by Kevin Kruse
The danger of investing a disproportionate amount of time with our problem employees is the cost of not spending that time and attention with the other team members. This is time that we could spend “re-recruiting” our stars to make sure they don’t get lured away by another company. This is time we could spend coaching our middle group of workers, moving some of them from average to stars. Think about your own team members, and think about whom you spent time with over the last week. Are you investing your effort in the right people?
ENGAGE PEOPLE THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENTLY
Are people around the world all motivated the same way? Actually, yes they are, but…
In my book We: How to Increase Performance and Profits Through Full Engagement, my coauthor Rudy Karsan and I share the analysis of survey results from ten million workers in 150 countries (Karsan and Kruse 2011). We identified a dozen drivers of “engagement”—the emotional connection one has to their employer and its goals—and zeroed in on three primary drivers: growth, recognition, and trust. People want to learn, grow, and advance in their careers. People want to feel appreciated by their managers and peers. People want to trust senior leadership, but not just from an ethics standpoint; they want to “trust” that leadership has a plan for the future and will successfully guide the organization to its goals.
As I lectured managers around the world to focus on growth, recognition, and trust, I would often be asked about cultural differences. “How can you say that everyone around the world is motivated the same way?” The secret is that on a macro level the drivers apply to everyone, but on a micro level you individualize how to apply it.
After all, it would be rare to find someone who says, “No, I don’t want to grow and advance in my career. Next year I want to be dumber and paid less.” But as a leader how you would activate the growth driver in a twenty-five-year-old might be different from how you would activate it for a sixty-year-old who is only a few years away from retirement. For the less experienced employee you might hold frequent career-path conversations, send her to training seminars, and offer graduate school tuition reimbursement. For the more senior employee you might enlist him to be a mentor or trainer to the younger workers, and he’d have to learn new skills as a teacher.
Similarly, it would be hard to find someone—anywhere in the world—who would say, “I just worked a hundred hours last week and totally blew past my goals. But I’d rather my boss not notice and just treat me like all the other slackers around here.” Most people hope that they are appreciated. But once again, how you show appreciation will vary person to person. I concede that there are cultural norms around the world. Workplace birthday celebrations that might include balloons, cakes, and singing in America are, I’m told, far more restrained in the Netherlands. Despite HR nervousness, I’ve seen plenty of high fives and hugs among colleagues here in America, while in China…you don’t see that too much.
The main takeaway is to treat each person as an individual; engage each person individually. Not in accordance to gender norms, or cultural norms, and certainly not “the same.” Tune in to how your team members prefer to be recognized. Maybe Ian beams with pride when he gets a big shout-out in the weekly team meeting. Maybe that would embarrass Christine and she’d prefer a handwritten thank-you note instead. How do they like to grow and develop? Maybe Bella learns best by reading books, while Gianna likes to learn in workshops. How will they best see how their work is aligned to the bigger organizational goals? Abby maybe only needs to hear the message from the CEO once to remember it. Ellie might need the company’s annual goals printed out and pinned on her cubicle wall. It’s certainly easier to treat everyone the same, but it’s not effective. Take the time to discover how to activate each team member’s engagement triggers.
CATS, DOGS, AND GOLDEN BUDDHAS
“If I were hiring for someone to fetch sticks out of the pond in front of the house, and a cat applies for the job and it has a master’s degree in stick-fetching…” This was how Dave Munson began when I asked him to give advice to new managers who might be listening to The LEADx Leadership Show (Munson 2017). Munson is one of the most entertaining and larger-than-life people I’ve ever interviewed. As the founder and CEO of Saddleback Leather, he’s grown it from selling a single bag a month to a 15-million-dollar-a-year business. And there have been a lot of twists and turns in his journey. As he says on his website, “A hot wife, two fabulous kids, 14 Rwandan sons and daughters, a cool dog and a crooked federale sent to kill me kind of makes up the Saddleback story.” And he left out his bullfighting and the three years he lived in a $100-a-month apartment without hot water in Juarez, Mexico. But back to his advice…
“…and then a Lab shows up, and he’s all wet, I would totally hire the Lab! I wouldn’t ask the cat to go swimming all day long fetching sticks.” Munson is talking about hiring the right person for the right job. And the right person isn’t necessarily the one with the right education or résumé, it’s the person who has a natural trait—or strength—for the kind of job you have in mind. To me, the key piece of Munson’s advice is when he mentioned that the Lab showed up already wet. As one of my mentors, Bill Erickson, once told me, a true strength isn’t just something you’re good at or that you like to do. A true strength is something you can’t not do.
With this definition in mind I think of my buddy Ian who is one of the most gifted sales professionals I’ve ever met. He’s a true relator. Now, I’ve had some sales success in my own life, too, but I had to force myself to do it. It was painful! As a massive introvert, I hate going out on sales calls, I hate cold-calling, in fact, I even hate calling people I already know! But Ian is different. I think he feels best when he’s on the phone talking to someone. He likes talking to fifty people a day. He gets energized by it. In fact, the way I feel when I’m cold-calling someone is probably how he feels sitting at home on the couch with nothing but a book in his hand.
While average leaders might try to assign work in some standard way to be fair, great leaders give different jobs to different people based on innate talents and highly developed skills. And beyond that, they let different people do the same job in different ways. I learn about different team members’ strengths by watching what they do well, what they do poorly, and by asking a lot of questions:
If you could be doing any job at all, what would it be?
When was the last time you felt you were in the zone—you know, when you lost all track of time—what were you doing?
What would you like to be doing five years from now?
What do you hate doing? What tasks are superboring?
I think one of the biggest gifts leaders can give others is to identify or encourage the development of a gift that someone doesn’t even know she has. When it comes to uncovering our strengths, or gifts, I can’t help but think of the statue known as the Golden Buddha. In 1955, in Bangkok, Thailand, a ten-foot-tall clay statue of the Buddha was being moved to a new location. In the process, a piece broke off to reveal that it was actually a pure gold statue that had only been covered in clay. With today’s price of gold the statue is worth $250 million dollars, but its true value had been hidden for over six hundred years. After much research, historians concluded that the Golden Buddha was likely covered in twelve inches of clay by Buddhist monks to hide it from Burmese invaders. When the monks were killed by their attackers, the knowledge of what lay beneath the clay died with them.
We are born with and develop certain strengths, but often they get covered up by our own limiting beliefs; we lack the confidence to pursue our true calling. I’ve actually encouraged several people in the past to switch their job function to go into sales. While they were all initially skeptical, those who have made the move quickly moved into six-figure careers and within years were happily earning exponentially more than they were before. One of the greatest gifts you can give your team membe
rs is to be the light that shines on their natural strengths.
WHICH OF YOUR CHILDREN IS YOUR FAVORITE?
A couple of weeks ago I heard a strange whirring sound in my home. I raced to the living room and to my utter bafflement and delight, I saw my daughter Amanda vacuuming the rug. My other daughter, Natalie, was lying on the couch doing nothing. Once I overcame the shock of the unasked-for housecleaning I naturally whipped out my phone, activated Snapchat, and recorded a video of my vacuuming daughter while I sang loudly “My favorite daughter, my favorite daughter!” And then I immediately panned to Natalie on the couch and sang “Not my favorite daughter, not my favorite daughter!”
Oh, the Dad humor! The reality is that I’m so nervous about scarring my kids with perceived favoritism that when the first draft of this book is done, I’ll count up the number of times I mention Amanda, Natalie, and Owen and I’ll add and delete stories until they’ve each been mentioned the same number of times.
Research from UC Davis professor Katherine Conger indicates I have reason to be on guard. She found that 70 percent of fathers and 74 percent of mothers admitted to researchers that they show favoritism toward one of their children (Shebloski, Conger, and Widaman 2005).
Studies vary but predictors of favoritism include birth order, gender, and personality. And indeed, offering varying degrees of love, attention, or material goods based on this is bad and leads to all kinds of negative family dynamics and increased dysfunction for the child who isn’t favored.
But parents can show favoritism—officially called parental differential treatment—with their kids in ways similar to a manager playing favorites at work. Your standards for behavior should be different for toddlers than for teens. Punishment for missing curfew might be lighter for a child who has never been late before, versus one who is a habitual offender. You should encourage the natural interests and strengths of each child (rather than just being a soccer family, for example). Consistent favoritism for the wrong reasons can hurt a family, but parental differentiation for the right reasons sends strong signals as to what gets rewarded in the home and leads to the development of one’s true strengths.
PLAYING FAVORITES IN THE MILITARY
“We salute, Marine.” Colonel Chris Dowling gave a stern reminder to a young marine in the chow line. In what was one of the most memorable days of my life, I visited Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) San Diego on the day when boot camp recruits finished a grueling fifty-four-hour-long test called the Crucible. With little sleep or food over the previous two days, dozens of recruits had just earned the right to be called US Marines, and now having little sleep or food over the previous two days, they were in line for the cafeteria where the “Warriors Breakfast” awaited them. As we walked past the newly minted marines, most snapped a crisp salute to Colonel Dowling. But several did not. And each time, the colonel would stop and say, “We salute, Marine.” And after he received the salute, we’d walk on down the line until it happened again.
When I asked him about it, he told me he was just giving them a reminder. He said normally, if it had been a week earlier and a recruit didn’t salute him, he would have asked them to drop and do push-ups, or worse. While he wasn’t going to ignore the infraction, he said he knew that the men were standing there half asleep and probably just didn’t see him coming. These marines just off the Crucible were being reprimanded differently than other nonsaluting marines would have been. Same standard, not to be ignored, but with variable punishment.
Seeing how to match someone’s strength to a job can sometimes literally be easy to see. Retired Marine Corps colonel John Boggs told me about a big young recruit he once had who was physically gifted but struggled with the simplest of rules. Rules as basic as putting “sir” at the beginning or end of each sentence. Colonel Boggs assigned the recruit to be his squad’s designated automatic rifleman, which is the marine who carries the big machine gun. Now, with purpose and pride, the young M249 “gunner” became a consummate marine.
Usually it takes extra effort for a military leader to develop subordinate leaders in accordance with their strengths. In an article published in the Military Review, US Army psychologist Melinda Key-Roberts writes that it’s a core tenet of army doctrine that nurturing strengths (not just correcting deficiencies) is the key to developing subordinate leaders to their full potential (Key-Roberts 2014). Unfortunately too many army leaders default to using the Army’s Evaluation Reporting System (AERS) or Officer Evaluation Reports (OER) when it comes to identifying strengths. That’s like a corporate manager using HR’s annual performance review to consider strengths. Neither work well as forward-looking methods for leader development.
Among other things, Dr. Key-Roberts suggests that army leaders need to make the time to identify the strengths of subordinate leaders, to give individualized specific feedback, and to utilize talent even if it’s outside one’s identified specialty. As one officer told her:
I have one guy who’s great—he’s the PT stud. The other guy’s a horrible PT guy…but [he’s] good at commo. He’s my commo NCO, and that’s how I handle him….He’s not [actually] a commo NCO, he’s a scout, but he’s good at it [commo]—he knows what he’s doing….Seeing what he’s good at [I say] “ok man, you’re my communications NCO.”
Another officer gave this example:
At the end of the day, I would assign the lieutenant who had great communication skills to be the guy who would interact at a more complex level with the Iraqi Security Forces, and the guy who was completely inarticulate but could kick down the door and do raids is the guy I would generally assign to more kinetic operations.
THE TAKEAWAY
In a misguided attempt to be objective and fair, too many managers treat all their team members the same. That’s an extremely unfair way to treat your best performers, and they’ll surely leave for better opportunities when they see they benefit no better than the slackers. When it comes to discipline, great leaders know that while the rules and standards need to apply to everyone—and treating everyone the same is easier than having to make decisions—the consequence of infractions should vary based on circumstances. Great leaders also know to take the time to identify each person’s strengths and then align opportunities and career path options to take advantage of them.
HOW MIGHT YOU APPLY THIS IF YOU’RE A:
MANAGER: Take extra time to get to know your new team members. Ask them what they are doing when they are performing at their best. Ask them what they like doing when they’re not at work. Consider purposely mixing up roles and assignments and see how people perform. When it comes to infractions, remember to use the same rules and standards, but vary the punishments.
SALES PROFESSIONAL: Great salespeople know that not all clients are equal. Do you spend as much time visiting your unprofitable clients as you do your profitable ones? Do you “wine and dine” your small accounts as often as your large? Consider plotting all your customers on a matrix. How valuable is each client versus how hard are they to service? The ones that are high value and low hassle are the ones you want to play favorites with.
SPORTS COACH: The next time a player breaks a rule—whether showing up late to a meeting or with a dress code infraction—consider the big picture. Do they have a pattern of disrespect or is it just an unusual mistake? Vary the punishment accordingly. Coach K is known for changing his practice methods and game strategy every year when he gets new players. Do your current players need to focus on the same drills that you used with last year’s players? How should you best use your players in the game—are they more of a set offense team, or a fast break team?
MILITARY OFFICER: With all the mandatory requirements and time demands, military leaders need to remember that they are tasked with the development of subordinate leaders. Make it a priority to look beyond rank and Military Occupation Specialty (MOS) code to identify and further utilize someone’s strengths. Watch and listen as you
observe people work, ask people what they’re good at, assign tasks that are outside their normal duties.
PARENT: It is more dangerous to be a parent who is unaware she has a favorite child than to be one who acknowledges it and adjusts. Be on the lookout for consistent favoring behaviors just because you like one child more than another (you can still love them all the same). Instead, remember that you can individualize expectations, punishments, and activities based on the ages and behaviors of your kids.
INDIVIDUAL: As an adult, playing favorites in the traditional sense of the word is healthy and to be encouraged. Think about all your family members and friends who you routinely interact with. Which ones make you feel happy and good about yourself? Which ones are unsupportive and seem to make you feel bad after you talk to them? You deserve to be happy and have the right to cut out negativity in your life—even if it means reducing the time you spend with certain family members. (Oh, the guilt!) How can you spend more time with your favorite friends? How can you give extra time, attention, and support to your favorite friends?
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REVEAL EVERYTHING (EVEN SALARIES)
Imagine that your manager, Ray, invited you and four of your colleagues to meet with him. After the hour-long meeting concludes, you walk out of the conference room frustrated and angry. What a waste of time! It’s so rude to call for a meeting and not even be ready for it! When you get back to your desk, you decide to send your boss an email so he knows exactly what you think of him. You write:
