Want Your Workers To Perform Better?

Answer your emails and learn to talk to your people!

During my 31-year naval career, when I thought of personnel management/human resources, I tried to simplify the terms by saying that PM/HR involved 3 basic categories: pay, records, and orders. Now many would say that that approach was pretty simplistic on my part, but I found that these 3 things concerned sailors (and me) the most during a career. And as I rose up the leadership ladder, I tried to keep these 3 concerns paramount, because I quickly learned that an unpaid sailor is a disgruntled sailor, and nothing leads to decreased mission effectiveness faster than a group of unhappy sailors. 

 

Since transitioning from the military, I’ve had time to reflect on what I did during my career, both the good and the bad. While I consider most of what I learned or did as good, there were two negative leadership traits I did my utmost to avoid as I was promoted, and subsequently assigned to positions of greater authority and responsibility. One was becoming a leader who said they were “too busy”, and the second was becoming a leader who avoided conflict. I’ll address each of these separately.

As we wrote the book, The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance, my co-author Bill Treasurer and I contacted several respected leaders across the business/military/political/athletic spectrum for interviews. Some of those contacted were extremely cooperative, responding to our requests in a prompt manner, and freely sharing their time and thoughts on what they thought made good leaders go bad. A select few replied back, politely declining our requests for an interview. However, about half of those contacted failed to reply back, even after repeated requests on our part (and yes, the email addresses were correct). Nothing irked me more in the military than a superior who didn’t reply back to an email. And yes, I know people are “busy”, but a simple “Yes”, “No” or “Got it” acknowledges that the supervisor has, at the very minimum, opened the email. Whether they actually fully read and reply back further or not is their call, but at least you know they had the common courtesy to open your email and reply back of its’ receipt.
 
What I learned…….Nobody is that busy! A simple “Got it, thanks! Let me get back with you!” works really well, and tells people that you recognize and appreciate their efforts to get you timely information. Failing to reply back is totally unprofessional on a manager’s part. And why? Because it shows that you don’t care about the person or their work. Enough said on that subject!

Getting the bigger salary, that coveted office and/or parking space, etc, comes with a price. Every supervisor likes the good times when they can shake hands, distribute bonuses and awards, personally recognize Employee of the Month/Year performers, and tell everyone how great they are doing. But where managing really gets tough is when results and performance trend south, some supervisors like to hide and push off all the bad “stuff” to their lower minions so that they don’t come off looking like the bad guy/gal.
 
I saw (and experienced) a lot of this during my military career, especially when it came time for annual performance report reviews. As the commander, the military believed it was your duty to personally meet with all your subordinates if possible, to review their performance, tell them what they did right (and what they did wrong), and what your expectations of them for the future were……..both for your top performers and your lesser performers. What I saw and experienced was that some of my senior leaders were good at it, while others were horrible and often “passed the buck” to their junior officers to handle the counseling (especially the bad). In most cases, in those commands where the senior leadership paid more attention to their subordinates, their effectiveness, productivity, and espirit de corps was significantly higher than those commands where the senior leadership was not engaged, ignored their duties and did not care about their people.
 
What I learned…..Accept both the good and the bad of being a manager. It comes with the higher pay and other perks of increased authority. Don’t pawn this responsibility off to someone else! Better workforce relations (which start at the top) will draw out the best of your employees, and make for a better work environment.