Now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout....
Allow employees to act courageously
http://working.canada.com/victoria/resources/story.html?id=89d866a2-de94-4750-a691-9d2cbcac5001
Take courage, everyone. The economy is teetering, no one knows what the future holds, yet we've got to manage better than ever before in order to right this foundering ship.
From the U.S., we're getting the message that Obama has courage, and he will surely need it.Here at home, we need courage, too, in order to stay competitive in business and keep our economy afloat.
But how do we, in the business model, reward courage?
How do we make sure that courageous behaviour in the workplace is rewarded rather than punished?
How do we create a climate in which making mistakes doesn't mean you're discredited and sidelined?
Courageous behaviour just won't happen in a workplace where managers spend their time reminding people of the consequences of failure rather that focusing on what happens when things go right, warns U.S. consultant Bill Treasurer.
How much effort will anyone make to solve a problem, he points out, when the boss says: "Whatever you do, don't screw up!" Or: "If you drop the ball on this, you're toast!"
Paying too much attention to what can go wrong effectively ends up filling workers with anxiety and undermines their confidence. So forget courage in that kind of environment.
To support courageous behaviour, Treasurer says, you've got to build safety nets for those individuals who are putting themselves on the line.
First, they've got to be given permission to be courageous, just as Treasurer was when at some point in his consultant career he was given the job of coaching upper management. These were people senior to him. He agonized so much over messing up that he went to his own boss at the management consulting company, Accenture, Hines Brannan, and confessed that the thought of coaching those senior people was too intimidating.
"Hines listened patiently," Treasurer writes in his new book, Courage Goes to Work. "Then, instead of telling me what a wuss I was being, he simply said, 'But Bill, you coach me.' "
What Treasurer received from this boss was permission to express his fears without embarrassment, which, in turn, allowed him to see that he could indeed meet the challenge. Imagine if his boss had been someone to whom he couldn't express those feelings.
"Permission enhances safety," writes Treasurer, who is founder and "chief encouragement officer" of Giant Leap Consulting, with clients like CNN, the Centres for Disease Control and EarthLink.
The manager who encourages people to express their true concerns can then concentrate on shifting their thinking to ways in which they can get the job done.
Second, companies must avoid seeing all mistakes as bad ones. Instead, they need to value what he calls "forward-falling" mistakes.
AT&T president David Scobey makes this point: "Mistakes are critically important to growth, not just individually but collectively as well. Growth is driven by innovation, and innovation often comes from making the right mistakes."
One of his clients, Treasurer writes, conducts monthly "lessons learned" breakfasts attended by the company's 100-plus project managers during which project mistakes are discussed by the team responsible for making the mistake. But the focus is not on punishment; rather it's on the lessons to be learned from the mistake and teaches the staff that "mistakes are a normal and necessary part of business - as long as the mistakes are put to good use by the company."
Third, company managers need to be very considerate how the staff perceives them as they "manage up" as well as "manage down."
Employees, Treasurer writes, are very sensitive to how their own managers respond to the boss's request and possibly ignore their own.
"Workers want to know that you're courageous enough to stick up for them and provide them with a safety net," he writes.
So, when a manager can show that she or he is as attentive to the needs of staff as to the boss's, they are, in turn, much more willing to respond to urgent requests with a sense of confidence and courage.
It's a simple demand, yet difficult: help workers feel safe and they will have increased commitment to carry out uncomfortable tasks - and even to make mistakes from which they can learn.
donnanebenzhl@videotron.ca
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
