Leader Feeder Blog | Training & Development Blog

Employees who feel entitled

What do you do with an employee who thinks she deserves a raise or a promotion but there is one thing holding her back – her attitude? Frequently the entitled employee is in a state of denial. Any attempt to confront and correct the attitude is met with contempt. In her own mind, she thinks she is untouchable.

An attitude of entitlement can form when employees become conditioned to think that they will receive positive reinforcements without having to earn it through their performance. If their current manager or a series of previous managers have been reluctant to confront the problem, the employee may feel entitled or justified in their behavior.

From the Employee’s Perspective

The entitled employee in his own mind often sees the world from a different perspective. He may think everyone around him (including his manager) as less competent than he is. He thinks that if it wasn’t for him, the whole place would fall apart. And he feels that it is his duty to point out the flaws of others.

An attitude of superiority may have been with them since the individual entered the workforce or it may have been cultivated from working for a manager who reinforced that behavior. The employee may have felt overlooked when they didn’t get a promotion or job opening that was posted.

A victim mentality only serves to perpetuate the employee’s perception that the world is against her. A low sense of self-esteem is an underlying cause and makes the employee fragile when confronted. It isn’t unusual for this employee to break down emotionally when confronted by their manager which causes many managers to avoid the subject.

The good news is that there is hope. This mindset can be turned around. It requires action from the manager.

Attitude is a Performance Problem

Managers are sometimes reluctant to confront an attitude problem with the same vigor as other performance issues. One employee’s negativity can poison the productivity of the workgroup.

Because the manager doesn’t necessarily have to be around the negative employee it can be easy to avoid the person. Unfortunately co-workers do not have the same opportunity to retreat. Therefore unabated, the culture of the workgroup becomes poisoned.

Putting the Ideas into Action

Prevent an attitude of entitlement to establish itself by reinforcing desired results AND behavior.
Provide coaching as soon as possible when an attitude issue becomes apparent.
If coaching fails to improve the situation consider using progressive discipline to apply negative consequences.
If attitude improves, provide positive feedback and encouragement.
If attitude tends to relapse after a few weeks or months, then deal with that pattern in a coaching or correcting conversation.

Caught in the Chaos?

A manager or supervisor’s job should be easier. After all, as long as you have the right people, the right materials, the right information and the right equipment, everything goes smoothly. For most of us this fairy tale scenario only happens on occasion. The rest of the time we are scrambling because one or two of the success elements is missing.

In fact it would be easy to simply react to whatever happens and never look past the immediate requirements.

Unfortunately this also means that the supervisor or manager never feels a sense that they are winning or moving the organization forward. And the employees never see a picture of where their leader is trying to take them.

Sports psychologists who work with elite athletes use a powerful technique that might help you in your leadership role.

The athlete will be asked to envision success – sinking the winning putt at the Masters or winning the Grand Slam of Tennis or hoisting the MVP trophy at the World Series. Then the sports psychologist will ask the high-potential athlete to imagine that they are looking back from that triumphant moment to today. They are asked to see what the steps would have been in order to achieve that ultimate success. Inevitably they will have needed good coaches, personal discipline, opportunities to compete and a track record of success.

In a similar way the supervisor or manager can imagine their department, division or company as he or she would like it to be. Crystallizing that vivid picture can help the manager look beyond todays hassles and frustration and towards a more exciting and powerful future.

Getting out of reaction mode and setting a powerful vision for yourself and your team will pay big dividends in terms of results, personal satisfaction and employee engagement.

Putting it into action

List all of the hassles and frustrations you encounter on a regular basis.
Describe your department in the future where those hassles have melted away and your vision has been achieved.
Think about the steps that would need to be taken to get there.
Keep that picture in your mind as you move forward.
Even when you find yourself going in circles because of today’s circumstances, realize that your vision is becoming closer to being a reality.
Watch how your team responds to your vision and helps you achieve it.
Feel the sense of satisfaction that comes from a job well done.

Teamwork requires conflict

If the title of this article makes you scratch your head, consider for a few minutes the concept that a strong team with a high degree of trust requires its members to challenge one another.

Ian Thomas, a professional speaker from South Africa was using the illustration of a pride of lions and the lessons we could learn in terms of our workplace teams.

A few observations:

Studies show that as little as 5% of employees actually understand the goals they are supposed to pursue. There is a pretty good chance then that your team is not pulling in the same direction.
Strong teams require strong individuals. Thomas suggests that every member of a lion pride has a job to do – some protect territory, some chase prey towards other members who go in for the kill. If any one of the team members is weak it automatically causes other team members to mistrust them because they are not helping advance towards the objective.
The team must challenge one another in order to make absolutely sure that they trust one another to pursue the goal together.

The conflict comes when the team debates the goal, makes sure they understand it completely and are totally committed to achieving the goal. They also have to challenge one another to bring 100% of themselves to the pursuit of the goal.

By not challenging one another in a work team, it might at first appear that everything is ‘okay’ with the team. In reality a team that loses confidence in itself and what the goal is will also breed mistrust and ultimately performance will suffer.

Putting it into action

Instead of assuming the team understands the goal – clarify it, debate it and ensure complete understanding.
Challenge each member of the team to be the absolute best at what they do and make sure you hire people who can perform to your expectations.
Encourage conflict be having the team challenge one another to be the best they can be.

Misdirected by metrics?

You’ve likely heard the expression, “What get’s measured, gets managed.”

And yet, if you pay attention to the wrong metrics or measurements, it can distract both management and employees from desired behaviors.

Metrics provide management with the key information needed to make decisions and assess performance in the business. Paying attention to the wrong metrics or confusing people with too many metrics can cause undesirable actions that actually work against the very goals you are trying to reach in the business.

Consider lean manufacturing as an example. Achieving lean can be in contradiction with the typical ways you measure efficiency. Lean is about reducing waste and making product in lock-step with customer demand. Old metrics might encourage a production manager to run excess product in order to drive down unit cost when that product will end up in the warehouse tying up working capital. Instead you want the production manager to figure out how to run smaller and smaller batch sizes to avoid work-in-process inventory.

It can be confusing enough for employees to understand what is expected of them without adding to the confusion with measures that incentify them to do the opposite of what senior management really wants.

If you are measuring so many things that no one can figure out the really important metrics, it might be time to stop measuring certain elements.

If there is no time to manage all the things you measure, why measure them?

Putting it Into Action

Based on where you are trying to take your organization, decide which metrics will provide the feedback you need to make better decisions.
Consider the value of some measurements – what does it cost to track that information and what decisions get made from it?
Consider the unintended consequences that might be created by paying attention to certain metrics.

Hiding behind your keyboard?

For all the productivity improvements technology has brought us, there is a dark side and it is impacting employee engagement and management effectiveness.

I’m talking about the tendency to send emails instead of going and talking to people.

In extreme cases it might even be to the person in the office or cubical next door.

With technology, it has become easy to avoid talking to people. Even cell phone providers are noticing that subscribers aren’t using many voice minutes, preferring instead to send texts and emails. For a manager, the use of technology can create an illusion of productivity and leave behind a wake of destruction in terms of engagement and less than stellar results.

Email isn’t a problem when dealing with facts and figures. It is a problem when dealing with conflict, persuasion and criticism. You may have been on the receiving end of a caustic email, or perhaps caught in the cross fire between two colleagues trying to out do one another with criticism. Hopefully you haven’t been the sender of this type of communication.

One of the exercises in our front line leadership course is reflecting on a communication situation in which you feel uncomfortable. Some of the most frequent responses:

Delivering bad news
Dealing with authority figures
Communicating with negative people

The discomfort leads to avoidance and makes it easier to type out an email instead of doing the right thing – going to talk to the person. Yes it takes longer and it could get a little messy and yet it is the only way to achieve the results you are looking for.

Putting it Into Action

When you are avoiding a conversation, stop yourself from sending the email and go talk to the person.
Before you send criticism by email and copy everyone in the organization – stop and go talk to the person.
Before you hit ‘reply to all’ and send back a zinger to someone who maligned you, stop and go talk to the person.

Need help to be able to have those uncomfortable conversations with people – come take our courses…

What do you think? Comment on this article below

Answer the ‘Why?’

I’m sure I used to drive my mom and dad a little crazy as a child because I used to ask “Why?” so often. It turns out that kids aren’t the only ones who want to know why. Employees are more likely to be engaged when they are informed and understand the reason you ask them to do something.

Any parent has experienced the exasperation of a child who asks “why” incessantly. In frustration, the response may eventually become, “because I said so!”

As it turns out employees also want to know why – they just don’t always ask out loud. Instead of asking why, they simply don’t do what you want. This makes the leader frustrated and impacts results.

Most people resist being told what to do without a good reason. Some leaders might mistakenly think that employees should just do what they are told. Research shows that giving employees a reason will increase their willingness to do what you want.

There is a bigger reason to share the reason with your employees – it helps them connect their work to the overall purpose of your organization. Without that connection it becomes easier for employees to tune out and simply go through the motions.

Employees have such a need to know what is going on they will make up their own information – its called gossip or the grapevine.

So fill in the blanks for them – explain why – and watch compliance and engagement increase.

What do you think? Comment on this article below.

Goldilocks leadership – not too tough, not too easy – just right

Just like in the children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the best managers know how to strike a balance between being too tough or too easy on employees.

The ‘too tough’ manager is mistakenly seen as an effective leader. Being ruthless might appear strong at first but when overplayed employees will become disengaged and demotivated. Autocratic leadership behavior is often justified because of crises, emergencies and constant firefighting. This can become a never-ending cycle.

The ‘too easy’ manager tries to keep everyone happy by setting low expectations and trying to be everyone’s friend. Employees lose respect and become stagnant which results in low motivation.

There are times when a manager should be tough and times to go a bit easy. The default mode is to challenge and empower employees to achieve top results in a supportive and encouraging way.

What do you think? Comment on this article by clicking below.

New Public Course Dates Announced!

Front Line Leadership – a two-day course for supervisors, team leaders, lead hands and managers. Especially good for leaders promoted from within. Nov 25/26, 2010 Cambridge, Ontario – Feb 3/4, 2011 Windsor, Ontario. Get the Outline

The Psychology of Persuasion and Influence – intriguing advanced communication skills for managers, executives, sales professionals. Learn how to get people to do what you want more willingly. Full-day, Jan 19th, London, Ontario. Register Here

The Canadian Association of Family Enterprise is hosting a session entitled “Maximizing Employee Performance in a Family Enterprise” Dec 9th, 2010 in London, Ontario – contact Tamelynda Lux southwesternontario@cafecanada.ca

Turnover at the top

One supervisor was counting up the number of plant managers he had seen come and go during the past five years. There were seven different people at the top, each with their own agenda.

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that employees might roll their eyes at yet another imperative change coming from a senior executive who might not be there in six to eighteen months.

While some resistance can be aggressive in nature, most resistance is passive. People pay lip service but don’t change their behavior.

If you are in a senior leadership position, and especially if there have been a few predecessors with grand visions, consider taking a different approach:

Pace reality – Instead of trying to convince everyone that this time will be different, acknowledge what they are thinking and suggest that despite their skepticism they need to help the organization move forward.
Connect the Dots – Build on what has been done before instead of throwing it all away. Employees don’t want to see that their past efforts are deemed worthless by the new leader. This also helps counter ‘flavor of the month’ by showing the link between various initiatives.
Give credit to the people – As a leader, make sure that the employees and front line leaders get the credit for the change they create.

If you are lower in the organization, try to moderate your level of cynicism and give the new boss a chance to make a difference. Recognize the link between various initiatives over the years. Find ways to make things work instead of excuses and reasons it won’t work.

You are invited to comment on this article.

Leaders need to clarify what employees are trying to say

Even when the leader is trained to be a more effective communicator, it is quite possible that the leader’s frustration with employees might derail any improvement in communication skills. Without training everyone on how to be a better communicator, the leader can take some steps to help ensure that employees get their point across. We’ll explore more on that below.

Do you have front line team leaders, lead hands and supervisor who have been promoted from within and have a need for improved leadership skills? We have just set some November dates for Front Line Leadership in Cambridge, Ontario. The intriguing Psychology of Persuasion and Influence workshop has been scheduled in London, Ontario.

Clarifying what employees are trying to say

When we train front line supervisors, managers and team leaders to be more effective communicators, we also train them to clarify what employees are trying to tell them.

Even the most constructive leader can become frustrated when an employee chooses the wrong words, tone, timing and place.

To help, let’s break down the communication steps, where things can go wrong and how to prevent it from happening.

Intent – What is the message you are trying to convey? What do you want the other person to think or do as a result of your communication? Once the supervisor becomes better at this it is still possible that an employee might not have clarified their intent before they begin speaking. Keep an open mind to ‘hear’ what the employee is trying to tell you.

Encode – Once you know what you are trying to accomplish, you have to encode your message with words, tone and body language. Even when the leader begins to choose better words, reduce sarcasm and become more confident, the employees might still choose inappropriate words or use lots of sarcasm. The leader needs to listen with a filter to avoid being provoked with a response that is inappropriate.

Transmit – The physical act of transmitting your message can be impacted by timing, a noisy environment and whether other people are around. When the leader becomes better at choosing the right time and place to deliver the message so that the employee is not embarrassed, it is still possible for the employee to choose the wrong time and place when expressing their point of view. The leader needs to once again coach the employee to be more sensitive to timing and location while at the same time remaining open minded even when the employee uses poor judgement.

Decode – When hearing the message, the receiver’s brain has to decode the message. For the leader this means better listening skills. To help employees, the leader must be prepared to repeat key messages and choose different methods. It also important for the leader to have patience with employees who might jump to the wrong conclusion.

Interpret – This final step in the communication process is in the mind of the receiver. Better listening and clarifying skills will help prevent the wrong assumptions from being made. With employees it will be necessary to clarify what they are saying to make sure the leader understands the message.

Communication continues to be a challenge for many organizations. It is hard work to be aware of not only your own communication skills but also helping your employees become better at communicating.

You are invited to comment on this article.

What about the followers?

Over a coffee with a colleague, she shared with me an interesting trend emerging in followership. For decades, most training and development has been focused on executives, managers and front line supervisors with the justification that improvements made at those higher levels will be reflected in the behavior and results of the staff at the front line. And while there is some validity to that trickle-down strategy, companies are waking up to the idea of redirecting their training efforts to the employees at the front line who can have an immediate impact on results. We’ll explore more on that below.

And we have just set some November dates for Front Line Leadership in Cambridge, Ontario and The Psychology of Persuasion and Influence in London, Ontario.

Now is your opportunity to download your complimentary copy of the What Great Supervisors Know ebook. Simply click on the link, enter your email address, update your profile and you will get the link for the book. The pocket-sized book is a terrific reference for supervisors and team leaders. After reviewing the ebook version, consider buying copies for your front line leadership team.

The challenge with focusing training and development only at the leadership level is that it relies on the trickle-down approach. The goal is to impact the leaders who then in turn take their new skills and impact employees at the front line.

The challenge is that many of these new approaches and techniques become watered down and get lost in translation between what leaders heard and what they are prepared to apply back on the job.

One forward-looking company took the bold step of shutting down production for an entire week in order to put everyone in the company through one week of intensive training on continuous improvement, lean and problem solving techniques. You might be agast to think about shutting down for a week – after all you would be losing 2% of your production.

The company rationalized the decision by equating it to a plant shut down to maintain and upgrade equipment. Instead of upgrading equipment, they upgraded the people.

The president of the company said he was completely astounded by the results. The very next week after the training, employees were immediately putting their new skills to work, making changes to work flow in order to reduce waste and improve throughput. Many employees commented that they didn’t know they had permission to make changes and improvements. Financially, the company was more profitable after the training and morale and attitude shot upward as well.

Even if you can’t quite buy into the idea of shutting down production for a week, consider running a little experiment. Set up a pilot group where you bring employees in and train them on many of the same concepts you would train supervisors and managers. This could include identifying opportunities for improvement, communication, conflict, team building and problem solving. Then set them loose and see the kind of impact they have on your organization.

Leaders will continue to require development to help them in their role. After all, even the most enlightened employees will become frustrated if their manager doesn’t encourage them to make improvements. If you have gone the leadership route in the past and want to take it to another level, consider opening up the training to your front line staff.