Oh So Human

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Begin with a situation that happens all the time: for whatever reason, an employee has trouble managing his or her feelings, it spills out, and begins affecting customer service.

You’re the supervisor.

Like any supervisor, you were looking forward to teamwork, cooperation, creativity, mutual support, and you were hoping you’d never have an unpleasant conversation with an employee, let alone have to fire anyone.

It’s hard because most new supervisors worry about pulling rank, or being seen as the type that needs or enjoys exercising “power.”  Some newbies worry that ever having to assert authority will be seen as a kind of failure that says bad things about their managerial skills.

Despite those hopes, there’s no getting around it – something is occurring, and a basic workplace axiom is: if you think there’s a problem, you’re right.

So what now? Of course, you should be careful, want to get it right, certainly not make anything worse. And that’s the obvious reason you don’t want to just stumble into an unplanned conversation, loaded with bits of data and pieces of facts, and filled with strong emotions – running both ways.  Avoid that at all costs.

So, yes it’s good not to jump the gun, but that can run you right into another axiom – and this one is thoroughly road tested: good managers head toward problems, they don’t look away.

Despite what you may have heard, problems rarely just work themselves out in today’s workplaces.  So please don’t be passive.  The employees are watching.

Workplaces are mini-cultures.  The employees assume a supervisor knows what’s going on unless he or she doesn’t want to know.  Everyone’s looking to see how you handle the situation – and yourself.  Mostly they’re rooting for an outcome without turmoil and hard feelings, but they know that’s not always realistic.

Assume you’ll be nervous, but don’t worry about it. You don’t have to be perfect.  Take some time to prepare.  Be composed.  Never go into a meeting angry.  Remember, it’s not about you, and you haven’t been let down personally.  You’re having the conversation because a problem has been identified, and you’re responsible for the “work product” coming from your area.  It’s about the work.

So, it’s your meeting. The door is closed, obviously.  You’re not rude, the tone is friendly and civil, but there’s no need for chit-chat. Get right to the reason why you’re both there.  The most important thing is to state clearly what the problem is – work performance.

Use simple, clear language, give concrete examples, and explain what makes it a problem. Give the employee a chance to respond, but not to argue or filibuster. You want to be crystal clear about what improved performance will look like, and then give a reasonable timeframe for it to occur.   It’s very important to convey that you want the employee to succeed, but you do that best by being clear about what you need.  Wrap up the meeting, assuring the employee that there will be both help and follow-up.

That follow-up is crucial.  If employees see that you’re around, aware of what’s happening, head toward problems, but they also know that your first instinct is to support and be helpful, it makes addressing workplace problems much, much easier.

Nice people can be great supervisors.  It’s all going to be OK.

I laughed out loud when I first heard the term “tattoo regret,” but I know from first-hand experience in the workplace that there can be a threshold moment when a manager realizes he’s got employee regret.  The employee isn’t working out - and it’s not funny.

The actual problem might be the employee’s abilities, or it may be a “motivation” issue, or some combination of both that adds up to a non-fit. The main thing is, the difference between what had been originally hoped for, and what turns out to be true, can no longer be ignored.

Handling the situation well requires one kind of strategy. Insuring that it mostly doesn’t happen again – prevention – is the better approach for the long haul, and hinges on learning the right lessons.

Obviously, a manager begins by managing his or her own feelings.  That’s crucial, especially since everything changes the instant an employee senses you’re no longer thrilled they’re on your team. Be prepared for a range of responses, including denial and aggression, when you broach the problem.

For you the manager, remember – it’s always about the work and work performance. Your demeanor and use of language should convey that, and only that.

Prevention is the key:

Monitor that “uh oh” feeling, and head toward problems early.

Invest time in mentoring and/or coaching the employee without even hinting that you’re too busy, or that you’re annoyed you have to do it.

Remember, until that threshold is crossed – it isn’t. You’re helping your employee succeed, and trying to approach things as problems to be understood and solved – really.

As a practical matter, authentically helping an employee succeed increases the likelihood the effort will bear fruit, and decreases the likelihood there will be unreasonable fallout if it doesn’t.

It’s not quite win-win, but it’s a reasonable facsimile. After that, yes, you may have to do what was going to need to be done anyway. But you’ll know you did it the right way.

One of my favorite examples illustrating the many benefits of “coaching” a line supervisor happened also because of the flexibility provided by a good Employee Assistance Program (EAP.)

A supervisor who had recently become the Office Manager of a very busy State bureau came to see me – supposedly – about a personal problem at home. Truth was, she was checking me out because she’d been “nudged,” and told I might be helpful with her true problem  – managing people at work.

 For many years, she’d been the “trusty right arm” to her boss, a remarkable woman who’d been in her job fourteen years, and then abruptly had to leave due to Breast Cancer.  My client was the obvious choice for the battlefield promotion, but the truth was she wasn’t prepared for what the job really was: lion tamer.

 Replacing that boss would have been hard under any circumstances, but my client somehow hadn’t been paying attention – while still, actually helping her boss succeed.  She tended to react off the top of her head, had trouble owning mistakes and apologizing, and some of the people she was alienating were not just the obvious, “usual suspects,” but were some of her most ardent early supporters and natural allies.

It turned out there were some problems at home. Her essentially good marriage was being strained by disagreements with her husband about handling their youngest daughter, who’d just bombed out of her Freshman year at college (costing a lot of un-refundable money) was now unemployed, and sleeping-in most mornings.

 From the EAP standpoint, taking up the “home front” part was fairly straightforward – a meeting with my client and her husband, focusing on the need for both of them to stay on the same page, be both understanding AND jointly focused with their daughter, stay concrete, create strategies with timelines, but – above all – to commit to consistent follow-through.

Meanwhile back at the workplace, as so often happens, events were racing ahead.  A mini-delegation had already gone over my client’s head, to her boss – essentially conveying unhappiness and anger at what it was like to deal with her.  To my client’s eternal credit, her reaction was more hurt than anger, defiance, or disdain – the far more common reactions I see from others in roughly similar situations.

With that as our point of departure she was able to fess up to how “anxious” she’s been - ”not just recently” - but nearly all of her life.  She realized that watching her boss had been like being front row center for a virtuoso performance she took for granted . She admired it, and was gratified to be associated with her boss’s “success,” but in hindsight now realized she had “no clue” how her boss had pulled it all off.  My client was wired differently, and just couldn’t “ever put up with so much nonsense” without getting judgmental, upset, and unable to hold it all “in my anxiety-laden head.”

To make a long story short, our coaching focused on listening skills – especially including listening to herself – managing feelings, learning to not be afraid to not know something, and developing a slightly more collaborative approach.Simply having someone – not her direct supervisor – with whom she could speak from the heart about situations she hadn’t prepared for, but were now “on top of me,” made a huge difference.

She became more relaxed, which was sensed in the workplace almost immediately. I actually got a grateful, handwritten note from one of my client’s co-workers saying that the atmosphere was 100% better since my client had come to see me, and that others in the office were also very appreciative of the changes, and wanted her to tell me so.

Post script:

It turns out that the person who wrote the note had also been an EAP client, and was the one who’d lobbied heavily that her colleague make an appointment to see me. Behind the scenes at work she’d also been a voice of moderation and patience, which had helped steer things away from a total wreck.

I wish I could say they all lived happily ever after, but it seldom quite works that way. Things were better, and the entire office undoubtedly benefited from the small but real changes my client achieved. But it wasn’t a total metamorphosis, and the truth was she never really got comfortable managing such a busy, relentlessly boisterous operation.  By the way, her direct supervisor watched it all happen without saying a thing, or being any help at all. 

She weathered the storm with dignity, picked her moment, and then slid sideways into a smaller, quieter department just shy of the second anniversary of her promotion. Of course, part of what makes it memorable was the “thank you” note – they obviously don’t come very often.

 But the case highlights how helping a supervisor has a direct impact on the people affected by that supervisor. Many good, competent people need a safe place where they can talk and think about their real problems supervising live people.

Coaching works.

The thing I like best about coaching is how straightforward it is: either our sessions are useful in a tangible way, or they’re not. If they’re not, the sessions should stop.

Sometimes it’s crystal clear why the sessions are helping. The interactions are stimulating, validating, liberating, or something that feels right. Sometimes it’s less obvious, but it’s usually about external structure and accountability.

Either way, positive actions follow from the sessions – and that’s positive as defined by the client.

Even people who do pretty well working alone can find that having someone to brainstorm with, someone to run things past, someone to think out loud with in a risk-free situation – above all, someone to help move things forward is an invaluable asset.

No longer is it only the rich and famous who have personal assistants, advisors, and personal trainers. Now anyone trying to get from Point A to Point B can hire a trained, credentialed, insured professional.

Study after study keeps showing that people like coaching and their coaches. It’s the complete opposite of being sold a bill of goods, or getting into a dependent relationship with a guru.

Coaches are allies, but not sycophants. They support, but also reflect back honestly how what they’re hearing seems to fit with where things are supposed to be going.

Above all, the process is “positive” not painful, and clients should be looking forward to the meetings.

When I read business articles, I often get the feeling that the work world I see isn‘t quite what those folks are thinking of when they write about the workplace.

The problems they focus on always somehow seem the same – either non-strategic thinking or poor communication, or both. As I read, in my minds eye I see focused people with careers they’re pursuing and mortgages they’re paying, and it’s just that, according to the article, somehow things aren‘t quite coming together. So there‘s all this potential lying there waiting to be unleashed – if only management would get it right.

Enter – stage left – the right person, or the right management idea, or both.

I suppose I might be exaggerating a tad, and maybe it‘s nothing more than the feeling that they’re writing about a parallel universe where virtually everyone’s a professional, or at least has work skills, and knows the basics of adult functioning like shaking hands, returning phone calls, making minimal eye contact, wearing clean clothes, and using deodorant.

At some of the workplaces I’ve been called to consult, nothing could be taken for granted. I remember sitting in a conference room with a freshly promoted young supervisor having a very animated discussion about basic things like the need to give regular feedback, respond early to identified problems, while also addressing her anxiety about doing performance reviews.

We could look out onto a floor full of cubicles, and as we talked, a small squad converged around a particular one. My new supervisor shook her head and said, “We found rotting food in her file drawers, and unopened mail from months ago. “

I’m not suggesting that happens every day, but there are many, many workplaces where the human condition runs rampant in all its multi-faceted richness. “The Office” and “Dilbert” cartoons capture a slice of it, but a lot of what I see isn’t that funny. Pecking order stuff, raw aggression, dysfunction, and pure venality occur with sad regularity across the fruited plain.

Paradoxically, for some people work actually is “home” – a sanctuary, a model of sanity and reliability contrasting with the train wreck back at their own residence.

This can’t simply be dismissed as the other world of low-enders, where most wouldn‘t be caught dead.

Many of us have been there, are there now, or have siblings, cousins, and even children who are in that world.

Helping line managers do their tough jobs has only partly – if ever – been about “thinking outside the box.“

In fact, It‘s mostly about keeping your own concentration, and behaving like the person you aspire to be, despite what‘s happening in front of you, all the while learning, improving, and planning your “strategic” exit when the time is right.

It may sound a bit schmaltzy, but it really has been an honor and a privelege to occasionally be able to help some of those folks.

Every once in awhile I dream of coming up with some phrase that’s so memorable and evocative, I can copywrite it. Then it would get picked up out there somehow, create some “buzz,”, generate a ton ideas and comments – as well as a bestselling book. So far, no luck.

But I was leafing through some notes having to do with employees describing what made a good boss, and I noticed how often what got said connected to feeling “encouraged” to stretch, take something new on, and so many times the boss had more confidence in the employees than they did in themselves.

I’ve also noticed that some managers are “naturals” – almost effortlessly good at explaining a goal or a project so that the employee “sees” what’s expected while also feeling assured it’s “do-able.”

It’s a real skill to combine describing the process, anticipating the trouble spots, assuring support and adequate resources, and accurately describing the good outcome long before it happens. When a supervisor handles it well, it results in less anxiety (which means better initial listening and comprehension), less outright resistance, and a much higher probability of overall success.

Some supervisors are just more comfortable dealing with human nature – in all its splendor – than some others. For some, displays of anxiety or self doubt are weaknesses not suitable to a workplace – and some barely hide their true feelings behind that manufactured smile.

Most supervisors have been around long enough to recognize that not all line employees share their commitment to the job– but the “naturals” are consistently slower to be irritated or get exasperated at employees for being so needy – a repeat of instructions, say, or yet another reassurance about real and imagined “problems.”

Relaxed supervisors smile through the initial static, then slowly, appreciatively – but relentlessly – expect people to perform and the job to get done.   Their message:

“We can do this.”

 As I look at my posts so far, I’m noticing that my comments and examples are slightly skewed toward what I think of as “already ripe” situations. My role as an Employee Assistance provider has meant that clients tended to come through the door asking for help with a “situation” and – quite honestly –  ”ripe” is so often understating how far along, and even out-of-control, things have gotten. “Train wreck” might be a better description.

So, when faced with trying to actually help a live person’s real problem, as opposed to telling them what they could have done to keep the situation from starting up in the first place, has meant that I have two basic tasks: a) calm the person down so that they can access the ”hope” implied by actively seeking help in the first place, and b) provide the plausible, actual basis for that hope by suggesting and/or helping them develop action strategies that will make things somewhat better.

Am I overstating the extent of “social Darwinism” in the workplace? Possibly, since it’s also very true that I’ve worked in some extremely positive situations, where virtually everyone behaved like an adult, and mostly focused on the work. That’s always a potential problem with emphasizing “ripe” situations – it might distort the picture of reality itself.

Still, I have to say, it’s amazing how it all unravels so quickly when some sort of challenge, problem, or piece of negativity erupts – and now everyone is deciding first and foremost, whose side am I on, and who’s on mine?

This tendency is both real “out there” and also a part of the”wiring” of most of our fellow human beings. Which is why I find it pretty hard not to include looking at the “undercurrent” as part of any conversation about supervision and management.

What continues to be true is that good managers adapt to the human condition – without being trapped by it.

Most of us have heard, at least vaguely, of the Hawthorne Effect: behavior is modified when people know they’re being observed. Even though the Hawthorne Effect may ultimately turn out to be unscientific folklore, it still has that ring of truth that also seems to square with common sense.

The principles behind the Hawthorne Effect are definitely part of how and why coaching works, and it’s embedded in a lot of management ideas that have fancy names and big time gurus. Management by Walking Around – one of my all-time favorites – is an obvious example.

What happens when people know they’re being observed? Mostly good things, actually – more honesty, more productivity, more accountability. Sure, some people in some situations may feel put upon – intimidated even. But that’s not really where most of the difficulties come from.

So what’s the problem? In a celebrated business article written in 1974, the authors (Oncken & Wass) entertainingly posed the question, “whose monkeys are on whose back?” – very cleverly highlighting time management as a key managerial skill. More precisely, it’s about managing management time. So, from the other direction, managers are urged – not just to delegate – but to actively rebuff attempts by employees to put “monkeys” on their backs.

I can see how managers can come to resent, or at least view negatively, an employee’s need to be reassured, reinforced, praised, validated, or ”checked-in” with and communicated with, so constantly. Since managers are usually squeezed for time themselves, their ideal employee is a self-starter who takes initiative, works fast and efficiently, doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t need hand-holding and – above all – doesn’t take up managerial time.

There are workplaces where that’s what happens, but not many. Human nature is ubiquitous and relentless. Plus, the self-starters move up (or move on) quickly, usually replaced by an employee closer to the norm – someone wired to abhor isolation, and to at least minimally need basic reinforcement, and regular communication with the supervisor, to stay on track.

Two plus two equals four, the sun rises in the East, and – like it or not – employees need to know the manager is coming, intends to check in, and that he or she will figure out what’s going on by observing and asking questions. Managers who keep wishing it wasn’t the case are in for a rocky career.

 I vividly recall the anguish as she told me her story. She’d happily followed her husband here to Maine for his exciting appointment as statewide director of a huge program. She’d vacated her position as Special Ed. Department Chair at a highly-regarded public high school, where she was well known in her region as well as the state level, had presented at conferences, etc.

She applied for Special Ed jobs in the capital school district as well as the surrounding suburbs, but there weren’t many openings. She persisted admirably, had a couple of second interviews, and, just as the new school year was starting, got an offer to be a Special Ed teacher at a Middle School about 15 minutes from their home.

It was a nightmare. The Principal seemed clinically depressed, the district wide Special Ed department was leaderless, there was very little coherence to planning, distribution of assignments, and attention to actual educational goals. Above all, colleagues were either constantly stressed or outright nasty. Her first few meetings were disasters. She’d disagreed with someone – she thought very politely – and was “put in my place” very rudely. An hour later the person was acting as if it hadn’t happened.Her husband was putting in 16-hour days, traveling constantly, and was exhausted whenever he was home. Their last child was in her sophomore year at college almost a thousand miles away. “I feel like I’m on a desert island.”That phrase has haunted me ever since. There are many professionals who feel isolated in their working lives. Poignantly, many blame themselves entirely for their situation. And it’s certainly true that the need to pay bills and address basic family needs makes for some very pragmatic decisions about where to apply, and what to accept for professional work.

But the sad truth is there are many supposedly “professional” workplaces that leave a lot to be desired, to say the least, and some are outright pathetic. These unnecessarily unhealthy workplaces exacerbate the already difficult juggling act most professionals do to manage their lives. There are things to do, and help with doing them, to make the present better – while planning a better future.