Manager’s guide to growing happy employees

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At a point when I didn’t have the money to hire an assistant, I ran an ad for an unpaid intern. I ran it on a lark, thinking I’d be lucky if anyone in the world would want to work for free.

The number of responses I received was incredible, not just in quantity, but also in quality.

Losing the Management Crutches

The intern I chose was smart, talented, and fun — all the things I want in a coworker. And I was nervous she would leave. So every day, I thought to myself, “Am I doing everything I can to keep her? Am I teaching her enough? Is she getting enough out of this job?”

People aren’t managers because they have the title. They’re managers because they make the people they lead feel good about themselves and what they’re doing. I knew this before, from books, but I really learned it with my unpaid intern.

Most managers have a title and pay their employees. These are management crutches. If you want to be a really good manager, ignore those formalities and make people believe that they’re getting something even more important out of the manager/employee deal; that way, you’ll help them to grow personally.

Six Ways for Everyone to Win

Each person is at your company for a reason, and believe me, it’s not for the gold watch at the end of 40 years of service. They want to get something from your company so that they can grow personally and professionally.

Find out what they want to get, because if you’re helping them to get it, they’ll want to do the work you need them to do. People like to help each other.

Otherwise, they’ll do the work to get paid, but they won’t do it well. And managers who have people underperforming are not really managers — they’re figureheads, and people aren’t doing work for them.

A real manager gives employees what they need so that the employees deliver what the manager needs. Here are six ways to make that happen.

  1. Manage people first, do your own work second.Your job is to make sure the people on your team perform well. They can’t do that if you’re not managing them, so most of your day will be spent helping them to develop their skills.Your own work is something that comes after you’ve taken care of everyone else. This means you have to get very fast at doing your own work so that you can be available when direct reports need you.
  2. Delegate your best work.A great way to make more time to help people grow is to delegate your own work. But don’t delegate your grunt work — who wants to do that? Delegate your best stuff and the person you give it to will feel really lucky to be getting more work to do. You get more time no matter which kind of work you delegate, so you might as well be popular.
  3. Help people get recognized.You have more access to the world outside your team than the people reporting to you do. Use that access to make sure people know the strengths of your various team members.If you help people get recognition, they’ll be more likely to pick up a mentor. And while a boss is not always the best mentor, they can certainly help locate a mentor, and someone with mentor will stay longer and care more about work.
  4. Make projects relevant to people, not companies.If you’re giving a new assignment to a team member, don’t focus on what it will do for you, or the company. Focus on how it will help that person to grow in ways she’s hoping to grow. Show her the skills she’ll develop on this project and how they’ll change her.If you can’t do this, the only way to get her to care about the project is to offer other means for personal growth in exchange for her effort on the project. It’s not enough to say how something helps the company — it has to help the employee as well.
  5. Align yourself with your boss.People are much more likely to follow someone who seems to have support from the rest of the organization. You look like you can do more for your team if you have good relationships with people higher up.If you don’t look well-connected in the organization, people won’t work as hard for you because they don’t think you’ll be able to meet their needs.
  6. Work reasonable hours.If you work all the time, you look like you don’t have a grip on your workload and maybe even a little imbalanced. This doesn’t inspire confidence.It’s fine for high-profile people who have built up trust. But in general, the hardest worker looks the most scared. Otherwise, why would that person have to work so much harder than everyone else? Why wouldn’t they want to go home and be with family and friends?

Getting the Right Answer

The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.

Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?” And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.”

 

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New video blogger for Brazen Careerist: Bruce Tulgan

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I know, I know, I spent a whole post ranting about how almost everyone should not be video blogging. So it’s surprising to hear that I’m launching Bruce’s video blog here, right?

The reason I love Bruce’s video blog is that he is a great speaker, and he has great ideas, and he gets them out really fast, which is important because I don’t have a lot of patience to watch video online.

The first time I heard of Bruce was when he published the book, Managing Generation X. He was the first person to say, Hey, we’re not like the baby boomers. We’re not going to be able to work with you if you don’t start treating us differently. I was so excited to buy his book. So excited that someone had identified what I was feeling.

Bruce still has a great sense about what is coming next in the work world, and his forthcoming book, It's Okay to Be the Boss, is about management. Specifically, how to be a competent manager in the new workplace. Bruce’s bottom line is that management isn’t just a title, it’s an obligation you have to the people who report to you.

He focuses on how to be a good manager when the most junior employee in the company has no problem asking for Thursdays off to go to karate class. He gives tips on what to do when you become the manager of your friend. And he shows everyone, even non-managers, how to tell your boss how to manage you more effectively.

So, here’s the first installment of what I expect will become a regular feature on Brazen Careerist. Let me know what you think:

[MEDIA=9]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

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How to sidestep office hierarchy to get the job you want

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A lot of you know you’d like to be doing something more significant for your company, but no one is giving you the chance. This is your wake up call. You don’t need to wait for someone to bestow a title on you — you can take on a bigger role right now.

The key to taking on a bigger role is to have your current job under control. If you can’t handle your current job and another one, then you have to wait until you can change jobs. But if you get great at time management then you can do your current job and start doing another one without waiting for an invitation to climb up a rung on the corporate ladder.

Once you’re ready to take on other, more interesting work, you can use this three-step process to sidestep hierarchy.

1. Find a problem area in the company that no one is dealing with.
When I was in charge of online marketing at a software company. I knew that I wanted broader, operational experience, but it wasn’t part of my job description. So I got my marketing workload under control and then looked around for a trouble spot in the organization that no one was paying attention to.

I found tech support. The people were poorly trained, it was a huge cost center, and the company was growing at a rate that meant this problem would increase by 300% over the next year.

2. Come up with a solution you think you can execute.
I wrote a report that showed the problem and I outlined a detailed solution, with a timeline. I had no idea how to manage tech support. I outlined the solution by listing best practices that I got out of a management textbook, and my schedule was as broad as possible.

My boss was happy to give me responsibility for tech support because no other managers wanted it and he didn’t have budget to hire a new manager. But he didn’t change my title. He just said, “Okay, you can do that. Thanks.” No formal announcement.

3. Convince a team to help you.
I gathered up the three tech support people and explained to them that I understood their problems – being overworked, having no supplies, having constantly breaking products to support, etc. I told them I would help them fix these problems. They liked that, so they got on board to help me.

Then, before they could start doubting my ability to manage tech support, I asked each of them what they wanted from their job. Each had different answers. One wanted more money to support his daughter, one wanted management experience, one wanted less stress on the job. I made a plan to show how each of them could meet those goals.

The outcome: By the end of six months, I had done such a good job turning around tech support, that my boss gave me seed money to start my own company.

This last part is very important. When you are looking around your company for something new to do, don’t look for the perfect, dream job. Look for a job that will let you grow and show people how talented you are. This is the kind of situation that leads to huge opportunity.

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My study of the six-figure pom-pom girl

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Most of my girlfriends who make more than $100K a year were cheerleaders in school. We are from all over the United States. We are from all different types of companies. Only a few of us can do the splits. Yet we all bounced in short skirts and cheered for boys.

I chalked this up to coincidence until I conducted further studies:

Study #1 The education study
I was never the kid who got A’s. I was the kid who developed arcane strategies to pass class. An example: For my high school junior thesis — which was an amazing (for a high school junior) 15 pages — I leveraged my debate-team evidence on torture weapons in Somalia to compose a paper on ethics, which was not particularly well written but was well received because of the perceived time spent researching.

After hiding my academic mediocrity for years, I was gathering bios for a business plan when I realized that I was surrounded by business geniuses who had been mediocre students. I removed everyone’s education credentials from the plan — even those for the guy who was very high up in a prominent worldwide company.

Conclusion: Success in business and success in school are not linked and do not require the same skills.

Study #2 The personality study
When I worked in software marketing my company had a training day. The whole company piled into a hotel that was too fancy for an all-company meeting unless there was something bad coming.

The CEO announced that one of the most common downfalls of fast-growing companies was poor communication. He told us that the corporate psychologist on stage with him would make sure our company did not have this problem.

Then the psychologist gave us all personality tests.

We circled words. We filled in boxes. We tried not to look at the page of the person next to us when the person next to us might notice.

We graded ourselves because the psychologist promised, “There are no wrong answers. We’re finding out who we are so we can communicate that to our teammates.”

I glanced at the CEO to make sure that given the choice of perfection or power, he also chose power: I didn’t want to admit to power mongering if the other power mongers would not.

The results, surprisingly, were not surprising. Once we understood the basics, everything fell into place. The psychologist told us that people are motivated by one of four areas:

1. Power and achievements
2. Friendships and other relationships
3. Having fun
4. Keeping peace and finding truth

Conclusion: All senior managers at our company were motivated by power and achievements — except the VP for sales, who was motivated by relationships.

Cheerleader conclusion
After analyzing these two in-depth studies, I have concluded that while a position on the dean’s list does not necessarily signal a good business career ahead, a position on the cheerleading squad does.

A girl who joins the cheerleading squad is a performer, a leader, and has a nose for where the power is. In high school, money is not the issue — boys are. And girls on the cheerleading squad get more of this currency than girls on the dean’s list.

So when your daughter wants to be a cheerleader, discourage it, of course. For all the same reasons that my friends and I do not put pictures of ourselves as cheerleaders on our desks at work.

But Peggy Orenstein writes, in her New York Times article What’s Wrong with Cinderella?, that there is no discouraging girls from wanting to be princesses. So I think there is probably no discouraging girls from wanting to be cheerleaders, either. In that case, the good news is that the cheerleader thing is a sign of good things to come.

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The sales pitch is dead; here’s a new way to sell

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What do you do with your ideas? How do you get them traction? It used to be you made a sales pitch – to venture capitalists, to customers, to your boss.

But today young people are deconstructing the sales pitch – paring it down to its core information and parodying the BS that surrounds it.

The nail in the coffin of spin might have been last Tuesday, when Google purchased You Tube, and the twentysomething founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, made a home video to announce one of the most significant corporate acquisitions of the year to consumers.

The video starts out with the two of them talking about the benefits to the consumer – lines that may or may not have been scripted and sound a lot like spin. But then Hurley says of YouTube and Google, “Two kings have gotten together.” He appears to realize he has lost himself in generic salespeak, and he laughs.

Then someone says, “Just keep going.”

So he does. He makes a Burger King joke.

Among young people, there is a general dislike for the classic idea of sales. “Our company is not a sales-based organization,” says Siamak Taghaddos of GotVMail, a virtual phone service for small business. “Not in
the typical sense. We educate people. I’m a firm believer in letting someone make their own decision.”

Sales spin only works if you have a monopoly on the real information. In an era where information rules and everyone can get it whenever they want, there are scant opportunities to credibly slant the truth. Instead, you
just have to put it out there and hope it works.

Spin doctors on sales teams are out, and authentic communication is in. This is why many companies do not have a sales button on their web site, but they do have a blog. The blog is a way of getting out information in an authentic, efficient way, which is the best path to acceptance.

The power of authenticity for the new generation cannot be overstated. Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Computer evangelist and founder of Garage Technology Ventures, is a notable voice of authenticity on his blog, Signal Without Noise.

Most people with Kawasaki’s experience rely on their authority — the power of their reputation — to push through their ideas. Kawasaki, however, is not afraid to rely on authenticity — a dedication to providing genuine and useful information that has value to his audience.

As a blogger he initiates conversations with his readers rather than issue one-way declarations. His daily posts reflect an understanding that his resume is not as important as the power of the information he provides right now. The tacit agreement is paying off: in the pool of millions of blogs, his is one of the 50 most popular.

So what do you do to both act on your idea, and then be able to convey it effectively, with authenticity? Here are six things to consider.

1. Jettison the stupid stuff.
“Ninety percent of selling an idea is having a good idea,” says Kawasaki. “People think that the difficulty is marketing and sales. But if you have a good idea then you can really screw up in marketing and sales” and still succeed. So stop focusing on how you are going to pitch, and come up with the ideas that pitch themselves by
virtue of their genius.

2. Become the anti-salesman and slip under the radar.
One of the common complaints young people have about working in big companies is that no one listens to their ideas. Outside a company, entrepreneurs have a good idea and move on it. But inside a company there are customs and guidelines for starting new products. Kawasaki says, “Being an entrepreneur and an ‘intrapraneur’ are more similar than different. The key for an intrapraneur is not trying to get permission.” He concedes that you
will have to step on peoples’ toes, but you should do it only after you have a version of the product ready to go.

3. Start a conversation instead of a canned speech.
People are looking for information and have little tolerance for fluff. So if you want someone to believe in what you’re doing, be a good on your feet. “It comes down to being able to handle questions quickly and well,” says
Brian Wiegand, CEO of Jellyfish, a shopping search engine.

Because the Internet turns the idea of authority on it’s head, people want to contribute to a good idea instead of being handed a good idea. So when you want your idea to have traction, “let people add their ideas to your
own so they like the idea more,” says Wiegand.

4. Find people who need you.
Kim Ricketts creates book events at corporations. Like most good ideas, bringing authors to companies fills a need – in this case to give employees the chance to hear new thinkers. Ricketts also fills a void for publishers, who are looking for new ways to sell books. Her events are a great example of how good ideas gain traction quickly, with little or no marketing, because they answer a customer’s problem.

5. Focus on the information.
Often, an in-person sales pitch to a young person is like an IM message blinking on-screen to a baby boomer: Unwanted interruption of information processing.

If you’ve been selling for decades, tone it down, because you sound desperate to a new generation, and also a little dishonest. If you really have a good product, the facts will speak for themselves.

And pay heed to people such as David Hauser, CTO of GotVMail: “I don’t want to be told what to buy. I can research online myself and make the decision on my own.”

6. Be your true self.
Taghaddos says you should worry as much about yourself as your product. “Be authentic: Lay a foundation for a company and yourself. If you are how you want people to perceive you, then people will like you and they’ll buy your product. They’ll do it without any pressure.”

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Most misunderstood aspect of delegating at work

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On my last post, where the comments are especially good, Diana wrote that delegating has always been hard for her and she asked how a manager can overcome the following problem: “If the people I was managing didn’t know what I was doing that was more important than what I was delegating for them to do, they would get fussy and say (amongst each other) that I was a bad manager because I never did anything myself, I just pawned things off on them.”

This is a great opening to talk about one of the most misunderstood parts of delegating: You should delegate your most important work and keep the crappiest work for yourself. This way the people you delegate to will love what they are doing, and they will appreciate how much trust you have in them. You should do the crappy work yourself because it is so hard to lead people effectively if you are giving them crap to do.

If you are worried that they won’t do a good job on the important stuff, then coach them. Management does not mean getting the crap work off your plate to make time for important work. It means doing the crap work and doing a lot of coaching, and, if you’re really good, making time to take on projects to expand your own skills.

As a manager you always have to think about things from your team’s perspective. Three things to remember:

1. The people you supervise will think you “do nothing” if you do none of the crap work.

2. “Important work” means that it helps someone meet their own goals. So you should delegate to people not based on what is important to you, but what is important to them.

3. The number-one factor in job happiness for young people is training. If they think they’re learning a lot on the job, they’ll like the job. You need to constantly coach these employees and teach them new skills and ideas. If you don’t, you won’t be able to lead them.

So forget delegating the unimportant stuff. Just do it yourself. But ask yourself, if it’s so unimportant, why is anyone doing it?

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How to run a meeting

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There are lots of rules for running a good meeting — always have an agenda, start on time, make sure no one is hungry. But this rule is more important than all others: Be a cheerleader for your objectives. When you run a meeting you have an objective and you are trying to convince everyone else to help you get there.

Here is a list of five types of meetings and how to run them.

1. The update-on-what-I’m-doing meeting
To people who are not used to running meetings all day, it’s easy to mistake a meeting for something that is purely informational. Don’t do that. You will be poorly prepared and you will look bad. After all, why give an update on what you’re doing without making people understand the value of what you’re doing? Meetings are about conveying value.

2. The get-on-the-same-page-as-me meeting
If everyone is not on the same page, it’s your fault because you’re the leader. Deal with nay sayers one-on-one, before the meeting, not in the meeting. Why gather everyone in a room to convince only a few of them to change their minds and get on your page? You don’t need a meeting for that. Each person has different issues to address, and you can’t do that in a group without offending the offender and boring everyone else.

3. The we-have-some-stragglers meeting
Let’s think about a project that is not on track. For one thing, it’s probably because only some people are behind, but not all. This is a management problem, not a group problem. To get specific people back on track, meet each straggler before the big meeting, and help them to change how they’re working. You need to understand why they’re behind and help the shift their priorities and/or work practices. Then you hold the meeting to let everyone know that the project is back on track because you have commitment from people who need to change how they’re working.

4. The no-one-is-making-this-a-priority meeting
Many teams of messed up projects are a bunch of people who don’t report directly to the team leader. But leading with no authority can actually be a path to success if it’s done right. If the leader has no authority to make the messed-up project a high priority, the way to solve this problem is not to call a meeting. You solve the problem with team members individually. Find out what their goals are and figure out how to align this project with their goals so they are excited to meet them. The big meeting is a celebration of your success at these one-on-one meetings. It’s to show everyone that they’re all committed to the team.

5. The let’s-hear-some-ideas meeting
Just because you write brainstorm on the agenda doesn’t mean people will do it. You need to make them want to. They need to feel that you will listen, that their ideas matter, that people in the meeting will be respectful.

Which brings me to the reason you have an agenda. You need to control the parameters of the meeting so that you meet your objective. The best meeting shows everyone how well the team is working, how meaningful the project is, how happy you are to be able to work with everyone. A meeting is a way to make people love working with you. Because that’s the way you will meet your objectives, whatever they are.

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Start managing better or else

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What’s the problem with most managers? They are so involved in getting their own tasks done that they fail to manage. Bruce Tulgan writes that undermanagement is an epidemic, and Adecco reports that half of American workers think their managers don’t take performance reviews seriously.

Continue this behavior at your own risk. The Financial Times (subscription) says:

“Generation Y grew up rating peers’ physical attributes, pop culture creations, teachers’ style and grading practices, and products. No surprise, then, that there are websites drawing decent traffic for people to rate their bosses, their clients, and their customers. The tone of online commentary is often racy and retaliatory.”

I was not able to find any of these sites. Leave it to the Financial Times to tease us with this information and provide no links. But still, you’d better Google your name right now, just to make sure your underlings haven’t started rating (or berating) you.

Hat tip: James in the UK

Battle cry against power tripping

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Here’s a new word for the workplace: Rankism. File it in your brain next to racism and sexism. And brace yourself for a big change at the office, because rankism is another kind of discrimination we should not tolerate.

What’s rankism, or rankist behavior? It is hiring an intern and ignoring her all summer. Or pointlessly yelling at the receptionist about a manager who is late. Or a professor taking credit for a graduate student’s research. All these are examples of people who think they can treat someone disrespectfully because of their lower rank. The Devil Wears Prada has tons of juicy examples — as well as snappy fashion and a happy ending to make the story acceptable.

But rankist behavior is never acceptable. And Robert Fuller, the man who came up with the word rankism, is on a mission to end it. His big idea is that people have a right to be treated with dignity no matter where they are in the pecking order. He’s part of what’s become known as the “dignitarian movement.” (He’s written two books on this topic: Somebodies and Nobodies and All Rise.)

Wondering if you’re at a job where you’re treated with dignity? You need to receive recognition, humane treatment and a living wage.

If your job doesn’t qualify, you need to speak up, which is hard to do, but having a word to identify the problem is half the battle. “Vocabulary changes thing,” says Fuller. “The Feminine Mystique referred to the ‘problem without a name.’ Sexism was not a word until five years after that book came out. Once the word sexism was available women had a weapon to make demands.”

Fuller wants you to take cues from the success of that movement. Say, “Hey, that’s rankest,” the same way you’d say, “That’s sexist.” But don’t yell: “Having the words rankist and rankism will give workers in every line of action a battle cry. They won’t scream at the top of their lungs. They will mention it calmly and cause the person on top to look at their actions.”

Here are five more steps you can take to combat rankism in your own work life:

1. Get a good read on potential managers.
Management sets the tone of respect or disrespect at work. So sniff out offenders before taking the job. Vanessa Carney works at Let’s Dish, a food preparation company. “The management team here is genuine,” says Carney, “The people who run this company have a good attitude and it trickles down.”

Carney was especially impressed when the owner of the business sat down with her after a few months to find out what, exactly, she wanted to do in her career.

2. Let people know that rankism matters.
Probably those behaving this way are not even conscious that they’re doing it. In one study about harassment, most people who were disrespectful were not aware of it–they thought they were making jokes at the time.

“They are misguided comedians,” says study author Catherine Hill, director of research at American Association of University Women. She also found that people respond to what they perceive as cultural norms. So speak up when you see it, even if you are not on either side of the exchange.

3. Don’t accept rationales for rankism.
Common refrains are “This is the only way the business can work,” (to justify long and unpredictable hours), or “I got through this so you can too,” (to justify hazing-like practices).

Joanna Vaillant is a management consultant — a position known for difficult work conditions. But she did research to find a consulting company that respects its employees: Boston Consulting Group. She recommends talking to people who work in the company about the company. “In business school I talked to classmates who worked at different companies,” says Vaillant. And she chose well. She recently got married and received assignments that would allow her time and headspace to prepare for that big day.

4. Take a bad job.
Working at a low-level job is not just a headache, it’s an integral part of your personal development. A big barrier to fighting racism and sexism is that if you are white you don’t know what it’s like to be black, and if you are male you don’t know what it’s like to be female.

But everyone can work in a low-level job — especially in the service industry where the exposure to rankest behavior from customers is huge.

5. Consider leaving.
One of the scariest things about demanding change at the workplace is the prospect of getting fired. But young people today — those invariably filling up the entry-level positions — switch jobs often. So the risk of offending your current boss for speaking out against rankism does not seem that big a deal.

The workplace is ripe for eradicating rankism. The youngest workers are optimists about their ability to change the world and passionate about valuing diversity. Also, in poll after poll, young people report less interest in money and more interest in the quality of work and the quality of life work affords. So it makes sense that now is the time for the dignitarian movement, and we should all jump on board.

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