Good Boss, Bad Boss: Be a Better Boss

Members Click Here for Additional Tools

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Why care about Leadership?

  • Retention – Unwanted turnover = 1.5 – 2.5 annual salary
  • Capturing Discretionary Effort  – What the value of 10% more productivity?  How about 100% more?
  • Less stress

Realities of being the Boss

  • You are under a microscope
  • The blame you get, and the credit you get are both exaggerated
  • Most people land in leadership roles because they were good technicians or practicioners of their work
  • Leaders underestimate the impact they have on others

5 Things you can do right now to be a better Boss

1. Be a better listener

  • Take the time
  • Don’t multitask (especially PDAs)
  • Seek to understand… not to plan your response
  • Paraphrase without being a parrot

2. Be a Teacher

  • It may take more time in the short-run
  • Don’t micro-manage
  • Tell people why
  • Connect them to something bigger

3. Give and receive feedback in abundance

  • Look for opportunities to offer feedback on a daily basis
  • Ask your direct reports for feedback frequently – and act on it
  • Offer both positive feedback, and corrective feedback

4. Be crystal-clear in your expectations

  • Write important expectations down formally at least once per year
  • Constantly reinforce expectations
  • Use several different media to describe important expectations
  • Practice what you preach at all times

5. Provide consequences for both good and poor performance

  • People will do what gets reinforced
  • You are currently getting the performance you are asking for
  • Be absolutely consistent with consequences
  • Apply consequences to reinforce both good and poor performance

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Leadership Boot Camp

Find out all about the Wily Manager Leadership Boot Camp:

  • Why bother?
  • What it’s about
  • Who should participate
  • How it works
  • What’s covered

Listen to the ‘Leadership Boot Camp’ Podcast:

: Download Podcast (MP3)

Leadership Boot Camp Podcast Slides

Download the Leadership Boot Camp Brochure:

Wily Manager Leadership Boot Camp Brochure


Why Most Leadership Development Activities are a Waste of Time

It all starts off with noble intentions and great expectations.  Organizations invest thousands to send a manager off to some Leadership Development Training, with high hopes of getting a return on their investment, and of seeing some measurable change in managerial performance.

The normal result is a large invoice for the training and related costs, and a new PowerPoint slide hung on the wall, with some convoluted model or diagram that’s supposed to change our lives, and solve all organizational ills.

How do managers and organizations get is so wrong?

They have the right idea, but they make the same mistake that any of us that has ever been on a diet before has made.  We think that some temporary action, and new package on an old bit of knowledge will make a difference.  Here’s a blinding flash of the obvious:  if you want to lose weight, eat more veggies, eat less of everything else, and try to exercise more.  Most importantly, make these changes habits rather than a temporary intervention.

Organizational and Leadership Development is no different.  Figure out what behaviours you want your managers to display, and take action to make those behaviours into habits.  This is incredibly easy conceptually, but much harder in practice.  You need to look at your reward systems, development systems and processes.  Part of your answer may include training, but only then as part of the solution.

We did some work with PepsiCo, who are generally well recognized as very competent at Leadership Development Activity.  Their development model calls for 10% Leadership Training, with the balance of development activities taking other forms such as coaching, job-shadowing, special assignments, and secondments.

Don’t get me wrong – I absolutely believe that quality leadership is the stargate to better production, increased quality, improved safety, and better cost control.  I just think that organizations that attempt to bridge their leadership quality gaps via training are taking the easy way out, and burning shareholder money to boot.

Just like most of us don’t need another diet book, but rather the discipline to use one of the 44 we already own, leaders don’t need another day in a classroom – they need help making habits out of the things they learned last time.

Solutions to Office Layout Disgruntlement

We’ve heard many managers compare their jobs to that of baby-sitter.  The only difference being when the kids upset you, you can send them to their room, and the snacks and TV-watching options are better for the baby-sitter.

It is true that managers of people get dragged into all kinds of trivia, and much of it should be ignored.  There seems to be no more emotional issue than that of the office layout.  Several years ago, people were mourning the loss of office walls, as many organizations transitioned to cube-farms.  Now people fight over the size and location of their workstation.

Unfortunately, most managers have very little time/patience/control over the office configuration, so the best they might be able to do is offer some advice to disgruntled cube-dwellers as to how to cope with the physical office reality.  Here are some ideas:

Define Your Office Boundaries. This worked for Les Nessman at WKRP, and it can work for you.  Don’t acknowledge anyone unless they knock at your pretend door, and certainly don’t put up with people walking through your pretend walls.  You might even want to suspend wall paintings from the ceiling to line up with your pretend walls.

Engage in Closed Office Behaviour.  Make loud personal telephone calls.  If you feel the need for a nap, close your pretend door and sleep like you would at home (unless you sleep in the nude).  Need to pick your nose?  You’re in the privacy of your own office – go for it.  If someone tries to talk to you through a pretend wall, look towards the pretend door, and shout, “I can’t hear you.  Would you like to come in here?”

There’s No Place Like Home. Most people spend more conscious hours in their workplace than they do in their homes.  You need to make the place comfortable.  Buy a portable fridge to put under your desk, as well as some small kitchen appliances (start with a toaster, blender, and espresso machine).  You probably don’t control much in your work-place, so make your 8 X 8 part of the empire a castle.

Of course with this new-found freedom, you will also have to respect and ignore others engaging in the same behaviour if the illusion is to be complete.  Here’s a YouTube clip on office layout that outlines the perils of being too interested in what’s happening one row over on the cubefarm.

Office Design – Enclosed Offices vs. Cube Farm

Members Click Here for Additional Tools

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Office Types:

  • Enclosed Offices
  • Open Space Concept
  • Cubicle Farms
  • Alternative

Why Getting Out of Offices is Great:

  • More and better communication amongst team members
  • More direct contact – you end up knowing people better
  • Space can be modified quickly and easily
  • Usually people have more access to natural light
  • Some companies have found it reduces cost because you can put more cubes per floor than offices. (Cisco reduced costs by 37%)
  • It’s harder for employees to slack off

Why it Sucks:

  • Reinforces negative notions of hierarchy when some are in cubes, and others in offices
  • It’s not possible to close a door for privacy
  • Meeting in your “office” is more difficult
  • Constant noise and disturbances
  • To do it well, isn’t really any cheaper than building offices
  • It lowers morale and productivity
  • Unless the work environment requires a high level of interaction with others, the lack of privacy is a distraction that negatively impacts productivity
Making it Work:
  • Over communicate any office-space change.  This is a very big deal to people
  • Be very clear about your reasons for making a change, and make sure you consider the pro’s and con’s
  • You need much more meeting space in an open concept than with offices
  • Hire someone to help you through the transition
  • Ensure white-noise
  • If you go open – everyone must go, from the CEO on down
  • Research it well – there is no shortage of information arguing both for and against open office space

One Solution:

  • If employees spend the majority of their time working individually, put them in offices
  • If employees spend a great deal of time collaborating, put them in an open office configuration.  Perhaps in offices of four to eight people.
  • If you want you employees to spend most of their time reading Dilbert, put them in cubicles.

Last Word from Robert Probst:

  • Before his death, the inventor of the cubicle apologized for his contribution to “monolithic insanity”

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Making Difficult Conversations Easier

How do you tell someone they smell? Or that they need to stop handing out religious pamphlets at work?  Maybe an employee dresses inappropriately at work.  Perhaps an employee’s spouse calls the workplace several times per day.  What about your assistant’s drinking problem?

You could do what some managers do:  ignore the behaviour and hope it goes away.  Now, hope rarely works as a strategy to solve a problem, but let’s give it a try and see what happens:

They Smell:  If you don’t act they’ll keep smelling.  If you’re in a retail business, you’ll almost certainly lose customers.  If the aroma is only affecting co-workers who have brought the problem to your attention, they will know for sure that you don’t care and/or that you lack the courage to deal with a relatively simple problem.

An employee is pushing an opinion or unwanted material on co-workers.  This one is a bit more tricky  — you need to balance an individual’s right to speak freely with his coworker’s right to not be harassed at work.  This one is a level of degrees, but suffice it to say that if you’ve received complaints, the behaviour is probably already perceived as being too aggressive.

An employee is dressed inappropriately.  When I was in university, I worked for a retailer who had a strict dress code.  This included a ban on earrings for male employees.  This was fine until one of the senior executive’s sons showed up with an earring, and the facility manager would not address it for fear of reprisal.  Now, there are a whole bunch of things wrong with this scenario, but needless to say, when the manager displayed his cowardice in this regard, he had a facility full of male employees wearing earrings out of protest within a month.  Rightly or wrongly, the dress code fell apart, and the manager lost all credibility.

In these, and in perhaps most cases, it can look (at least at the outset) that it is easier to NOT engage in these difficult conversations.  In the short term, it probably is easier.  Longer term, you create all kinds of problems for yourself as a manager if you don’t tackle difficult conversations.  You erode trust, you lose credibility, and frankly you’re not doing your job as a leader.  Consider this one of the “burdens of leadership”.

If you want help with this difficult part of the job, listen to our podcast, and visit our page on Difficult Conversations.

Job Descriptions — Probably Poorly Done, Almost Certainly Useless

Do you have a job description?  Have you seen it since you were hired into your current position?  Does it bear any resemblance to what you actually do every day?  If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions (much less all 3 of them), you are in the minority.  Most organizations either don’t have job descriptions, or have ones that are useless.

There is a good argument to be made that job descriptions are a relic from a time gone by, and that many jobs defy a linear description that is normally seen on a job description.  I would argue that the majority of jobs can, and should have job descriptions, but not in the way they are normally done.

If your job description articulates in painstaking detail the activities that you will undertake on a “normal” day, then it officially sucks.  Sorry to be the one to bring it up but:

a)    Nobody cares how busy you are.

b)   Nobody cares what you do.

Of course there are some highly bureaucratic organizations (often governmental organizations) where they do care about these things, but they are the minority.

Well run organizations care what you get done.  What did you produce?  What are your results?  How much value did you create?  A good job description will articulate these things – not how many paper clips you will use to file a report.

So I’m drawing a line in the sand today – Job Descriptions are dead.  Throw them away.  In their place, we will create POSTION OUTCOMES DESCRIPTIONS (PODs).   This is not a directive to the HR people out there – they are usually the last to come on board with such changes.  This is to every person who wants to make a difference.   A well-written POD will facilitate you making a difference at your job.

Write yours today, and get your boss to sign-off on it.  Then, when the crap-tasks start sliding across your desk, you have some mechanism by which to question it.  In your old Job Description, the crap-task would have fallen under “other duties as assigned”.

Now do you see why you need to do this?  There are lots of tools on the Wily Manager website to help you with this.  Join the revolution – and let us know how you’re making out.

How to Write a Job Description

Members Click Here for Additional Tools

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Things to Keep in Mind Before You Write a Job Description

  • Job descriptions are not an ‘HR thing’
  • Job descriptions should be focused on outcomes
  • Job descriptions should be used for the entire life-cycle of an employee (recruiting, development, evaluation, discipline, succession)

Four Components of a Job Description

One: Basic Functions

  • Who does this position report to?
  • Who reports to this position?
  • What are budgetary or statutory requirements?
Two: Results to be Achieved
  • Specific outcomes required of this position (production, quality, safety, risk management, etc.) – ‘what’
  • Leadership and interpersonal competencies – ‘how’
  • Values and attitudes required – ‘how’

Three: Stakeholder Management

  • Where does this position intersect with others?
  • Who are key stakeholders, and what is the nature of the relationship with this position?

Four: Metrics used to Evaluate Performance

  • Measurement must be meaningful
  • Production
  • Quality
  • Compliance
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Financial
  • Employee Satisfaction/retention

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Politeness in the Workplace? Go #@$% Yourself!

I’m not really sure when it happened.  Sometime over the last few years it has become socially acceptable to have a potty-mouth at the office.  Most often I am invited into workplaces for short periods of time – usually a few months – so I normally don’t know anyone when I first show up, and have to take some time to get to know people.

I find it incredible that people who don’t know me are quite willing to use exceptionally foul language in our very first meeting.  I should clarify two things:

1)   I’m not there to fire them, or otherwise torture them… which may be construed as just-cause for an expletive or two.

2)   I’m not offended by any of this, and use my own fair-share of foul words in more familiar company.

I just find it curious that people think words your mother always told you she didn’t want to hear are now common-place in work settings.  In my experience, this transcends just about all demographic groups.  It is not just younger people, nor is it just men.  I have witnessed this in large cities, and small ones, in a wide variety of industries.  I think it’s safe to say this has become a societal thing.

So… what is to be done?  Probably nothing.  But I would caution anyone who cares that first impressions are very powerful, and if you litter your first impression with language that would make a lumberjack blush, then you will inevitably come across as insensitive and less intelligent.

As a general rule of thumb, it might be good to know someone’s last name, before asking them (in so many words) if they like sex and travel.  Likewise, don’t assume that you’re not offending anyone, just because everyone else seems to be swearing.  It’s amazing that many offices insist on no fragrances or smelly foods for fear of upsetting someone, but have no similar guidelines for certain forms of noise pollution.

Until you know who you’re talking to, you might want to channel Bill Cosby more so than Eddie Murphy.  In the mean time… check out this clip for how one office handled it.

Recruiting — The Black Art

In professional sports, considerable resources are spent scouting new prospects and eventually landing them in the organization.  Those that manage professional sports know that you truly do “win it in the draft”, and they take their recruiting process seriously enough to make it a key source of competitive advantage.

With very few exceptions, other businesses do not do nearly as well.  Many (perhaps most) organizations manage the recruiting process about as well as George Bush manages the English language.  It might be entertaining, but only for the same reason you would slow down to look at an accident scene on the side of the highway.

It seems that many organizations of all shapes and sizes improvise their way through this important process.  What makes this most surprising is that every time an organization goes to the market to hire, they put themselves at considerable risk: risk to reputation, as well as legal risk if they mismanage the recruiting process badly enough.

A meaningful discussion of this important subject would take much more space than I have here, but here are five ideas to improve the recruiting process in any organization:

  1. Take it seriously — it’s very expensive to get it wrong.  The Journal of Compensation and Benefits estimates the cost of turnover at 1.5 to 2.5 the annual salary of the position.  So when your new recruit doesn’t work out, and leaves after three months, there is a real cost to the organization.
  2. Know what you’re recruiting for.  If there isn’t a comprehensive job description, you need to write one – before you even place an ad.  You need to know what results the position should be achieving, and what competencies are required to do the job well.
  3. Separate your needs from your wants. I recently read a job advertisement in the paper for a public sector organization that wanted 20 years of experience, and multiple university degrees for a job they were only willing to pay $45k per year.  That person does not exist.  Decide what your “minimum price of entry” requirements are, and categorize everything else as a “want”.  In other words, it would be a bonus if the person had that experience or competency.
  4. Get rid of bad recruiters or hiring managers. Anyone who seems to power trip or get perverse pleasure out of making candidates squirm should be removed from the process.  If you find yourself with such a recruiter or an HR person – fire her.  If it is a hiring manager, insulate them from the process, and seriously consider firing him/her, too.
  5. Make the match. Remember you are being evaluated every bit as much as you are evaluating the client.  Allow the candidate to ask questions; Tell people what to expect; follow up with everyone; always check references.

As best I can tell, most organizations recruit poorly not because they don’t know what to do, but rather because they choose not to do it.  This is at your peril.

By the way – Jed and I have done a podcast and a topic bundle on effective interviewing.  Hopefully you find it useful.

« Previous Page
Next Page »