Fear of Success

For those of you who are keeping track of my professional life, I have another story that seems to rival the water main story on my old blog. This has to do with successes.

Many of you may have read The One Minute Manager, an old skinny text on how-to lead from the late 70's/early 80's. It began the windfall of management books that are kind of between self-help and business. My uncle gave me this book for Christmas one year right after I landed a management role. One of the basic premises is to spend 80% of your time with the top 20% of your staff. Most people spend 80% of their time with the bottom 20% of their staff. Getting to the first goal is difficult at best. It requires culture shifts on dramatic levels.

When I first got to Indy one of my challenges was to "de-silo" the teams. There were different cultures in each team, different dynamics, and different motivations. The one thing this job had that my last one didn't was reports on staff performance from various angles. For the most part, all I see is bad news. Last month I sent an email out to all of the staff I manage recognizing those who met or exceeded production expectations. I hoped this would encourage people, let them know management took an interest and spent time celebrating success. I put their names up on the FISH bulletin board and put their names into the drawing for employee of the month. The reply back was, "All management cares about is making money." What the??? Productivity isn't even rated in dollars!

Ok, so I went back to research where exactly this message was cultivated. Turns out I have to face the "H" word: history. I will say several individuals really responded well to my initial email and thanked me for paying attention, but I got an ear full from a few. They advised me that their teams were "private" and "were just doing their job" (even though their numbers were terrible...I could argue that they weren't doing their job). However I was the listening open boss and let the feedback in. One pointed out that by recognizing those who made expectations immediately pointed out who didn't which was mean and encouraged competition. Holy cow. These people would be eaten alive in a for profit sector. One person advised me to recognize the whole team, not just the individual. I told them that I would be open to that if I actually had a team that WAS up to par. I don't.

I solicited feedback from all of my employees on how to best do recognition for success. Not surprisingly the ones who were against public recognition were those who were so far below the mark they were on disciplinary action. In the end, I did "modify" my recognition but I sent it out again last week acknowledging progress with several individuals.

The response I got back from one was, "And now you have to spend your time filling out all of the paperwork for every single person you recognized for the FISH board." I replied, "I will and I look forward to it."