Slightly Shocking Advice

G is a colleague who is one of the most amazing leaders of people I know.  He has been doing it for 14 years. I often look to his example & mentoring for advice. Yesterday at lunch he gave me some slightly shocking advice.

Background: At the F50C, annual and mid-year review time brings with it something I’ll call Leadership Assessment to help me avoid being dooced.  In the Leadership Assessment process, all managers of a department get together for a marathon session in which they discuss every employee: their strengths & weaknesses, potential for promotion, readiness for promotion.  They also set the employees’ review score and any compensation increases above & beyond what the score brings.

What’s nice about this is that important things like score and potential for promotion are not at risk to be in the hands of just one power-mad, jackass boss.  The group is a tempering, if not eliminating, influence on that kind of managerial abuse.  Of course what’s totally uncomfortable about this process is knowing that every manager on the team is sitting around talking about you, judging you, and sharing dirty laundry about you.

The slightly shocking advice:

Before every Leadership Assessment period, G asks his boss, What are you planning to say about me at Leadership Assessment? If that isn’t enough for the timid folks out there, G then tells his boss, After Leadership Assessment I’m going to come back to you and ask you what you actually said about me, and what everyone else said about me.

Wait, it gets better:

Then G goes in turn to each of his employees, and tells them: Here’s what I plan to say about you at Leadership Assessment, and then afterwards I’m going to come back and tell you what I actually said and also what everyone else said about you.

I find this advice amazing, mainly because it never would have occurred to ask this of my boss, or tell this to my employees without their asking first.  As much as I love and crave feedback, I am timid when it comes to asking for my leaders to lay my brand perception, potential and reputation all out on the table like that.  And I was super impressed when G told me he did this for his team.  He says consistently they love it.  I talked about managerial courage a little bit the other day: that’s nothing compared to this courage.

Are you bold enough to have your leadership really lay out for you all the external perceptions & reputation?

Are you bold enough to ask your manger to be frank about your potential for promotion?

Are you courageous enough to tell these things frankly but fairly to your employees?

Rypple Again

I swear this is it.  But I did try out Rypple on my team and 100% of them ended up replying! And they were very candid, which is awesome.   Not just candid, but focused, specific and actionable.  VERY awesome, totally usable.

(Rypple says if you ask 4+ people you have a stronger chance of candid response and full participation.  I think this is because the people you ask can see the count (not the who) of people you ask, and with 4+, folks are more comfortable that they’re truly anonymous.)

So, ta-da, here I share with you:

What my team said about me

Keep Doing

• Empower your direct reports, which makes them feel their commitment and work is valued and does add to the bottom line.
• Be very proactive & take follow-up action.
• Share knowledge, contacts & resources with your tea.
• Hold career development conversations.
• Recognize us, & hold us accountable.
• Give immediate feedback.

Start Doing

• Consistently ask for feedback and make those discussions open and comfortable.
• Ask, trust & limit over-advising when it sounds like things might be working out.
• Don’t react quickly to bad news. Let us talk through it together to arrive at next steps or a solution together.
• Provide information on how we each fit into your area and how your area fits into the team space. Provide leadership and direction on how we can add value to the broader business intelligence efforts at our company.

This is only slightly wordsmithed:  I reformatted it into keep doing/ stop doing form, and changed the “Don’t do X” statements into “Do Y” statements, because it’s always more effective declare what you ARE or WILL be instead of what you are NOT or SHOULDN’T BE.  I firmly believe you accomplish much more when you run towards something instead of running away from something.

I really like how candid everyone was. They called out a couple of blind spots which I didn’t know I had! Specifically:  jumping in to give too much advice too soon, and over-reacting to bad news.  Wow, I’m glad to hear i do the latter because I always hated it when I had managers who did that!  I can see it in myself now — I hear bad news and my bias for action goes into  fix it fix it fix it mode.  My team members will be better served by letting them — and holding them accountable to — fix the messes themselves.  This means holding back the advice, asking more questions like, “what do you think we should do?” and tempering my over-reactions.

I’ve sent this same summary to my team and my boss, so that all can see what people like about my management style and so that all can see what I want to hold myself accountable to address.

I hope that some of you are totally shocked that I shared the results back to my team & boss, at review time no less.  Good, if you are shocked you should be! We managers should absolutely be modeling how to know and own our strengths & weaknesses, and if we are going to hold our teams accountable to be more effective & use feedback, then we should in turn model it ourselves and avoid hypocrisy. Try it, try being honest & show your integrity!

If you manage people and think asking your team for feedback and then heaven help it, letting everyone know what that feedback was is too risky or immature or sets a dangerous precedent or whatever, then there is something wrong with you and you shouldn’t be managing people. Also you are a total coward.  I’m serious, go find a new job where you aren’t allowed to manage or review others.

Experiments in Setting Clear Expectations

In a former life, I had an employee who was full of ambition, a sense of entitlement and a task focus (vs a big-picture focus), but just did not “get it” in terms of understanding what it take to be promoted or take on increasingly complex responsibilities. She felt that if she could just notch up a long, long laundry list of tasks completed it proved she should be promoted.

We had to have endless conversations about the fact that stunning performance does not equal merely a long list of tasks accomplished.  Rather stunning perofrmance includes critical thinking, problem solving, offering recommendations and solution options and not just talking about problems, taking initiative to look beyond the first right solution, taking initiative to go beyond the clients’ literal expectations and delight them, communicating extremely well, building trust, managing up and taking action without having explicit instruction or every last data point.

I always felt if I’d just been more explicit from the start about my style and my expectations, it would have been easier for her to “get it,” about thinking beyond just tasks and understanding the more complex behaviors and attitudes necessary to out-perform.  So after working with her I typed up an explicit list of my expectations and now I use it with new employees.  I think too many of us managers expect our team members to read our minds or magically figure out what our style & expectations are.  But how can people out-perform if they don’t know what good performance looks like? As well, too often we tell employees, take initiative or communicate well, but we don’t tell them what good initiative, or “well” looks like. It’s so much easier just to talk about it frankly and start off on the same page.  Since I give new employees a copy of this list and we talk through it, it’s also easier to hold them accountable when they are not meeting expectations.

This list is a compliment to job duties (make widget X, maintain database Y, deliver project Z).  This list is about  things that directly contribute to your being supremely effective in doing those things, vs merely scraping by & getting them ticked off your list.  It’s also about how best to manage up to me.  It’s not perfect, and it’s not exhaustive, but it has been really helpful in terms of getting off on the right foot.

My Management Style/Expectations

1. I prefer to give basic direction & step back

• You are empowered to problem-solve & act without my detailed approval for every choice or action.

• I expect “insurance,” however:

• Tell me how you will gain my confidence in your decision-making, without asking me for approval on all details.
• How will you approach insurance for basic issues vs big or very sensitive issues?

• Identify reasonable deadlines, interim milestones, etc and manage to them.  Hold your partners/virtual teams accountable as well.

• If you need more direction, clarification, clearer deadlines, or have questions, I expect you to ask me right away

• Don’t burn time spinning your wheels

• Better to clarify than make assumptions

2. I expect you to manage my expectations

• I generally expect a 1-week turnaround for basic assignments, and a 24-hour turnaround for critical issues / fires
• 1-week or 24-hours too short? Propose a more reasonable time frame
• Surface material issues & proposed course of action in timely manner
• Challenge me & propose better ways of doing things
• Bring me thoughtful options & recommendations, not just problems
• Regularly inform me of your wins!,
• Regularly share feedback that you get, both positive & constructive
• Give me a regular pulse on your workload and capacity

3. I expect effective communication

• Provide regular progress reports at every status, and in-between status if necessary
• Identify interim milestones, communicate & manage to them
• Ensure you can present the bottom line / exec summary, and provide relevant level-setting or context, without drowning me or your audience in too much detail
• Share drafts whenever possible and request feedback regularly
• Identify how you will communicate to and gain buy-in from stakeholders, then execute on that plan
• Identify how you will need to leverage me for communication support

4. I want feedback from you (thanks in advance!!)

• How am I doing? Are you getting what you need from me?
• What should I start/stop/continue doing?
• Give me specifics about what actions I took that you liked or didn’t like

5. I expect you to be savvy about your strengths, weaknesses & development

• Be able to speak frankly and freely about each
• Own your weaknesses – none of us are perfect!
• Identify how you leverage your strengths and how you can position yourself to operate primarily from within your strengths
• Identify how you can mitigate, work-around, or neutralize your weaknesses
• Ask me for support, tactical ideas, strategies, etc to help you bolster strengths and mitigate weaknesses.

• Be proactive in regularly asking for feedback from me, clients & peers
• Identify and articulate your development interests – what are the next experiences you want to have, and why?  What do you want to learn?

How to Give Useful Feedback

Intern Nathaniel at Rypple left a comment the other day and then pinged me, which I thought was thoughtful since he is clearly doing some viral marketing.  So I like Intern Nathaniel, he seems conscientious and the guy’s just doing his job, trying to be a good marketer in a web 2.0 world. Brother’s gotta get the rent.

Anyhow, squeaky wheel gets the grease and all, I did go check out Rypple and it’s intriguing.  It’s a service that “lets you ask a question of people you trust and get back private feedback and then use that feedback to improve.”  I haven’t tried it yet, but I will after I write this post and then I’ll report back.  Cruising quickly around the site, here are my initial impressions:

• Might be very useful for small companies or firms where HR does not have a robust partner feedback process in place.
• Hmmm, how is this better than sending an email request for feedback?
• Only as good as the question you ask: with a vague, open-ended question you might get vague answers.  With a focused, specific and actionable question you will probably get useful answers.
• User interface is cute. I’m big on cute & friendly UI.
• The sample questions scrolling on the home page are really good. They appear to be real questions from users; Rypple has some beta users who really know how to solicit useful feedback.

Like I said, I’ll try it out and report back.  I am going to ask two questions of my team:  what is the one thing you wish I would do more more of to support you, and what is the one most annoying thing I do that I should stop?

In the meantime, here are my top tips for giving really useful feedback.  These come from real-life trial and error with my teams, effective feedback I’ve gotten, and trainings:

• Give it right away. Give it in the moment, when the behavior and result is fresh.  This makes it real and concrete for the person you’re giving it to.
• Make it actionable. What’s the call to action? Feedback like, Listen more, has no clear action a person can take to fix it. Feedback like, When you text in meetings and interrupt when I’m talking, it doesn’t seem like you’re listening to us, has very clear actions a person can take to fix it.
• Don’t avoid the hard stuff. Ignoring subtle things, or painful things does not mean they will go away. They will get worse. Nip it in the bud.
• Be as objective as possible. Obviously, this is about judging others’ behavior and style, so no one is perfectly objective.  But focus on observed, demonstrated behavior, the impact & consequences of that behavior.
• Load up on praise. People, if there’s one thing to remember, it’s REWARD THE BEHAVIOR YOU WANT MORE OF. Same concept as focusing on strengths: you’ll get a way bigger payoff when you focus on what’s working.
• Give it all year long. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’re not giving balanced, fair, constructive feedback all throughout the year, or if your message when giving performance reviews is a surprise, then you shouldn’t be managing people and there’s something wrong with you.
• Set expectations for change. Don’t just say, You sucked at X. Also say, I expect to see Y next time.
• Support them to change! For Pete’s sake, please also say, Let’s work together to figure out how you can do Y. Or, I’ve got your back as you work on Y. Then have them put Y on their agenda each time you meet for status — keep it active and real, and for Pete’s sake, GET THEIR BACK.
• Give feedback to peers & partners. Just because you don’t have direct reports doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be helping peers & partners to be more successful by catching them doing things right and providing actionable, specific, balanced and useful feedback when things aren’t going so well.  And just because you have direct reports doesn’t mean you get to slack on this.  We are all more successful when we help our peers, partners & clients to be successful. Do your part.
• Give feedback to your boss and your boss’ boss. This is tricker.  You have to invest a lot in your upwards relationships.  You MUST be trusted & known for being reliable and driving results.  But giving upwards feedback helps your mucky mucks be more successful, and a rising tide lifts all boats. This is good for them, for you and for your team. Practice with the small stuff and work up to the big stuff. Catch your mucky mucks doing things right, too! Here’s an example:  I used to tell my boss he needed to thank & recognize my team more.  I also helped him out by telling him what to thank them for and by writing nifty handwritten notes for him to sign.  He respected and valued this feedback, so I branched out a little, tested the watters and still got good results.  Finally I was able to tell him, Hey I don’t think you realize it but you come accross as really intimidating to certain folks at lower pay grades, and here’s why. He had no way of seeing this directly, and knowing this helped him adapt his style to connect better and thus get better results from some key people.

How I Manage Up

Everyone’s boss is different — we all have our weird blind spots and paranoias and strange weaknesses and hyper-focused strengths.  So my tricks for managing up may not work for you, in fact they probably won’t.  But if my boss ever hires you, you can use these tactics on him.

1.  I debate with him. He likes debate.  He likes to argue the point and the merits.  Once I got some feedback that he & my former director liked me because at the time I was one of the only people pushing back.  That little reinforcement was all I needed to get super comfortable saying, “I completely disagree, and here’s why.”  The real tactic here is that I communicate with him using his preferred style.

2.  I give him direct, relatively blunt constructive feedback. He’s from Jersey, he likes direct communication.  We live in MN, there’s a lot of passive aggressive communication.  I try to be plain & straightforward.  I give direct feedback to him on his performance and style because 1) he’s not very self-reflective and doesn’t always monitor the interpersonal after-effects of his approach.  And 2) he once invited me to give feedback.  The first time I gave it, it felt like a big risk.  But there were no bad consequences to me; in fact he thanked me.  And that encouragement was all I needed to keep doing it.  The real tactic here is that I help identify pain points & friction points, and suggest possible solutions, before they cause trouble.

3.  I demand clear expectations and well-defined, specific desired outcomes. Actually, I need to get better at demanding these things, at the time, in the moment, when the confusion is happening.  He’s strategic, and he’s often thinking out loud at a mile-a-minute clip.  He usually locks onto his desired outcome like a pit bull locking it’s jaw, but often the outcome is not fully baked and it’s up to the rest of us to bake it.  A lot of the time I feel like I’m trying to mind read.  Or, I’ll have to digest our conversation for a while and then go back to say, “This is what I think we discussed, and now that I’ve mulled it over, here’s what I actually think I should do.”  This, more than anything, directly causes most of my stress, so my goal in 2009 is to stand up for myself right in the moment and get specifics and clarifications.  Just like the ROWE people say I should.  The real tactic here is that I [should] insist on specifically defining, and agreeing on, desired outcome and timing. Also I [should] ask for proof/data/objective facts when he makes an assertion that’s way out of left field.

4.  I take abstract, vague ideas and execute them. I take the crazy ideas and make them happen.  Like I said, he’s often stuck in his desired outcome without a clear path to getting there or an understanding of all the steps to take and issues to clear, and a lot of the time he’s lighting a panicky fire to get there.  He’ll be the first to admit, he isn’t organized, task oriented or a process master. (On the HBDI: no green.)  So he hires people like me, who are.  The real tactic here is that I complement his weaknesses with my strengths. Part of the success here is that he hired me to be this complement — however, I spent a lot of time early on figuring out what his strengths & weaknesses were so that I knew where I could add value.

5.  I make sure he recognizes the team. I show off their wins to him, insist he send thank-you’s or notes, nominate them for awards he gives.  Because it’s not a strength of his at all, and because it helps him not be scary.  The real tactic here is just a variant of both #2 and #4.

6.  I make him look good. Because: DUH. His priorities are my priorities. I’ll drop everything to get him a deck for a meeting with his boss or an important client.  I scan his calendar to figure out when big-deal meetings are happening and either offer or ask what he needs. I feed him wins & measureable successes from my team so he can in turn show them off to his boss and partners. I get shit done. I warn him when trouble or stupidity happens, if it’s likely to get back to him — no surprises. The real tactic here is that I make him look good. Dang, I wish my own team would take this one more seriously with me! LOL.

7.  I delegate up. I am not afraid to give a clear request or assignment back up to my own boss.  I particularly like to deploy him when I think some particular action on his part will make it easier for me or my team to cut through an obstacle and move forward.  Becuse our success is his success. Also sometimes I just think there’s something he should be doing, not me. The real tactic here is that I protect the boundaries of my own work, and ask for the resources (usually action from my boss) I need to be successful.

5 Important Things

I always reflect around the holiday / new year time and lately what’s been running through my mind over and over again is that I have a list of five important things.

These are the very most important things to me, and therefore they are the things I should be focusing on and making time for over everything else.

1. My family.

2. Reading.

3. Writing every day.

4. Running every day.

5. Cooking healthy things from scratch.

Hmmm, notice that my day job and my career are not on this list? I be lying if I didn’t admit I have to maintain a pretty constant level of cognitive dissonance about why I work, since work isn’t directly aligned with my five important things.

In fact, I’m having trouble making room for two of my five things as it is (running & writing), so how on earth can I devote enough time and energy to my day job?

The main reason I work is to maximize my cash flow, in order to build wealth, in order to create a cushion and level of freedom from debt & the impact of crises for me and my family.  I’m not strongly entrepreneurial, so maximizing my cash flow is easiest for me by working for The Man, vs owning my own enterprise.  I’m aware that this isn’t necessarily the best way to optimize my cash flow, or max it out to the fullest potential, but this is about playing to my strengths.

Secondary reasons I work: to have interesting challenges to tackle; to get recognition from authority figures (this is acutally a problem for me and I am trying to learn how to be less interested in The Man telling me I done good and therefore am good); to feel like some sort of modern, interesting, fantastic, sharp-dressed, clever career gal from yuppie 1980s heydey cinema; I like empowering others and helping them reach their potential (which is why I like to lead people).

My big challenge is to keep the right focus. I want to work to live, not live to work.  It’s sooooo easy to fall into the trap of the latter.

Do you work to live, or do you live to work? Why?

Is She Good?

Today I have to write about someone else’s performance, in order to write about my own performance.  For both of us, the question to answer: Is she good?

Let me start by saying that I firmly believe that my first job as a leader of people is to coach, develop & empower my team to be highly productive and to advance in their careers. (Be that advancement to higher levels or advancement as individual contributors to higher challenges).  Of course, I also need to set vision & strategy and at my management level I also have individual contributions, but my primary job is my team.  Why else am I managing people?

On all my teams, I’ve had mixes of star, average and poor performers.  Any team would have this, yes? And where my people land on that continuum — where any of us land — is not fixed through time.  Performance improves, performance slips, new challenges emerge and we rise to meet them, or not.

So when my client, who is several pay grades above me, asked today of one of my team, “Is she good?” it broke my heart but I had to assess fairly and answer no. She is good at some things, at work that is tightly scoped and appropriate for her pay grade. But my client was questioning whether she is good at handling the challenges before us, challenges that have evolved over the year.  And she has not risen to them. As much as the skills required to meet these challenges are crucial to moving our initiative forward, my client was also asking, “Is she good enough to promote?” and the skills are even more crucial at leadership levels.  So: No.

Here is why this is also about my performance: My primary job is to develop and empower my team.  In the first half of the year, I considered this employee one of my stars.  But over the year, she has slipped from star into average and seems to be continuing her slide. Granted, I was on maternity leave for part of this slide, but I have been asking myself what I could and should have done better to help her prevent her slide (and the disengagement that is going with it).  I have also been asking myself whether I even assessed her correctly in the first place.  And this is soooo important to me, because my primary job is my team.  How could I not have seen this coming, or stepped in to prevent?

Here are some of the things I have learned from the situation, that I’ll try to apply going forward:

• I bias towards seeing the potential in people.  This is a good thing.  But some people give strong early impressions, and then can’t follow it up.  I’m going to be more cautious about assessing people as high-potential for promotion until I see a longer period of consistent strong results. And a long period of not being overly dramatic and acting overly entitled.

• The higher you go, the more important become communication, ability to reduce confusion & ambiguity, delegation, and ability to see the big picture and focus on what’s important.  When giving feedback in the future, I’m going to be more blunt about these being big limiting factors if people can’t get a handle on them and mitigate weaknesses in these areas. I’m good at giving actionable, behavior-based feedback but I think I haven’t been as blunt as I should have been about consequences, particularly promotion consequences, of not addressing problems in these areas.

• I am going to talk to my boss and my most trusted manager peers more regularly about their impressions & assessment of my team members. We do this well at my company at review time, and I do regularly ask the vague, Do you have any feedback for my team? I want to start asking specific things like, What do you see as the biggest value [name] brings, or How do you think [name] has been doing at [activity] or What do you see as [name]’s next destination? Also: How do you think I am doing coaching [name] around [issue]? Asking these things throughout the year will give me a pulse check on my assessments of their performance and my success at coaching, and give me insight into behaviors or interactions I may not be seeing directly.