Knowing Your People

Different people are motivated by different things. While this may sound obvious on the face of it, many systems are designed to provide one type of motivation for all people. A company may, for example, provide higher pay and bonuses for its most successful employees. Another organization might provide highly visible recognition programs for its most successful employees. Yet another may provide training and development to its stars. The organizations most successful in motivating its people and leveraging their talents implement some kind of combination of motivators.

Using different motivators is not just something an organization must consider, but is also something a front line leader must use. One of the things I have had to learn as a leader was to connect different motivators with the people most motivated by them. I started out by projecting my own needs and outlooks on the people that reported to me. I would provide verbal praise, which is important to me, to all of my employees who did well. I saw some respond well to this and others not as well. Why wasn't this working evenly for everyone? One of my own managers helped me out of my quandary by helping me step out of my own perspective and learning what motivated my people.

I incorporated into my regular meetings with my people time to learn about them as a person outside of work. I learned that some people provided a second income to a household and because their spouses would be moving within a year or two, that they were not interested in promotion. I learned that others, because of their responsibilities in raising children, were more motivated by the money associated with promotion. Others were interested in getting time off (time off is also something that is extremely important to me). Others responded especially well to specific goals and to achieving them (yes, I know that all goals need to be specific, but I have found that some people respond especially well to specific goals, more so than some of their peers). Still others craved that verbal praise and public recognition of a job well done.

You are, of course, limited by the resources at your disposal. You may not be able to grant large additional chunks of time off to your employees, or you may not have the ability to award bonuses. You must search for ways to deliver what rewards you can to your employees, and perhaps find ways to deliver rewards that may not appear to be available. For example, I thought that I could not deliver a bonus program to reward my employees. I knew, however, that some of them were well motivated by money because of their responsibilities at home. Working with the site director (who had the authority to create a bonus program), I identified a specific action my employees could take that would increase revenue. I then created a monthly bonus program that was large enough to get the employee's attention, but small enough to achieve a high return on investment comparing the increased revenue to the cost of the bonuses. The program has served to motivate many of the people on my team – but not all of them (I have one member of my team who comes to work to contribute to the success of a team, he has commented to me on the bonus program, “let others who really nee the money work toward the bonus”).

The first step in linking motivators with your people is learning what makes your team members tick. Make sure that you are meeting regularly with your people, either formally or informally. Every week, you should ask yourself, “what have I learned about my team members today?”

Making Corrections Versus Making Speed

When you perform an action slower, you have more time to make little corrections to get the action right. We have all experienced this. The same holds true for processes, too. The slower an organization performs a process, the more time it has to make corrections to get the process right.

During this weekend's rowing practice, my crew made a significant strides in our ability to row together. For the longest time, we have struggled to keep the boat balanced while we rowed. This interfered with our ability to stay together. The faster we rowed, in fact, the harder time we had rowing in sync. For weeks, we could row in sync no faster than 22 strokes per minute (spm). As soon as we increased our rate to 24 strokes a minute, we fell apart, and our oars would move out of time so that we looked more like an octopus than a crew. We have recently been making changes to our individual rowing technique to correct our balance. We have practiced these adjustments at a low rating of 16 to 20 strokes per minute. This gave us the opportunity to concentrate on what we were doing (for me, it was not dropping my hands in between strokes).

On our Sunday row, with good weather and an energetic crew, our boat captain put us to the test. We performed a series of drills to test how fast we could row using our new found balance. We would row hard one minute at a specified rate, then rest one minute, then start again rowing hard at a higher rate. We started out at 22 strokes per minute, which was well within our comfort level. Then we tried 24 strokes per minute, which is where we had been falling apart. We stayed in sync and rowed well. Then we tried 26 spm, we still held it together After another minute of rest, we bumped it up to 28, then 30. We rowed a full minute 36% faster than we had ever rowed as a crew before. We increased our speed once more to 32 spm. Suddenly, I saw the oar handle of the guy in front of my flying toward my face – he had “caught a crab” and lost his oar. He leaned back, I leaned back, and l lost my own oar. At 32 strokes per minute, there is no time to make any corrections or to recover (I have, in fact, recovered from “catching a crab” at 22 spm, but I have no chance at 32 spm).

Despite losing grip on our oars at 32 spm, the practice was a rousing success. Losing the oars got me thinking about speed and the ability to recover. As I said in the beginning, processes work this way, too. When you perform a process slowly, your team has time to make adjustments and corrections. When you work a process quickly, you have to get it right or risk disaster.

When starting a new process that involves a lot of human touch or input, it is wise to set up a checking process – a quality assurance process – to correct mistakes and set up a feedback loop to your employees. These checkers prevent errors from impacting your customers, or at least mitigating the impact of the error. The weakness in using checkers to correct mistakes is that it takes time to complete the checking process (in my rowing story above, we performed internal quality assurance checks by making adjustments to our stroke, which we had the time to concentrate on when we were only rowing 22 spm).. The quality assurance checking places a cap on the maximum speed at which your process can operate.

A solution for overcoming this speed governor is to set up a way of sunsetting your checking process. This means that, at some point, your employees need to be able to perform the task or carry out the process correctly themselves without someone correcting their mistakes. To get to this point, you need a feedback loop in your checking process. It isn't enough that your quality assurance checker corrects the mistake. You must also get the message back to employee of how to correct the error: what was the mistake, discovering why the employee make the mistake, and taking action to correct the mistake.

As part of this feedback loop, you need to identify the root causes of the employee mistake. If the employee didn't know, update your training or retrain the employee. If the employee didn't have a necessary resource, get the resource. If there is a disincentive to the employe doing the process right, remove the disincentive.

Having the employee perform the task right the first time enables you to redeploy your quality assurance checkers to another, newer process. Your employees, performing the task correctly the first time, can now operate at a faster speed. The benefit is that your team is now providing service faster to the customer. The risk in operating at this faster speed, is that when mistakes do occur, they will impact the customer before you can make any corrections. Just like when the oars went flying on our boat when we were rowing 32 strokes per minute, you won't have time to correct the error that your team makes operating at a high speed. The question you have to answer as a leader is, does the higher speed and greater efficiency of the process outweigh the impact of the errors?

Teamwork: The Influence of an Individual on a Whole Team's Performance

-->I am continuing the practice of my first two posts of relating rowing experiences to the workplace. This time, I am describing how one person can benefit or hobble the performance of an entire team.

The boat I am on has a problem with balance. Boat balance is critical in rowing because without the boats either leans to one side or flops back and forth – both situations make it harder to row in time or with consistent power because the oars hit the water at wrong times and the rowers hands get pushed against the gunwales of the boat. With proper boat balance all of these things correct themselves and rowing because enjoyable.

I helped balance the boat in my latest practice by making an adjustment to my hand height right before I drop my oar into the water. I made this adjustment based on two occurrences the practice before. The first was the boat captain demonstrating the effect of hand height from one person on the entire boat's balance. Holding his oar, he lowered his hands about four inches which caused the entire boat to lean dramatically. The second occurrence was the post practice discussion where we discussed all of the things each of us can do to improve the boat balance: one of them being not to lower one's hands just before dropping the oar in the water (which is something I have been doing for months, but hadn't realized it caused a problem).

I concentrated on holding up my hands instead of dipping them down before I dropped the oar into the water. It appeared to make all of the difference in the world: the boat had a better balance and rowing was much easier. As a group, we made other adjustments, but I know that my own small adjustment improved the situation.

This experience gave me perspective on the impacts each member of a team can have on the performance of a group. It is important, therefore, for a leader to help each team member understand the difference his or her contribution makes to the whole team's performance. Are you not sure yourself what is the impact? Find whatever data you have on your team's performance and work to divide up and identify individual contributions. The easiest impact to find is absence. If someone is not there, your team's production capacity diminishes. If you are meeting some deadline or responding to some emergency, that individual's absence will reveal itself in poor team performance.

Many workplaces, such as help desks and other IT services, benefit from having many measurement tools to identify individual contributions. Learn what tools you have, find your team members' individual contributions, and help them see their importance to the performance of the team. By helping them understand their contributions, you can help them make a greater contribution to the success of your team.

Pausing on Compartmentalization

Sometimes at work I talk to my team members about compartmentalizing work stress and home stress: not allowing the stresses and concerns of one to impact the other. I often associate compartmentalization with the phrase “work life balance”. Our work environment, especially for the people providing phone and email technical support, lends itself to compartmentalization. It is the type of job that once a person logs out of the computers, he or she can leave work and not think about it until returning the next day.

In talking with one of my team members today, however, I paused in my dedication to a separation between work and personal life. My phone agent, S, told me that he was exchanging texts with his high school age son who had informed him that his school had received some kind of gun violence threat (something related to the Mayan end of world/calendar thing supposedly inspired someone to contact and make such a threat).  Happily, S and I could talk about this openly. He told me that this was on his mind and that he had mapped some scenarios in his head where he would pick up his son from school. It turns out that this was not necessary, but I appreciated the fact that he told me about this in the morning to avoid any potential surprises later on. This is just a week after the school killings in Connecticut.

As a non-parent, how can I seriously talk to my team members who are parents about separating the stresses and worries of child raising from what they do at work? With the modern connections of texting, email, and cellphones they have readily at their desk, how can I expect there to be a wall between the two? I don't think I can, and I don't believe I should.  So many of my team members are parents. I see my role as a leader to empathize with their concerns and help them manage a work life balance instead of creating two compartmentalized lives.

Taking Coaching from the River to the Workplace

I was recently the recipient of excellent coaching in a physical activity. While there are obvious differences between coaching for a sport or physical activity and coaching on the job, I saw that the elements of the coaching I received could indeed be applied to the workplace.

I joined a local rowing club earlier this year, inspired by the Summer Olympics and urged on by my wife who had rowed in college. As you may know from watching this summer's Olympics, the rowers of a crew sit backward in relation to the forward progress of the boat. At the stern of the boat, sits the coxswain who faces forward and gives directions. The coxswain speaks direction into a microphone system attached to speakers throughout the boat so that everyone can hear. The seats of the boat are numbers from bow to stern. I was rowing in the number three seat which is toward the bow of the boat. We were sculling, so each rower held one oar. The idea is to row in time and to use certain techniques to make your row efficient and to drive the boat forward.

Our coxswain, D, is the one who displayed excellent coaching abilities. We were rowing down the river, when D shouted, “seat three, your oar is too deep in the water!” Putting my oar too deep in the water is a technique problem I have struggled with for weeks. Putting my oar too deep makes it harder for me to row, but produces no extra power for the boat. It also slows down my stroke which can put me out of sync with the others in the boat. At D's corrective instruction, I made the same adjustment I had been making for weeks, I started lifting the oar just after I put it in the water. This creates a kind of S movement in the water. It partially corrected the problem, but was inefficient. I also couldn't maintain such a movement for more than a few strokes.

“Three seat, your oar is still too deep in water!” I made the correction again, but reverted to my original movement after several strokes. After a few more corrective commands, D asked, “who is three seat?”

“Dave”, I answered.

“Okay, Dave, you are pulling your handle up when you take a stroke”, D said, looking over the shoulders of the other rowers sitting between me and her. She watched me for a few more strokes and informed me that I was pulling with my arms too early.

“You are pulling your arms in early on your stroke. That is what is pushing your oar too deep in the water. At the beginning of your stroke, only use your legs, then lean back, then pull with your arms. Don't even think about pulling with your arms until you have straightened your legs and leaned back”. This went back to the instructions from my Learn to Row class a few months before. I made some corrections, but didn't get it quite right. D kept correcting me for 10 minutes while we rowed. Every once in a while I would get a stroke right.

“There, you've got it! Do that stroke again, with no arm pull until you lean back.” I would get a few strokes right, then make some mistakes. D, watching what I was doing on each stroke, would verbally correct me on the my stroke errors. 

After 10 minutes of this, though, I suddenly was pulling straight back with no arm pull until I leaned back – the correct technique. I was doing with for several strokes in a row, then 10 strokes in a row, then 20 strokes, and so on. I could feel the oar pivoting differently, so that it was a completely different experience.

“That is it exactly! Dave has got the stroke down perfectly”, D told the whole boat. As I maintained stroke consistency, she kept up that encouragement. It felt great to make such an improvement that I could feel and to be recognized for the improvement.

So let's break down D's coaching to me into its elements and describe how to apply these in the workplace. She observed the problem behavior and identified the poor results and attempted an initial correction (“three seat, your oar is too deep in the water”). Through further observation, she identified the root cause of the poor results (“Dave, you are pulling your handle up when you take a stroke”). She then continued her feedback to me so that I became more aware of when I erred and when I made a correction (“There, you've got it! Do that stroke again, with no arm pull until you lean back”). Finally, when I made the consistent correction, she praised my new behavior and its results (“That is it exactly! Dave has got the stroke down perfectly”). We can apply each of these steps to many opportunities for coaching in the workplace.

To coach, you have to be aware of the poor results that are going on. Many workplaces, call centers and technical support desks especially, do a great job in collecting metrics for individuals. On the boat, the coxswain or coach simply watches the rowers. In the workplace, a coach might looki at a report, review customer feedback, or look at sales numbers. The first step of coaching is taking this data and identifying what is the root cause of the poor result. Identifying the root cause as being an action an employee is taking, a coach might be able to correct the behavior just by informing the employee of the problem. This is, in fact, what D first attempted with me (“seat three, your oar is too deep in the water”). This early step is only effective if the employee is unaware that he or she is making the mistake. In my example, I was already aware of the mistake, but I didn't know how to properly correct it.

A coach in the workplace will often find the same problem: the employee doesn't know how to properly correct the behavior. This takes additional observation and analysis. On the boat, D watched all the actions I was taking in the stroke and identified my early arm pull. She then instructed me on how to make the correction. In the workplace, a coach converses with the employee and asks the employee pointed questions about why he or she is performing a certain action. This can often identify the root cause. Root causes vary from a lack of knowledge, to having a system that actually rewards the negative behavior, to factors outside of work causing distractions. It is critical for the coach to identify the root cause of the behavior so that he or she can work with the employee to develop a solution tailored to address that specific root cause.

Having developed a corrective action with the employee, the coach now works with the employee to drive the improvement. The employee is responsible for implementing the change he or she agreed to. The coach is responsible for providing feedback on what the employee does well and what the employee does not do well. On the boat, this is done through instant verbal feedback. This is an advantage in physical activities that is often not practical in the workplace, but it illustrates the importance of timely feedback. As a coach, you need to provide your feedback as soon as it is practical. The coach and the employee agree to a timeframe of further observation and agree to how feedback will be delivered.

The final step for the coach, when the employee has made the behavior change, is to provide positive feedback. On the boat, this is done by verbal encouragement in front of the rest of the crew. In the workplace, it might be done through a reminder email, a stop at the employee's desk, or a quick instant message. If the behavior change is significant, and if the team could benefit from having a positive example, the coach can recognize the employee's improvement publicly in front of the team. For an employee that is motivated by public recognition, this is an extremely powerful motivator and reinforcement of positive behavior.

You can effectively coach in your workplace by applying the elements of D's coaching. First, be aware of the poor results and identify the root cause of those poor results. Second, inform the employee whose behavior is driving the poor results in case he or she is unaware of the impact of the behavior. Third, identify the root cause of the employee's behavior by engaging the employee in a conversation about why he or she is engaging in the behavior. Fourth, develop a plan with the employee to correct the behavior and establish a feedback channel through which you can deliver fine tuned corrections. Finally, provide positive feedback to the employee when he or she gets it right. These steps work on a boat, and they can work in your workplace.