Managing to Change the World

by Alison Green

  As we discussed in Chapter Six, you can build staff members’ knowledge and improve specific skills, but it is difficult to change talents and basic inclinations. You might teach someone to use a particular software program or to deliver an effective presentation, but talents (like good writing, critical thinking, or being able to connect well with other people) and inclinations (like having a strong sense of responsibility or pursuing goals relentlessly) build up over a lifetime and tend to be deeply rooted and difficult to develop.

  For instance, you might have a regional director who frequently gives presentations about your program to external audiences. She is enthusiastic and knowledgeable but lacks polish and tends to read directly from her slides. In her other work, she is very strong and, among other things, has raised significantly more money than her peers have. This is a case where public speaking training, whether a formal program like Toastmasters or informal role playing with you, could pay off, helping her become a more confident and skilled speaker.

  In contrast, if you have a legislative analyst who is shy and uncomfortable interacting with others, you might be able to get her to speak up a bit more, but she’s probably never going to excel at networking and building coalitions.

  Distinguish Between Development Needs and Serious Performance Issues

  Fortunately, the meat of the shy legislative analyst’s job is analyzing legislation and writing briefs, activities that don’t require a lot of interaction with others. While it might be nice if she were more outgoing, her shyness doesn’t interfere with her ability to do her job well. But in other cases, the behavior in question will have a negative impact on the staff member’s ability to do her job at the level you need. In situations where the employee’s basic talents and inclinations are at odds with the requirements of the job, don’t allow development to become a distraction that prevents you from dealing with core performance issues.

  A media director, for example, needs to have good judgment when talking to reporters and be able to represent the organization’s positions clearly and compellingly. Perhaps your media director has been on the job for five months and has shown poor judgment in several cases—in one, speaking to a reporter calling about a delicate public issue without first consulting anyone and making comments that inflamed the situation, and in two others, confusing reporters to the point that they called the executive director asking for clarification. You also have noticed that she still doesn’t give the standard spiel when describing your organization’s work to reporters. These problems go to the heart of the media director’s fit for the role. You might eventually succeed in drilling the basic spiel into her, but she lacks judgment, the ability to think on her feet, and perhaps even basic critical thinking skills. Development efforts might produce small improvements with her, but she will probably never perform at the high level you need.

  In determining whether the problem goes beyond a simple development need, watch for the following signs:

  You’ve tried developing the person some but have not seen significant improvement.

  The issue is something fundamental to the job.

  You’re busy and are unable to invest the amount of time that would be needed to guide the staff member to where you need her to be.

  If one (or more) of these issues is the case, see Chapter Nine on dealing with serious performance issues and letting lower performers go.

  What About Motivation?

  If you have the right people on your team, you shouldn’t have to spend lots of energy motivating them. It’s important to create the conditions in which the right people will feel motivated, of course, by giving them meaningful roles with real responsibility, helping them feel as if they’re making progress toward ambitious but attainable goals, giving them a sense that they’re learning, reminding them of the bigger picture of what the work is adding up to, praising their efforts, and showing that you care about them as people. Managers also need to avoid demotivating staff, as we discuss in Chapter Ten. But taking someone who is not excited about a job and turning that person around is awfully hard, and generally a questionable use of energy. Therefore, the development techniques we’ll talk about here focus mainly on developing skill, not will.

  HOW TO DEVELOP PEOPLE

  When it does make sense to invest in developing your people, how do you do it? Although formal training programs can help when they are aimed at specific, concrete skills, generally the best learning comes when employees stretch themselves in the pursuit of meaningful goals and when managers coach them through the process.

  In fact, simply managing to a good outcome develops staff. For instance, imagine that you manage a grant writer who is responsible for producing a major proposal to an important foundation. Having read Chapter Two on delegation, you’ll do everything we advised there:

  1. You’ll discuss your expectations and what makes a proposal good, and you may show your staffer a sample of a proposal that worked in the past.

  2. Once you have agreed on the expectations, you’ll review and discuss an outline and possibly even a draft of one section to make sure the tone is right. Then you’ll make comments on full drafts until they are where they need to be.

  3. After the proposal is in, you’ll do a quick debriefing to talk about what went well and what could have gone better.

  Through this rigorous process—even more than formal writing courses, or official development plans, or any of the rest—your staff member will almost certainly become a much better proposal writer. If you think about the times when you have most successfully learned a new skill, the same probably holds true: we’d bet that most of what you learned came from actually doing the work rather than from sitting in a classroom or reading a book on the subject.

  Still, there are things you can do beyond simply managing to a good outcome to contribute to your staff’s learning. We look at a number of them here.

  Naming the Issue

  Before you can address a development area effectively, you need to name the issue. We know this sounds obvious, but sometimes coming up with a label for a behavior you want to see can be powerful. For instance, if you have a general unease with the training workshops you’ve seen a staff member give, don’t simply tell her that she needs to work on her presentation skills. Instead, identify specifically what the issue is, such as that she’s using the same presentation for experienced participants as she is for less advanced ones. Once you’ve determined that, you’ll be better able to name the issue for her—in this case, saying something like, “We need to work on how to adapt your message to fit different audiences.”

  WHAT ABOUT DEVELOPMENT PLANS?

  Opinions vary on this, but we’ve grown skeptical about the value of separate development plans, in part because those plans can distract staff members’ attention from pursuit of their substantive goals. When a staff member does have specific development goals, though, one option is to include them in a “key development areas” section at the end of her annual goals. This will remind both of you to revisit her progress in these areas while keeping the onus on the employee to drive herself forward. Here’s an example:

  Goal 4: Key Development Areas

  1. Refine my meeting-running skills.

  2. Learn our database software thoroughly so I can better spot opportunities for using its features.

  3. Improve my ability to advise activists on strategy, incorporating more nuance and less one-size-fits-all advice.

  Articulating Key Principles

  Once you’ve named the issue for your staff member, you can break down the key principles behind how to perform the skill well even if they seem obvious to you. After all, if you’re a successful and experienced presenter, adapting your message to fit your audience might feel like second nature to you. But it won’t come naturally to someone with less experience, so be sure to articulate the principles that go into doing it well. After identifying for the staff member that you’d like to work on adapting her workshops to fit the audience,
you’d then go on to talk about key elements of how to do that well, such as asking questions to gauge audience members’ prior knowledge, modifying examples to make them relevant to the audience’s work, and paying attention to the audience’s body language and other cues.

  Giving Stretch Assignments

  Assigning a staff member a responsibility that requires her to apply new skills or old skills at a higher level (such as going from managing two people to managing eight) often produces significant growth. Because people learn by doing, you might produce more learning by asking your strongest staff members to do more.

  WHAT ABOUT PROMOTING FROM WITHIN?

  Promotions can be a great way to recognize when a staffer has developed and is ready for new challenges, and promoting from within lets you avoid the uncertainties of hiring a relative unknown from the outside. At the same time, even when your staffer is outstanding in her current role, there are many cases in which a promotion isn’t the right move.

  When contemplating promoting someone, the most important factor to consider is not what sort of job the staffer is doing in her current position, but instead how strongly matched she is with the skills you need in the new position. Organizations often do the opposite of this: we have frequently seen outstanding staffers get promoted and then flounder because the skills that made them so effective in the first position aren’t the same ones needed for the new one. Most commonly we see this with promotions to managerial positions, since the skills needed to get results through others are often very different from those needed to get results on your own. For instance, a grant writer might excel at writing winning grant applications, but when promoted to development director, she might need very different skills, such as the ability to articulate expectations, help people solve their problems, and judge talent.

  We encourage you to create opportunities for promotion when they make sense for the employee and the organization. But don’t feel that you need to promote employees in order to retain them. There are many other ways to keep good employees on your staff, which we address in Chapter Eight.

  Introducing One Piece at a Time

  Some staff members love an enormous new challenge and will rise to meet it, growing in the process. But others can be paralyzed. A complement to the stretch assignments approach, then, is to structure the process so that your staff member starts with easier pieces and gradually adds others. For example, in grooming someone to become a manager, you might first have her manage others on a particular project, without giving her overall responsibility for managing all of their work.

  As part of this process of breaking down a large new skill into its steps, you can create an atmosphere of deliberate learning by using an approach of “discuss, do, reflect.” First, you and the staff member talk through what she is going to do, then she does it (perhaps with you observing her in action, where appropriate), and finally she reflects with you on how it went and how to improve in the future. For instance, if your assistant already screens job applicants’ résumés, you might ask her to go further and begin conducting initial phone interviews with internship candidates. In the discussing stage, you’d meet with her to talk about interview techniques and perhaps role-play several interview situations. In the doing stage, you might observe her conducting one or two of the phone interviews. And in the reflecting stage, you’d discuss how she did, identify what she found most difficult, and brainstorm alternate ways of responding in the future.

  A similar approach is to emulate what classroom teachers do in almost every lesson: using a cycle of “I do, we do, you do.” Here, you first demonstrate a new skill for the staff member, then you do some of the work jointly, and finally you step back and allow her to do it on her own. For instance, if you’re teaching your staffer to create formulas in a spreadsheet, you might first do a few yourself while she is watching (I do). Then you’d talk through a few examples together and do them jointly (we do). Finally, you’d have her do a few on her own without any help from you (you do).

  Modeling the Skill for the Staffer

  Implicit in the “I do, we do, you do” approach is the idea that often people need to see a skill or approach applied before they can do it themselves. For instance, if you want a staff member to conduct external meetings more effectively, you might have her accompany you and watch while you do one yourself. In modeling the skill, be explicit with your staff member about what you are doing and why. For instance, in modeling an external meeting, point out to the staff member how you were careful to agree with the participants to an informal agenda at the beginning of the meeting.

  Giving Feedback

  One of the most powerful tools managers have for developing staff is providing direct feedback. Simply articulating areas in which you’d like to see a staff member develop can go a long way toward making progress. (Tool 7.1 provides a worksheet for preparing for a conversation on giving feedback.)

  You should provide feedback on a constant, ongoing basis in order to reinforce behavior you want to see more of, prevent bad habits from becoming ingrained, and foster an atmosphere of open communication. Providing feedback regularly can also allow you to address potential problems while they’re still small rather than telling a staffer that something she has been doing for months is wrong. While ideally you’d be providing feedback regularly throughout your interactions each day, some of our clients have found it helpful to have a triggering mechanism. One such system is the 2 × 2 system. Tool 7.2 provides a sample form for this system.

  At different times, your feedback will be positive (recognizing where an employee is doing well), developmental (sharing ways a good employee could do even better), or corrective (things that must change in order for the employee to meet your expectations).

  Positive Feedback

  One of the best ways to shape your staff’s behavior is to give positive feedback. Telling a staff member, “I loved the way you organized that spreadsheet; the categories made sense and you made sure it was easy to read on the screen,” almost guarantees you’ll be seeing more well-organized spreadsheets in the future. In addition, positive feedback is a form of creating accountability. If your staff member consistently does a good job but never hears from you about it, she may wonder why no one appears to have noticed.

  At the same time, most people can see through sugarcoating, so give positive feedback only when you really mean it. And with good employees around, you should be able to find plenty of actions that warrant praise.

  Developmental Suggestions for Growth

  When you spot ways that a good employee could do even better, sharing these suggestions can help her take her performance to a higher level. This type of feedback isn’t about serious concerns. Likely, the employee would continue to do a fine job even if she didn’t implement your suggestion. For instance, if you notice that your Webmaster isn’t at her most effective when explaining technical topics to nontechnical staff, you might say something like, “I wanted to talk about our meeting with the campaign team and share some thoughts about how you might get your points across to them better.” You could then explain that while her agenda was well structured and her points strong ones, non-IT people don’t know some of the terms she uses, and that using simpler language and stopping to check for understanding might help her communicate better with her audience.

  Corrective Feedback

  Unlike developmental suggestions for growth, where the staff member would still be doing a good job even if she didn’t implement your suggestions, corrective feedback is about things that must change in order for the staff member to meet expectations. Most managers find this type of feedback the hardest to give, and some put it off out of discomfort. Don’t fall into that trap. The longer you wait to give corrective feedback, the more the problem will take root, so get in the habit of giving this sort of feedback as soon as you can. As you do, be direct. Don’t get so caught up in trying to be tactful that your message gets diluted or lost. For instance, if you’re disappointed in yo
ur communications director’s poorly written press release, say, “I’d like to talk about this recent press release. When would be a good time to do that?” Then tell her that the release did not meet your expectations. Point out the specific ways in which the press release fell short and suggest concrete ways she might improve it.

  You might also use the example as a vehicle for delving into other issues that might be at play. For instance, you might say, “What’s strange to me is that I know you are a better writer than this. Do you have a sense of why you didn’t apply your skills as well as you might have here?” The employee might reply that she forgot to schedule time to write the release and wrote it at the last minute (an opening to delve into issues of time management), that she didn’t think it was important to get it right because reporters rarely copy text straight from releases (responsibility), or that she honestly did give it her best shot and is frustrated that it didn’t come out better (writing skills).

  If the problem persists after talking about it directly, you may need to reconsider the employee’s fundamental fit for the role. Chapter Nine has an in-depth discussion about what factors to consider in such a situation and how to have serious performance warning conversations.

  A STRUCTURE FOR GIVING FEEDBACK

  1. Describe the behavior you’ve observed in a short sentence: “I’ve noticed recently that when running meetings, you sometimes have trouble keeping the group focused on the agenda.”

  2. Provide two or three concrete examples to support your feedback: “First, in our meeting with X, and then with Y . . .”