How often have you wished that your managers would be willing to tell an employee who regularly comes to meetings late that his performance needs improvement? Or that more managers could be relied on to have meaningful mid-year performance discussions? Or differentiate merit increases? After all, they've been through training programs, meetings, etc. etc.
As an adviser on the topic, I know that the awareness and understanding achieved in seminar discussions does not automatically translate into behavior. There are many additional steps needed to achieve manager behavior change. Oddly enough, for compensation and performance issues, employee surveys are part of the solution, even though manager behaviors typically have very little influence on the process.
The multiple-choice version? They are a good place to start because they tell us what employees are thinking. But if that anonymous, sterile crowd experience is the definition of listening in your company's culture, then no wonder managers think it's OK to go through the motions when it comes to complicated interactions like pay and performance discussions.
No, I'm talking about demonstrating effective discussions as part of your effort to align manager behaviors with your culture. It's messy and time consuming to try to figure out why employees hold their opinions. How they give meaning to their work. How to use insightful employee feedback and explain why you're not using nonproductive feedback.
But once you show that listening and discussing can achieve results -- via regular focus groups, advisory groups, team meetings, etc. -- the expectation for authentic conversation is established. Managers who participate observe how difficult conversations work and contribute to problem resolution. They experience how give and take improves relationships and diminishes that unspoken resistance to performance expectations that can waft through the air around any team or department like fog.
"Use words, not numbers, to understand your customers," was the Management Tip of the Day from the Harvard Business Review on Friday because the process lets you delve deeper into the customer's relationship with a product or service. Few salespeople would run away from a discussion with a customer -- they'd see it as an opportunity to build understanding and trust. Why be so eager to talk over both bad and good? Because that's where results are born. Let's show our managers how it's done before we expect them to change.
Margaret O’Hanlon is founder and principal of re:Think Consulting. She has decades of experience teaming up with clients to ensure great Human Resource ideas deliver valuable business results. Margaret brings deep expertise in total rewards communication to the dialogue at the Café; before founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal in Total Rewards Communications with Towers Perrin. Margaret earned her M.S
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