The most important thing about dealing with difficult people is always to try to build a relationship with them as quickly as you can.
By preparing yourself for a good interaction with people and by creating great relationships with them as early as possible, it is often easy to resolve problems quickly.
When working with employees for example, you can build relationships gradually over a period of time buy having regular, simple conversations with them almost about anything!
This helps!
When dealing with people who are difficult and are new to you, it’s important to build the relationship quickly by showing that you are listening, asking interested questions and generally being supportive of their situation.
Take the Easier Ride – Delegate
Had I been asleep or was I still awake? That (very) early morning call brought delegation into sharp focus. And it shaped my management forever.
It was 2.30 am. It was cold and dark and I’d been in bed for just a half hour when the phone rang.
“Alarm Center here, are you the keyholder?” – (in a very lively(!) south London suburb store). Grumpily, I replied in the affirmative. My wife didn’t even stir.
“The alarm has gone off and will need your attendance – when will you be there?” I told them that it would take me 40 minutes or so.
The 45 miles through the empty streets would not take the 90 minutes typical during the morning and evening rush hour.
I grudgingly got up and put my clothes on, vaguely aware that I had only been in from the neighbors Christmas party for a short time – and not entirely clear how much I had drunk at all, but it would be close.
About 10 minutes into the drive, the car hit a patch of black ice and slid down a 12 foot bank into a field. It was bumpy, but amazingly, nothing was damaged, except for a few scratches. Even I was OK.
Indeed, it sobered me up pretty darned quickly. As pure chance would have it, I was in a field where there was a gate about 200 yards away which would get me back onto the road.
Quickly, I opened the gate and drove through, up to the Store and did my duty.
Over the next three months, I made sure that my recruitment process brought in some key people, who would be able to deputize for me fully. It was no way for me to be, driving in at all hours.
That wasn’t my role.
My role was to manage the business, drive strategy and change and above all, grow profit. I couldn’t do that unexpected driving in at all hours. And ending up in a field. And luckily surviving.
In that moment I understood the value of delegation and getting a team in, to work right by me with everyone doing what each of us did best – and with some of them living nearby!
I knew my place.
Don Tapscott on Organizational Nakedness
Corporates need to change in an online world which is much more open – and then will they?
Is the place you work really transparent and if not, how can you help it to be?
Checkout Don Tapscott’s fascinating clip on how nakedness is coming to organizations. This has relevance for everyone…
Employee Motivation – Accessing Their Unique Talents
How well do you truly understand the people you have working with you in your team?
Why would you want to know?
They show up, do what you tell them, take their pay and go home. It’s as simple as that.
Or is it?
In fact, is there a trick you are missing?
Your people are invaluable to you. They are the lifeblood of your business or organisation. And yet, in many situations, managers take little time to truly find out what makes each of their people special. Makes them unique. Makes them tick.
And why would this be important to know?
When people bring a unique blend of skills to your workplace, it’s important to know about it. And not just because you might be able to get more out of them.
When you know what turns your people on, they work happier and contribute more; sometimes, much more than you might expect from them.
When they are working in their ‘flow’, they are on top form, in overdrive. And then remarkable results come.
So, how do you find out what your people are best at, and also where they struggle?
Many organisations now use a variety of techniques to get to the bottom of who their employees truly are. These take the form of assessments – often simple questionnaires – that their employees complete.
Then both employee and line-manager work together with the data, to understand the focused results that such information provides.
More commonly now, external coaches are brought in to work with special types of assessments, to provide an outsider’s support, well away from line management or performance assessments. This enables openness and honesty – not always possible if your boss is your coach.
In the assessment systems that are available, some tend to place people in boxes, which can almost lead to the employee ‘acting out’ what they expect to be like from the results. This can be very discouraging, especially when told that it’s ‘just the way you are’ (and this with little hope of ever changing!).
There are now more modern approaches, which are enabling employees to understand better their behaviours. These can be adapted and developed, with the encouragement and challenge of a coach, to deliver far greater performance than previously possible.
Often these ‘behavioural’ approaches accelerate development, to such an extent that prolonged coaching contracts are unnecessary, although after a time, such is the success, that (especially senior employees) come back for a further burst of activity, to raise the bar on their own performance even further.
Ultimately, it the employee’s prerogative to decide in which areas of developing their performance they might wish to focus.
With a modern, self-assessment style questionnaire identifying where they are in the moment, it is be well worth the time and investment to give themselves a head start. Celebrating the unique skills and talents they already have is a good place to start.
Those at the head of a business or organisation can set an example.
This enables them to model change as a ‘good thing’ and encourage others to take full part, in the knowledge that this is not going to be a painful experience, maybe challenging, and ultimately good, for the employee as well as everyone else, both inside and outside the workplace.
For a one-on-one detailed analysis to help our clients, we use a product called ‘Print’ from Print Strategies. ‘Print’ is an easy to use patent pending tool for understanding human motivations and behaviors.
In partnership with coaching, together they make an irresistable partnership. Check ‘Print’ out here and give us a call if you need to know how we can help you.
Procrastination and JDI
Getting better information makes for the more correct decisions.
Yet the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ sometimes means that we use collating information and all sorts of other seemingly completely valid tactics as a good excuse for being slow to decide.
In a management role, procrastination can seriously hold back progress and demotivate individuals and teams who, full of innovation and drive to move forward, get frustrated and confused when action is held up.
There are a number of steps that will help the procrastinating manager.
Firstly, recognise it is a good and reasonable defence mechanism, which relates to the things which might have occurred in the past.
A hurried decision which might have had an unsatisfactory and upsetting result.It is part of your character and maybe just a little too strong a behaviour for those who are around you.
It can often be a great asset if you are surrounded by ‘gung-ho’ types who just go for things – there is value in caution and it is all relative!
Secondly, get real! Many of the ‘Fear’ writings, such as ‘Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway’ by Susan Jeffers and ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living’ by Dale Carnegie, extol the virtues of realistically assessing the potential downsides.
Often, asking yourself ‘What is the worst that could possibly happen here?’, gets you able to see how unlikely your decision is to be life-threatening. So have a think and be realistic – then do it!
Third and finally, consider the effects of putting off decisions. How much harm does it do to the organisation, your nearby people and above all you, as decisions lie there at the back of your mind, unmade?
The result is most often not the negative outcome that your worst fears suggest, but the subliminal worry that NOT having made the decision, i.e. it is still to be worried over, is often much, much worse when added up than the decision itself!
So, in most cases, a good chunk of information, weigh up the potential downsides and then, JDI.
“Just Do It works a treat!”
As an example, I once, in my early management days, worked with a middle manager who became a real challenge, with his behaviour and attitudes – even I was intimidated by him!
It took me 18 months of fear of confrontation and worry to tackle him about it – the evidence was never really that strong – I told myself…
The interview took an hour, during which time he completely apologised for his behaviour.
He had not realised that the way he was experienced by others was so damaging.
Once pointed out, he accessed feedback regularly on those days when he was ‘off on one’, and he encouraged his supporters to bring him down to earth quickly.
I took 18 months worrying about that conversation.
Looking back, I learnt that it is far better to get these things aired early on, for everyone.
And never once has this backfired on me since.
Looking Inside
As managers, we are in an enviable position. I know this from personal experience.
When I moved on after over 25 years as a manager, having teams of sometimes up to 300 reporting to me, I spent a little time being managed myself.
The different perspective was illuminating, to say the least.
And I recognized some things in myself that I’d not noticed before.
When you manage people, you need to develop a very trusting relationship if you want the best from them.
It’s so easy to expect them to behave in certain ways – and then, without recognizing it, to demonstrate the very same behaviors yourself.
You see, somehow, we either get blind-sided and fail to even notice that we are doing the opposite to what we expect from our people.
Or we are arrogant enough to reckon that the rules are meant for everyone else.
And we are above them
Once when I was paying a visit to a cloakroom at an event my organization was hosting for their managers, I overheard a discussion I’ve always remembered.
One of the senior executives was telling a couple of people about the wine-buying trip he was just back from on behalf of the executive boardroom.
And the $300 bottles of wine they had been buying.
10 minutes alter he was up on the podium, reminding us that we were in a financial pickle and we all needed to start saving serious money in the business.
See what I mean about arrogance?
We all need to look inside at ourselves and our behaviors to see if we are at least mirroring those we would expect of each and every one of our people too.
By preparing yourself for a good interaction with people and by creating great relationships with them as early as possible, it is often easy to resolve problems quickly.
