Episode #300: You Have To Chastise People, Right?

I was meeting with the HR team from a client company. In fact, this was the first meeting with the HR team, because previously we had been directly dealing with the sales line managers. They were looking for a leadership programme for people being moved up into leadership positions for the first time. They had requested the manuals, so I brought them with me and we were going through them. The HR head stopped on a page where it referred to giving praise to staff. “Doesn’t the boss have to give out corrections and chastise staff for poor performance, rather than giving praise”, she asked? She said she had a attended training from a competitor – a very large Japanese domestic training company and that is what they were teaching in their programs – how to give strong leadership to staff.

I have to say I was overjoyed when I heard that piece of market intelligence. It means this behemoth rival of ours is a dinosaur and so far behind it is breathtaking. I explained to her what happens when you directly criticise people. They either puff up their chests like a barnyard rooster and fight or they slink off with their tail between their legs, like a beaten dog, giving up entirely. Maybe in the good old days of a high unemployment rates and young graduates hitting the workforce like machines, you could get away with this type of leadership.

We have 1.6 jobs for everyone looking, unemployment is at all time lows and the numbers of young people in the 15-34 age bracket has halved over the last twenty years. We are running out of demographic margin to find enough people for our companies. In addition to that, we have to be really clever about the retain part, because it is going to take ages and cost a bomb to replace people who up and leave. So idiot managers yelling at people isn’t going to work anymore.

Those who make mistakes or are underperforming generally know this and either try to justify their position or just see a collapse in confidence. Given we can’t just fire people willy-nilly, we need to be in the restore people business. If we criticize, they throw up defensive positions and these people don’t take accountability or responsibility.

We need to see the person as a whole – they do some things well and other things not so well. It is typical for the boss however to become a fault finder, rather than a good finder. The boss is always in fix mode, so when something is broken they fix it and their biggest fear is something is broken, but they don’t know about it. They are constantly scanning for bad performance.

We should see what the person is doing well and recognize that. Praise the things they are competent it. For the things they are not doing well, we can refer to these indirectly. Why not directly? Why not tell it like it is baby and get it all out on the table? If we want the person to accept responsibility and fix it, we need their cooperation. So praise first, then we might call attention to their mistakes indirectly. We might ask them how they think we could fix this issue. For example, maybe they are not meeting their sales targets. Telling them they are not selling enough is not new information for them, they already know what. We can ask though, “The team will miss their target for this quarter. What can you do to help the team make the target?”. They have missed their target, they know it and now they are being invited to talk about what they can do in their area of responsibility, to get the numbers back up. It is the same message as, “hey stupid, you missed your target, what are you going to do about it?”, but without the resistance which arises to looking at alternatives and solutions. We get on the forward momentum train and look to what can be done. We want them to own the solution, because they are more likely to execute on those ideas.

We might talk about our own mistakes before we draw attention to them. This provides an entirely different context to the discussion. The boss has admitted that they are not perfect and that they understand that things go wrong, but intimate it is possible to recover from mistakes. We let them save face and we tell them we are sure they can fix the problem. We are giving them support in that we believe they can recover from this and we will help them. For those people who collapse into depression and lose their self belief, this is important to rebuild them and send them back out there in the firing line to make it work the next time.

Yelling at people may make the boss feel good, but it is not helping the business. We cannot operate as if demographic exigencies don’t exist. We need to keep people and make them productive and that requires a different skill set as a leader. The EQ or Emotional Quotient is certainly the key. Bosses who lack this understanding will pay a weighty price of lack of staff. In fact they will be losing staff continuously and the business will see competitors thriving as they wither in the vine.