The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) (18 page)

Managers are taught how to give feedback, which is invariably management-speak for criticism. The only thing worse than feedback is constructive feedback: that is when you know you are in serious trouble.

Managers are never taught the even more important art of giving praise. To some managers, praise is for wimps. And yet as individuals, we all crave recognition. If we want recognition for ourselves, we should be prepared to give recognition to other people. Done well, praise is an easy way of building support, respect, and alliances. It is easier to succeed when you have people who actively support you than when you are met with a wall of passive indifference. So praise is not about being nice for the sake of it. Praise is a way of becoming a better manager.

praise is an easy way of building support, respect, and alliances

Here is how to praise well:

•
Be brave.
Find the courage and time to say thank you. You are not being weak by saying thank you.

•
Praise real contributions.
It is a sensible courtesy to thank colleagues for making a photocopy, fixing the coffee, finding a document. A “thank you” does no harm. But if you start lavishing praise on someone for the outstanding way they poured the milk into your coffee, then do not be surprised if you earn a reputation for insincerity: no one will believe you even when your praise is real.

•
Be specific.
Don’t thank someone for being a great person, instead thank them for a specific thing they did which helped you. Show why you are grateful: “you’re doing a great job” is meaningless; “you saved that client relationship by getting that shipment out on time last night” means something.

•
Make it personal.
Show how their effort helped you; you might even recognize that they went out of their way, or they were doing a thankless task, or that it was unusually difficult.

•
Where appropriate, offer recognition in public.
There is little point in being recognized if no one knows you have been recognized.

Here is how to mess up praise:

•
Focus all your praise on a few favorites.
Exclude and annoy everyone else.

•
Praise trivial things.
Avoid the one-minute manager “well done, you have clean shoes this morning....” At best it is patronizing and it also devalues all your other praise.

•
Be insincere.
If you name-check 50 people in a speech, it will be completely meaningless. If you are specific about what each of 12 people contributed, it means something.

Praise can be subtle and effective. In meetings, you can use praise to get your own way, as follows. Listen to all the arguments around the table. At the right moment, quietly summarize, thanking each person for the wonderful/original/brilliant insight they brought to the table. Watch as each person around the table puffs up with pride at having their brilliance recognized. Naturally, you will focus only on the points that support your position. By the time you finish your summary, everyone will be rooting for you because they think you are supporting what they have said. At a milder level, simply build on someone else’s idea: “Dan made a great point there, and it made me think (enter your point of view here).” That simple public praise starts to bring Dan around to your side: he now sees you as an ally.

One of the best managers I know makes a habit of ensuring he praises at least 10 times as often as he criticises. He keeps score. His criticisms are sufficiently unusual that people sit up and take notice. He has now found that even his occasional criticisms are a mistake. He can normally achieve the same outcome by making a positive and supportive suggestion which leads to action. He is one of those rare bosses that people want to work for, rather than having to work for.

Criticism is kryptonite in any organization. Most of us have thin skins. We like to believe we are not defective models when it comes to being human. As a test, rate yourself as below or above average on the following:

• Honesty

• Kindness

• Hard work

• Ability to drive a car

• Parenting skills

• Competence at work

About 95% of humans rank themselves in the top 50% of humanity on most criteria. This is statistically impossible but emotionally inevitable. It is normal not to see ourselves as defective, but as a manager your criticism will suggest that your staff are defective in some way. It should be no surprise when our well meaning advice (criticism as the other person sees it) can become a case of “light fuse and stand well back.” The result is either an explosion or a long sulk.

So the first rule of criticism is do not criticize or offer unwanted advice, unless the criticism will help the individual or organization succeed better. If someone has bad hair, bad teeth, bad dress, bad jokes, bad car and has an unfashionable pastime, that is their problem, not yours. Unless of course these defects affect their prospects or the prospects of your business.

If you are to criticize, make sure you have the right context and the right process. The right context means:

•
The right time.
If you offer criticism while a colleague is still bouncing off the walls with frustration at a setback this simply adds fuel to the fire. Equally, if you leave it months before raising the issue, you have missed your chance. Deal with the issue as soon as possible, when your colleague is in a calm and receptive mood.

•
The place.
Criticism and advice should always be in private. Public criticism is ritual humiliation which leads first to loss of face and then to loss of employee, followed possibly by a lawsuit.

•
The right goal.
The intention is not to show someone is a failure: that sets up conflict. The goal is to find a better way of doing things. So the style should be collaborative, positive, and action focused. It should not be an analysis of past failings: that leads to arguments, not to progress or improvement. Before you start you need to be clear in your mind about what the desired outcome should be.

The right process can be summarized with a simple acronym: SPIN.

•
S: situation.
This is a simple review of the facts: “I noticed that you were late in to work for four client meetings last week.” Agree the facts: if you are wrong, apologize and move on. If the other person goes into denial, then probably you have picked the wrong time for the discussion. Find a time when you will be dealing with reason, not emotion.

•
P: personal impact
or “this is how it made me feel.” For instance: “Being late makes me think you do not care about client work....” Again, it is hard to argue with feelings. And it offers the chance for the other person to state their position.

•
I: Inquire.
This is about asking questions to find a constructive way forward. You should be listening 85% of the time, rather than giving your grand view on how someone else can be less defective. First, enquire about why this problem is occurring. It may be because of a problem you had not been aware of. Then, ask how they would like to change things: they have to suggest the solution. They will only act if it is their plan, not yours. So take your time, let them work it out for themselves, with your help.

•
N: Next steps.
This is where you get them to summarize. Be specific about what will happen when. And ask if there is any support they need or you can give: make sure they cannot come back with more excuses later on.

By the end of the conversation, they should feel that they have found a positive way forward and that you have supported them on that journey. They should not feel that they have been scolded like a school child and told to do something they do not want to do.

The most unrealistic thing about TV soap operas is that the characters never mention the soap opera in conversation. The most surprising omission from an MBA is that it does not teach you how to manage MBA types. Managing MBAs is different from managing other colleagues; the more prestigious the MBA, the more distinctive the challenge becomes.

managing MBAs is different from managing other colleagues

Top MBA graduates can be very high maintenance but very high performance. The trick is to maximize the performance and minimize the maintenance. If there is such a thing as a typical top MBA graduate then he or she will:

• Have very high expectations and ambition

• Have a big but fragile ego

• Be a natural over-achiever

• Be naive about handling people, at least early on in their career

So how do you handle such a person?

•
Stretch them.
They are natural over-achievers, so let them over-achieve. Set stretching goals and timings and they will work all hours to over-deliver. If
they are not stretched they become like the very bright kid at school who is bored by the lessons and becomes disruptive before going into a self-defeating vortex of doom.

•
Give them autonomy.
They will resist being micromanaged because it is against their dignity and they probably do not have great respect for you or any of their bosses. They think they are smarter and better than anyone else, including you.

•
Never demean them.
They find it hard to take criticism, even in private. So keep your difficult conversations positive: focus on what needs to happen next and drive them forward that way.

•
Set clear expectations and boundaries.
They will want it all and want it now: be clear about bonus and promotion expectations and stay very firm and very consistent.

•
Make them feel they are doing an important and worthwhile job.
Even mundane work can be sold as important: if they have to read 5,000 pages of routine documentation for an M&A deal, then clearly the success or failure of the deal may rely on them picking up a problem in the paperwork. Dull work, worth billions.

•
Be their pooper scooper in chief.
They will mess up dealing with other people and you will need to clear up. They will always believe that it is the fault of the other person who is not so smart, hard working, etc. Coach them in private to help them understand that it does not matter whose fault it is: they have to get the result. Slowly, they will learn to adapt their style to those of other people so that they can get their way.

All of these rules apply to managing all professionals and perhaps all staff. The risks and rewards associated with MBAs simply raise the stakes.

•
Introduction
116

•
Colleagues or competitors?
116

•
Understanding yourself
118

•
Understanding others
119

•
Negotiating judo: succeed without fighting
121

•
How to disagree agreeably (how to turn disagreement into agreement)
122

•
How to handle exploding head syndrome
123

•
When to fight
125

When I coach executives, I very rarely find that any of their challenges are to do with tasks or techniques. Nearly all the challenges which executives find most challenging are other people: colleagues, team members, and bosses. Unfortunately, people cannot be managed like accounts: you cannot insist they conform to standard rules and that they should all balance at the end of the month. For better or worse, people have minds of their own. As managers, we have to deal with them to get results.

Dealing with people is getting harder all the time. The days of command and control are long gone. If we are to succeed, we have to make things happen through people who we do not control. We have to learn the subtle arts of persuasion, influence, and occasional hard ball. Because there is no rule book for dealing with people, this is the skill which most managers struggle hardest with. We learn mainly from experience of messing up and occasionally succeeding, or by watching others mess up and succeed. This is a long, slow random walk of experience. Most of us do not have the time or patience for this slow walk.

Although there is no rule book, there are some fairly predictable principles of success and failure. If we can learn the principles, then we can decide how to apply them in practice and in the style which best suits each one of us.

Who is your deadliest competitor? The people you really need to fear are those who can take away your promotion, seize your bonus pool, get their priorities put ahead of yours when it comes to management time and support, and can mess up your projects and proposals. So your real competition is not in the marketplace. Your real competition is sitting at a desk near you. Your colleagues are your deadliest competitors, but also your most important collaborators in making things happen.

your real competition is sitting at a desk near you

To make your task more interesting, your firm probably extols the virtues of team work. So you have to work with people with whom you are competing, and all of them think that they are at the center of the universe, have the most important and urgent tasks, and that they are the good people surrounded by mendacious, idle, and incompetent colleagues.

Succeeding in such a contradictory, and possibly dysfunctional, environment requires a certain mindset. You need a simple set of rules to guide you in dealing with your colleagues and the organization. Each firm and each individual has their own unique success formula. You need to build yours and make it fit
with your firm. But in practice there are some fairly universal rules that can be adapted to most firms.