Month: October 2020

Assertive, Aggressive, or Leave Me Alone: Where Do You Fall on the Leadership Scale?

THE COMMON CHALLENGE: Many of the executives we are asked to coach have a common problem: they are either too aggressive or too retiring. Their organization wants us to encourage them to be less aggressive or more assertive. Finding that “sweet spot” where their views are heard and respected, yet they don’t trample over other voices, seems to elude their leadership skills.

ARE YOU ASSERTIVE OR AGGRESSIVE? There are many definitions of assertiveness versus aggressiveness, but a simple one I use is that aggressive behavior denies the rights of others and emphasizes winning at all costs; frequently, aggressive behavior uses anger or physical intimidation. Aggressive leaders don’t understand the difference between debate and dialogue. Read “Are You Using Debate or Dialogue? Does It Matter?” to learn the difference.

In contrast, someone who is assertive tries to find a win/win solution, listens well, and allows others to save face.

TOO RETIRING? On the other side of the scale are those who have failed to find their own voice as a leader. Frequently, even when they suspect a team’s course of action is a mistake, they will fail to speak up and allow the herd of lemmings to leap off a strategic cliff. They mistake passivity for teamwork and fail to make necessary contributions.

What Should You Do?

ASK FOR FEEDBACK: Through a 360 review, performance feedback or other tool, ask your staff for feedback about your style. While they may not be honest the first time you ask, if you keep asking, eventually you will receive a useful assessment. Be wary of asking family and friends. I have known many a workplace mouse who turned into a tyrant at home! We all behave differently depending upon the environment and the particular power dynamic we are facing.

LEARN TO LISTEN AND TO SPEAK UP:  We all like to think we are good listeners but most of us are not. When I was coaching an executive who was athletic, physically commanding, and had a habit of pacing like a caged cheetah when he spoke to his underlings, I had to have special cards made up for him that said: “Sit down, lean back, breathe, listen.” Read “Want to Be a More Effective Leader? Learn How to Listen” for tips on listening skills.

Similarly, for team members who are reluctant to speak up, I coach them to start small with issues that are not too threatening in order to practice assertiveness skills. I remind them that it’s all about skills, and that anyone can learn them, just as we can learn a new computer program. You can say almost anything if you know how to say it.

EDUCATE YOURSELF: Read books, listen to podcasts, watch videos on communication skills, attend training and teach others what you have learned.

While most of us realize that we need to constantly improve our technical skills,

we don’t pay the same attention to learning communication skills, even though lack thereof is frequently the number one problem that may limit our advancement.

What Do You Think?

Have you known leaders who were too aggressive or too retiring?  Contact us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com

What Can Leaders Learn From Covid?

THE COVID CATASTROPHE:  Most of us are sick of this year and keep longing for some magic carpet to whisk us away from this mess. I saw a T-shirt the other day that read: “2020: Directed by Quentin Tarantino”. Can’t we all relate?

HERE TO STAY:  While we all want this mess to be over, most experts warn that it will be many months, and perhaps years, before we approach anything we recognize as “normal.”

Indeed, most speak instead of the “new normal” or opine that we will never return to anything like that. Fareed Zakaria, for example, the CNN anchor, New York Times columnist and author, recently published Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Zakaria stresses that this is just the first in a long line of pandemics and other catastrophes that we will be facing, especially since we’ve been living in a “petri dish” for years. While we don’t want to hear this warning, Zakaria emphasizes that there is hope in the form of learning that we can glean from 2020.

COVID WINNERS: Zakaria writes, for example, that we need to look at countries that have handled Covid well and understand why. He cites Taiwan as an example and argues that it’s not their form of government or culture that has made the difference, but the reality that they had to deal with other contagions such as SARS, which they handled badly. While the results of those situations were catastrophic, the Taiwanese government learned from their mistakes and managed Covid differently than many countries, including increased testing and contact tracing. The results were that Taiwan didn’t need to endure shutting down the whole country or a tragic death toll, unlike most western countries.

What Should You Do?

ACCEPT REALITY:  Acceptance is usually the last stage of grieving as I wrote in a recent Monday Memo, Employee Engagement Now: What Works. Most of us are grieving the life we used to have. Unfortunately, the grieving process is not quick or linear, so we have been slow to move to acceptance, especially when we have no idea what the future holds. Yet mourn and move on we must if we want to travel to the other side.

PIVOT AND INNOVATE:  The most successful organizations in the current crisis have been faster to realize that they needed to pivot and innovate because nothing was going to change back quickly, if ever. Rice University, for example, managed to continue in person classes by setting up tents for outside learning, while other colleges had to quarantine unexpectedly or utilize remote learning with inadequate preparation.

Similarly, innovative school districts, such as South Bend School Corporation, realized that some students had no access to acceptable WiFi and so quickly outfitted school buses to serve as mobile hot spots for students to use. Who knew that a school bus – that usually sits empty for most of the day – could serve as a mobile Internet café?

 LEARN FROM DISASTER:  Just as Taiwan has been able to cope more effectively with this pandemic, according to most experts, because they learned from previous epidemics, leaders need to start asking their staff what they are learning from the current chaos. While many of us keep asking the question:  when will this ever end?  the innovators among us will ponder: what are we learning? We can all hope that these are lessons we can take with us, even into an uncertain future.

What Do You Think?

We cover these and many more innovative leadership and management ideas in our workshops – live or virtual. Contact us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com

Would the Netflix System of Management Work for You?

Change is Good? We are all dealing with so much change these days. I saw a T-shirt recently that read: “2020. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” Can’t we all relate? If we look at the reality of our streaming habits these days, Netflix is the clear winner for most of us, but are you willing to adopt and change to some of Netflix CEO’s, Reed Hastings’, more controversial management techniques?

Hiring and Retention: According to Harvard Business Review’s look at the company, they believe that: “the best thing you can do for employees — a perk better than foosball or free sushi — is hire only “A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.”

Fire the Worst: Netflix also has a policy of making sure leaders don’t hang on to people who are not “A” players, using the test of “would you fight to keep this person.” If the answer is no, they show them the door. They do try to be fair to the leavers, however, realizing that: “If we wanted only “A” players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people-and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them-we learned to offer rich severance packages.”

And Skip Performance Reviews? The company decided that performance reviews and plans were a waste of time so instead, they instituted a continual process of 360 feedback, asking “managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work.”

What Should You Do?

Use What Would Work:  Developers and engineers who work at Netflix may be a very different group than you are leading. Indeed, even that company acknowledges they need a different system for warehouse workers. Your environment might also not be conducive to some of their techniques but just thinking about doing things differently may be useful.

Use Caution With 360s:  While I don’t advocate never using 360 reviews, I do believe that training managers to give skillful feedback can be challenging. Your problems are increased if you want to use peers for the same process. It can be difficult to weed out comments that may be inserted because of personality conflicts, competition or outright sabotage. Indeed, all that advice needs to be delivered in a way that the receiver can hear and integrate.

Abandon Performance Reviews and PIPs?  This can be useful if leaders actually give real-time, regular feedback. In my experience, however, they may avoid doing so because they do not like conflict or they are too busy. At least with a more structured performance management system, staff receives feedback at regular intervals, rather than not at all.

Hire and Keep Only ‘A’s?  Wouldn’t we all like to do that? Unfortunately, if you are managing a sector with a lot of competition for talent, that may not be possible.

For more innovative management ideas, go to Workplaces That Work.

What Do You Think?

We cover these and many more innovative leadership and management ideas in our workshops – live or virtual. Contact us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com

How to Handle Zoom and Road Ragers: managing Anger at Work 

ANGER NOW:   People are peevish now, no question. Even if you are toiling in your own cave at home, the ragers in your group still find ways to assault you over Zoom, email, or other technologies.

If you are in the real world with them, anything may set the erupters off: the copier isn’t working, someone forgot to make coffee, their presentation disappeared into cyberspace, they don’t like the way you breathe. Whatever it is, they fuss, fume, and scream at routine daily annoyances that the rest of us grin and bear.

WHY DO THEY DO THAT?   When people are angry about everything, the critical common denominator is them. They mistakenly think anger is empowering and rage is a way of being assertive. Not true. When someone is constantly irritated, they are assuming the “poor me” victim role, the weakest posture they can take. Their underlying emotion may be fear, hurt, frustration or a combination of the three. Anger may also mask depression.

WHAT IF YOU ARE THE RAGER?  No question, many of us are having trouble managing our own anger right now. How should we deal with this? I have coached executives, for example, who believe that it is healthy to express their anger in the moment, that suppressing their rage may hurt their health or psyche and that those they lead should not be so sensitive or should just: “deal with it, because it’s who I am!”

The research, however, does not generally support this view. While expressing anger may feel good to the rager in the moment, they later feel shame, guilt, and remorse. In addition, eruptions may have long-term health consequences, including high blood pressure, diabetes and more. Read this Anger Management Help Guide for anger management tips.

What Should You Do?

REFUSE TO TOLERATE ABUSE: While you can have compassion for the co-worker who is expressing anger inappropriately, you should never tolerate abuse. Walk away, complain to your boss (or your boss’s boss), or HR.

DOCUMENT: And document, document, document. Just be sure you document behavior; specifically what they say or do – not your conclusions, assumptions, or biases about the person’s behavior.

SPEAKING UP: While you don’t have to confront the rager, and should not do so if you feel unsafe, use a format such as this if you do:

You did ______.

(Describe specifically what the person said or did.)

When I objected to your behavior, you ignored me.

(Or yelled or whatever; describe what the person did or said.)

I care about you and support you and I wish you success in our workplace, but if we’re going to work together you need to treat me and other members of our team with respect.

(Set a boundary with the abuser.)

You hurt me (or them) when you said or did ____. It also resulted in us missing a key deadline because Mary was so upset by your outburst that she had to go home and our assignment wasn’t completed.

(Describe the behavior and the result of that behavior upon yourself, your colleagues, and the work itself.)

I would hope that this is something that you’re not proud about. If you want to continue to stomp around with a frown on your face, go ahead, but you’re going to do it without us.(Outline consequences of repeating the behavior.)

I respect your work and I want to have a good working relationship with you, but peace at any price is no peace at all. You owe me and the team an apology. I intend to give you the benefit of the doubt and move past this, but we’ve had our last heated argument and I’ve taken my last bit of disrespect from you. (Add a specific request and repeat that you will not tolerate the behavior and the consequence if it continues.)

Above all, communicate these messages in person (safely distanced), over video conference or on the phone. Email or messaging just exacerbates the problem.

UNDERSTANDING HELPS:  If we take the time to understand why someone behaves this way, we are more grounded in our thinking brain, rather than our hidden or unconscious brain, and these sorts of boundary- setting conversations become more useful.

AND WHAT SHOULD RAGERS DO?  If you are a rager, you need to deal with it, for your sake, as well as the sake of your team, and your other work and personal relationships. Get help from a coach, a therapist, or your priest, but do learn to express anger in healthier and more skillful ways. Here’s a useful guide for managing anger.

What Do You Think?

How do you and your team manage anger at work? Call or write us: 303-216-1020 or email: Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com