Yep, I heard it again. A new client, a CEO, told my team prior to our first work session, “I want my life back. I love working, but I’ve got to stop working 90-hour weeks. Something needs to change around here.”

Sounds logical and completely reasonable to me, but how do you get your life back if you are the only person who knows your job? Worse yet—how do you do that if you are the owner, CEO, or a senior manager? Who can do your job?

As I have observed over the years, being a CEO is hard. Being the top dog is tough and it’s lonely. For publicly held companies it’s even worse since Sarbanes-Oxley Act went into effect in 2002. There are more reporting requirements, more involved board members, and more people watching to confirm personal and professional integrity and ethics are in play.

How do you find someone to takeover some if not all of your job responsibilities in the near or long-term? How do you do this when more executives and prospects don’t want the job?

• Develop more leaders throughout your organization and not just at the top
• Create more “depth” and not just single-position strength
• For more information/solutions, read my book: Something Needs to Change Around Here: The Five Stages of Leveraging Your Leadership

Now, let this Dragon Lady of Accountability™ ask you: If you’ve been working 90-hour workweeks, how much of that time are you spending developing others? Let me guess. None. Hardly any. If, on the other hand, you had been spending dedicated time to developing skills in your other managers, supervisors, and front-line staff, you would not feel (or be) so out of control. You would feel more in control because you would be leading a team who knew what was expected of them, individually and as a whole.

Get your life back by developing skills in others and by developing leaders throughout your organization. Get your life back by working with your team to develop systems, processes, and procedures that help all of you gain greater control now and in the future. When you create an organization others want to become a part of and where your team members are happy, that’s when you will get back to a life you can enjoy.

Copyright 2004 & 2011 – Liz Weber, CMC – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com

Pretty sobering isn’t it? However, for anyone paying attention to the news for the past several years, this should not be new information—just a reaffirmation of more challenges coming our way as employers. So how do we confront it?

(1) Provide an environment our employees want to be a part of—now and in the future. We need to continue to create business environments our employees want to come to and participate in on a regular basis, versus a job they do not look forward to each and every day. If they dread coming to work, they certainly will stop coming when they can retire or some other company lures them away with more money. We can improve our work environment for our employees through a number of ways depending upon what our respective organization and employees need.

• Clean up the place. This sounds petty to many, but I can’t tell you the number of times I have had to strongly recommend to clients that before they spend any money on consultants and other experts to fix their employees, they would increase their return on any such investment if they first cleared away the gathered clutter, bought filing cabinets, threw away broken equipment that was stockpiled in corners, organized their inventory and supplies, and hired a janitorial service to regularly clean the facility—particularly the restrooms.
• Hold all employees (including ourselves) accountable to abide by the Values of our company—day in and day out. Again, this sounds touchy-feely to some of you, but after working with various organizations for 20 years, I have seen the attitudes and focus in employees shift positively when they know and understand what standards of performance and behavior they will be held to and then are.

(2) Provide continuous, serious training to our current employees to keep them engaged, in step with technology, and learning new aspects of our business’ operations. A recent study by Korn/Ferry showed that 51% of the executives surveyed indicated they were at least “Likely” to choose a different career field, because it provided the possibility of learning something new. Other studies are also indicating that more people nearing retirement are planning to continue to work, at least on a part-time basis, to keep engaged, learning, and current. Given this, doesn’t it make sense to provide additional opportunities for our employees to learn new and challenging skills with us instead of having one of our competitors hire them away?

Again, there are no easy answers. But if we start to prepare now for the serious challenges ahead, our employees can (and will) collaborate with us to find strong solutions to the shrinking labor pool.

We have a special guest on the blog today. David Graham, founder of Executive Insight, has written a terrific article that we’d like to share with you.

How do you empower HR leadership teams to deliver more business value?

Visit David Graham‘s blog for more great articles.

This article, produced by Deloitte Human Capital discusses the role of the HR COO. If you have any questions, contact Jack Sellschop at jsellschop@deloitte.co.za or Gareth Evans at garevans@deloitte.co.za

The emerging role of the HR COO – Empowering HR leadership teams to deliver more business value

Despite the proven benefits of HR transformation, business executives and HR leaders alike continue to voice frustration with HR’s ability to deliver value. With no shortage of talented people doing great work, what is the problem? All signs point to the need to rethink how HR organisations deliver on the promise of supporting the business – with a new role designed to drive performance improvements across the entire HR organisation, namely the HR Chief Operating Officer.

The business wants more – not less – from HR

Business leaders today fully understand the value of people. They can clearly articulate their top people priorities – and are more than willing to invest to get what they need. At the same time, Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) leaders know they have to deliver what the business needs and wants. As a result, when business and HR leaders sit down to work together, they are often focused less on what needs to be done, and more on how.

Predictably, business leaders want better, faster and more compliant HR services at a lower cost and an HR organisation that can turn on a dime to support their ever-changing business strategies and goals. Unfortunately, many HR organisations continue to struggle to meet those demanding requirements.

The challenge of getting to “better, faster, cheaper and more agile” is daunting for any organisation, but it is doubly difficult for HR organisations, where many leadership teams still operate with structures and roles that have been in place for decades.

The traditional model for HR leadership

Today, a typical corporate HR leadership team is led by a CHRO and includes HR VPs for business units, HR VPs for Centres of Expertise (e.g. Compensation and Benefits), a VP for HR Operations, a VP for HR Technology, a head of legal for HR and an HR controller. Some leadership team members have dual reporting relationships, which can include direct lines to the CIO, CFO, CAO or Chief Legal Counsel.

Within this familiar structure, leadership team roles and responsibilities are predictable. For example, HR VPs for business units are naturally focused on business unit HR issues. Centre-of-Expertise leaders concentrate on HR policies and programmes. Leaders for HR Shared Services and Technology manage operations and technology. And so on.

In terms of operating model, HR leadership team members typically have their own budgets and resources and are responsible for developing an annual operating plan to support their priorities and projects. Implementation, however, is often the responsibility of an IT or Shared Services group, which may have its own resources and budget. Members of the leadership team and their organisations provide implementation support as needed, such as communications assistance or loaned resources.

This traditional model works well as far as it goes – but it does not go nearly far enough. For example, when coordination is required across multiple functions and business units (such as merger integration or enterprise-wide rollout of a new HR initiative), the model falls short. In those circumstances, integration is typically handled on an ad hoc basis through an informal network of “go-to people” in the HR organisation. The network steps up and pulls together to handle deals when they happen, with leadership often provided by an experienced team of HR leaders. Success hinges on relationships and special effort rather than reliable processes, lines of authority and structure. As a result, there is often a gap between the expectations of business leaders and what HR is set up to deliver.

What’s not working?

Most HR leaders can point to an innovative service they developed to solve a critical business challenge. Their stories have a familiar theme: the work required a lot of cooperation, goodwill and effort by HR people who stepped up to the challenge to get something important done. The examples are hard to replicate because they required huge commitments of time and energy.

Similarly, many HR organisations have gone through successful HR transformation programmes. By design, these programmes come to an end point at which the transformation of current HR services (or the development of new HR services) stops. There is rarely a structure in place to sustain the cycle of continuous performance improvement.

These two scenarios illustrate a fundamental dilemma. On one hand, HR leaders understand that the business understands the value of people and is willing to invest in people more than ever before. Yet on the other hand, their HR organisations are not prepared to take advantage of this opportunity with their current structures, roles and processes. HR leaders understand this dilemma and want a solution to this problem.

Rethinking structure

To help HR organisations seize this business challenge, we propose a simple step in the evolution of HR organisations: a division of responsibility between HR executives who focus primarily on what needs to get done and those who focus on how it gets done. That step requires creating a new, senior HR role – the HR Chief Operating Officer.

The HR COO is the leader who focuses on how HR services are delivered, as well as the design, development and implementation of HR services. The person in this new role will drive efficiency, effectiveness, cost and compliance for all HR services. The table on page three shows the division of responsibility in the HR leadership team when an HR COO is established.

Getting it done

Like any other leadership position, the role of the HR COO should be defined to establish clear lines of responsibility and reporting relationships. However, because solid line reporting relationships will not always exist, the influence element of the HR COO role should also be well defined.

Responsibilities

• Current HR service delivery, as well as driving improvements, to provide efficient, effective and compliant HR services
• Design, development and implementation of new HR services
• Development and implementation of business-focused HR metrics
• Delivering reliable workforce data with corresponding workforce reporting and analytics
• Development of the overall HR budget and analysis of total HR spend
• Development of a vendor management plan
• HR compliance and risk management
• Project management, including building capabilities for HR to manage projects such as Six Sigma in HR
• Development and implementation of an HR technology strategy to support the business needs

Structure

The HR COO role will generally have a combination of solid-line and dotted-line reporting relationships.

Influence

The ability to exert influence is always important in leadership, but it is even more critical in structures with multiple dotted-line reporting relationships. HR COOs and their direct and indirect reports need a solid understanding of how goals are set and how performance will be evaluated. This requires clarity about who influences and shapes day-to-day work, as well as longer-term career needs of these individuals.

Strength through business results

The HR COO is a new and evolving role, but from organisations that have taken early steps in this direction, there are clear indications of common themes that drive effectiveness.

For starters, the HR COO role depends on having a clear and communicated mandate to drive HR service delivery, with responsibility for HR efficiency, effectiveness and compliance. As such, it requires full support of the Executive Committee and the HR leadership team. The HR COO will need to develop working relationships with members of the senior leadership team. One way to gain that support is to establish shared HR leadership team goals that are part of each member’s performance objectives.

Looking ahead

To put it simply, the HR Chief Operating Offi cer is not a role that someone can be phased into overtime, nor can it be piloted. It requires a depth of conviction from CHROs who know they are not yet delivering the services that the business needs. In the months and years ahead, more and more CHROs will embrace the HR COO model as they strive to crack the code for operational excellence in HR service delivery. Recognising that even the best people cannot excel in a sub-optimal operating model, they will make the call that only leaders can make – to change the operating model of the HR organisation to harness the power of how.

What are your views on the role of the HR COO? We would love to hear from you.

Reposted with permission: ©2011 David Graham All Rights Reserved If you want to re-post or republish, please contact David Graham.

David Graham founded the Executive Insight blog with a primary objective is to share business-related content around strategy, innovation, human capital, technology, risk management, tax and my favourite, digital and social media marketing to decision-makers. He also participates in LinkedIn and Twitter and welcome your feedback, comments and dialogue.

He manages all digital channels for Deloitte Consulting in South Africa. Connects and shares with like-minded and influential people. Married, three children, mountain biking, outdoors, good food, red wine, Lions (local rugby team in SA).

Her question honestly stunned me for a moment because of its simplicity and its importance. If we, as business owners, do not know which positions in our company are key, how can we ensure we have those positions properly staffed, trained, and supported now and into the future? If we do not have our key positions solidly staffed and operating effectively, what might we anticipate about the rest of the positions in our company?

From the perspective of most consultants and businesses, key positions are typically those positions that sit in the C-Suite: Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Operating Officer (COO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), and chief of anything else, as well as other members of the executive and senior management teams. From my perspective, a key position is any position within an organization that has no double. Basically, any position within your company that you only have one person filling the slot. This could be your CEO, your Director of Sales, your Office Manager, your Maintenance Supervisor, or your Mechanic Level 3.

My definition of key positions obviously creates more key positions, but for any organization to do effective organizational and employee planning, you need to take into account all of those situations where one person currently holds all the knowledge of his or her position. If he or she leaves your company, you do not want your organization held hostage because no one else knows how to do that job—be it the CEO’s or the Maintenance Supervisor’s.

It is crucial that all key positions be reviewed to ensure employees (in key positions) are:

1. Documenting critical procedures (i.e., not limited to procedures that only this position handles or knows how to do).
2. Identifying and training a handful of other employees on the critical procedures to ensure others know how to do or at least know how to access the information to do these critical procedures.
3. Identifying and developing others who could step up or step into their position when promotions occur or if needed for an unanticipated reason.

Key is not a label exclusive to the folks working in the fancy offices. So, who exactly is key to your company? That’s easy—a key person is anyone who holds the (one of a kind)(one and only) key to running any area of your business.

Copyright 2006 & 2011 – Liz Weber, CMC – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com

Here’s how to address it:

1. Remember that a key responsibility of management is to ensure that production continues regardless of shifts in resources; and in this case, shifts in personnel due to retirements. When a known or anticipated shift may occur, it is management’s job to have contingency plans in place to accommodate them. In this case, it is the manager’s job to ensure there are one or two backups in place for every member of her staff. This creates depth in the department and obviously promotes cross training among staff.
2. Consider the employee’s feelings about her job. Many of us become possessive and territorial with our work. Quite often, we are the ones who created the job, and who developed and refined the systems that have allowed us to do our jobs effectively for years. It is a very real and very human reaction to not readily relinquish aspects of our jobs. Goodness knows, no one else will be able to do them as well as we do! The manager needs to acknowledge each employee’s potential possessiveness with his or her job, while helping them learn the importance of sharing what they know with others. It now becomes this employee’s job to train her own backups—not the manager.
3. Help your employees learn how to delegate to and train others. A woman at a conference shared an important idea on delegating with me a few years ago. She told me: “Dumping is when you give someone else the work you don’t want to do yourself. Delegating is when you give someone else the work you love to do yourself.” That statement had a profound impact on me. How much time, effort, patience, and attention to detail will you have if you give another person those elements of your job that you don’t really like? Not much. But if you have to start sharing and delegating elements of your job that you love to do yourself, how much time and attention to detail will you spend with that new person training him or her on how and why you do your job the way you do? I would guess, a great deal more. By default, we become better trainers when we are handing off tasks we care about. 

So, what’s this manager supposed to do now? She needs to sit down with all of her employees and explain the need for every employee to identify and start training at least two other people how to perform key aspects of their particular jobs. This will take time. That’s why we suggest each employee create a short-term and long-term list of items they need to train someone else on, as well as a list of tasks they (themselves) need to be trained on—then work their lists. This basic give-and-take process fosters greater communication among staff, enhances relationships among staff, and also, shares the knowledge. It’s a win for everyone involved—and no one gets hurt.

Copyright 2007 & 2011 – Liz Weber, CMC – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com

Needless to say, when new clients hear my response, their troubled facial expressions often indicate they are thinking, “She’s trying to sell us additional services we really don’t need.” No, I am not. But I am trying to save you money and time. These days nobody can afford to do a lot of unfocused, wasted work.

Think about it for a minute—what is succession planning?

• Succession planning is not figuring out who is going to step into someone else’s position when that person retires.
• Succession planning is really determining what skills, knowledge, behaviors, and values you will need in key positions in the future to ensure your organization continues to grow and succeed according to your strategic plan.

Therefore, doesn’t it make sense to have a very clear strategic plan in place so you know what skills, knowledge, behaviors, and values you will need? Then you will be able to determine what key positions you will need. Once you know what positions you’ll need, you can develop specific position descriptions that define what skills, knowledge, behaviors, and values the individuals who will fill those key positions must develop or possess.

By focusing on developing the skills, knowledge, behaviors, and values of individuals who may move into key positions, you will, by default, create an organization that takes a more holistic approach to succession planning and employee development. Instead of the traditional succession planning process (i.e., plugging a person into an empty spot), you will create a pool of individuals who possess much broader-based skills and knowledge, and who also exhibit the behaviors and values held dear by your organization.

So you see, you can’t develop your future leaders and key positions until you know what type of organization you expect them to lead. And you can’t plan for succession options until you plan your organization’s future.

Succession Planning Reminder: First determine what you need—a true strategy for success.

Copyright 2006 &  2011 – Liz Weber, CMC – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com

From my more than two decades of experience working with really good and not-so-good leaders, a number of skills stand out, but for now I will focus on these (magnificent) seven:

1. Strategic Thinking – The ability to think beyond the day-to-day and override the natural tendency to see the difficulties that proposed strategies might cause. Strategic thinking requires (a) leaders to focus on what’s right for the organization, the employees, and the customers now and into the future and (b) a willingness to deal with intangibles, unknowns, and risk. Strategic decisions are more often than not based upon experience and instinct, with enough research to hope projections hold true. Strategic thinkers think about the whole organization, instead of just the individual department previously managed. Strategic thinking requires continuously pushing forward to ask, “What’s next?” instead of saying, “Ahh, we’ve finally arrived.”

2. Opportunity Identification – Business development, business acquisitions, sales, mergers, product lines, service lines, etc., all fall in this category of opportunity identification. What is appropriate given what our organization is, does, and should be in the future? Closely linked with executive team strategic planning, opportunity identification often takes on a more individual approach and is done through the leader’s personal readings; tracking of world, regional, and local news events; observations during conversations over lunch, in the bank, with colleagues, etc. It is the leader’s individual ability to put the various puzzle pieces together into a probable picture of future opportunities.

3. Infrastructure Development – The ability to realize that any solid house needs a solid foundation. Infrastructure development requires ensuring the boring and not-so-sexy things such as policies, manuals, procedures, protocols, facilities, equipment, land, etc. are all in place to allow the organization to effectively handle current operations and, at the same time, to be well-positioned to accommodate future, more sizable work volumes. Infrastructure development is a delicate dance of not over-acquiring or over-building (and thus creating too much overhead) while at the same time, ensuring internal capacity to operate now and grow into the future.

4. Financial Acuity – The ability to understand what the organization’s numbers are telling you in terms of where you were, are, and where you are going. Leaders obviously understand the basics of cash flow, profit and loss, and balance sheets. However good leaders understand how business actions and inactions can cause the direct and indirect shifts in the numbers, as well as how to enhance the overall capital strength of the organization though business revenues, acquisitions, divestures, etc. Good leaders understand that cash is king and that big does not necessarily mean better—if you can’t pay your bills. Smart growth is more important that growth for growth’s sake.

5. Professional Networks – The gut-level understanding that strong, reliable networks of professional advisors, colleagues, competitors, associates, and friends will provide tremendous support, insight, and solid sounding-board opportunities. These networks and associates are outside the organization and will often provide straight answers and insights that internal staff don’t see or are afraid to share. Professional networks provide opportunities to gain knowledge quickly and to acquire various opinions to evaluate while holding no real decision-making power or authority over the leader. They are sources of information. What’s more, a good leader often provides more to the network than is ever taken away.

6. Brand/Goodwill Development – The understanding that without a solid reputation, your organization’s value diminishes. Every sale becomes harder. Every employee recruitment and hire takes longer. Every meeting with colleagues becomes a bit strained. Protecting and strengthening the organization’s name, reputation, and value becomes paramount to good leaders. Without it, they are leading an entity no one wants to follow.

7. Development of Others – The understanding that knowledge transfer and developing skills in others is crucial to any organization’s long-term success. We’ve all heard, “Our employees are our strongest asset.” Yet many of these same organizations refuse to spend more than the bare minimum on employee training each year, and few have focused direct daily effort on developing their organization’s prospective future leaders. Good leaders have long realized the need to develop the above skills in their employees with leadership ambitions and abilities. Good leaders have for years been focusing on helping their organization’s future leaders prepare for personal and professional success. The success of the next generation of leaders will help ensure the organization’s success.

The above list isn’t all-inclusive, but it provides a sound basis to build upon. If the above skills were easy, every leader would possess them. They’re not easy. They are somewhat innate and most assuredly strengthened with practice over time. On that 1 to 5 scale, how strong are you?

Copyright 2007 & 2011 – Liz Weber, CMC – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com

When most people think of Succession Plans, they imagine some document that outlines who’s going to step up into a vacant spot when the current position-holder retires, moves up him or herself, or experiences the “hit by a bus” scenario – which is any emergency or unexpected situation that requires someone else to quickly step in temporarily or long-term. That singular focus type of plan is great and basically outlines who some of your “fall back” or “go to” people may be. That’s good to know when you need to make a quick personnel decision.

The other and more comprehensive purpose for succession planning is to not only create the above document, but to also plan for acquiring, recruiting, or developing internally the skills your organization will need as it continues to move forward. So instead of just filling a spot with someone who can hold things together, you’re creating depth and talent throughout your organization. This will allow you to have a pool of individuals with high-level, broad-based skills capable of filling one or more positions within your organization. This provides greater flexibility, increases employee knowledge and skills, and also increases employee commitment to the organization.

So, back to the initial question: “How do we start pulling a Succession Plan together?” I’d suggest you follow four initial steps:

1. Plot Your Organization Chart – Print out your organizational chart as it needs to be to support your organization 3-5 years from now. This updated chart should reflect the type of entity your strategic plan is moving you towards. Then  list the position title. Below that, list the names of three to five people. First list the current position holder (if the position stays the same). Second, list the names of anyone who could step in quickly at least on a temporary basis. Third, list the names of individuals who have the potential to be viable candidates for the position long-term — if they have more time, training, and development opportunities.  Highlight the names of anyone currently capable of stepping in and filling a position in green (Green means ‘Go’). Highlight the names of anyone who needs additional training and development in yellow (Yellow means ‘Not Yet Ready’). If you have no name to put in a box, put “???” and highlight the “???” in  red (Red means ‘Stop = Hot Spot’).

2. Assess Your Chart – Review your color-coded organization chart. How much red are you seeing? Are you also seeing situations where you have one back-up person identified, but that person is planning to retire within the next few years? Do you have several positions where only one person knows or does the job and you simply don’t have any other employees?  In this type of situation, if you lose that person, who’s going to do the work?

3. Prioritize Your Plan – For any position boxes that have more red than green or yellow, highlight the entire box in red or some other obvious color.

4. Plot Your Plan – Review the highlighted areas to determine “Hot Spots” or priority areas.  These Hot Spots are areas or positions that need attention quickly to develop skills, transfer knowledge, initiate cross-training and mentoring, or at a bare minimum, document critical procedures.

If you use this same process with your current organizational structure, you will also see where your current Hot Spots are. Which positions are vulnerable if the current employees are out or unavailable? Which positions are have multiple people capable of stepping int. Which areas need attention – now? Those that do, most immediately need to simply organize their filing systems, create basic procedures & checklists that others can follow, if needed, to keep that function moving. Slim staffing isn’t an excuse for not having clean systems and basic support documentation in place.

Though the above is a quick overview, once you know what you have – or don’t have – you’re better able to know where to start in Succession Planning. Be clear on what you want the plan to do. Then use your organizational chart to plot the direction and immediacy of your plan. Plot your plan to your future success.

Lessons to Leaders

My client’s goal was to develop their next generation of leaders. At a recent meeting I wasn’t surprised to hear every group of senior managers complain about the weak or under-developed personnel management, delegation, strategic thinking and personal accountability skills in their direct-report managers. The really interesting thing is: Almost all of these senior managers are individuals who themselves had these same weak skills just a few short years ago. Huh. I wonder how they strengthened them…??

Obviously, they gained stronger skills by being coached and mentored, by reading, by acquiring exposure and experience, by leading difficult projects, by attending training programs and by focusing when at work. They gained many more skills by being held accountable by me, The Dragon Lady of Accountability, (or others like me) and by being “forced” to learn, to try and ultimately to “naturally” do the things effective managers and leaders do. The key is: They were taught. Someone experienced shared insights and lessons learned with them.

And now it is their turn to share what they’ve learned with their next generation of leaders.

One of the fundamental responsibilities in management is to develop the people for whom we are responsible. We’re supposed to help them continuously develop enhanced or new skills to ensure they’re capable of performing at a level our company will need them to perform 1, 2 or 3 years from now. We wouldn’t expect a computer to be able to support upgraded software programs 1, 2 or 3 years from now without enhancing its capabilities and yet we hold that expectation of our employees. We naively assume they’ll just figure things out.

More often than not, the most often studied trainer in your company is you. You’re the one most staff pay attention to every day. You’re the one they model, take their cues from and develop their skills because of. You’re it. So it’s time to conscientiously analyze how you do what you do and segment it so others can learn in bite-sized pieces, just as you did. Your managers won’t need to learn everything you learned or in the same order – because your organization is different now than it was when you learned select skills. However, your managers will need to learn many of the same people skills you’ve struggled to master. Let’s face it – people are people and that’s the most difficult challenge any of us face in our lives: Dealing with people.

Most importantly, remember: It wasn’t all that long ago that you too had weak management and leadership skills. So the next time you are frustrated with one of your staff, take a mental step back and ask yourself, “Did I ever do something like this? If so, what lesson did I learn that helped me through it? How can I share that lesson now?”

Don’t get frustrated. Teach. It’s the way you will develop your next generation of leaders. Share your lessons learned.

Copyright 2009, 2011 – Liz Weber, CMC – Weber Business Services, LLC.  www.WBSLLC.com

However, if those comments are said more than once or by more than one person – look out. You may have a number of problems that need to be addressed – and quickly. Employees typically start using the “no trust” comment when they feel impeded in their ability to do their jobs. They bring it out when they feel restricted, limited, or micromanaged. They use it when their ability to do basic to difficult aspects of their jobs is restricted. Why the restrictions? Management may fear the employees will somehow mess up if given full rein, or the employees will have access to “sensitive” information in order to fulfill select tasks. With the best of intentions, management is screwing up.

By trying to prevent a mistake or control sensitive data, management is creating a culture where employees do not (because they cannot) fulfill the full scope of their position responsibilities. Management is creating under-achievers. In addition, skilled, competent, well-meaning employees become frustrated as they feel handcuffed in their abilities to perform. By trying to create safeguards, management is creating confusion as far as who can do what, who can access what data, and who will handle which parts of various tasks.

Management is confusing roles and responsibilities, as well as creating frustration and a lack of trust. Management doesn’t trust the employees to fulfill their position responsibilities completely. As a result, the employees don’t trust management to give them an assignment and then let them do it. So when the employees are handed a task, they often look to management with hesitation – waiting for management to snatch parts of it right back. However, what management observes is an employee population that doesn’t “own” the work they’re given. Management doesn’t trust the employees. The employees don’t trust management. No one wins.

If you’ve heard the “no trust” comment or you do shortly, do not brush it aside. Ask a few questions to determine what actions are creating the negative environment:
- Help me understand. Specifically, what has happened that makes you believe I don’t (management doesn’t) trust you?
- Give me an example of what you have experienced that causes you to say, “There’s no trust around here.”
Then, sit back and listen. If the employee doesn’t share specific examples that allow you to clearly understand his or her perspective, ask again and wait until you hear specific examples of management’s restrictive behavior. You may be amazed at how your good intentions have created handcuffs, confusion, and frustration for your employees.

Copyright 2010 – Liz Weber, CMC – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com