were to add it up, you’d probably realize you’ve spent 100 hours of your time on this person already. And if you look at what you’ve been doing during that time, you’ll see that it’s mostly not been mentoring or development: It’s been supervision. Yikes, that’s ugly stuff. That word should give you chills! Supervision is what children need so they don’t stick their finger in a socket. Not a good model for building a company culture for adults.
What if instead of the next 100 hours of supervision, you spend 10 hours having direct conversations with this team member about what’s been going wrong, what your standards are, why they should care, how you’re going to help them grow, and how you’re going to hold them accountable for their growth. Don’t you feel better already?
Think about it another way. Isn’t not investing in them the surest way that they will leave—or stay and drag other people down? Think of all the good things that will happen when you train and invest in one person. Think of what it will mean to them as a human being. Think of what it will mean to you to be the kind of human being who helps other human beings with hard things. Think about the message it sends to the other people on the team that you’re willing to take that kind of a risk. Think about the people below that person on the org chart who will benefit from their growth even if/when that person does leave. There’s no end to the potential benefits of investing in your employees, but ultimately the most important benefit is this: It’s the right thing to do.
MYTH #4:
“I’m not a therapist, I don’t have the skills to help them with their personal problems.”
How many things have you tried to help you become a better leader, manager, and all-around effective person? How many consultants and coaches, how many self-improvement books, podcasts, and weekend workshops? How many of those ideas have you tried to introduce into your company culture? If you’re reading this, chances are you decided long ago that who you are and how you relate with your work is highly relevant to the business—and that your personal transformation would be good not just for you but for the people around you. Why doesn’t the same hold true for everyone else in your business?
Even if you’re ready to acknowledge that your employees’ personal growth is relevant and will be good for your business, there’s still this challenge: How do you broach the subject? And how do you have this more personal conversation without going beyond the bounds of the professional agreement between a manager and an employee? We’ll be answering these questions throughout the rest of this book by offering many simple methods to talk about performance issues in a way that intersects beautifully with personal growth challenges. That it’s hard doesn’t put it off limits. It just means it’s hard. And as I hope you’ll discover in the rest of this book, you may be making it far harder than it needs to be.
MYTH #5:
“We just need better systems and more communication.”
Systems, processes, action plans, and procedures are wonderful things. They are necessary in creating a minimum amount of order and predictability to your business. But ask yourself: How many systems do you have right now? How many hard and so-called soft documents have you written over the years with big promises as to what they were going to deliver? Vision documents, brand positions, marketing strategies, values presentations. Have any of them, honestly, done even a bit to get people to take real ownership of their work?
Systems are not the solution to people problems. They’re absolutely the answer to systems problems though! The key is to know the difference. When an athlete breaks their leg you put it in a cast to help restore structure and stability. But to support them through the emotions of the fall and help them to get back up again? For that you need a whole other kind of medicine.
Let’s make a new set of operating assumptions. They’re not the opposite of the myths we’ve hopefully just debunked, but a reframe that allows us to approach the growth conversation with the honesty and nuance that we all deserve:
“I can’t find good people” becomes “I can’t know who my A players are until I challenge them to find out.”
“Nobody cares as much as I do” becomes “I haven’t figured out how they care in their own way that can harmonize with the way that I do.”
“I can’t afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway” becomes “I don’t have time to do anything else.”
“I’m not a therapist, I don’t have the skills to help them with their personal problems” becomes “I’m not a therapist, but I am two steps ahead of this person as a professional and can help them grow by sharing the things I’ve learned along the way.”
“We just need better systems and more communication” becomes “We don’t need more communication. We need to start speaking a different language.”
Imagine for a moment that you were to start living into these new assumptions bit by bit, a little more each day. Who do you want to go and talk to first?
From Strength to Growth
Most people spend their whole lives using their strengths to cover up and hide their weaknesses. But, if you surrender to your weakness, therein lies your pathway to genius.
—Moshe Feldenkrais
Cheryl had a knack for social media, an invaluable skill-set for a modern marketing team. She was a natural at coming up with new initiatives and seeing patterns in the results so we could adjust strategy. But Cheryl was not a good teammate. She was constantly pushing deadlines, increasing the scope of projects at the last minute, and she tended to dominate team meetings with her ideas, which shut down others in the process. She wasn’t mean about it, the team generally respected her and looked to her for guidance. But the grumblings were there. People dropped hints to her about the way they felt bullied into agreeing with her. Cheryl wasn’t picking up on the hints.
I wasn’t either. Team members would complain in off-hand comments here and there. It was nothing blatant, but a little bit of having to cover for her here, a little bit of extra work because of her there. It didn’t seem like that big a deal. Of course, I see now, it was very much a big deal. But I wasn’t listening. If I had been, I would have done something. I even remember thinking things like, “What can I really do? I’m not her therapist, I’m her boss. And who will pick up the slack if she gets upset and walks out? Anyway, let’s see what happens, if it comes up again I’ll talk to her.” Can you spot a few of the the Employee Engagement Myths in action? All of them?
Somewhere around that time I started waking up to a similar theme in my own life. It turned out that when it came to blind spots, Cheryl and I had more than a little bit in common. I was ten years older, we’d come from entirely different backgrounds, but in the thing that mattered—in our relationship to our work—we were birds of a feather. As long as I remained blissfully ignorant of my version of the blind spot, I couldn’t help her with hers. I literally couldn’t see it—they’re not called blind spots by accident.
It was then that I had my window. The quiet grumblings had turned into two identical flare-ups within a matter of days. Twice Cheryl had failed to communicate scope changes to her teammates, and each time they’d had to spend an extra two days re-working something they had already crossed off their list. The grumblings bubbled over when her behavior started screwing
