Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Rule #1 in Business: It’s Not About You

Every day, I get at least three requests from people who want to write guest posts on my personal blog.  I have given up responding to these people.

Why?  Because looking at my blog for 30 seconds will tell you that I don’t do guest posts. I have never done guest posts.  I may include tips from other experts, but the writing is always my own.

Yet people continue to ask me, because THEY want to do a guest post.  They are making this initial interaction all about them.  It doesn’t matter what I want or need.

This is not a good strategy for building relationships with people, especially managers and co-workers who have no vested interest in doing what you say.

What’s in it for them?

You might have heard the story of the salesman who greets a prospect by announcing, “I want to tell you about a great new product that has a thousand new features, all for the low price of…” The prospect stops listening as soon as she hears the words I want and slams the door in the salesman’s face.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to enter a negotiation or interaction with someone by expressly stating what you want. As I said in this post back in 2010, no one cares – they want to know what’s in it for them.

For my advice on how to proceed, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Reader Question: Dealing with a Micromanaging Peer

This question was submitted by a reader at the Fast Track blog:

I’d like to get your input about how to deal with a coworker who micromanages laterally. I am a manager, and one of my peers, another manager, often takes it upon herself to tell the other managers how they should run their departments (even though we haven’t asked and it’s not within her realm of responsibility). It doesn’t happen all the time, but every few months or so she’ll go on a tirade and drive all of the managers crazy. For example, she’ll get on a dress-code policy kick and scrutinize every article of clothing staff wear, and then send repeated emails to department managers saying that it needs to be dealt with. The most recent time this happened, when I went to check on the “offensive” clothing, they fell completely within the code — perhaps she just didn’t like what the person was wearing?

She tells us which staff members need disciplining (when they don’t), tells us how to deal with clients, recites well-known procedures to us over and over, and will even go so far as to reorganize our service desks because she doesn’t like how they look! And I don’t mean just a little — I’m talking moving computers to a completely different location, and leaving post-it notes everywhere about why something isn’t right or shouldn’t be the way it is.

Usually I try to see where she’s coming from and consider whether she has a valid point, but often it’s just trivial things that don’t matter or don’t make sense. I’ve tried ignoring her, giving in to her, and being firm and telling her why my department chooses to do things a certain way and that we won’t be changing it. Nothing seems to help. I think she acts this way because she cares about our organization and likes to see things run smoothly, but it’s too much at times, and ultimately not her responsibility. Our organization functions well and overall our staff have good morale. I am perfectly capable of handling my team and, if I do say so myself, do a darn good job of it. How can I get her to back off when she gets like this?

Here was my advice:

I think it’s time you had a formal sit down with the micromanaging peer.  Ignoring her might be the path of least resistance, but at this point it sounds like her behavior is negatively impacting the productivity of your team – and this is a problem that’s yours to remedy.

Ask her to lunch.  If it isn’t completely out of the ordinary, go offsite so you won’t risk being interrupted or joined by another teammate.  Tell her there’s something important you need to talk to her about, and preface the discussion with a comment along the lines of what you said in your e-mail to us:  “I admire how much you care about our organization and I know that you want to see it run smoothly.”  This will help to mitigate her natural response (i.e. defensiveness) to what you’re about to say.

Next, tell her that while you appreciate her input on your team’s discipline, dress, etc. you are capable of managing these issues yourself and that you’d prefer it if she would confine her improvements to her own group.  Use a “this is what’s best for the organization” type of argument, such as “Right now my staff feels that it’s getting confusing cross-direction, and their work is suffering.”  Try to be assertive rather than wishy-washy.  You are a manager for a reason and your judgment should be trusted.

If this doesn’t work and she continues to interfere and wreck havoc around the office, you should talk to your boss on the down low.   Just remember to be solution-oriented and bottom-line focused in your comments, as the last thing you want to do is come across like you are whining or complaining.  You are not a tattletale and this is not a mere personality conflict.  Be clear that you are genuinely concerned that because of this woman’s actions, the organization is not operating as optimally as it could be.

For guidance from Fast Track's other amazing experts, check out the full post.

Building Culture in a Digital World

Quick quiz: true or false?

1. You don’t know anyone who works at your company.
2. You try not to involve yourself with your company’s digital networks.
3. When it comes to certain office protocols, you have no idea what is and isn’t acceptable.

If you answered ‘True’ to these statements, you’re part of the 20 percent of global employees who work on virtual teams, and your organization’s culture is a total mystery to you.

This is a problem, because even as we strive to enhance our cultures so our employees will stick around, our strategies mostly shut out employees who don’t come into our offices. If we want to encourage collaboration and track productivity, we have dozens of effective digital tools from which to choose. But when it comes to tools meant to inform and reinforce culture, there’s not much.

In a recent article for Fast Company, Austin Carr reported on a few new technologies that are a step in the right direction. Yammer, which is an enterprise social network that Microsoft acquired for $1.2 billion, acts like a Facebook for internal business use. It enables employees to exchange messages, media and status updates—integrating the option to “Like” a coworker’s post or give him or her “Praise” badges.

Taking it a step further is emotional intelligence company Kanjoya, which has a product called Crane that taps into an organization’s Yammer network and analyzes data to measure how employees are feeling at any given moment or on any given topic. Crane can tell, for instance if your employees are irritated by a new policy or don’t like the way management is handling a current issue. Although it’s not always clear what leaders should do with Crane’s data from a big picture perspective, the program at least allows them to address small details that might otherwise go unnoticed and fester.

For tips on how to effectively build culture in a digital world, check out my full post on the AMEX Open Forum.

Drinking Too Much Kool-Aid Can Be Dangerous

Anyone who has worked in an organization for longer than a few months has heard the expression “drinking the company Kool-Aid.”

Even though Kool-Aid isn’t as popular as it used to be and may well end up with the same fate as Twinkie, the comparison still resonates. To drink the Kool-Aid means you believe in the organizational culture so much that you are willing and able to spout its principles without thinking, and that you ignore any evidence supporting the notion your company’s way of doing things isn’t working as well as it could. 

This is dangerous.

I once worked with a small company that was convinced its new accounting practices were revolutionary in the industry. Management spent a lot of money to get an automated system up and running, and drilled employees mercilessly on how to use it properly. The company got a great deal of incredible PR around the initiative. The system was easy to use! It saved tons of time! And new accounting was just the first step in a phased cultural initiative that would leverage state-of-the-art technology to free employees up to do what they did best!

There was only one problem. It didn’t work—at least not precisely enough. It turned out that some of the complex accounting issues the company faced required a human brain to sort. But the company was so busy touting its brilliance that it took numerous customer complaints to realize what was happening.

When you have a terrific culture or are in the midst of changing your culture to become terrific, it’s easy to overlook data that doesn’t support what you’re trying to do—and that’s where things get risky. A healthy organizational culture must be in touch with its thinking and have the ability to make rational decisions.

For suggestions on questions to ask to remain in touch with reality, have a look at the AMEX Open Forum.

 

Unconscious Bias is a Reality

Imagine that your employee has been talking about continuing his or her education, and is considering going back to grad school. You have a managerial position open for which this person would be perfect, but in the back of your mind, you worry that he or she will either leave or be overly distracted with school. So you create other reasons why another employee is better for the role, and leave this person as is.

This is just one example of the new workplace bias.

Bias Goes from Conscious to Unconscious

Bill Shackelford is the president of diversity consulting firm IEC Enterprises and the author of Minority Recruiting: Building the Strategies and Relationships for Effective Diversity Recruiting. In his article for Workforce Diversity Network, Shackelford says an understanding of how bias creeps into today’s enlightened workplace starts with an expanded definition, which is: 

Bias: “Intentional and unintentional, conscious and subconscious, attitudes, behaviors and actions that have a negative and differential impact on segments of the society, or favor one segment of the society.”       

As Shackelford points out, most employers have adopted fair employment practices designed to manage the classic forms of bias (i.e., intentional and conscious). Examples of intentional and conscious bias would be actions designed to intentionally discriminate against individuals because of their race, gender or ethnicity. Refusing to hire people because of their race or promote people because of their gender are classic examples from the past.  

But today’s most common forms of bias are more subtle, as in the case listed above. Decisions to hire and promote are often not based solely on the qualifications of the candidates, but are influenced by subjective criteria. When these subjective criteria relate to fixed diversity dimensions (race, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc.), the resulting decision is inherently biased.

Learn to combat unconscious bias over at the AMEX Open Forum.

How to Lose a Pointless Process

It’s one of the great injustices of Corporate America.  Complex processes spring up around everything, and only some of them make sense.  As someone with an eye toward improving productivity and adding to the bottom line at your organization, inefficient, overly complicated, unethical, or just downright silly processes may irritate you to no end.

Off With Its Head!

Whether you’re a new employee who has seen things done better on the outside or a tenured one who knows change is essential, your first reaction might be to march into your manager’s office and let her know exactly what you think of this nonsense.  This may include an emotional, frustration-fueled recommendation (read: rant) to do away with the process immediately.  Or better yet, why not skip your boss and go straight to the source of the problem – the “keeper” of the process?

Well, hold your horses because this approach doesn’t usually work.  The truth is, most processes were implemented for a reason, and most were sensible at one time.  Managers, and especially the “keeper” of the process, are invested in it and presumably understand the big picture regarding how the process fits into the scheme of general operations.  They will probably not appreciate being told how things should be by someone who doesn’t have the whole story.  And by railing on said process, you may in fact be implying that they are not doing their jobs well, which will put them on the defensive right away.

For more tips on coping with bureaucracy, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Are You Selling Yourself as Well as You Could?

For several years, I’ve been recommending that people focus on being able to succinctly and effectively highlight their accomplishments because others (i.e. recruiters, managers, partners) will judge them mostly based on their past track record of success.

It turns out that’s not exactly the case.

What You Could Do is Better Than What You Have Done

According to Heidi Grant Harvorson at the Harvard Business Review, when we are deciding who to hire, promote, or do business with, it turns out that we don’t like the Big Thing nearly as much as we like the Next Big Thing. We have a bias — one that operates below our conscious awareness — leading us to prefer the potential for greatness over someone who has already achieved it.

In a series of studies conducted by Stanford’s Zakary Tormala and Jayson Jia, and Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton, it is clear that human beings demonstrate an unconscious preference for potential over actual success.

In an experiment related to the workplace, hiring managers evaluated two equally impressive candidates who varied on one factor:  one had two years of relevant experience who scored highly on a test of leadership achievement, and the other had no relevant experience but scored highly on a test of leadership potential.  Interestingly, the evaluators believed the candidate with leadership potential would be more successful at the new company than the candidate with a proven record of leadership ability. The researchers documented this preference in laboratory and field experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to comedians to graduate school applicants and measures ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to admission decisions.

For more, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

It's Time to Tip Over Those Sacred Cows!

I have to admit, when my colleague Jake Breeden told me the title of his new book, I had to look up what it meant.  But once I did, it made perfect sense.  Jake’s book, Tipping Sacred Cows, is about the hidden beliefs that keep us from achieving our true potential.  While they are mostly virtuous, they can also be dangerous because they are rarely questioned.  Some of them really resonated with me, and I bet they will with you as well:

Balance

This value is often misconstrued to mean constant compromise, but bold leaders must make tough choices. And when we as leaders move from doing one thing well to many things poorly, our organizations suffer. Leaders who hide behind balance as an excuse to avoid taking a stand for an unpopular position do themselves and their companies a disservice. In short, when balance encourages us to say yes to everything all at once, we end up saying no to leadership.

Collaboration

Too often collaboration is automatic, meaning that we work on something together by default instead of making the purposeful, conscious choice to do so.  The default state of working should be working alone; leaders should collaborate only when they must.  Depending on your role, that may mean a significant part of your job requires collaboration.  But ask yourself the question: does this work really need more than me?

Creativity

This value can backfire because of a leader’s need to add her own ideas.  Adopting someone else’s best practice doesn’t give you the same sense of pride and accomplishment as generating a new best practice.  Creating a needless innovation feels better to the innovator than does creating nothing at all. In such cases, creativity has stopped being a tool used in service of larger goals, and has become the very personal source of a leader’s narcissistic needs.

For more sacred cows you should consider tipping, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Help - My Co-Worker Can't Say No!

Over at Intuit's Fast Track blog, a reader wrote us with the following question:

Here’s the question, with our experts’ responses below:

My manager quit earlier this year, leaving me to run the marketing department with a woman we’d just hired.

I wasn’t in favor of the hire because I was concerned that she lacks professional maturity, but now she’s my co-director and we’re making do.  They’re not replacing my manager, and there’s been no conversation about how our roles have changed or what our strategic direction forward looks like—we’re just barging ahead.  My problem is this:  She’s hardworking, cheerful, and bright—and absolutely incapable of saying “no” to any request.  Whether it’s another director, a member of the senior team, or even (not making this up) a janitor with another “great idea” for improving the web site, she’s on board and happy to make it happen.  Web cams on the roof?  Sure!  Amateur photo contest?  Why not!  Some of the projects have been great, but most just clutter up the site and create huge amounts of work for me, because she doesn’t think about how her “happy to do it” attitude drags me into hours of editing work for unproven ideas that sound like fun and then backfire in big ways.  Our more boring, but important, work falls by the wayside, and our numbers are suffering because she won’t focus on fundamentals.

We now report to someone off-site, and he’s as hands-off as can be.  How can I work with her to make her understand that we need to make decisions as a team, and that her decisions set precedents for expectations we can’t undo?

Here's my response:

I can rather picture this person.  She is very idealistic and enthusiastic, but lacks the experience and critical eye to fully understand what’s doable and what isn’t.  Working with her would probably drive me to distraction too.

But that’s not helpful, because your success in your role depends on your ability to get this co-manager to cooperate with you.  So I’d appeal to what seems to matter most to her – that people like her.  I’d take her to lunch and preface the discussion with how happy you are to be working alongside one of the group’s rising stars.  Ask her if she’s amenable to developing a system for vetting projects so that the two of you are perceived as a can-do team, the one with which everyone wants to work.

Then, lay out your suggestion.  I recommend that this include meeting semi-weekly to discuss your duo’s priorities and decide what you’re going to move forward on, and in what order.  Neither of you should give other team members definitive answers on their recommendations until the two of you have met.  This will hopefully give you a regular chance to talk her out of ideas that are not feasible, or re-direct her energies into the fundamentals you mention.  Always remain positive when discussing an idea, no matter how wacky.  Say something like:  “That sounds really fun, but given that we’ve already committed to X, I think we should revisit it.”  The less forcefully you shut her down, the more likely she is to comply.

It sounds like you may be a little older than her.   If this is the case, perhaps you can offer yourself as a mentor and she’ll begin to lean on you for more strategic direction.  At that point, you can probably be even more direct with her about the problems that can arise when expectations aren’t managed properly, and your advice will be better received.

For great answers from the other experts, have a look at the full post at Fast Track.

Is Business Travel a Blessing or a Curse?

It’s fun to travel with colleagues.  No, really.  Back when I worked at CA, my whole team traveled from New York City to Las Vegas once a year for our company’s annual trade show.  After the highs and lows only a harried week of work in Vegas can provide, I really bonded with these people.  Many years later, I still keep in touch with many of them.  And I still love Vegas.

Traveling with co-workers, however, involves a set of informal rules of which it’s helpful to be aware.  Here are a few that I’ve learned over time.

1. Don’t insist on sitting together on the plane.

Plane etiquette is tricky.  Some people don’t mind gabbing away the whole time, while others would like nothing more than sit silently with their iPad and relish the calm before their trip’s storm.  Because it can be difficult to ascertain your co-worker’s camp and awkward if you get it wrong, sit apart unless you can’t avoid it.  You can probably use the quiet time yourself.

2. Do use the trip as an opportunity.

During a trip, you will probably have more chances to converse with your colleagues than usual.  Use the time to get to know them as human beings.  Express curiosity about their family and hobbies and be open in answering their questions about your lifestyle.  The closer you become when you travel, the stronger your relationship will be back at the office.

3. Don’t let your guard down too far.

Of course, there is a such thing as getting too close.  Always look presentable and avoid inappropriate conversation topics such as sex, drugs, current personal struggles, mean-spirited gossip, and anything you’d be embarrassed about if your boss found out.  Never use a business trip to launch a physical or sexual relationship with a colleague.  Even if you are both single, this is not the time or the place.

For more dos and don'ts for traveling with colleagues, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.