How to be a Better Boss
This is the support site for the program on supervision I designed for the Managers of the Vera Institute's Legal Orientation Program. The program was delivered in Austin, Texas on January 15, 2008. We titled it: "How to be a Better Boss."
Click on the following links for a copy of the program note-taking handout and a show set of the program slides. In addition, every participant received a custom Resource and Workbook that followed the same outline, but with more material and pointers. If you were a participant in the program, contact the Vera Institute for your Resource and Workbook.
The objectives of the program were:
By the conclusion of the program you will have a better understanding of the supervisory parts of the job of an LOP manager and tools to help you do that part of your job better.
Through the use of the Resource and Workbook you receive you will be able to continue developing your supervisory skills.
Here's an outline of the topics we covered in the order presented.
For almost thirty years, I've been asking participants in my training programs to identify a time when it was great to come to work and then, with others, come up with a description of a Great Working Environment. While the language varies from one group to another, they all identify the same things.
- The group was really productive.
- They liked the people they worked with.
- The work was interesting and meaningful
- Expectations were clear and reasonable
- There was regular and usable feedback
- It was fair, consequences matched performance
- There was the maximum control possible over work life
Top of
page
Your job is to use what you say and do to accomplish the mission and care for your people by influencing the behavior and performance of the people who work for you.
Let's expand on the key words and phrases in the above statement.
"what you say and do" is your behavior. It's what you control.
"to accomplish the mission" means that part of your job is achieving your objectives and helping achieve the objectives of the organization and your program.
"and care for your people" means that you also have the job of taking care of your people and helping them grow and develop.
For short periods of time you can reduce performance in one area while you put important time and energy into the other. For example, your mission achievement may suffer while you're devoting extra time to training a new person. Or, you may put development efforts on the back burner to deal with a crisis or a big push.
"by influencing the behavior and performance" reminds you that you can't "make" another human being do anything. You can't get inside their head and "motivate" them. What you can do is use the behavior you control (your own) to influence the behavior and performance of others.
You influence behavior (what others say and do) and performance (the measurable result of work). Both are observable phenomena. If you can't see or describe them, you can't manage or influence them.
"of the people who work for you" means that what we talked about in this program was your job as a boss. You may use influence in other areas of your life, of course, but this program was about your job as a boss, responsible for the performance of a group.
The Supervisory Process
The Supervisor Process is very simple. You start by setting expectations. You follow up to see if behavior and/or performance are in line with those expectations. You deliver feedback, and perhaps consequences. And you do this over and over and over again.
The easy part is understanding the process. The difficult part is doing it over and over, several times a day, with unremitting diligence.
Top of
page
Identifying Key Behaviors for the People Who Work for You
You need to identify the key behaviors that you expect from the people who work for you. These are not performance measures. They're basic behaviors like being on site and ready to begin work at the appointed time or dressing in an appropriate manner.
You need to identify what you expect and then describe what acceptable and unacceptable behavior are. I suggest giving a copy of your descriptions to everyone who works for you and including it in the on-board training you give new people.
Top of
page
Every job has a limited number of key tasks that the people who work for you need to be able to perform. You need to identify them and develop your ability to describe unacceptable, acceptable and excellent performance for each task.
You need to know how much ability each person who works for you has on each task. That helps define your development agenda for each one.
Damon Runyon Principle
"The race may not always be to the swift, nor victory to the strong, but that’s how you bet."
Top of
page
The Mastery of Time: Your Non-Renewable Resource
Time is the only resource you can't replenish. That's why you must pay attention to how you use it.
Know where the time goes. Most people who do a good job of time management develop a way to track how they're doing. The most common way to do this is with a periodic time use survey or inventory. If you're using a program like Timeslips, it can provide an easy way to do this. There's also material in the Resource and Workbook.
Most good time managers take some time each week to look ahead and block out the time that's already committed to recurring events and other commitments. Then they try to take the discretionary time they have left and consolidate it into useful blocks.
Recurring events are those events that happen every day, week, month, quarter, year or less often. Make a list of them. Put the list into your time management system so they don't surprise you.
Other commitments include work and family activities. As you plan your time for the next day or week, block these out, including prep or travel time.
Consolidate discretionary time. Most meaningful project work simply can't be done in short ten or fifteen minute bursts. You should consolidate your discretionary time into large blocks of uninterrupted time.
Take enough time to make progress. There's good research on this. Most people need an hour to an hour and a half at a time to do meaningful work on a project.
Top of
page
Two factors drive performance. A person must have the ability to do what you want. If they don't have the ability, you have to address that before you can expect performance.
People also show different levels of willingness to pitch in and work. Two people can be at the same level of ability and require very different levels of monitoring and follow up by you because of their willingness to pitch in and work.
I like illustrating this with the following diagram.
You can see that there are four quadrants. In the upper right quadrant are the people who have high ability and high willingness. They're your top performers. You can assign them work and turn them loose.
In the upper left quadrant at the people with high willingness and low ability. That's the state people are in when they first come on board. Your challenge is to increase their ability while you keep their willingness high.
In the lower right quadrant we have their opposite, people who have high ability but low willingness. These are your people who are worn our or burned out. You challenge is to rekindle their willingness.
Go back and look at the Great Working Environment results. That gives you clues about how to improve or maintain willingness.
Then there's the bottom left quadrant, where the people are low in ability and low in willingness. Most of the time they're either in the wrong job or they just aren't willing to pitch in.
Most of the time (see Damon Runyon Rule) they are people who need to work somewhere else. Your job is to do what's necessary to save the few who are savable while helping the rest find employment more suited to their abilities and willingness.
Most of these people are "Sneakers." I call them that because, no matter how hard you work, you can't polish them.
Top of
page
What you need to know to Train Effectively
There are two kinds of training that you will need to do. On-boarding is the basic training you do when a new person comes on board. Ongoing training is training you do to help them maintain and develop ability.
On-boarding involves several stages. If you plan for each of them you're more likely to help your new team member become productive quickly.
You can do several things before your new team member arrives. One of them is planning the training program. But you should also contact the new person, offer to answer any questions and tell them you're excited that he or she will be coming onboard.
The first day is critical. It's truly your only opportunity to make a first impression. Have a specific plan for what will happen and when. Make sure to block out time when the new person is with someone else so you can handle important work activity.
Plan the first week and first month a new person will be on board. You should know what important events will happen and when. You should have some standards about what needs to be learned and when you expect it.
This is a good place to remember The Fram Rule: "You can pay a little now or you can pay a lot later." It's easy to let urgent work drive out important training. But that on-boarding can yield a productive worker sooner than a chaotic, unstructured first few weeks. It's also important to keep morale up so that willingness stays high.
Ongoing training is a different set of challenges. It should be a process of constant improvement that grows out of day-to-day work and evaluation. It is influenced by the goals of the person who works for you. As a general rule, your training will be most productive if you try to build on strengths and make weaknesses irrelevant.
Assuming that willingness stays high, your new person should improve in his or her ability to handle the key tasks you've identified. As that happens, you need to spend less time supervising their work and exert less control over how the work is done. Use this Control Continuum as a model for how this will work over time.
There are several other things that will help you train more effectively. You should gain a working knowledge of Information Processing Styles, Learning Styles, Teaching Techniques, and Basic Content Types. You'll find that material in your Resource and Workbook.
Top of
page
When you set expectations for behavior or performance you need to make sure you cover all the bases. Here they are.
Describe the behavior or performance you want. Be specific.
Tell your team member when you expect to see change. Sometimes that means laying out performance milestones.
Agree on how you will measure the behavior or performance. Ideally, both of you should know whether your team member is doing what he or she should be doing or performing up to par.
Describe the consequences of different behavior or levels of performance. There's more on consequences in the Resource and Workbook.
Describe the amount of control you will exercise over the basic work. In practice this usually comes down to how often you will follow up or expect a report and what you expect when you touch base.
Top of
page
Following Up
Remember The Dinosaur Principle: Problems are like dinosaurs. They’re easy to kill when they’re small. But they’ll eat you if you let them grow big.
Great supervisors follow the Dinosaur Principle. That's why they touch base a lot.
Not only do they touch base a lot, great supervisors use every encounter to coach, counsel, correct and encourage. They know that Feedback is the breakfast of champions.
Top of
page
There are four kinds of conversations that bosses have with the people who work for them about their performance or behavior. The one that most people think of first is the Formal Performance Appraisal.
The Formal Performance Appraisal is done on the schedule, using the forms, and according to the rules of your organization. If you do your job well using the other kinds of Supervisory Conversations, there will be no surprises and the discussion will be oriented more to the future than the past.
Routine supervisory conversations are the most common ones. They're short, sometimes lasting only seconds. They're informal, meaning that there's no documentation. The idea is to catch problems when they're small (Dinosaur Principle) and deal with them.
Sometimes that doesn't work. You may have someone working for you who isn't changing behavior or improving performance. Or you may have someone who needs a concentrated program to develop a skill or ability.
Then you need a Transitional supervisory conversation. You give notice to your team member that unless things improve you will need to document and possibly deliver consequences up to and including termination. Of you ask your team member if he or she wants to pursue a development process that will require concentrated attention and documentation.
Most of the people who are behaving badly or underperforming will improve without need for documentation. For the rest, Project conversations are the order of the day.
Project supervisory conversations are devoted to a specific issue. They can be long. They are always documented.
Top of
page
Analyzing Supervisory Situations
To get ready for a Supervisory Conversation, you will need to prepare. That starts with analyzing the situation. We said that ability and willingness are drivers of performance. That's what you must analyze to determine what should change.
Start with your team member's Ability to do the job. This is task-specific. Figure out if they have the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) to do the job. If not, you need to do some training.
Figure out if your team member has the resources that he or she needs to do the job. Do they have the time they need? Do they have enough budget or staff support? If they don't, you should fix the resource problem.
Then analyze Willingness. Do they routinely pitch in with whatever work to be done? That's what high willingness is.
Willingness is generally global. Usually a person who pitches in does so with everything assigned. But sometimes a person shows high willingness except on a single task.
If you see that, the situation is probably a confidence issue. Your best bet is usually to spend a little training and development time helping the team member develop confidence on the specific task. That, in turn, often involves setting things up so the member can have several small wins as they improve.
Top of
page
One of the hardest things a boss has to do is talk to people about behavior and performance. Here is a simple three step technique for you to try. If you use it you will increase the odds that discussions of behavior and performance come out the way you want and you will reduce the intense, confrontational nature of some of those conversations.
The three steps, in order are. Tell the person What the subject of the conversation is. Tell them Why it's important. Then Wait, as long as it takes, for their response. Here are the details.
Tell them What the subject is. Use the Joe Friday Rule, "Just the facts." Leave out the adjectives.
Tell them Why it's important. Use logical language to describe what happens because of what they did. Use emotional language to describe how you or someone else may feel because of what they did.
This should all take no more than a few seconds. Then Wait. Be quiet. Shut up. Stay silent until the person who works for you responds, no matter how uncomfortable you are. Say nothing. Do not even encourage your team member to speak.
What your team member says next determines where the rest of the conversation goes. But, note, it's now a conversation where you both have parts, not a monologue where you are doing something to the team member.
This is surpassingly easy in concept and devilishly difficult in practice. It's difficult because almost all of our role models reversed the order of the first two steps and added adjectives. Then they eliminated the third all together.
Top of
page
How to Give Good Documentation
Documentation is necessary these days. You document to explain to a third party why you made a decision or took an action. Sometimes that third party is a player in an adversarial proceeding. There are two rules for good documentation.
Good documentation provides a record of performance or behavior. Use the Joe Friday Rule. No adjectives.
Good documentation should be done as close in time as possible to the behavior or performance you're documenting. I suggest that you complete it no later than when you're ready to leave for the day.
Top of
page
Burnout, as a term of art, is a form of depression. In its most severe cases it can result in death. Burnout is a common phenomenon in nonprofit and human service situations.
There are three common phrases that you'll hear from people who are worn out or burned out. They are
Nothing I do matters
Everything I do is wrong
Nobody cares
Some people use those phrases all the time, maybe as part of their own stress-relief efforts. But if you start hearing more of them more often from anyone, you should start paying attention.
Whether we're talking worn out or burned out, the situation is reversible but not treatable. In other words, there's very little a therapy can do, but you have some things you can try as a supervisor.
The most basic is changing your team member's situation for a bit. Give him or her a temporary assignment doing something different or working in a different place.
Beyond that, there are two things you need to become familiar with. The first is something called "Explanatory Style."
Explanatory Style defines the ways that a person accounts for things, good or bad, that happen. It was developed by Dr. Martin Seligman and first laid out in his book, Learned Optimism. There's more on Explanatory Style and using it to spot burnout in your Resource and Workbook.
You also need to be familiar with options that your organization EAP or your local community provide for people who are in psychological trouble. People are more likely to follow your advice to use a service if you can describe in detail what will happen.
Top of
page
Conclusion
Even if you have no other training or experience in supervision, management, and leadership, you can do a good job with your own experience, instincts and the tools you learned about in this program. Note that I said, "learned about," not "learned."
What you learned about here won't become your own and won't make a difference until you put it into practice. Remember what we said about deliberate practice.
You need to work on something specific.
You need to assess your performance.
Then you repeat the process.
I've written a Resource and Workbook to help you continue your improvement. Please contact me if I can ever help you in any way.
Top of
page
You may reprint or repost this material providing that the following conditions are met:
- The material remains essentially unaltered.
- Wally Bock is shown as the author.
- The notice Copyright 2008 by Wally Bock or similar appears on the article.
- Contact information for Wally is included with the article. You may refer readers to this Web site as a way to meet this requirement, or refer them to this site or use the information on our main contact page.
Any other reprinting or reposting requires specific permission which is almost always granted. Click here to request permission if necessary.
Top of
page
