“I can predict when a senior officer is going to be fired,” Steve said, and sipped his coffee.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Whenever the executive is a big portion of the agenda of three board meetings in a row, it’s not long after that the executive is invited to leave,” Steve explained.
Interesting theory. Makes sense. Sadly. Why can’t three sequential board meetings discussing the same person be about the dilemma of how to reward them enough for the outstanding contributions they have made?
I left Milton’s munching the last of my kosher English muffin, mulling over the larger question that Steve’s axiom evoked. Why do we, as leaders, spend so much time on the negative behaviors in an organization?
One answer might be that the negative behaviors can seriously damage a company’s ability to succeed, maybe even to be in existence, so the attention must be paid to resolve the problems. But are the solutions so thorny that it takes multiple sessions with multiple people involved to arrive at the right action?
I look at my body of field data, from nearly 22 years of entrepreneurialism, and over 1,200 examples represented mostly by clients served and a few businesses started or invested in. The solutions to such problems are really pretty straightforward, most of the time. In the case that Steve and I were talking about that morning at Milton’s, the solution was to meet with the executive in question and say to him or her, “If you angrily walk out of a meeting like that again, you’ll be fired. That was disrespectful and unwarranted. No one was treating you disrespectfully, and you didn’t have the facts straight anyway. Now. What’s going on? Why did you fly off the handle?” Took about 15 seconds to say this out loud. Slowly.
How the executive responded would determine next steps. But it took that company’s board six months and three meetings to agree to communicate 15 seconds of straight feedback, in order to set and maintain behavioral limits for the tantrum-throwing executive.
And it’s not just senior level people who take this inordinate amount of time to figure out how to say the truth, anticipate a response, consult with everybody under the sun, etc. Sure, there are potentially legal and business considerations to take into account when the subject is about negative employee behavior, but employers are inappropriately gun-shy about confronting someone with unacceptable behavior. Out of those 1,200 client interactions, many of which occurred over several years, I have participated in hundreds of serious employee relations issues, as a consultant or as a leader in the affected organization. In other words, I’ve had to follow my own advice. I have seen only three occasions of negative behavior in an employee that couldn’t be addressed with a half-hour conversation with the person concerned. That is a well-scripted and confidently conducted conversation, mind you, but it’s not hard to compose the right message.
It’s harder to deliver, however, because of one key reason, in my opinion. The reason why boards and business leaders and middle managers and first-line supervisors wrangle so much about whether or not to tell somebody the truth is that they are afraid of the consequences. I’ve spent more time explaining to clients what they can actually do, than what they cannot do. I think the average manager or executive or owner has been spooked out of their confidence to do the right thing in correcting inappropriate employee behavior.
What are they afraid of? Legal retaliation, and damage to the business because the troublesome employee is feared to be a critical part of financial performance. So that’s basically the protection racket, right? The legal profession generally supports the extortion by how it is compensated for its services. And the prospect of losing revenue and profit by terminating a “key” person scares managers into silence, or worse, sternly admonishing the troublesome employee but never following through with consequences.
Failing to act confidently and decisively to correct unacceptable behavior because of fear of a consequence sends the entire organization the message that you can be a jerk in the workplace as long as it appears that you are important to financial results and/or you have a legal ace in the hole. That message is like a cancer-causing virus, self-inflicted by cowed leaders. It destroys teamwork and employee engagement.
I’ve made that particular mistake myself, early on in my entrepreneurial adventure. Cost me a lot of time, trouble and expense. I learned that no one is indispensible, that the rest of the team steps up to minimize the damage caused by losing someone everyone knew had to be fired. Your team will respect you for setting limits. And then sticking to them.
Friday, December 3, 2010