diversity of all sorts in the workplace. Scott Page, Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, has been researching the diversity of thought for years. He highlighted much of his research in his book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. It turns out diversity of thought is even more important than all other types of diversity. His research discovered groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity in a team yields superior outcomes and collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you are talking...
As a leader, people come to you with problems weekly, daily and in some unfortunate cases hourly. Is this your fault, their fault or the system’s? Wouldn’t it be better if the person with the problem delivered a solution or at least a potential solution at the same time? Fortunately, you can have some control over this problem parade. You just need to role model and insist that your teams adopt the “Don’t Bring the Problem without a Solution” philosophy. I was recently hired a consultant on a website project and like most projects things weren’t always turning out as expected. I am sure there were many minor hiccups I didn’t hear about but when there was a fairly major problem that could potentially cost me more than originally anticipated, the consultant came to me to address the issue. As the conversation started out, I was becoming more frustrated picturing a further delay and increased cost of the project, or worst a problem he couldn’t fix. As he continued with his explanation, I became pleasantly surprised that after he finished telling me about the problem, he went into not only one but two potential solutions. This response left me going from frustrated and disappointed to impressed and optimistic. How Can You Get Your Team To Take On The “Don’t Bring The Problem Without A Solution” Approach? It starts with you! Like most things in leadership, if you want your people to adopt or maintain a behavior, they need to see you role modeling it consistently. As a leader, you are probably coming up with solutions to problems all the...
