In today’s
environment and in hiring Gen Y and Gen Z, answers like the aforementioned don’t
resonate well and in fact do nothing more than to get the employee looking for
another job…pronto.
Sometimes the boss
can be technically right, but management wrong.
As the boss you may be able to debate a viewpoint from many angles and
because you’re the boss you could force someone into accepting your viewpoint. What
happens when you do that?
Very simply the
employee begins to spiral into a place where they’re not really working to
solve problems, but working to avoid your wrath. so you won the technical
battle, but long term, you lost a potentially good employee who is now so demoralized
that he or she is no longer an asset for solving problems, but a mere sycophant
to what you say. Congratulations. You
have created a robot.
So one of the
first things a good manager has to learn (or should I say a manager has to learn
in order to be good) is to increase motivation for your team to solve problems
WITHOUT any fear of the consequences of their ideas, suggestions or
recommendations.
As the manager,
you can either build cultures that are highly collaborative and work together
or you can create cultures where you have a lot of paralysis and its very
difficult to make a decision.
The one time that
you have a chance to change the culture is in the hiring process because as the
manager you can hire a potential robot or hire someone with “clarity and
creativity”
What do I mean by Clarity?
When you are
building a business or just trying to get an existing business to perform
better, there are so many things you can do, so many paths you can take and so
many avenues you can go down that you want people who have the ability to dial
out the noise and find the “signal” that the group believes it should be
following.
Without the ability of everyone on the team to believe in and follow
the signal, you will end up managing a “co-op board” where everybody wants “their
way.”
What do I mean by Creativity?
There are a lot more
problems to fix today than ever. The newly hired employee has to be able to come
to you with a clear understanding of the problems (clarity) and then offer up
three or four creative solutions; suggesting one for reasons he believes in because the facts bear
him out.
If that employee is told that
his ideas are stupid or that he doesn't know the business well enough, then say
goodbye to that employee forever and say good bye to your idea of creativity.
I have sat in too
many meetings where the Boss asks his team what they would do about a particular
problem and they all clam up. Finally I have
to jump into it and start a brainstorming session with an idea and then ask
people to build upon including the boss. As soon as the boss indicates that any
idea is stupid, we take a time out and I go have a “heartsy” with the boss.
Sometimes I get him to understand and sometimes
I get an “I don’t understand. If it’s a stupid idea, why can’t I say it”? “Because its not the final idea; maybe something
beautiful will grow out of it. Why not give it a chance?
Then back into the
meeting room for round two and I tell the boss that his job is to keep encouraging
them to redefine the solution. How will it work? Who will do it? When can it get done and how much do they
think it will cost?
If I can get them
going on this stream of thought, I know we will have a good solution(s) for the
problem. If I can’t, well, its back to “Because
I’m The Boss That’s Why.”
And now the only problem
left to decide is when will the business be put up for sale and for how much?
Its your choice.
I
know what I would do
