Over 30 years ago I had a conversation with a teenager that caught me completely off guard – and reminds me of a valuable principle to this day. While I have a very well-honed skill for catching people doing things wrong – if I want to be an effective leader, I need to catch people doing things right. I work on this every day, with clients, peers, and bosses – greatly because of the jumpstart this conversation gave me.
As a leader, your credibility is maintained, day by day, when you do what you say you will do. For example, if you announce that, from this point forward, every team member will be expected to demonstrate our team’s valued behaviors, you have set a standard. Educating team members about desired valued behaviors is important, but, without accountability, those valued behaviors are just one more set of expectations that your employees can ignore.
If you’re like most managers we work with you just don’t have enough time. Your open door has become a revolving door of employees bringing you problems that need solving. So how do you turn these problem-bringers into problem solvers?
People don’t hate meetings. They hate bad meetings. And there’s a long list of reasons why so many meetings are bad: there’s no decision to be made (it should have been an email; there’s no agenda and the meeting goes in circles; no one clarifies the action items and nothing gets done; you invited the wrong people and everyone’s multi-tasking; the list goes on an on.
Every business needs a captain, a person that sets the stage for all actions and all relationships that take place within the work environment. If you, as a leader, do not set the stage by defining and aligning practices to clear performance standards and values expectations, people will be left to “figure it out on their own.” This leads to widely varying practices – not aligned, proven practices. That lack of clarity and alignment erodes consistent performance, service, and results.