I am an administrator for a mid-sized professional services firm in a division of employees under the direction of a director. The director claims that his staff has been empowered to do their jobs. But nowhere in the discussion is there ever any mention of accountability (which I believe goes hand in hand with empowerment). I am not referring to the finger pointing blame game. I am talking about those who fail to learn their jobs/responsibilities after much personal training, coaching, and handholding. As the firm’s administrator, I believe that some key people must be held responsible for their repeated mistakes. The director, however, views anyone who points to an individual’s inability to retain the basic knowledge required to perform their job as “not a team player”.

In this situation, how can one ever address poor/weak performance without being labeled “not a team player”?

I am a frequent (online) reader of Practical Leadership and would welcome any suggestions you might have.

You’re describing a fairly complex situation that would take more analysis to give you a firm recommendation. In our consulting work, we run into lots of accountability problems. They always require thorough analysis to get the roots of the issue. I will draw from some of that experience and take a general stab at a few things that might be helpful:

One of the rewards of being in my line of business is that I get to meet a wide variety of very interesting people doing this type of work. I met Donald Cooper five years ago and he’s become a very good friend. Besides being a funny and fascinating guy with lots of stories to tell (his family owned Coopers, the famous Canadian sporting equipment company), Donald is an outstanding speaker and seminar leader on marketing, service, and business excellence (his web site is www.donaldcooper.com).

After a trip to Atlantic Canada and Prince Edward Island, Donald included this passage in an e-mail to me:

“We saw hundreds of hermit crabs that have no shell of their own so they ‘occupy’ the empty shell of some other critter. They walk around with this borrowed shell on their back and when danger threatens, they retreat inside the shell. As they grow, they outgrow their adopted home and rather than be limited by their immediate surrounding, they cheerfully (I’m just supposing about the ‘cheerfully’ part) go in search of a larger shell. There’s got to be two or three life and business lessons that we can learn from this - like knowing when it’s time to move on because you’ve outgrown where you are.”

Donald is so good at keeping his eyes open and finding leadership analogies in daily life. Hermit crabs are a good metaphor for growth and adaptability. We all need to figure out how to protect ourselves while continuing to grow.

After the following Improvement Point (sign up for Improvement Points here) was sent to sent, a subscriber sent me the question that follows. My response follows that.

“I agree 100%, Jim. But if they are not in place, how do you deal with the 1% who abuses this trust? These rules set the expectations don’t you think?”

There is a place for rules. And there is a need to enforce them occasionally. Managers start with values that (often unconsciously) treat people like children and need rules to keep them in line. They see themselves as enforcers and often hide behind legalistic, bureaucratic approaches to “treat everyone fairly.” They use position power to cover up their weak people skills and manage to the lowest common denominator.

Leaders start with trust and assume people are responsible adults. They enforce rules and policies as a last resort when persuasion power has failed to bring the individual onside. They continue to expect the best from people even when they see the worst from a few. They would rather be occasionally taken advantage of than bring everyone down to a rule bound, restrictive, and bureaucratic mediocrity.

Like everything else in life, this issue is all about balance. We need both management and leadership. But the greatest results clearly come from starting with leadership and falling back to management when needed.

Many managers are great at supplying information, but they’re not so good at communication. In this “information age,” our organizational lives are overflowing with e-mails, voice mails, phone calls, newsletters, books, articles, manuals, and web pages. Like the sailor marooned in a lifeboat on the high seas, we have water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. We suffer from a profound lack of communication. Too many managers over-inform and under-communicate. The differences between information and communication underscore those between managers and leaders, as shown in this table:

Just before the opening ceremonies in Beijing, Tavia Grant from The Globe & Mail sent me an e-mail and interviewed me for her story on how managers should deal with people watching the Olympics at the office (“World’s Watching: Who’s Working”, August 8, 2008).

As the Globe & Mail so often is, her story was very timely. It also raised key leadership questions. This issue is a great way to contrast enslaving and overbearing cultures and their heavy handed bosses with more open, fun, and team oriented cultures with their people focused leaders. I wrote about this in an excerpt entitled “Might is No Longer Right” from The Leader’s Digest at http://www.clemmer.net/articles/Might_is_No_Longer_Right.aspx.

If engaging and retaining top people is a concern (as it is becoming for many organizations), a much watched event like the Olympics could be a time to build a stronger relationship between the manager and his or her team and with team members. Some of my perspectives on this broader issue can be found at http://www.clemmer.net/articles/Retaining_Top_People.aspx.

Here are a few other leadership points this issue raises:

The “dog days of summer” can cause some “dogging it” and slacking off during August. But in today’s competitive and tight cost environments, organizations need strong levels of productivity from those who aren’t at the beach or cottage. Clearly everyone can’t be sitting around watching the Olympics all day. But managers can post medals charts in common areas with updates or put a TV in a common area. Managers should also have a discussion (in person rather than sending out an e-mail) about web usage for watching Olympics and get agreement on how everyone will refrain from tying up organizational band-width or time watching events on their computers. And that this is once every four years.

Most managers are doing far too little to mitigate the destructive and wasteful effects of e-mail misuse. Like a B-movie, the e-mail monster keeps growing larger and consuming more time and resources (”E-zilla: The Insatiable Beast”). Some of the more common abuses I hear about in my workshops are:

With the huge amount of time being sucked down the e-mail sinkhole each day, teams can get a fast and large return on their time investment by getting together – in person – to establish e-mail protocols. Here are a few ideas your team might consider:

Periodically review your team’s e-mail usage by asking everyone what you all should keep doing, stop doing, and start doing to ensure e-mail is an enabling, rather than enslaving, tool.

I have just scratched the surface. Please send me (Jim.Clemmer@Clemmer.net) your pet peeves, protocol suggestions, and experience with taming the e-mail beast.

A workshop participant from Denmark who’d attended an international management development forum I facilitated contacted me because he was taking on a new assignment in South America. He wrote:

“Based on all the new managers that you have met and provided with guidance though the years, what are then the 5-10 most significant challenges these new managers face?”

It’s hard to isolate the most significant challenges a new manager faces because there are a lot of them. Here’s my quick stab at listing the key ones:

Knowing Thyself – it’s natural for new managers ego’s to become a bit inflated. After all, it’s a big deal to get promoted. But it’s important after coming down from that “high” to ask yourself “is this what I really wantand does it fit my strengths and passions?” Too many managers accept a promotion because there may be more money, or they covet a more power. Taking a hard look in the managerial mirror would result in many more happy offices.

Servant Leadership – highly effective managers serve and support the people on their team. Too many new managers see their role as command and control.

Navigating Change – it’s easy to be pulled “below the line” and feel victimized by major changes in an organization. Strong leaders make people hopeful. They help their teams navigate through tough times. It is the leader’s mood that most impacts the team.

Coaching and Developing – I agree with Peter Drucker; the central role of a manager is developing people. This is where a new manager may have a real challenge because his or her natural strengths may be to do work and handle problems. Making the transition from solving problems to making sure people have the skills to solve problems is a big change.

Tame the E-mail Beast – technical tools are great for informing, staying in touch, and operational management. But we don’t lead through e-mail. Most people are overwhelmed with data, analysis, and the sheer volume of daily e-mails. New managers must counterbalance IT tools with verbal communications.

Deal with the Moose-on-the-Table – it’s often easier to avoid tough conversations or touchy topics. That’s like ignoring a moose standing on the middle of the meeting room table. Everyone knows it’s there and is annoyed by it. It takes courageous leadership to initiate those difficult conversations or to hear the team point out that leadership behaviors are doing more harm than good.

Upward Leadership – many new managers think their main role is leading people on their team and perhaps influencing peers. But strong managers also work hard to lead their own boss or influence the bigger organization. They refuse to be victims of weak direction from above.

We’ve all heard it’s the journey and not the destination that is most important in life. But whether flying or driving, we’re too often so intent on getting to our next destination that we miss the joy of the trip. Then it’s a whirlwind of activity until we get back in the plane or car and race on to the next destination. We’re so busy rushing toward tomorrow that we aren’t living today. Life becomes an ever faster rush of blurry scenery speeding past our window.

One warm, sunny summer day I played “hooky” with a good friend. I appreciate many things about Carl Hiebert. The day we spent together was fun and relaxing. But most of all it was inspiring and energizing. I wrote about Carl in my book, Growing the Distance, in the chapter on Responsibility for Choices.

On that beautiful summer morning in July, we flew in Carl’s new ultralight aircraft. It is an open-cockpit, fair weather flying machine, made up of welded metal tubs wrapped in a fiberglass skin. Two seats are squeezed together so tightly that I had to put both legs around Carl’s front seat and keep my left leg away from rubbing on the throttle cable that ran through the open cockpit back to the small gasoline powered engine that pushed us along from behind. I had no desire to mess with that cable nor have it rub the skin off my bare legs (I was wearing shorts). No locked doors between passenger and pilot on this flight!

I arrived just after he and an engineer friend had removed the large glass bubble windshield and replaced it with a much smaller one so Carl could get better aerial photos. Carl has produced and sold a number of gorgeous coffee table books based on the tens of thousands of shots he’s taken from the seats of the many ultra light planes he’s flown (all the way across Canada on two occasions). As we took off from my uncle’s farm near Elmira, Ontario where Carl stores his plane, we flew over the very familiar and beautiful rolling rural farmland of Waterloo County. I spent many years of my childhood in this area and have flown over this territory hundreds of times in commercial jets taking off from Toronto’s international airport, 90 miles away. But that was flying at hundreds of miles per hour thousands of feet in the air tightly encased in an aluminum tube while I busily prepared for my next destination. The countryside below was an interesting and distant miniature world way down below us.

As the ground mist cleared on this morning, we flew up to a few hundred feet, 50 miles per hour, with the wind billowing through our hair (OK. It billowed through Carl’s hair. It just rippled the skin of my ever expanding forehead). We “caught big air” as we circled ever higher in thermals (rising air currents) with majestic hawks playing in these same “magic staircases to heaven.” More than once I spread my arms, felt the wind beneath my “wings” and soared with the birds as I yelled out a “yeehaw” or two.

We flew lower and waved to farm boys taking a break fishing in the Conestoga River. We waved to farmers cultivating their fields. We smelled the freshly mowed hay – and the freshly spread manure. As we flew, Carl’s keen photographer’s eye was constantly noticing colors, patterns in the fields, textures, and lighting. He would circle back around to click a few shots with his camera – showing me how to look at the scene with new eyes; how to appreciate what nature or a farmer had painted on the canvass laid out below us.

At a few hundred feet, we had a bigger perspective on the world. But we were in the picture, not just looking at it. We were flying strictly for the joy of soaring in the air and seeing the world from a new perspective. We had no destination. To some we were wasting time because we weren’t getting anywhere. To others we were wandering aimlessly. To me we were living in the moment.

That afternoon, we cruised the same countryside in my new convertible car. We had the top down and the wind in our face. We turned up the music and yelled ourselves hoarse in conversation over the noise. We explored roads we’d never been on before. Roads that we may have noticed from the air, but now we had no idea where they went. So we found out. We discovered beautiful country homes on hilltops or nestled in the woods. We discovered new vistas. We stopped, backed up, and Carl framed and photographed the perfect country scene that I would have just sped by. We visited a few friends for a chat. We bought ice cream. We had no particular place to go. We had no agenda. We had a great time.

Below is a description and link to one of my favorite fables on resisting peer pressure and following what I feel is right. I once had a gymnasium of high school kids applaud this story after I told it (holding the attention of 300 grade nine kids was stretching the bounds of my professional speaking comfort zone!). They recognized the timeless wisdom it illustrated.

Ringing True to Me

It’s often difficult to be true to ourselves - it generally means we don’t follow the crowd. Standing up and standing firm for our beliefs can be lonely and unpopular. Find out why the thumb stands apart from the other four fingers in this excerpt: www.clemmer.net/articles/articles.aspx?article=293

Here are personal application ideas for ever deepening your authenticity:

Are your values truly your own beliefs or are they what other people or institutions have said you should care about? Are they your true, internal “bone deep” beliefs or an external “should” value? We often don’t recognize a lifetime of conditioning that has left us with other people’s belief systems. We need to replace any “should” values with our own.

Spend twenty minutes per day writing out your deepest feelings and reflections on the day in a personal journal. This can be especially helpful if you’re going through difficult changes or have suffered a serious setback or loss in your life.

Learn how to be quiet and listen to your voice within. Follow where it leads.
Complete tests like the Kolbe Index, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Gallup’s Strength Finder Profile, Social Styles, and the like to determine your personal style and how you can maximize your preferences and strengths while working with varying styles on your team.

When giving or receiving feedback, keep it in balance. Point out the strengths or things going well. Use your own “blessings and brag list” to keep your perspective if you’ve been given some painful personal feedback.

Contribute to authentic conversations in an authentic workplace. Speak the truth as you see it. Obviously the time and place needs to be appropriate. Diplomacy and tact are also critical. Help others (especially your peers and those above you) to see the Moose-on-the-Table. (Click here if you’re not familiar with this term: http://www.mooseonthetable.com/moose_resources.aspx