I’ve had a funny month. One of my clients has demoted one of their managers, and fired another. A second customer is considering buying out a minor shareholder who’s also a manager. All of them for either not being able to do their jobs as it relates to managing other people or themselves. It all seems to relate back to feedback, influence, and communication.
I’ll give one example. One of my construction clients had an operator who screwed up and caused unnecessary damage. It was bad enough that the operator suspended. His manager didn’t know how, or didn’t feel confident in doing the suspension himself, and asked the general manager to do it for him.
At this point I’ve got a couple of questions, like how come we’re discussing the fairly straight-forward suspension of an operator at the executive level? Or how come somebody is a manager (leader) and still not confident confronting poor performance? Or how somebody who couldn’t perform basic managerial tasks without guidance and oversight at every step is hired for a job that is essentially just that. Or how long has this being going on?
Ultimately they decided to let that manager go. After they started digging and asking questions they found other issues. They decided that if that general manager has to do his job for him, then why pay the guy?
Which means that the general manager is now (still) the bottleneck for operations. Which isn’t his role. He has to spend time finding the right gal or guy as a replacement, and run operations in the meantime, while juggling his “real” job of building relationships with existing customers and finding new ones in a new operation in a new city.
How well do you think he’s going to do at hiring a good operations manager with all that on his plate? Oh, yea, he’s also short an operator while the original problem child is on suspension.
So what? Well, if you’re in a “manager”, making your “general manager’s” job easier means handling things at the lowest level possible. If you’re not comfortable at giving specific, fact-based feedback and applying the appropriate consequences, then start now. Yes, you’re going to suck at it and be really uncomfortable with it at first, especially if you haven’t done it before, had a good example of how to do it, or had training. Too bad. All those excuses have a solution, but none of them should hold you back from starting now. Everything is practice until it isn’t. So start practicing.
If you’re the “general manager”, then stop hiring for just experience and knowledge. Look for the ability to develop, coach, and mentor team members. Look for the ability to create teams. For the experience admitting mistakes, fostering trust, taking responsibility, and being comfortable with conflict.
Your Homework This Week: Catch somebody doing something right every day for the next seven days. Give them specific, actionable feedback. If you don’t know what this means then do the research and learn how. *
*hint: I’ve written at least two dozen article on the topic of giving feedback for this blog.
