Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

executive leadership coach

When Your Feedback Doesn’t Work

By Leave a Comment

When Your Feedback Doesn’t Work
Image Credit: Shutterstock

Feedback is crucial.

It is necessary for aligning expectations, solving problems, improving performance, and developing talent – all the things that increase the bottom line.

But often, feedback doesn’t work.

In fact, more than half of your managers may not be having the difficult conversations needed to hold people accountable.

What’s the problem?

A survey of 750 HR professionals by Sibson Consulting and World at Work revealed that 63% of executives believe that the biggest challenge of performance management is managers’ unwillingness to have difficult conversations.

And this may be because when managers do deliver feedback, it is poorly received.

According to a study by Globoforce (2011), even when managers tackle these conversations with the best of intentions, employees are often left feeling resentful or discouraged – 55% of employees believe their review is inaccurate or unfair, and one in four say it is the thing they dread most in their working lives.

I work with companies to develop leadership and align culture. If a particular company’s management is struggling to hold its people accountable, I find it is usually due to poor feedback delivery and follow-through.

Here are five top reasons likely to keep a manager’s feedback from working:

1. The feedback isn’t timely.

I hear more dismay and resentment from employees who have just received their yearly evaluation. They cite being surprised and hurt at hearing for the first time a dissatisfaction with their performance dating back 12 months.

“Why did he wait so long to tell me?” asked one employee. “I feel like I’ve been judged for a year on something I could have fixed long ago.”

Another said, “I rectified that situation 10 months ago – why am I getting cited for it as though it’s still a problem?”

The answer to this is timely feedback. Teach your managers to address problem behavior quickly so that the employee in question can benefit most. Not only will the situation be fresh in their minds, they can also get on track to course-correcting much sooner. And instead of writing this up 12 months later as a problem, your manager can talk about the employee’s improved behavior.

2. The feedback doesn’t seem clear or relevant.

When addressing problem behavior, your manager needs to remember to:

a. Be specific about the behavior. It is not enough to say, “You need to stop acting like a drill sergeant,” which is a judgment and open to many interpretations. Instead, the manager must point out specifics about the person’s presence that require change. To use the drill sergeant illustration, is it language? Tone of voice? The closed or intimidating body language using folded arms, leaning into someone’s face, etc.?

b. Relate how the behavior has a negative business impact. Your manager needs to coach his employee – not just course-correct. Part of this is to relate the problem behavior to a negative impact on the business so that the employee can understand cause and effect.

For example, “When you use that harsh tone of voice, it can feel intimidating or offensive to others, which causes them to refrain from collaborating with you. If we don’t have a team that can work well together, we won’t be able to produce the results we need in order to support the business.”

3. The feedback doesn’t offer a clear picture of the desired behavior that should replace the current problem behavior.

Sometimes, employees just don’t want to change. But the more likely scenario is that they want to do well, but they simply don’t know how. Just because your manager has identified the problem behavior doesn’t mean the employee knows how to replace this with one that is acceptable.

Be sure your manager describes in detail the new behavior they want to see. For example, if an employee has been conveying disapproval or aloofness in meetings with body language, the manager should give a very specific behavioral alternative. For example, give details such as, “Instead of crossing your arms and leaning back during meetings, try leaning forward just a bit (which connotes interest), and keep your arms at your side. This will eliminate the appearance that you don’t care or that you disapprove of the message you are currently hearing.”

4. The employee doesn’t trust the person delivering the feedback.

This is a tough one. If your manager is perceived as not having the best interests of his employee in mind, the latter will not receive the feedback well, due to a lack of trust. If your manager has effectuated steps 1-3 above and is still not getting anywhere, it’s time for the manager to check in with a different question, such as, “Sandra, you and I have talked about your tendency to overlook deadlines, and you have pledged to correct this. Yet, the problem persists. Help me to understand what’s happening. Can you shed more light on this?”

This approach should reveal whether there is something else behind the lack of change, such as a basic resentment and feeling of unfairness on the part of the employee, or another problem of which the manager was unaware.

5. The employee’s identity is at stake.

It can happen that feedback simply doesn’t register because it threatens the employee’s sense of self.

Hearing feedback that doesn’t register with that sense of self can cause an employee to become defensive or feel overwhelmed and unable to respond. The employee may insist on disbelieving the feedback since they cannot “see” their behavior being a problem or having a negative impact.

A standoff will not be productive.

Instead, consider having your manager engage the employee in a series of small experiments as a way to coach the latter into more awareness and better management of self.

For example, if Max frequently ignores his fellow employees in the workplace, your manager can help him with a small, but focused goal to connect with each of them once daily. Have the manager ask Max to observe how his fellow employees react to him over the next few weeks and report back. Most likely, Max’s coworkers will begin to warm up to him and include him in more conversations. Debriefing with the manager will begin to help Max develop more awareness around how his lack of connectivity has adversely affected his work relationships – and a way to turn this around.

Teaching your managers the gift of honest and productive feedback is manifold. Far beyond outlining standards, it can provide your employees with a growth path that benefits them, their team, and your organization. Take charge of this process by modeling this with your executive team so that you can begin to integrate true accountability into your culture.

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

Why You Need to Get Personal with Your Team

By Leave a Comment

Why You Need to Get Personal with Your Team
Image Credit: Shutterstock

Many years ago, I oversaw the development for five hospitals. It was a great joy to develop the team for some near-impossible goals that my area had been given, and to reach these successfully.

I loved my team and would have done just about anything for them. But sadly, they didn’t know that. In fact, quite the contrary.

Sharon sat down one afternoon and closed the door.

“You don’t even know us,” she said. “I bet you don’t even know that Alex has gotten engaged. Do you even care about us?”

Are you connected with your own team?

How do you know?

You can imagine that I was crushed. My introvertish nature coupled with a high drive for results had been seen as aloof and uncaring – far from the truth.

The effects of not being personally connected with your team can be devastating – a low level of trust resulting in poor performance and a host of other undesirable behaviors. The symptoms are such that you may blame these on the larger culture of the organization or on other external factors.

Yet, the culprit may simply be that your team doesn’t feel connected with you.

Leaders struggle with this, and we play a lot of head games.

We may want to appear in control to assure the team all is well. We may ask ourselves if being seen as vulnerable is risky to our position of being “in charge.” And some of us question the relevancy of connecting beyond the professional framework.

Yet, without humanizing ourselves, we can appear cold, uncaring, wooden, untouchable…the list goes on. Somewhere along the way, someone has taught us to appear as though we have it all together in order to reflect confidence in leadership.

Not true.

Becoming human allows others to do so – to identify with you and connect.

Human beings need to feel a sense of connectedness. This comes from knowing others on the team and feeling known and accepted as a member.

In order to have this happen, we must become real.

Highest-performing teams know this – and work on it regularly.

Here are three things you can do right away to “get personal” with your team so that you can engage with each other on a greater level:

  1. Take your teams members to lunch.

During your time together, tell them you don’t want to talk about work, but just want to get to know each other better. Have some questions ready – why did they pick France as a vacation last year? Where did they grow up – and how did this affect the way they see things today?

  1. Develop an understanding about each other’s gifts and talents.

There are some great assessments out there for this: StrengthsFinder, Enneagram, and others. Have each team member take the assessment, bring their results, and talk about how these show up in their work and life.

  1. Take some time to learn each other’s lives.

What does this mean? Who are you outside of work? What is your favorite movie? How do you handle surprises? Make up a list of questions and share the answers as part of your team-building. Do this over time – knowing each other personally should be intentional and consistent in order to create bonds and connectedness.

Have fun with this. It has become a joy for me personally to connect with others in this way and to develop deep relationships.

As a bonus, when people feel you care about them, they also care about you. When the going gets tough, the team will pull together in a new and more concerted way to succeed.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

Three Shifts to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions

By Leave a Comment

Three Shifts to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions
Image Credit: Shutterstock

Do you ever feel as though your team has the potential for better decision-making power, but it’s just not happening?

Are you and your team stuck in autopilot and missing out on sharpening your creative edge?

What can you do when you need to help your team make better decisions?

Help them to up their game through shifting their mental, emotional, and physical space.

Shifting Mental Space

You will need to pull your team members out of auto mode. Decisions are made two ways: the first is automatic, instinctive and emotional; and the second is deliberate, slow, and logical. Teams, like individuals, can hit a comfort level in their performance and slide into autopilot when making decisions. This is dangerous, because sliding into autopilot does not require our full attention and this means drifting into limited, biased thinking and missing some pretty important stuff.

When I work with teams to sharpen their competitive edge, I often find that they are stuck because of biased thinking. This is not unusual – we all have biases. These biases are formed by making sense of our world so that we can navigate with a feeling of safety and security. But these biases also get in the way of our best thinking – our out-of-the-box, creative, innovative thinking – that allows us to develop a competitive edge.

What is a tip-off that your team suffers from biased thinking? Language.

Statements like, “That won’t work because…” or “We’ve always done it that way…” “We just don’t have the workforce/budget/green light/(fill in the blank with your own) to be able to do that…”

A simple shift in language may be all you need begin stepping into better thinking. Instead of asking the question, “What should we do?” ask the question, “What could we do?”

What if the limiter did not exist? What if the budget problem was not there? Step outside the box for a moment and start brainstorming. Then, only when you have come up with the “what,” do you back into the “how.” Ask the question, “How might we accomplish this with a limited workforce? Other?” Get creative.

Shifting Emotional Space

Personal agendas and turf issues may interfere with best team thinking. However, once your team is in “brainstorming mode,” its members will be less likely to call themselves out on any personal agendas they have which are holding the team back from its best decisions. A case in point is with a recent client’s top executive team that could not seem to arrive at a decision regarding how to proceed with plant expansion. Arguments for over-extension, no budget, and other deterrents kept coming up in conversation.

Finally, I asked the following question: “If these things were not an issue, what would you need in order to feel comfortable about expanding?”

Mumbling somewhat, two of the executives questioned who would be overseeing the process and the new plant. Then one finally said, “Well, it doesn’t feel good knowing that this might pare down my area of responsibility. If that happens, my career track will slow down tremendously.” The other executive nodded in agreement. And there it was – the real issue. The fear of losing political ground and potential for greater leadership was getting in the way.

I’m happy to say that we figured out that situation to everyone’s ultimate satisfaction. But how do you get in front of this kind of scenario so that it doesn’t slow down or interfere with the group’s best decision-making?

Ask the following at the beginning of the process: “What are the concerns each of you has that we will need to take into account as we explore options?” And give time for each of them to explore their thoughts with the rest of the group. This will uncover limiters that even they didn’t know they had until given the opportunity to reflect. Once you have everyone’s feedback, you’ll want to let them know that if they will just face into some out-of-the-box thinking with you, you’ll then make every effort to make the decision a win-win for everyone.

Shifting Physical Space

Take your team out of the office. Get them into a different physical environment.

Let’s face it – it’s tough to change ways of thinking overnight, and you will need to incorporate the approaches I’ve outlined above over time to realize greatest gains. Meanwhile, work calls and decisions must be made now. To get your team members to begin thinking more creatively and with greater attention, get them out of the office and their work attire.

Book a space at the beach, mountains, or other location that removes them from “office think.” Start your time by asking each of them how life is right now, whether they are renovating a home, planning a vacation… In other words, connect on a personal level before business. Then, frame the meeting with a fun exercise to foreshadow creative decision-making before you get into the meat of the meeting.

One exercise for this that I like a lot is Karl Duncker’s Candle Problem exercise. Duncker was a psychologist who developed this exercise in the first part of the 20th century to test functional fixedness and cognitive bias.

Subjects are given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches, and asked to fix the lit candle to the wall so that it will not drip wax onto the table below. Because the objects are so familiar, this makes it difficult for the subjects to think past using them in abnormal ways.

If you would like to learn more, and discover the solution, see this YouTube video or this short Wikipedia write-up that explains it.

The next time you and your team have some important decision-making at hand, try these three shifts, and let me know how this worked for you.

Ten Character Indicators

By 1 Comment

Ten Character Indicators
Image Credit: Shutterstock

“How you do one thing is how you do everything.” ~ Madeline Albright

Thirty years ago, a business owner named Dave found himself in a critical position. A key employee had been found embezzling, and the company faced a $1 Mil shortfall. To Dave’s business, this was the difference between surviving and sinking.

After examining his options, he felt the only thing he could do was to sell the business or find a partner who would invest money to help stabilize the company. As luck would have it, he found a man named Ed who owned quite a few businesses similar to his, and who was willing to become a partner with Dave to save the enterprise’s future.

One day, as they were finalizing terms of the partnership, Dave and Ed went to lunch.

During the meal, something happened that should have tipped Dave off about Ed’s character. But he ignored it. He was desperate for funds and reasoned that the incident had nothing to do with how Ed would conduct himself in business. And because he chose to ignore this incident, it wound up quietly hurting Dave for the next 30 years.

What was the tip-off to Ed’s character during that fateful lunch?

When it was time to settle the $48 food bill, Ed offered to pay. The server brought change from Ed’s two $20 bills and the men left for their cars. As Dan and Ed stepped into the parking lot, Ed chuckled as he folded his money into his wallet.

“That gal needs to pay more attention,” Ed said. “Instead of giving me $2 change, she gave me a $1 bill and one of my $20 bills.”

“Ed – that’s obviously a mistake on her part! You’re going to return it, right?” asked Dan.

“Are you kidding?” said Ed. “If someone is going to be that careless, it’s money for me and a good lesson for them.”

Dave felt terrible. He went home and wrote an apology letter to the restaurant. Without disclosing who the offender was, he enclosed a $20 bill as repayment.

The next week, Dave and Ed signed partnership papers. Ed contributed the agreed-upon cash infusion to the business and thus saved it. He brought in a managing administrator to manage the company as agreed. Over the next 30 years, Dave enjoyed residual income from the business without having to manage it, and Ed’s appointed administrator operated as per Ed’s directives.

One day, Ed fell terminally ill, and Dave was called in by a key executive to talk about the future of the company and the partnership interests. As Dave and the executive went over opportunities, it slowly came to light that the business was charging Dave a disproportionately higher amount for expenses in facilities, upkeep, and business development for 30 years. The amount of money that should come to him as profit was staggering. Dave felt physically sick. These funds could have made a great difference to him and his family over the 3 decades that had passed, but he was now a weary 87-year-old widower with little energy left to fight the battle.

It was then that he thought back to that first lunch with Ed and heard his words, “If someone is going to be that careless, it’s money for me and a good lesson for them.”

The fact is, character does matter. Madeline Albright’s quote “How you do one thing is how you do everything,” rings true.

Now, most of you reading here will quickly say that you would have given back the $20 on the spot. I am confident that you would have done so. But no matter how honest you are, might there be other areas in your personal conduct or ways of doing that need fine-tuning?

Character does matter.

Here is a list of 10 common character flaws that have significant repercussions in life and work.

  1. Are you punctual and thus respectful of others and your time together, or are you perpetually late, signaling to others that they are just “not that important”?
  2. Do you respect good boundaries with others, or do you tend to blur the lines to the point where you become entangled in problems that aren’t yours?
  3. Are you careful as you commit to others, or do you tend to overpromise and under-deliver or default?
  4. Do you seek always to understand first, or are you prone to snap judgments before you investigate fully?
  5. Are you respectfully honest when asked for feedback, or do you gloss over the truth as you seek to please others?
  6. Are you open to constructive criticism, or do you take a defensive stance as you find excuses for the behavior in question?
  7. Do you seek to reconcile or release undesirable stress in healthy ways, or do you tend to carry resentment around like a boulder, compromising your relationships (and your health)?
  8. Are you quick to support others when they are a topic of gossip, or do you jump on the injurious bandwagon with the crowd?
  9. Are you respectful of what’s yours and what is company property, or do you find yourself taking home a few pens or empty file folders for your own use, because you tell yourself “it really doesn’t matter.”
  10. Do you operate from a place of generosity, or do you race to get that proverbial front parking spot before the other person does?

Can you think of others? What is the one area that you would like to work on that will make a difference to your life and to those around you?

Taking Your Manifesto to Work

By Leave a Comment

Taking Your Manifesto to Work

Part III of Making Your Leadership Work

Is your leadership only in your head? You should be taking your manifesto to work.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: anything that sounds great in theory, but doesn’t teach you how to use it.

This is especially true of leadership. There’s a lot of “feel good” stuff out there and heady theory about what leadership is, who you ought to be, and how it should work.

But what do you do with this?

Unless you can apply your knowledge practically, on the job, knowledge is not power, contrary to the old adage. You just walk around thinking about it and living off the warm and fuzzy feelings that thinking about leading can generate.

You and your leadership will just sit in your head.

How do you fix this?

You learn how to make the powerful connections that put your knowledge to work.

The power in possessing knowledge is always the same, whether it’s learning how to lead or perfecting your backstroke in the swimming pool.

You have to practice. You actually have to take your knowledge and apply it to learn how to master it.

So when it comes to your leadership manifesto – your beliefs as to who you are as leader, what is important, and how you intend to act on these beliefs, there’s a big hole.

And it’s taking your manifesto to work – seeing how it can make significant change.

How do you do that?

Well, first you must have developed your leadership manifesto. If you haven’t crafted your manifesto, click here.

And then, you need to put your manifesto to work by defining the impact it can make on the enterprise. This powerful visioning will serve as your inspiration for all you do.

To do this, you’ll need a piece of paper and pen or pencil. And then…

  • Position the paper so that it is in “landscape” mode.
  • Draw lines to make three columns on the paper.
  • Across the top, your column headers will be (left to right): “Manifesto Statement,” “The Enterprise,” and “The Transformation”
  • In the left-hand column, under the heading “Manifesto Statement,” list out the key statements from your manifesto.
  • Across from each statement in the “Manifesto Statement” column, and under the heading “The Enterprise,” write how the enterprise can be positively affected because of the statement.
  • Example: If your manifesto statement reads, “Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart,” then across from that, your statement about how it can affect the enterprise might be, “We have created a culture that cares and is involved.”
  • Across from each statement in the middle column, “The Enterprise,” list the resulting transformation in “The Transformation” column. “My employees are more creative and engagement, resulting in a superior product.”

Here it is so that you can see the relationship between your leadership manifesto and how you can impact the enterprise.

 

Manifesto Statement The Enterprise Transformation
Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. We have created a culture that cares and is involved. Our employees are more creative and engaged, resulting in a superior product.

 

Continue with each statement from your manifesto until you have exhausted the list. As you review your paper, congratulate yourself. You have just outlined the impact that your unique leadership can have on the enterprise – and the world.

Once you have defined the unique impact you can make with your leadership, you will identify those strategies that will best support this intended impact, and then, the actions necessary to effectuate them.

How will you put your leadership manifesto to work?