Employees are an Enigma, Part II

I don't think there will be a part III to this line of thinking. I wonder if I was just having a bad day when I wrote about the inability of our employees to be good team players or if I just couldn't admit that it's not really their fault. Anyway, since I posted that some things have changed a little. First, I've decided to change my approach and I think I convinced a couple of other people at work to do the same. You know, they always say you can't change someone else's behavior, you can only change your own. And that's how you make change happen, for better or worse.

When we hired this new group of 'managers' we said we were going to let them do the job we hired them to do and spend our time coaching them and helping them to be successful. Don't think we planned to do this for purely altruistic reasons, but our plan wasn't fiendish either. It was pretty normal and reasonable, considering that we have been working at making our company grow successfully for over five years. We need to have a team ready to take over when we are just too old and feeble to go on or maybe just when we want to take a couple of weeks off and go to Acapulco. At first, we were spending most of our time with the new group training them on the basics of the company and the organization. How the processes work, who the other employees are and what are their jobs, the different policies and procedures and the general conditions and daily routines. After several months, we began to expect that they would automatically start to take over and act like us (probably not a good thing anyway). Sometimes when they made a mistake, we spent more time telling them what they did wrong than showing them how to do it right. Other times we held them by the hand and walked them through different scenarios so they could make a more informed decision in the future. In other words, we were inconsistent and we didn't have a standard so that we could hold them accountable. They responded by becoming less and less willing or able to make the decisions we were demanding and everyone was frustrated. They also never wanted to be the "bad guy." It's so much nicer when everyone likes you and wants to be your friend or when you can be someone's hero (without trying to figure out who the victim is). We call that tendency the "Chanito Syndrome" and it's a common problem everywhere. A couple of people quit, for undisclosed reasons, and that made it even harder to get things done. Not just because there were fewer people to take up the slack, but because the roles kept changing.

I think the most important thing we have done to change in the past few weeks is to leave the new managers alone. Not alone in the sense that we have abandoned them, but freer to make decisions that will allow them to succeed or even to fail. If they succeed, we will reinforce them and if they fail we will be there to pick them up, dust them off and help them learn from whatever went wrong. I think it's already starting to work, but I could be dreaming. . .

I also found a cool website that has some really useful information, like a very succinct employee handbook. You can enjoy it here http://punkrockhr.com/punk-rock-employee-handbook/