I’ve spent some time with Ryan Taylor, my personal fitness trainer at my gym, who is probably the most natural coach and mentor that I’ve ever come across. Why is he different? Well firstly he listens to what I want to achieve, is flexible when I want to add more goals and encourages my strengths and accepts my weaknesses whilst improving technique to overcomes them. Most importantly, he makes the whole process fun, varied and interesting.

He’s not soft
The workouts are always hard, he’s not soft on me, far from it! He encourages and compliments me when I do well and isn’t critical when I’ve tried my best but not succeeded. I’m just asked and motivated to have another go to get it right. I can’t remember not wanting to!
What is most surprising is that he’s only in his early twenties and I don’t think he realises how good a coach and mentor he is!

What could business learn?
Over the past few months I’ve began to think that business managers could learn a great deal from Ryan’s technique. Creating systems to catch people out, identifying weaknesses and spending time training poor performers and achievers may not be the most productive use of management time. Instead it would be more productive to develop people’s strengths.

SWOT analysis
We’ve all looked at a SWOT analysis at work. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are identified and discussed but too often the emphasis focusses on the weaknesses rather than developing the strengths. That can and I’ve often been asked to sort out the resulting paralysis.

In going to the gym I want to enjoy it. Doing the exercises and playing the ball games I enjoy improves my fitness. People working in business are not very different. If Ryan can ensure that as well as enabling me to feel good about my fitness regime but that I don’t neglect the areas I’m also weak at. Then business managers should be able to do the same.

There is a lesson here!

The report showing serious concerns raised by the NHS care regulator about the way some hospitals in England look after elderly patients highlights a problem in the management of health care for the elderly. But is this a general problem of management in the UK?

The Care Quality Commission said three had failed to meet
legal standards for giving patients enough food and drink and treating
them in a dignified way. Not surprising then that people are puffing out their cheeks and saying that it’s disgusting and that things must change.

Rules, rules  and Regulations
The problem is, how? The UK and much of Europe is weighed down and being murdered with regulations on this and directives on that. Indeed one of the explanations we all understand for people prevented from doing something quickly is “Health and Safety mate”. We shrug our shoulders and accept the inconvenience.

This was demonstrated to me twice yesterday when, funnily enough, I was visiting a hospital to talk to some executives and offered a cup of tea. I picked up the pot from the counter to pour the cup for myself to be told that I had to allow my host to pour it in case I spilt hot water over myself, “Health and Safety”. After being handed the cup of hot liquid to hold I marvelled that I was allowed to drink the dangerous liquid on my own!

The second situation I came across was the location of a lead free electric kettle. “Which shouldn’t be too close a sink in case the water from the sink caused an electric shock”. Again Health and Safety was quoted!

Statistics before customers
I agree that business needs to record information, particularly for those in hospital that will aid recovery but this shouldn’t be at the expense of providing the service that the customer or patient expects? Would it not be possible to design a system that allowed nurses more time to administer care as opposed to filling out forms?

But hospitals aren’t the only area where this question could be applicable. Too often in business we record statistics, create and follow procedures and are constrained from giving a good service because the rules don’t allow the time to allocate towards giving the customer what the customer wants.

Sign above the door
It reminds me of the time when a company wanted to increase customer handling and I asked a Director about the policy for making customers feel welcome. The answer was, “We have a sign above the door “Welcome to the store” and every receipt has “Thank You” printed on it”.

Last Saturday I visited my Mother and little did I realise that I would have a lesson in how embarrass customers, employees and in poor management.

An outing for Mother
My Mother has just broken her arm and is feeing very sorry for herself. So I decided to take her to a hotel for a favourite outing of afternoon tea. With great anticipation we drove up the long hotel drive in Miskin, South Wales, for a relaxing afternoon overlooking the large gardens to find that there was just one other couple in the lounge.

To say that the meal of sandwiches, cakes, scones and even the service was disappointing would be an understatement.  On leaving my Mother, an excellent cook in her time, caught sight of the manager and mentioned the fact and said that at £25 ($32) she considered the meal overpriced and lacked value.

The person responsible
The manager asked us to wait a minute. I wondered if some adjustment was about to be made to the bill. To my surprise he reappeared with the chef saying, “This is the person responsible, make your complaints to him” and then without waiting to hear what we had to say ran off on another errand. My Mother was at a loss to know how to handle this unusual situation and I outlined the problem in the gentlest terms to an embarrassed and petrified member of staff.

“The scones had been freeze-chilled and therefore had a consistency of being stale, the profiterole was similar and lacked any taste in the filling such as vanilla and the bread on the sandwiches was too thick to be able to taste the fillings…”. By this time I began to feel extremely sorry for the chef who was looking quite helpless. I end his torment I smiled and described the meal as “uninspiring”.

Not a customer’s job
We left vowing never to return. Not because of the poor tea but because, as customers, it was not our job to instruct the staff, that’s the manager’s job. It’s also not the kitchen staff’s job to be appraised of a “poor job” by customers, that again is the management’s job. I also attached the chef’s poor performance on lack of training and expectation by the management.

My offering of help!
However, as I love to cook cakes, pastries and have a wide collection of Indian, Chinese and Japanese teas I would be delighted to offer to show the manager how he could instruct his kitchen team and waiting staff to deliver a fresh, great tasting and perfectly served afternoon tea. That way he can manage to do his job!

A few days ago I answered a question on delegation on LinkedIn and then on Friday was having a robust discussion on delegation with a friend in my network and thought I would share the discussion with you.

“Delegating could harm a career and promotion prospects”
Was the statement made by the senior manager in my network. He reasoned that obvious errors cost the business money and impacted on mission critical outcomes. Then with the time taken to recover from from errors delegating tasks took up valuable management time and could “harm his career and promotion prospects”.

“Management style didn’t encourage mistakes”
It seemed that his “management style”, and that of the business, didn’t tollerate mistakes. I pointed out that if the management don’t tollerate mistakes then there will be little room for experimentation. If people can’t experiment then, those that use experimentation to learn, will become frustrated and tend to leave to businesses that will allow it.

Experimentation is healthy. It’s how we learn to improve at any hobby, computer programme and game, even how to socialise and make friends. But, it seems that when people become managers they often have to be trained in how to encourage and manage it.

In any event lack of experimentation, from my experience, only helps competitors forge ahead with more efficient processes, products and customer focussed thinking.

The process
I explained the process my mentors showed me and which I’ve have adopted and train:

a) Discuss the subordinate’s idea with them. Be open minded, highlight potential problems as you see them, business issues and consequences of success and failure.

b) If the subordinate still wants to proceed then discuss the process they will be using and then provide support (physical as well as verbal) and have a plan to pick up the pieces.

c) If the subordinate is successful. congratulate and say how delighted you are and tell everyoneone else what a success it’s been. If it’s not a success then discuss the reasons with the person, then ask how they intend to recover the situation. Again provide increased support but don’t blame, chastise or bad mouth to others – (after all you made the decision to allow the experimentation and would have looked good if it had succeeded).

d) Turn the entire process, success or failure, into a learning situation by analysing what went right / wrong with the subordinate and what could be done differently next time. Either way make the subordinate “feel good” about the process and your support.

I’m not sure my friend was convinced by my arguments. Then I must admit he’s been secure in his current job for the past twelve years, despite higher than average team turnover and mediocre company results and doubtless will be there for a good while longer!

In the past few weeks I’ve been reminding people how time is often the enemy of change. Reading the business papers I’ve been struck by how many businesses and even Government accepts the “need to change” to reduce costs, increase productivity and remain competitive but seem to ignore the time trap.

The alcohol “responsibility deal” brokered by the UK Government and supported by Asda, Heineken but only signed up to by Tesco, Marks & Spenceer and others is just one example. 

Managing change creates frustration
Managing change creates frustration for those implementing it and those that have to work with the consequences. This frustration often creates delays, huge additional costs, lower productivity and result in poor staff morale as organizations take account of the economic cycle, merge and seek to become more competitive.

The time trap factor
One of the crucial factors for those designing change within organizations is the time factor. Yet time is the one part of the equation that is ignored, often with disastrous consequences

To understand the time trap factor let’s remind ourselves how change is planned and implemented. For some months plans will be made to improve systems or organizations. The people that work on these plans consider future benefits, implementation plans, risk analysis flow charts etc. Once all the plans have been finalized and an implementation process agreed, the time frame for these people has moved to the present and their outlook is to the future.

Different time frames
On the day that the wider world, generally those people that are affected by the changes, are informed, the managing group or government minister are full of confidence and optimism for the improvements that the future will bring. The group being affected, however, are in a different time frame. Their experience is based upon the past and, even if that experience was understood to be inefficient, there is comfort in what people know and understand.

All change produces winners and losers. The winners will move their time frame to the future and the losers will move further into the past. In addition each group will be seeing the change from the perception of not “Is this change good for the organization” but from the personal standpoint of “Is this good for me”

The trick is to move as many people to the future time frame as possible, right from the start. The more people that talk about the future change in positive terms the greater the chance of success. Errors, however, revolve around poor communication, hurried change, poor planning and implementation.

The result is the creation of two camps.
Those viewed as being supportive of the change and those that are seen as being unsupportive. When this happens it’s interesting to observe that once people are viewed as being in the unsupportive group by the change leaders it’s very difficult for the individuals to move themselves out of this group in the minds of others. In a company situation such staff will often feel forced to leave.

Ignoring the time factor may not reduce the need for change, it may, however, increase the frustration and management effort needed to implement it.

Much of my time is spent working with executives on increasing their personal impact and team productivity. An important area is social intelligence.

Social intelligence includes the ability to read people and predict behaviour. I’m not talking about body language.  am talking about how one can influence other people’s behaviour through observation and creating appropriate actions as a result.

Let’s take an example: During our career we have used our understanding to predict our boss’s, colleagues and even life partner’s reaction to certain situations or news. The result is that we know, or think we can assess, the right time to deliver bad news.

Another example of when we heighten our use of social intelligence is at the job interview. The candidate tries to identify where the interviewer stands on certain topics by reading the reaction to answers. Generally this involves detecting negative responses to what’s being said and then to modify or alter the answer accordingly. It’s called self-preservation.

However, many executives don’t use their social intelligence most  effectively despite there being many occasions when they want to influence their team to undertake a new project, accept company targets and then looking for buy-in versus compliance.

When this happens the executive will rely on compliance. The problem with compliance, however, is that it’s often destined to fail or achieve only fleeting short-term gains. Using Social Intelligence increases the chance of long term buy-in and project success. TOne of the main keys is understanding normal human traits. 

• People are natural pleasers: They will try to look good to those that lead them 
• People like simple solutions: So managers should reduce the number of alternatives when outlining a new project. 
• People want results “Now”: The Latin term is Myopia Temporal and it’s where poeple will discount future consequences in place of a  result that looks good for them right now. (Supermarkets use this to get people to buy sweets at the checkout, even when they are on a diet)
• People will follow a crowd: This is useful to a manager to persuade others to buy into a system 

Command and control cultures have a tendency of delivering only short-term results. Alternatively Social intelligence is a process that most managers should find easy to develop with practice. Two keys include: 

1) Identifying with the team the actions and values that generate success. Then support those that are considered valuable and move away from those considered less supportive.

2) Sharing decision making with the team. That is not to say that they share in the decision making just that they understand the route to the decision process. This allows for dissent but in the face of a majority a dissenter will generally align with the majority. This style of consensus management creates creativity and innovation and is used with considerable effect at Google and Apple. 

Creating buy-in with a team used to command  and control systems isn’t always easy. However, using the techniques above eventually creates teams that will begin to operate in a more incluse manner.

As Mahatma Ghandi suggested to one observer “I must hurry, for I’m their leader…and there they go”

This information is taken from the new event: “You’re Here…But How To Get There” that shows Executives how to utilse their personal presence to deliver outstanding team results.

If you would like more information on the event “You’re Here…But How To Get There” or on this article please contact me at Stephen@assimilating-talent.com or phone 01727 838321. 

After only five months of regularly using video on my blog over 2000 views. The most popular have been those on asking and answering interview questions for sales jobs. Perhaps in the current financial climate that’s not surprising but it has encouraged me to upload more videos on recruiting and managing sales teams.

Most viewers come from The UK, USA, Canada, Kuwait, Australia and I hope that everyone will continue to find them useful.

I was facinated by Management Today’s article: “Directors seem to have a very different view to the hoi polloi on how business is going…“ and that most senior executives feel secure in their current job and even if they were to be made redundant that finding a new job would be easy.

However, what caught my eye was almost the final line of the article that said, 74% of directors reported a strong collective sense of purpose, compared to a mere 47% of those below them. Not because I disbelieve the statistic but because, in my experience, almost all Directors feel a greater sense of purpose than subordinates.

Most subordinates, on the other hand, have to wade through encouraging and often meaningless “visions, goals and objectives” to determine what’s happening. This was reinforced by a friend who told me last week “There’s no point in being too upbeat and enthusiastic about the company’s prospects, it saves time, tears and disappointment in the long run!”

Perhaps it’s why so many Directors will sigh, run their brow and ask “Why is my team so difficult to motivate?”

Lucy Kellaway’s brilliant article in yesterday’s Financial Times on “The not so delicate art of firing people” where she analysed two emails giving staff bad news. Her conclusion that “using an upbeat tone is a cowardly attempt to hoodwink staff into thinking something good will happen”, was spot on!

It reminded me of an email that was given to me by a friend that was designed to be motivational, and I guess was in a funny sort of way as it had the effect of binding the team even harder against their team leader. This is what the IT team found in their email inbox when the team leader had just departed for a weeks holiday.

“I am sending you this email because whilst I’m away I don’t want you to feel leaderless. I view my job like being the leader of a flock of geese. I have the responsibility to guide the flock to new feeding pastures.

Generally I will take the lead so that weaker geese can fly in my slipstream but sometimes I will allow another goose to take the lead to provide experience of leading the flock. Whilst I’m away I hope that some of you will take the opportunity to take the lead until I return to guide you once more“

On receipt an email was sent to the rest of the team by someone who said ” I hadn’t realised that for the last six months I’ve been flying round in circles to God knows where whilst looking up a Ducks arse”