I have a received a few “raised eyebrows” comments about my statement that people don’t listen. A manager said to me:
“My people do listen to me”.
Do they? Or are you just lucky?
As a young manager I used to think that what I said mattered. But it did not. Sometimes it looked like it did: the team members already agreed with me – hence they ended up doing it. It was luck.
That is why I developed a strong affinity for asking clarifying questions: If I can discover what a person is really thinking about a given task, at least I now know what they plan to do. Then, if I don’t agree, I have at least a fighting chance of discussing it.
I have developed a golden rule:
When it comes to doing the work, what I say most likely won’t matter. Only what the team member thinks will matter.
On November 9th, 2006, the Rutgers football team was having a bad night – but they just kept “chopping wood”.
It had started badly. Louisville returned the opening kick-off for a touchdown. Then Louisville could do no wrong getting 25 points before Rutgers would score on the last play before the half. Going to the locker room, loosing 25-7 at half-time, Coach Schiano would talk to the team:
“Just keep chopping away guys. It’ll turn, if you let it – it’ll turn. You just gotta keep doing it though. If you don’t do it, you’ll never know what could have happened.”
The second half was like a new game. Louisville would not score again. Rutgers won, on a field goal with 13 seconds left, 28-25.
Asked by a reporter at the press conference, if a moment stood out for him, coach Schiano answered:
“There was a moment when Eric Fosters came walking down the sideline like this (coach makes hand chopping movement), and we passed each other and he never even looked at me he was so focused… At that point I said, you know what, these sons of a gun just might do this.”
(for reference: my definition of Objectives )
From the coaching file, here’s what engineers tell me:
I hate to go to design reviews to find out what I did is not what They wanted – never mind that the specs weren’t clear about it in the first place.
I am being micro-managed by my Lead Engineer who keeps fiddling with my tasks every second day – as if he didn’t trust me.
I went into engineering to learn to solve problems – not to follow exactly how somebody else who got to the company before me wants me to do it.
I’m tired of having to get approval for every solution to every problem I hit on my task – just because the lead engineer wants to make sure we do what “They” want.
These comments are symptoms of teams who don’t discuss objectives. Instead, Team Leaders assign tasks by explaining how they want them done. Why do they do this?
Actions are the source of improvement, not people.
I remember a director at a contract R&D firm. He complained out loud and often about his staff. He had come from a big car manufacturer where apparently they could measure load curves for engines in a quarter of the time it took his current team to get them. Somehow this poor man had now ended up with a bunch of nitwits who could not do it right. Was he right? Do R&D firm hire nitwits?.
Well, he looked at measurable results – that was the good part. Comparing the time it takes to get load curves told him that his current team needed to improve, and by how much. But it didn’t prove “nitwitness”.
The part he got wrong was that he kept looking at the people, judging them as if they were their results. But he never focused on what they actually did. To his mind there was little else to fix but the staff themselves. And the results never improved.
People are not the source of improvement, their actions are.
A trivial distinction?