Earning Trust and Success

Aces in Their Places

One more aspect of delegation can help limit your anxiety. You must delegate in a proper manner. Delegating tasks blindly or randomly can turn disastrous if the person to whom you have delegated a task  is not suited to that task. Fortunately, one reward of getting to know your employees is that you can better understand each employee's strengths and weaknesses. By tailoring the tasks you delegate to your employees’ strengths, you put them in a better position to succeed, and their success is ultimately your success, even when you inevitably give them all the credit. By putting your aces in their places, you also foster a sense of belonging and importance to each member of your team. If an employee knows that they are in that role because you handpicked them for it, this will pay huge dividends in that person’s own confidence which helps to maximize their performance.

Celebrating Success

In order to get the most out of your employees, it is helpful to foster a culture of mutual celebration of success, and no success is too small to escape such celebration. Take time out to recognize a job well done, and you will encourage additional successes. Cultivating certain emotions in your employees such as enthusiasm, optimism, confidence, and tenacity will help them to perform better and enjoy further successes. 

Earning the Trust of Your Team

Avoiding micromanagement, delegating tasks properly, and celebrating successes are all ways to increase your high regard and trust for your team, but trust is a two-way street. An effective leader is one whom the followers will trust implicitly. Trust, like respect, does not come automatically. Some people may be naturally inclined to trust people, but the degree of trust you need to lead effectively must be earned.  

Honesty

The most important way to earn trust is to consistently be honest. This can even be helpful when admitting you are wrong or that you don’t know the answer. Employees will respect someone who can admit vulnerability more than someone who tries to hide behind a veneer of perfection. Lying to your employees, buttering them up with fake sentiment, or taking credit for their successes are quick ways to make them distrust you. Once employees distrust you, your ability to lead them effectively becomes nearly impossible. However, honesty should never be used as a weapon. You may occasionally have to tell an employee “how it is,” but this is exactly where considerations of tone and intent become vitally important. 

Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP

Delegation and Anxiety

What frequently stops us from delegating responsibilities to our employees is a fear that they may fail us. However, this distrust of our employees can be more damaging than failure itself. Living in fear keeps our lives in holding patterns, and we never grow or allow others to grow. There is no reason to be afraid of failure because it is inevitable. If, however, we are able to view failure as a learning opportunity, then we can become comfortable with the idea and learn to take risks. Here are some suggestions to help you manage your trepidation about delegation:

• Write down your concerns rather than voicing them or allowing them to swirl in your head. This can help to vent anxieties.
• Manage your stress levels through exercise. When you do this regularly, you will tend to feel better physically which gives emotions such as anxiety less room to take hold.
• Meditate regularly to practice staying in the present. Worry is a future-oriented activity but one over which you have little control.
• Appreciate and celebrate healthy progress over perfection. Our notion of a perfect situation, a perfectly performed task, or any other number of perfect things that we can imagine is actually a linguistic construction. Actual perfection is something that is completely beyond our control.
• Learn to recognize and counteract magnification -- a distorted thinking pattern in which you imagine the worst possibility as the most likely possibility. Often, when you feel in the grips of an arousal emotion such as anxiety, you tend to think in shorthand and images rather than in complete sentences. Identifying this shorthand, converting it into complete sentences and investigating the logic of that can help lessen your feeling of anxiety. For example, when you delegate an important task to an employee, your anxiety over the situation might prompt shorthand thoughts such as “failure, disaster, poorhouse.” Translating this into a complete sentence might look like “If my employee fails, I will be blamed for the worst possible disaster that can occur at this company, and I will be fired.” Now that you have translated the shorthand into a complete sentence, ask yourself if you would truly be fired over this. Often, you wouldn’t have the level of responsibility you have if your boss was going to be so quick to fire you.

Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP

Changing the Script

If the child, parent, and adult mode behaviors are essentially scripts, what keeps people playing their roles, and how can someone slip out of a role? In transactional analysis, there are two types of transactions: complementary and crossed. A complementary transaction means that the behavioral modes match up and can continue indefinitely. One person’s child mode evokes another person’s parent mode, and things can spiral out of control into perpetual conflict. In order to intervene, one person has to engage in a behavioral mode that doesn’t complement the other’s behavior. This creates a crossed transaction.  When a transaction becomes crossed, this destabilizes the scripted behaviors where those involved seek to find a new complementary behavior. Keep in mind that in this scheme, Parent to Child and vice versa is complementary, but so too is Adult to Adult. The way to change the script then is for someone to adopt an Adult mode of behavior. When this turns the transaction from a complementary transaction to a crossed transaction, the other person seeks to find a new equilibrium in a new complementary transaction, so they will in turn also assume the complementary Adult role. 

Trusting Your Team

When you lead others, you will find that they will rise and fall to the expectations you set for them. If you trust your team and act to be worthy of their trust, they will strive to be worthy of your trust.

Dangers of Micromanaging

One of the most difficult habits to keep under control when leading others is the tendency to micromanage. If you are someone who has a great deal of responsibility within the company and are emotionally invested, it may be tempting to try to do it all yourself. However, micromanaging, even for the most tireless of managers, is the kiss of death in being an effective leader. Your employees will come to resent always having you looking over their shoulder. Another tragic consequence of micromanaging is that you may well stunt your employees’ growth. In order for each employee to become the best they can be, you have to encourage them to find their own way. Sometimes they may not do something in the same way that you would, and standing aside may result in their failure. Keep in mind, however, that failure is often a prelude to success. Allowing an employee to make a mistake is akin to allowing that employee to grow and become better. Here are some suggestions to help you avoid the temptation to micromanage:

• Tell employees that they can come to you with a problem only after they have thought of at least two possible solutions to that problem.
• While having an open-door policy is helpful in building rapport with your employees, and it is useful in serving the needs of your employees, you must consider how useful you are to those employees if you stand in the way of their growth. Consider limiting your employees’ access to you in some ways. One possibility is to allow a certain time of day for open access while other times of day are reserved for appointments only.
• Another suggestion is to resist the urge to jump in at any sign of difficulty. Instead, count slowly to 10 and consider whether or not this is one of those times where your help is truly necessary.

Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP

Adult versus Parent

One idea that comes to us from the psychological approach of transactional analysis is that when people interact with each other, they tend to slip into pre-formed scripts based on how they have experienced authority when they were children. These scripts can frequently allow people to engage in escalating behaviors that create vicious cycles of conflict. Transactional analysis recognizes three primary styles of behavior in social interactions:

• Child. A person’s need to escape responsibility can cause them to slip into child mode where they can act dismissive and rebellious. People operating in child mode often dismiss other people’s criticisms and maintain an attitude that they are going to do what they want regardless of how others feel.
• Parent. When someone feels a need to assert control over a situation, often in a case in which they feel powerless, they may slip into parent mode. From the sound of it, you might think this is an example of where someone has adopted the voice of reason, but more often than not, it is the voice of authority and not a very reasonable authority at that. If you have ever experienced someone talking to you as if you were a child, that person was most likely operating in Parent mode.
• Adult. The ideal mode to operate in is Adult mode. Those who operate from this mode are concerned with reality as it is rather than disregarding reality like someone might do who is operating in child mode or trying to control reality like someone operating in parent mode.Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP 

Calming a Storm

If you’re successfully engaging your employees, it is inevitable that small conflicts will arise. It might be tempting to see these conflicts as a negative. In truth, if they are allowed to rage out of control, they will have negative effects.  However, the fact that people are engaged enough to get angry or tense shows that they are employing their creative energies, and that is a positive. Nevertheless, when tempers flare, it takes a calm leader to be the eye of the storm and channel that energy in positive ways or calm it so that employees can function productively. 

Here are some suggestions:

• Always address conflicts from a place of calm. You may have to take a time-out or allow others to take a time-out from their own anger. Try to do so from a place of empathy and understanding. Avoid calling out employees in front of others. For example, when two employees are in conflict with each other, send one of them on a break while you discuss the situation with the other. Be sure to give each employee the chance to tell their side of the conflict, and make sure you listen more than you talk.
• When you speak to your employees about conflicts, make sure you are specific and address the issue in terms of behavior and not in terms of the employee’s character traits.
• Discuss how the conflict affects the rest of your team, but avoid doing so with an accusatory tone.
• Allow employees to give you their understanding of what caused the conflict rather than identifying the cause yourself.
• Allow employees to suggest solutions for resolving the conflict. If necessary and appropriate, act as a mediator between two employees who have had a conflict with each other. Be sure that each is coming from a place of calm.
• Allow everyone involved to agree upon the appropriate action to take in order to restore the peace.
• Most importantly, communicate from a place of mutual respect for all parties involved. Often in the aftermath of a conflict, the parties involved may feel either embarrassment or resentment toward the other party. Help to restore the sense of mutual respect by treating all parties with the same degree of respect, regardless of any perception of level of fault or culpability.

Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP

Lighting a Fire

You will often find yourself in a position in which you need to get your employees energized and motivated to work hard and enthusiastically. One who has adopted the rule-through-fear paradigm will consider this the time to become forceful and aggressive, but this can frequently backfire. Instead, an effective leader uses inspiration and positivity to harness enthusiasm in employees. Lighting a fire isn’t akin to burning down the house so much as shining a light to guide your employees. Here are some suggestions for increasing employees’ enthusiasm:

• Share inspiring quotes, speeches, or ideas. While the movie The Wolf of Wall Street is not a great example of ethical leadership, it does give a good idea of how powerfully inspiration can foster enthusiasm in employees. This is why coaches in professional sports like to give the “Win one for the Gipper” -style speeches.
•  Use upbeat music to get people going. Music that has a good beat and makes people want to dance also helps to instill enthusiasm and a kind of esprit de corps.
• Celebrate group and individual successes in order to foster a positive and forward-looking morale.

Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP

Feedback Sandwich

Experiencing criticism can be a stressful situation, and the common approach to hearing criticism is to prepare a defense. One way to soften another person’s experience of your criticism is to use the idea of a feedback sandwich. Instead of telling people what they are doing wrong all at once, you can mix the negative with genuinely positive comments. It’s important that these are genuine, however, or you can come across as insincere and manipulative and lose any goodwill or trust you might have earned with your employee. Finding a positive thing to say about an employee who needs correction serves an additional purpose as well. Whenever you are angry at another person, a good tactic to help spur your thinking away from that person’s faults is to consider something positive about that person. Having something good to say about your employee can help to put the entire situation into a more manageable perspective.

Following up (versus Badgering)

When you set goals, it’s important that you set a goal that is achievable and corresponds to a timeframe. Similarly, when you intervene, it is helpful to have a definite view of success as well as a timeframe to check back with the employee. This follow-up will work better when it is approached as “how are you doing with this?” rather than “have you done what I told you to?” Furthermore, you should consider avoiding two types of extremes: not following up at all and overdoing your follow-up by continuously returning to the issue. When you initially discuss the issue with your employee, it will be most effective if you both identify a time in the future to schedule a follow-up conversation during which you can check in with each other. If you never follow-up, it erodes your credibility when you do offer constructive criticism because it makes it seem as if there was no real need for criticism. On the other hand, if you continuously come back to the situation that prompted the criticism, you put the employee into a guilt-redemption type drama. If you follow up with your employee at a scheduled time, and that employee has not shown improvement, you can re-assess what needs to be done further and use that time to schedule another follow-up. Keeping your follow-ups structured can help you avoid the pitfalls that can turn following up and being invested in your employee’s success into a form of harassment.

The Importance of Tone

In your role as leader or manager, you will often find yourself in situations in which you have to perform well even when you are not at your best. One truth about effective leadership is that when things go right, you will want to deflect the praise to your team members, but when things go wrong, it’s all your fault. This can put you under constant pressure, and some of your more socially conscious and astute employees might recognize this fact, but most won’t. Nevertheless, employees and supervisors can forgive much when you approach them with the right tone.

Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP