Navigating Organizational Politics - Do You or Don't You?

I am back to publishing on Mind the Gap after a brief hiatus to get my other blog, My Military Spouse Career, up and running.

This week, I am focused on organizational politics. I have had multiple conversations over the last few weeks with people who have made comments like, "My performance should speak for itself." Or "I don't see why I should have to 'sell' the work that my department does." They didn't want to "play the game" of organizational politics. I want to share a model that has helped me, and hopefully the individuals I shared it with, to look at organizational politics through a different lens.

I learned the "foxy-donkey" model while in the UK. Simon Baddeley and Kim James outlined the model in a 1987 article in Management Education and Development. The model includes two dimensions, reading and carrying.

The 'reading' dimension is how you understand your external world, including your ability to read various characteristics of an organization: its decision processes; its overt and covert agendas; the location and bases of power inside and outside the organization; and the organizational culture and its style. It also includes the ability to read one's own power bases and abilities to exercise influence. The scale for this dimension moves from political unawareness at one end to political awareness at the other.

The other dimension focuses on integrity at one end of the spectrum and psychological game-playing at the other end, characterized by self-centered behavior.

When you combine these two dimensions, you end up with four types:

• Owls: individuals who demonstrate wise behavior because they are politically aware while maintaining integrity
• Sheep: individuals who demonstrate innocent behavior because they operate with integrity but are politically unaware
• Foxes: individuals who demonstrate clever behavior because they are politically aware but are self-centered
• Donkeys: individuals who demonstrate inept behavior because they are self-centered and politically unaware

We all demonstrate different behaviors at different times, but our focus should be on moving to wise behavior as often as possible. To start on this path, I recommend you spend time thinking about the following questions:

• What are the sources of your political power today? Knowledge? Relationships? Position?
• How are decisions made in your organization?
• What are the overt and covert agendas of individuals in your organization?
• Who has power inside and outside of your organization? What are the sources of their power? Knowledge? Relationships? Position?
• How would you describe your organization's culture and style?

I have worked with my share of foxes and donkeys over the years - people who do not operate with integrity, and unfortunately, I have not yet figured out a way to shift them away from their self-centered focus. All I can offer is my firm belief that operating from a place of integrity with political awareness ultimately enhances your contribution and your reputation far more than actions taken only to enhance your standing in the world.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this model. Please contact me via LinkedIn or at susansalomone[at]susansalomone[dot]com.
  

Pain-Free Performance Management: Monitoring Progress

In today's post, we'll cover how you can monitor progress to keep your team on course. Up until now, we've covered setting goals and creating action plans. Now it's time to execute! Your team members will start making progress towards their goals, and your role as the leader is to monitor their progress to make sure they end up achieving them on time.

As I covered in last week's post on action planning, some goals require frequent check-ins while others only require a couple along the way. I have been using a GPS to represent the leader's role in performance management, but in this area, you differ a bit. Unlike a GPS, which is always monitoring progress, you are only able to monitor progress periodically. You are only human after all!

I have found that the best way, by far, to monitor progress are regular one-to-ones with your team members. I have taught many programs on performance management and have heard leaders push back on this concept more times than I can count. They can't imagine how they will make time to meet regularly with their team members. My advice - try it! You will find that the number of interruptions from your team goes way down. Instead of just calling you, emailing you or popping into your office whenever they think of a question, they start keeping a list of things they will cover with you at their next one-to-one.

How often should you meet? Last week's post can help you here. If your team member is focused on work that she has done successfully many, many times (i.e., her daily commute), your check-ins can be infrequent - every 2 weeks or once a month. If the goal is being achieved in a new way or is a completely different goal, or the team member is new, more frequent check-ins will be needed - likely once a week.

If you've never done one-to-ones with your team members, or you have, but you're not sure you are doing them "right," here is a suggested agenda:

Welcome and confirm the purpose of the meeting

Ask for what has gone well on assigned projects since the last one-to-one

Ask for things that could have been done better on assigned projects since the last one-to-one

Ask about progress on professional development

Ask what the person plans to get done before the next one-to-one

Ask what help is needed from you or others (and make sure you follow up!)

As you might guess by the agenda, this conversation will be driven by your team member, not by you. If we continue with our travel analogy, your team member is driving the car, so s/he is best positioned to answer questions about how the journey is progressing. As an outside observer, you will also assess and have an opinion about progress, but letting your team members share their thoughts first gives you a lot more information about them. You have the opportunity to figure out their strengths and weaknesses, how they approach work, and their level of self-awareness for example. If you just jump in with your opinion first, you may never get the chance to assess these things.

Please note that I am not saying you should not offer your feedback; you just shouldn't offer it first. In addition to learning more about your team member, you can build your feedback onto their observations, which often makes feedback easier to take in.

Let's look at a sample discussion. You are having a one-to-one with Sarah who manages large projects for your company. When you ask her what has gone well, she identifies a client meeting where important decisions were made after getting all opinions on the table. You can give positive feedback by adding your observation that Sarah's ability to ask open questions, listen without judgment and reflect back what she heard were important to the success of the meeting. When you ask for something that did not go well, Sarah identifies a deliverable that was turned in late and notes that she had not followed up with the person until the day before it was due. This has happened a few times, so you have an opportunity to give developmental (sometimes called "negative") feedback to Sarah about this potentially becoming a pattern. You can then ask how she can operate differently to get better results and ask what help she needs from you, if any.

Next week, I'll talk more about using feedback to get performance back on track. I hope you have found some ideas you can implement this week that will help you in your role as a leader. If you have questions or feedback, please feel free to email me at susan.salomone@gmail.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Have a great week!

Pain-Free Performance Management: Action Planning

My last post focused on setting goals with your team members. Once these goals are set, your next step is to make sure your team member has an action plan to achieve each of his/her goals. Your involvement in creating these action plans will vary depending on the goals and your team members' experience in achieving each of them.

I like to compare creating action plans to recent changes in my commute to school and work. In 2013-2014, I had a regular route that I took to drop my older son at school, then my younger son at his school, and then my drive to the office. I drove this same route over and over, so much so that I could drive the route with my eyes closed (although I never did!).

In 2014-2015, a new store was going up on one of the main roads I took every day on my commute, and the traffic patterns changed completely. This made it difficult to predict when I would drop my sons at school and when I would get to work, so I had to keep experimenting with new routes until I found one that was more reliable. There were a lot of false starts, but I eventually found a way that was rarely disrupted by construction and that allowed me to drop the boys off on time and get to work on time as well. In fact, my new route worked so well that I still use it even though construction has ended!

Let's look at how this compares to your team members and their experience with achieving goals. There are three main situations they will face:

1) your team member has achieved the same goal in the same way in the past, i.e., my daily commute before construction
2) your team member has achieved the goal in the past but must do so very differently now, i.e., my daily commute with construction

3) your team member has never achieved this goal before, i.e., my first experience traveling overseas

In scenario 1, a quick early check-in with your team member is likely all she needs to make sure she has a plan, to agree milestones and deadlines, and to discuss what to do if there are problems. Because your team member has achieved this goal in the past, she will know how to adjust her plan for most problems and will just update you on progress periodically. She will also recognize when a problem is so significant that it may prevent her from reaching the goal and will know to escalate this and get your help. Make sure your team member knows that if this happens, you want her to bring the issue to you and that you will lend support. Too much support will likely be annoying (think micromanagement). Who wants someone to ride with you to work every day to make sure you get there okay?

For scenario 2, think about using new technology or processes at work. In this case, you want to make sure you meet with your team member in advance to review his action plan, to talk through what will be different and to make sure he is comfortable with the new way of doing things. If he needs training or additional support, you can arrange that early instead of letting him learn through trial and error (like I did with my commute!). You also want to make sure your plan includes regular progress reviews to stay on top of challenges. In this situation, your team member may appreciate you riding along, but you need to discuss with him to find out.

For the final scenario - achieving a goal that has not been achieved before - I think back to when I traveled overseas for the first time. I was in college and had the opportunity to spend my junior year in France (I know... you feel very sorry for me!). Since I had never traveled overseas before, I spent a lot of time talking to other people who had made the trip before me, and my university prepared me with checklists and training to make sure I had a clear plan of what I needed to do and in what order. Having never done this before, I didn't know what I didn't know, so I really needed to tap into others' experience to help me.

Similarly, when you assign a goal to a team member that she has never achieved, you need to provide a lot more hands-on support with action planning than in the previous two scenarios. When I traveled overseas for the first time, I would have loved to have someone who had made the trip before ride along. I didn't have that, but I had lots of guidance from those people in advance. Similarly, you need to connect your team member with others who have achieved the goal before, if possible, and make sure that you have a plan for regular check-ins on progress. You will likely spend a lot more time problem-solving with your team member and connecting her with resources to ensure she is successful in achieving this goal. Just like me on my first trip, she will want a lot more support in this situation. Eventually, with practice, these goals will become as familiar and easy to achieve as my new commute has become for me.

Please let me know if you have any questions about action planning. In my next post, I'll focus on how to monitor progress against goals on an ongoing basis.

Pain-Free Performance Management: Setting Goals

I kicked off a series on making performance management pain-free with last week's post. This week, I'll focus on the critical first step of performance management - agreeing on goals. Just like agreeing on a specific final destination ensures everyone ends up in the same place, collaborating with your team members on to create mutually agreeable goals ensures that they end up where you are expecting them to end up, reduces stress levels and can actually make getting to your destination a lot more fun.

I always talk about "agreeing" on goals because getting your team members' buy-in is critical. When your team members are committed to their goals, they have a much greater chance of being successful, and your life is much easier. If you've ever tried to get somewhere with a toddler who had no interest in getting to the same place you did, you'll know how challenging it can be to get someone who is not committed to the same goal as you to stay on track.

When agreeing on goals, there are five criteria you can use to increase your team members' chances for success - create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).

Specific

My favorite story about setting specific goals (not!) comes from a colleague with whom I taught performance management programs in the UK. While reviewing his performance for the year prior, he asked his boss what he needed to do to get to the next rating level during the upcoming year. His boss' response? "Be better." Essentially, his boss told him "I'll know you're there when you get there."

Just think about starting a trip saying we'll know we're there when we get there. You would have no idea how long it would take, what resources you would need, what direction to go... I don't know about you, but I wouldn't start a trip that way!

Use the following questions to help you craft specific goals:

• What: What does this person need to achieve?

• Why: What makes this goal important?

• How: Where and with whom will it be achieved? What are the conditions and/or constraints under which it will be achieved? 

Measurable

Think about what you and your team member will see, hear and/or feel when the goal has been achieved and then look at how you can measure one or more of these. Choose tangible metrics so that anyone evaluating your team member can see whether s/he has succeeded.

Generally, you should agree on metrics in advance, but as people's roles evolve and they have goals they have never achieved before, you will likely need to be more flexible. Think about trips you have taken over and over versus a trip to a brand new destination. You know how long the former takes and how much fuel you need, so it is easy to measure success. For a brand new goal, you can estimate what it will take and what success will look like, but just like taking a trip to a brand new destination, these will only be estimates and may change once you are on the way.

Achievable

Your team member has to believe that the goal you agree on is achievable. You do this by balancing the level of challenge with the level of support that you and others provide. I'll talk in a future post about what to do if you and team member have a fundamental difference of opinion about whether a goal is achievable or not.

When the goal is one the person has achieved before, s/he knows it is achievable and needs less support and guidance from you. If you agree on a very challenging goal, especially one your team member has never achieved before, s/he will need much more support from you and others. Without that support, s/he may not believe it's achievable and may not even try to achieve it. How many of you would start climbing Mount Everest with no advance planning, special equipment or help from others?

Relevant

This is where you tie the achievement of the goal to what matters to your team member - his/her personal values and goals, the team's mission, and the organization's mission. Employees who know how their individual goals affect the overall success of the organization are more engaged and more likely to persist even when times get tough. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." 

Time-Bound

Lastly, set a deadline for when the goal needs to be achieved. These deadlines are what get most of us moving. Again, be realistic about goals your team member has never tackled before. Use your best judgment about what is reasonable but be open to adjusting deadlines. When it's a familiar goal, you can be much more concrete about deadlines.

Personally, I love the process of sitting down with a blank slate for the year and creating a vision of what I will have achieved by the end of the year. Maybe I'm just a goal-setting geek, but setting goals inspires me. I hope these guidelines will help you inspire your team by creating a clear vision of success for each of them.

Pain-Free Performance Management

Most people, leaders included, hate annual evaluations, and we have recently seen a lot of organizations (GE, Deloitte, and Accenture for example) move away from an annual performance evaluation process to something much more nimble. Whether you use this approach or a more traditional annual approach, you can make performance management much less painful and much more effective by approaching it as if you are the GPS (global positioning system) for your employees.

Start by imagining you are taking a trip... You begin by telling your GPS where you want to go. You can provide a general location and end up close to, but not exactly, where you want to go, or you can provide a specific location and end up exactly where you planned.

Once you are on your way, the GPS constantly monitors your progress to make sure you are staying on track. The system continues guiding you towards your destination if you are on track; if you take a wrong turn, it gives fairly immediate feedback to help you get back on track as soon as possible. When you arrive, the system lets you know that you have succeeded and are at your destination.

Just as with a GPS, leaders significantly increase the likelihood that their team members will succeed by agreeing clear, specific, achievable goals. Vague goals make it difficult to know when the team member has succeeded and lead to disagreement, conflict, and even disengagement. Our team members think they have arrived at the destination only to find out that, from our perspective, they still have a way to go.

Once our team members have clear goals, we need to monitor their progress towards those goals, encourage them to stay on track as they make progress, and provide timely feedback if they are off track. "Make a U turn as soon as possible."

And just like a GPS, we need to recognize our team members' success when they achieve goals. When they succeed, we need to pause and recognize their success. "You have arrived at your destination."

Over the next few weeks, I'll provide more detail on each of these steps to help you on your journey to pain-free performance management. I hope you enjoy!

Improving Employee Behavior: Recreating the Playing Field

In my last post, I talked about the value of putting the chalk lines down on the playing field proactively. You may, unfortunately, find yourself in a situation where this has not been done, and now there are hardly any chalk lines left on the field. I have worked with leaders who have gotten into this situation in two ways.

In one scenario, a leader has allowed this to happen while s/he was in charge. One employee started going over the boundary line, erasing part of it. The leader did not step in right away to correct the behavior and re-draw the boundary line, so the individual continued. Others saw this happening, so some of them started going over the lines too and erasing them even more. If things have gotten really bad, the high performers (team members who would never go over the line because of their personal standards) have started taking their balls and "going home." They are either leaving the team or the organization all together. In another common scenario, a new leader comes in and finds that the team's departing leader allowed this to happen.

In either case, you need to embark on a project to change the team's culture - not for the faint of heart. The team did not get to this state overnight, and you will not change the culture with one meeting or one conversation. You will need a plan, other people who will help, and lots of courage, energy and patience.

First, look to the resources you have: your leader, other leaders who have high performing teams, your HR business partner, HR specialists in training and organizational development, and/or external consultants. These individuals can help you create and execute a plan to change culture and can keep you focused when you are running out of patience and/or energy.

Once you have a team, step one is to-re-draw the boundary lines for the team, but which chalk lines do you put down first? Here are my priorities:

1. Behaviors that are creating risk for the organization and/or team members (e.g., unsafe working practices, bullying or harrassment)

2. Behaviors that will be easy to change - things your employees are able to do (e.g., attendance)

3. Behaviors that require skill-building (e.g., effective communication, giving feedback or conflict management)

How do you put boundaries down? There are a lot of options. To start, I recommend a meeting with the entire team to explain what is happening and why and to give details about expectations. You will really need courage for this meeting if you were leading the team as it evolved to its current state. I firmly believe that your efforts to change the team's culture will fail if you are not open about the role you played in getting the team to where it is. You have to lead by example, and you can't hold others accountable if you don't hold yourself accountable. Openly owning your part in the team's current situation and your public commitment to change are fundamental to moving the team forward.

Courage, energy and patience become important after the meeting. First, send out a written summary to clarify, in writing, your new expectations, then role model the expectations yourself and hold each individual accountable using effective feedback practices (more on this in a future post). When a team member goes over the chalk line, put the chalk line back down. If a team member continues to go over the line, you may need to discipline that employee or even terminate his/her employment. This is never easy, but remember how the team got here in the first place. Schedule training to help the team develop needed skills. I strongly recommend that this training be done as a team including leaders. This builds relationships, creates shared language, and ensures everyone has the same baseline of information. Keep revising and working your plan until you and the team have created the culture you want.

Culture change is tough, so ideally, you avoid getting here in the first place by being proactive about drawing chalk lines. But all is not lost if you find yourself on a playing field with no lines. Start somewhere. Follow the steps outlined above with support from people you trust, and one day, you will be proud to share the story of how you turned your team's culture around.

Share your stories and let me know if you have questions in the comments below.

Improving Employee Behavior with Chalk Lines

Anyone reading this who knows me, especially my family, will be very surprised that I am using a sports metaphor. I played very few sports as a kid, really don't watch sports, and can barely keep up with the score even when one of my sons is playing in a game. That said, I have found myself using the metaphor of chalk lines on sports fields more and more with leaders who are struggling with employee behavior issues. (By the way, since we just finished a big holiday and have more coming, I have to point out that this metaphor works with family and friends too!)

We use the word "boundaries" a lot when talking about how individuals treat each other, and it dawned on me a while ago that these invisible behavioral boundaries are like the chalk lines on a sports field - let's say football (American football or not, whichever you prefer). When you play on an actual football field, all the chalk lines are already on the field. The boundaries are clear to everyone playing the game, and as a result, everyone knows where the goal line is, what is in bounds and what is out of bounds.

Unfortunately, when we are at work, there are not a lot of chalk lines on the ground telling us what is in bounds (behavior you want to see more of) and what is out of bounds (behavior that needs to change). It's like we are playing a pick-up game of football at the park.

Of course, we all think certain behaviors are obviously out of bounds - stealing, yelling at a co-worker, yelling at a customer - but I have worked in HR long enough to know that even these behaviors are not out of bounds for everyone. Hopefully, your organization provides some of these basic chalk lines (the outside edges of the field) through its employee handbook, organizational values, policies and other tools. You need to be familiar with these chalk lines yourself and also need to make sure your employees know that you expect them, as employees, to know where these chalk lines are too.

You will also almost certainly need to put additional chalk lines down for your team. One approach I have used with teams is to create a "Team Contract" or "Team Ways of Working." We work together to create a  team vision and then brainstorm what it will take to make this vision a reality. We talk openly and specifically about the behaviors we need to see more of and behaviors that need to change. We narrow these down to 5-8 team commitments that are shared with the whole team. These commitments serve as additional chalk lines on the field, and because we worked on them as a group, everyone knows where they are. Teams re-visit these commitments regularly to see how they are doing and to refine them as needed.

Just like with a game of pick-up game of football in the park, putting the goal lines and boundaries down in advance increases your team's chance for success, both individually and as a team. People see that staying in bounds will get them to the goal faster, and they waste a lot less energy fighting about where the lines are than they would if they weren't agreed in advance. You can even reduce turnover that could result when people get so tired of conflict that they just take the football and go home. With goal and boundary lines agreed in advance, you and the team focus your time and energy on achieving results and may even have fun while you do it!

I'll talk in my next post about putting chalk lines down after something happens. In the meantime, I encourage you to work with your team to create your own "Ways of Working." Let me know what questions you have and share your experiences in the comments.