On Dealing with a Tradesperson

"The Bitch" a short-short story

Less Obvious Tips for Mentors and Mentees

"It's Not My Job to Make You Coffee:" a short-short story

Individiualized Management

Book publishers and consultants know that managers and leaders are always looking for a magic pill, a few-step formula for leadership success. Formulaic sells. 

So in comes Total Quality Management, 6-Sigma, Agile/Scrum, Management by Consensus, Theory Z, etc.

In truth, good management is the opposite of formulaic. It's individualized. Consistent with your work-group's mission, how can you maximize each supervisees' strengths while skirting their weaknesses. So the wise manager and leader sits down with each employee to craft an individualized approach. 

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers key factors in individualized management.

Career Lessons I Learned From Einstein (my dog)

I thought you might like an advanced look at my next AOL piece.

Career Lessons I Learned from Einstein (my dog)

After rejecting a pound-full of scary and/or ugly curs, I came upon an white bundle of cuteness and sweetness. He kept pawing on the cage, "Take me! Take me out!"

Normally, I virtually deify intelligence but at that moment, I ignored the experts' urging that, before adopting, I assess a dog's trainability. That sweet cutie was mine. Career lesson: Look your best and be as nice as possible. Those may matter more than your competence, alas.

I was soon to understand why Einstein's previous owner, in the middle of the night, threw such a cute doggie over the fence into the pound.

Experts say dogs are more secure if left in a crate when being left alone. I didn't like the idea of caging my baby so I left Einstein in a room with the door closed but with access to the backyard. I returned to find him having destroyed the carpet next to the door: He had spent the hours trying to dig his way under the door so he could escape from his "crate."  Career lesson: Take even consensus expert advice with at least one grain of salt.

Within a week, Einstein had eaten my glasses, a bottle of my medication (He had to get his stomach pumped), and one morning when I opened the door to get the newspaper, he sneaked out and took off down the street. In my tee-shirt, shorts, and slippers, I raced after him. Two blocks later, he's sauntering up the freeway ramp with me in hot pursuit. Fortunately, traffic was stopped on the freeway and I yelled "open the door!" because I knew Einstein (his name is obviously false advertising) loves being in a car and perhaps he'd jump in. Fortunately, someone did and Einstein did.  Career lesson: New employees may need close supervision.

Two weeks after I adopted him, I had to go out of town for a day. I figured Einstein would be more secure left at home than in a kennel, and with the doggy door to the backyard and plenty of food and water, he'd be okay. Wrong! When I returned, the house looked like it had suffered a 7.0 earthquake. The poor baby was terrified I wouldn't come back. Career lesson: Be gradual in giving your employees autonomy.

I read training advice from Cesar's Way to No Bad Dogs. Alas, those authors hadn't met Einstein. Despite using clickers, treat-rewards, gentle tones, firm tones, everything short of a stun gun, Einstein remained a, ahem, free spirit. He just can't restrain himself from pulling on the leash when he sees another dog with whom he'd like to play or a tree on which he'd like to pee. But after a month of trying to be the Dog Whisperer, I decided that good enough is good enough. Einstein walks reasonably well on a leash and he comes when called, well, sometimes. Taking dog training classes and/or hiring a professional trainer felt like more work and expense than the benefit would yield. And now, five years later, while some might say that Einstein has trained me as much as I've trained him, I don't regret deciding that good is good enough. Career lesson: The perfect is the enemy of the good. There may be more important uses of your time and money.

Einstein is my receptionist. When a client arrives, he's greeted with an enthusiasm no human receptionist could match. (Of course, I'm not sure that most human receptionists would want to kiss everyone who walked in the door.) Einstein often then races around my home/office, giving a whole new meaning to the term "lap dog." One time, a rather stuffy client was waiting in the living room as Einstein did his lap. Along the way, Einstein pulled a piece of my underwear from the hamper and proudly showed it to the client. While I was embarrassed, I managed a joke: "Every new client gets a free piece of my underwear." Instead of my having lost all credibility with the client, he laughed and we got off to a good start. Career lesson: Often, the antidote to a screw-up is humor.

Oh, one more career lesson. See if you can get your boss to allow pets in the workplace. It can reduce stress and improve office culture and even productivity. Owners are allowed to bring dogs to work in the U.S. Congress. If it's good enough for Congress, it should be good enough for your workplace.

Becoming an Effective and Beloved Boss

The first time I got hired to be a manager, I thought, "Well, I'm the boss. I guess that means I'm supposed to boss-around my supervisees." (A liberal arts education didn't include the art of supervising.) No surprise, I got "laid off."

I've learned a few things since then:

Look the part. We're a lookist society. It seems that half of how we're judged is our appearance. If you choose to appear fringey or grungy, you'll be leading with one strike against you. Rule: dress one notch dressier than employees at your level, two notches dressier than your supervisees. So if your supervisees wear casual shirts and pants and your fellow managers wear nicer shirts and pants, you wear a sport jacket, no tie.

Hire slow; fire fast. A boss's most important job is something she unfortunately often can't do: hire her supervisees. Usually, they're in place and can't easily be terminated. Study after study finds that hiring wisely is critical. That's not surprising: It's hard to turn a lazy employee into a hard worker, a dullard into a genius, a technophobe into a supergeek. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, wrote, "Great managers get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off before figuring out where to drive it." So, the rule is: hire slow, fire fast.

Let everyone you respect know you're looking to hire. The best hires usually come from referral--your friends and colleagues are likely to refer only truly good people, not bad employees who respond to want ads with a primped-up resume, highly coached interview skills, and shill references so they look better than they are.

Your selection process should focus on simulations: having the applicants do bits of the kind of work they'd do on the job. And better to hire an inexperienced, smart, kind hard worker than an experienced person with lackluster intelligence and drive.

Spend only a short time trying to improve a weak supervisee's performance. Even psychotherapists, working one-on-one with patients for years, have a hard time fundamentally changing them. You're unlikely to do better. So if after a brief effort to improve a weak employee, you see little progress and you have the power, cut your losses. Where possible, rather than use a legalistic approach to termination, counsel them out: Point out that their strengths aren't best utilized in this job and that you'd like to help the person find a better-suited position.

The power to inspire is under your control. Workers are far more motivated if they believe in the mission and in you. Even if your supervisees' jobs are as mundane as payroll clerk, you can legitimately assert that their jobs are crucial. I'd tell them, "Our job is to make sure that the company employees and their families get all the money they deserve and that the company is not unfairly shortchanged. Very important."

Even more potentially inspiring: your behavior. If you present your supervisees with a wise strategy, work hard and ethically, focus on solutions not complaining, prioritize improving the company not aggrandizing yourself, you'll inspire most of your supervisees. Those that remain insufficiently productive should, if possible, be victims of Fire Fast or at least moved where they'll do the least harm.

Mold the job to your strengths. Some of your job description is limited by your boss and by your workgroup's needs but often you can structure your job to spend more time using your strengths and little using your weaknesses. Where possible, delegate tasks that would expose your limitations.

My wife is an education administrator. Most people in her position focus on managing people and doing budgets. But she remolded her job description to minimize those and maximize the things she's best at: giving speeches, doing demonstration lessons for teachers, appearing in the media, and solving people problems, for example, with the teacher's union, parents threatening to sue, etc. The result: she won, over 100 other candidates, her region's Schools Superintendent of the Year Award, Congressional Woman of the Year, and in 2014, the Best Public Advocate Award from the International Society for Technology in Education. .

Which are you strong and weak at: Strategy? Tactics? Budgeting? Organization? Coaching employees one-on-one? Leading workshops? Developing efficient procedures? Resolving people problems? Resolving technical problems? Public speaking? Running meetings? Hiring? Firing? Collaborative decision making? Solo decisive decision-making? Can you adapt your job description to fit?

Be strategic. Many managers have the opportunity to create strategy. My favorite approach to setting strategy is:

1. Lead a meeting with your supervisees in which you brainstorm the relevant strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

2. Take their input back to your desk and develop a draft strategic plan.

3. Share it with the group and revise it based on their input.

4. Inspire your workers to implement the strategic plan, usually including measurable goals for which your workers are accountable, praised, celebrated, and perhaps financially rewarded when accomplished.

5. When goals aren't met, address the problem promptly, candidly, and crisply while, where possible, preserving workers' self-esteem.

Delegate. If you do it all yourself, you'll likely not only to work too long hours, your workers will feel disempowered. Sure, do the things you're good at and enjoy doing but delegate where appropriate, even if you could do it better yourself. Sometimes good is good enough. Indeed, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

Treat your supervisees not equally, but fairly. Management isn't one-size-fits-all. Some workers need close supervision while others are most productive with maximum freedom. Some workers are motivated mainly by praise, others by fear, others by chats about their family, still others by increasing their responsibilities. Some employees can take lots of candid feedback; others would shut down.

Be only mildly nice. If you're too effusive, you can generate complacency in your workers. A small measure of fear doesn't hurt. Also, by withholding your kindest self, when a supervisee does something good and then you're very nice, he'll appreciate it and be positively reinforced by it, whereas if that's your normal behavior, it will more likely be shrugged off as business-as-usual.

You can more often get what you want if you don't insist on getting credit. For example, when I was president of a theatre's board, I developed a plan to capture audience members' emails. A small part of my plan was something another board member had come up with. So when I presented my idea to the board, I said, "Susan suggested a way to capture emails. I built on it and here it is. What do you think?" I believe that my giving her as much credit as possible helped it get adopted and contributed to my being perceived as someone more interested in getting things done than in self-aggrandizement.

Create an atmosphere of candor. Praise people for disclosing significant problems, chastise them for withholding key information. Candor is key--when it's an important problem. Sometimes, small problems and weaknesses are best ignored. They and you must wisely decide which battles are worth fighting.

Run crisp meetings. Meetings can be time sucks. Only call a meeting when an email to your staff won't do--for example, when you want real-time brainstorming or you're trying to build staff morale (Hint: Serve food. It lubricates conversation.)

Send the agenda in advance; ask for input. Start on time, keep to the agenda, and the time limit. Best time for a meeting: right before lunch: people will want to get out on time.

Let others talk. For most of the meeting, your main job usually is to listen carefully, ask clarifying questions, keep one person from dominating or being unduly negative, and encouraging quiet people to contribute.

The best time for you to have your say is after they've all had theirs. At the end of an agenda item, you'll often want to make a concluding statement such as, "In light of John's statement X, Mary's statement Y, and Jose's statement Z, we're going to do Q."

Embrace and win at office politics. When I was young, I thought, "I'll ignore office politics. I want to succeed on the merits." Mistake. In many workplaces, especially in tough times, some workers will stab others in the back, withhold information to gain power, and otherwise sabotage them.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: Practice positive politics:

• Make the effort to be at least moderately liked by all while staying out of the gossip vine.
• Take the time to develop relationships with key people. Periodically ask them, "Is there anything I can do to make your life easier?"
• When you want to propose something, see if you can get the right people on board before formally proposing it--even if you have to share the credit.
• If you're sabotaged, privately warn the offender that if it happens again, you'll report it.

Do those things and chances are you'll be a respected perhaps even beloved boss.

I Have More Sympathy for Bosses than for Supervisees

The media almost always takes the side of workers over the bosses. Witness the endless parade of books, articles, and TV shows, about bad bosses. Their supervisees, however, are usually painted as saintly.

In fact, on average, people become bosses because they are smarter and harder working. And what do they get:

• Often bosses must supervise less competent and less hard-working people, and their hands are tied in doing so. If praise and gentle suggestions don't improve a weak employee's performance, threats of union grievances and harassment claims often tie bosses' hands.

• Firing is often very difficult, requiring months or even years of painstaking documentation, after which significant risk still remains of a wrongful termination suit or of the surviving workers' morale declining from the loss of their pleasant if unproductive pal.

• Bosses are often caught in the middle between higher-ups demanding more productivity and unproductive supervisees already complaining of overwork.

• Not much more money. Unlike workers, who get overtime pay after 40 hours, managers are exempt, meaning they can (and often are expected to) work 50-60 hours a week but receive no overtime pay. And the increment in salary for being a boss is taxed at their highest rate, so, after taxes, unless they're a true big-wig, the improvement to their lifestyle is usually minimal,

If you're a boss, I want you to know that at least someone's on your side.