Employees don't listen to me vs. Employees listen to me about everything.

Recently, Guangjian encountered two very interesting consulting cases. In one case, the manager complained about the lack of openness in the team's work, and that the team still followed the original method after they had made many suggestions for improvement, which made the work uninspired and always stayed in the same place. In the other case, the manager complained that the team had no initiative, listened to everything they said, and asked them to ask questions or make suggestions, but they never got a response.

A colleague asked me whether employees should listen to their bosses or not. When should they listen and when should they not? On the surface, it seems that the key action in these two cases is 'do employees listen to the boss or not' and their situations are opposite. But in reality, they are experiencing the same problem, which is 'the behavior I expect, the employee doesn't'.

In the first case, the manager is concerned about the openness of the employee, and the corresponding behavior is "accepting good suggestions from others and refining one's own approach". In the second case, the manager is concerned about the employee's initiative, which corresponds to the behavior of "questioning, different ideas and solutions".

In today's management column, we'll use these two cases to talk about why 'I expect behavior that the employee doesn't have'. What can we do now to avoid or remedy it.

Why does the company expect me to do this?

You expect someone to behave in a certain way, first of all you have to be able to answer the question 'why do you do it', and convince the other person that it is right, valuable and logical to do so.

If you can't answer the question yourself, or if you realize that it's an unreasonable request when you answer it, then it's not surprising that others can't do it. For example, if you want an engineer who often writes code until 2am to clock in at 8am every morning, or if you want a person to independently run a daily-shifted public website and achieve the quality of a magazine.

The behaviors mentioned in the previous two cases are actually the corporate culture that both companies want. That is, the company's managers believe that everyone in the company should act this way, and that if they don't, the company will no longer be the company they want it to be. The question then becomes - does the team know?

In the first case (the employees didn't listen to me at all), they insisted on openness, on the one hand, because what they were doing was revolutionizing the industry, which couldn't be done by one person alone, and required sufficient communication and cooperation, and on the other hand, because their competitive advantage was good quality, and the only way to continuously refine their quality was to keep openness. However, managers have not clearly communicated this reason to the team, and the company's values have only recently been helped by Guangjian. So they need to make up for the communication next.

In the second case (employees listen to me on everything), the reason for wanting employees to have initiative is that they are solving a cross-border, complex problem, so they recruit very good people in various fields, that is, they want not to be limited by the founders' own professional backgrounds. Managers have had clear communications, and will emphasize this repeatedly during employee onboarding, and in internal communications, but it doesn't work. Which brings us to the second question: is there a barrier when employees do this?

What obstacles have I encountered in doing so?

We did some interviews with the employees in the second case and found that the difficulty people encountered was that they were afraid to ask their own questions or ideas. Further questioning revealed that people were worried about looking stupid, and the reason for this fear was that managers could always easily find loopholes in their ideas. That is, when you are asked to come up with your own ideas and do the same, you are first met with denial. That's a hard pill to swallow.

Managers really mean no harm and just want to discuss the ideas. But here are two points that managers may overlook: first, no idea is perfect; and second, it's important to make ideas useful, not to find out where they don't work. So when we are confronted with an idea, the first thing to ask is what is the insight behind it, what would be the value of the idea, and based on that we can then discuss what might be wrong with it and how to make the idea more useful.

Since the expected behavior is for employees to initiate questions, ideas, and suggestions, it is important to give a positive response to this behavior in the first place, whether or not the question, idea, and suggestion is sound; caring about the valuable parts of these questions, ideas, and suggestions is a positive response, and discussing together how to make the idea more useful is also a positive response.

On the other hand, if it is true that the team is currently incapable of coming up with useful ideas, this positive response to the questioning can also help everyone to build good working methods and work habits.

And discussing the bad parts of these ideas right off the bat is a negative response. We often emphasize "Defer Judgment" in the brainstorming portion of Design Workshop, in the hope that people's thinking will not be limited by arbitrary feedback, but will have the opportunity to walk along the unsupportable idea to an awesome solution. It's the same with daily work.

If you continue to get negative responses, you will slowly lose confidence in proposing ideas, and not only will you be afraid to do so, you will probably not even dare to think about it.

What happens if I don't?

The second case shows us that feedback on the behavior is a key factor in whether or not that behavior keeps coming up. The first case actually had the same problem, except in their case: the behavior never came up.

You repeatedly tell me to do a thing, but I don't do it, and you don't do anything about it. I don't do it once, and you're not doing anything; I don't do it twice, and you're not doing anything; and over time, of course, I think it doesn't matter whether I do it or not.

So, when the behavior you think is important doesn't show up, you can't keep silent, you must give negative feedback and let the employee know the consequences that need to be taken. Like the situation in the first case, the immediate negative feedback would be "the work is not new and not improving, it needs to be revised", the negative feedback after that would be "you may lose the opportunity to get a more challenging project", and the negative feedback further down the line could be the loss of promotion during performance appraisal due to the lack of openness.

Let's take another case of counseling I've encountered before. This company had a production quality incident. The head of the company asked me if I should penalize the manager of the production department who was responsible for the final quality. But before that, the company had no clear standards for the division of responsibility for the production process and the quality requirements. I suggested that they ask the production manager to organize a review of the entire production process and come up with a clear process and standard; then inform them of the incident in an all-hands meeting, with the head of the company taking responsibility for the accident, but at the same time sharing the new process and standard, and making it clear that the accident was unacceptable; and that if something like this happened again after that, the person responsible would be subject to a deduction of bonus, or even dismissal. Punishment.

This feedback has to be quick and not delayed. Once delayed, it sends the message to more people that this behavior can be accommodated.

summarize

So, when we find a situation in the company where "I expect the behavior and the employee doesn't", we must think about it: have we communicated with the employee why the behavior is necessary, have we given positive feedback when the employee has the behavior, and have we given negative feedback when the employee consistently doesn't have the behavior.

Of course, as my colleague said after listening to the above article, "I still can't live my life well even after listening to so many truths", it's useless just to understand the truths, practicing and practicing over and over again is really the most useful method.