subject: Some "Don'ts" In Effective Leadership #2 [print this page] Some "Don'ts" In Effective Leadership #2 Some "Don'ts" In Effective Leadership #2
This continues my pet peeve article from a few days back. Of course, this goes back to my corporate days and why I finally had to leave. Maybe I will hit some sore spots to share with you. I sure hope so.
To refresh your memory, I worked for a very large corporation of about 45,000 employees in about 11 states and also in multiple overseas locations. Remember? The company was de-centralized and corporate leadership really suffered.
I had two different bosses while there, that really stand out in my mind. One knew what he was doing, but the other one was a big problem for the employee. I won't say anything about the better one, except that he was an outstanding business planner and had been given this supervisor position as a second responsibility, and he responded beautifully.
On the other hand she had over 20 years of experience as a supervisor but everything she had done was working with production. I want to note that she was highly regarded in her field. When she was put in charge of a section (mine), she had never dealt with "intangibles" before, and she simply did not know how to deal with a situation where the "count" meant everything for her. End result was she should have never been put in that position poor supervision was the result.
We tried to placate her with various counts and justifications, but she just did not understand dealing with intangibles. This is where the problems started to rise as she just could not bring herself to understand and trust the people that worked for her. Simply put, she had nothing to count. Morale suffered and we started getting employee turnover, and of course our production started to drop.
Our production consisted in the publication and issuance of confidential documents, and the control there-of. No, we could not measure our production of documents by any form of count because one of us generally was in some kind of a meeting to gather information from the engineers to know what they wanted and who would eventually need it. There was also the coordination between the legal department (legal documents) and other sections such as "military" to conform to their specific requirements.
Some notes that are very important to a supervisor or manager:
Never criticize and employee in the open. Get a conference room or somewhere private to discuss (or cuss) the situation in private. Yell if you really have to, but do it in private.
If there is a situation for a 1-1 meeting, determine well in advance what the meeting is to be used for. The primary reason for a 1-1 normally is to give the employee the chance to ask questions about reasons important to the employee, NOT THE SUPERVISOR!!!
What it does is create the need for the supervisor to establish a career path for the employee and give guidance in that direction. Normally this is considered the employee's time. Show leadership, not dictatorship.
Leadership can be a real problem as a result of internal politics and those problems will have to be worked out. Questions will have to be answered, and asked both. No-one can function adequately if they don't know the rules. Everyone suffers when mistakes are made, no exceptions.
When I was training someone, I use the "3" approach in that the first time I did it, explaining as I went, with the employee watching. The second step is to have the employee do it with me watching, and the third was to supervise while the employee did the expected. Many times there were a lot of repeats but eventually the employee was on his own. I seldom failed.
As I pointed out before, many employers will wait until the "performance review" to point out problems.
I won't dwell on this as I did discuss this last time, but it is important enough to repeat. You have to use care NOT to create a "tattle-tail" system. A performance review is a piece of history to show what has been accomplished, NEVER a surprise to the employee. The problems must be corrected as they occur. A "tattle-tail" system will only drive a wedge between the supervisor and the employee.
After 20 years of military life and 14 years more the corporate world, I was finally able to retire. Looking back on it, corporate life was the most stressful time of my life far worse than being in the military.
There are good ways to show leadership, and there are bad. Some supervisors will rise to the level of incompetence while many will do a very good job, but there are those select few that rise to true executive levels of respect.
