Worktime expectations: giving and receiving feedback

It's hard for me to decide which is more difficult: giving or receiving feedback.  But since there are numerous benefits to doing both in the workplace, I believe we should reasonably expect an employee to participate on both sides of this activity.  The reason is simple.  An organization needs feedback at the organizational level, just as humans need feedback on an individual level.

Just think:  How well would you function if your stomach doesn't tell you when you're full?  Or if your ears don't relay the sound of a fast-approaching vehicle?  Or if your eyes don't show you where your hands are as you're threading a needle?

An organization is much the same.  We know in our minds that it's important to stay coordinated with our colleagues, and everyone seems to lament the fact that often the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.  So, let's do something to connect our organizational senses.

Giving feedback is pretty straightforward:  After each significant engagement with another individual within the organization, provide some feedback to explain the good, the bad and the ugly.  The other individual can be anyone: a peer in your department, your manager, your direct report, a colleague in another part of the organization.

The challenges to meeting this straightforward expectation are mostly cultural.  Do you feel that your feedback is valued?  Are you afraid of giving feedback?  Do you know how to give feedback in a professional manner that gets the point across while avoiding personal attacks?  I believe it's a leader's job to remove these barriers to facilitate the critical flow of communications up, down and across an organization.

Receiving feedback is a bit more complicated, as two steps are involved.  First, you have to create a channel through which feedback is created.  Then, once feedback is received, you need to confirm receipt of the feedback and then act on it.

The appropriate action on feedback depends on whether the comment was positive or negative.  If feedback was positive, then continue doing whatever it was that merited the support.  If the feedback was negative, then adjust your behavior, explain your behavior or ask for further discussion of the comment.

The primary challenge to meeting this expectation is also cultural.  How much feedback are you able to take?  Positive feedback is always pleasant on the senses, but it's the negative feedback to which we need to pay the most attention.

After all, it's easier to adjust the oven temperature while baking than to salvage burnt cupcakes.

Worktime expectation: self-reflection

In trying to set performance goals with my staff, based on my worktime expectations of an ideal employee and our organization's mission and objectives, I received good feedback that the broad categories of my expectations are currently unclear at best.  So, I aim to explain each of them in a series of posts, starting with what I hope is the simplest category: self-reflection.

To me, self-reflection in the workplace is the solo act of reviewing and adjusting one's own behavior to better serve the organization's needs.  The process can be outlined in three simple steps:

1. Review your recent activities, assessing how productive and well-aligned they were.  Consider your own personal goals and the organization's goals in your assessment.
2. Make a short-term action plan, noting which activities to start doing, to stop doing and to still continue to do.
3. Execute your short-term action plan.

The length of the "short term" is up to the individual to decide, based on that person's individual capabilities and the time constraint set by leadership.  For example, take an employee with a short attention span who is expected to spend 2.5% of his time on self-reflection.  This employee may decide that "short term" equates to one week, which is just enough time for him to start losing focus on the action plan.

As implied, self-reflection is not a one-time process, but rather a habit that should be developed over time.  I searched on Google for "why is it important to self-reflect" and found a few useful resources that explain how the process helps in many situations:

• Real Talk blog: "Why Self Reflection Is Important"
• College of the Canyons: "Self-Awareness"
• DJUS Online: "Cognitive Effects of Self-Awareness on Thought"

And when would be good to start this process?  Well, how about today?

How to stop lying and start working on priorities

A quote from Mahatma Ghandi explains it well, "Action expresses priorities."  The "it" being how we regularly lie to everyone at work, including ourselves.

You may be thinking, what the __ are you talking about?  I always practice integrity in the workplace, and I would never lie to my colleagues.  Well, I happen to think the same!  But if you're like me, and you look back at a week's worth of work (facts) compared to everything you communicated (words), are you sure you haven't lied?  Do the facts really reflect your words?

Okay, okay.  Maybe saying "we" is too much.  Let's step back for a second, and let me explain how I lie.

Within the past week, I've frequently said to a colleague working on a project with me, "This project is a high priority."  Yet, when I sat down with the same colleague for our weekly check-in yesterday, I was forced to admit how little time I had actually devoted to the project.  And because I contributed very little to the "high priority", I questioned myself on whether it really was a high priority.  I would expect anyone else to ask me the same question.  And the sad truth is:  No, the project was apparently not a high priority to me.

When I looked back at my week, it turns out my real priorities were the following, in roughly this order: addressing real emergencies, addressing perceived emergencies, meeting to discuss non-priorities, reading and sending emails about non-priorities, talking to people about non-priorities.  Oh, and I almost forgot this one:  Telling people what my priorities and the organization's priorities are.

Does this sound familiar at all to you?  Regardless, the lying has to stop.  And for that, I'd like to share three ways to do this, which I will implement today for myself.

Write down your priorities and post them where you can see them.  If you care to listen, our director of IT will tell you about the list of personal goals on his refrigerator at home for him and his wife.  "Every day, we'd come home and ask each other, 'What did you do to advance one of your goals?'"  The question is asked with the best of intentions, to gently help each other remember what is truly important.  As the late Stephen R. Covey observed, "Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important."

Block time on your calendar to work on your priorities.  Blocking time off is easy:  Create an appointment on your calendar, and mark it as busy time.  Almost like magic, most non-priority meetings requests will be automatically deflected.

Work on your priorities in a place where distractions are minimized.  How can you be productive when you're being distracted every 5 minutes?  Shut the door to your office.  Or go setup a workspace in a remote corner of the office where only the cleaners visit.  Or work from a conference room (that you can reserve), from home or from a coffee shop.  And no matter what, always remember to turn off your office phone and close Outlook, Gmail or whatever email client you use.

What do you think?  What are your tips for getting the right work done?

All hands on deck: Maximizing productivity with a strengths-based approach

Today, three of us gathered in the ITS department to discuss vision and goals for the coming years.  My colleague Kristin Mullaney proposed the idea of taking a strengths-based approach to staff's professional development and, by extension, to organizational development.  What exactly is a "strengths-based approach", I wondered.  I had previously never heard of the term, and I was suspicious that it was just another managerial buzzword that only sounded good.

But as she explained the concept, I noticed myself nodding silently in effortless agreement.  Why not?  Without taking undue credit from her proposition, here are the main points I recall about the approach:

• Recognize that an individual's skills may (and likely do) extend beyond his or her assigned functional area.
• Throughout the business cycle of an organization, there will be peaks and lulls in the demand for any one skill.
• As an organization evolves in step with the global environment, the profile of appropriate skills (and functional areas) for the organization will change.
• By enabling an individual staff member to exercise skills that are not explicitly required for his or her "assigned duties", the organization actually facilitates professional development of its human capital.  And as a result, the organization better positions itself to meet future demands in the marketplace.

Her points seemed so sensical that I found it difficult to explain why we are not already operating that way, although I know realistically that there are significant challenges to the idea's implementation.  I can already think of some possible challenges: accepting complacency, seeking comfort in repetition, setting narrow performance goals, protecting traditional departmental "turf" or boundaries, witholding access on a "need to __" basis.  While there are still valid arguments for each of those actions, I question the balance of costs and benefits for each of them in the modern world.

As I watch the rise in demand for agile, responsive organizations, I believe we have to leave behind many of the stiff policies and cultural legacies from yesteryear.  Even if we don't do it for the advancement of humanity, we must change our behaviors and expectations for our own survival in an increasingly competitive global economy.  How many big-name companies can you name that fell into decline or disappeared altogether?  HP, Xerox, Kodak, Circuit City, Borders, ...

But if we in an organization can learn from history, embrace current best practices and keep an eye on the future, then together we can grow smartly and sustainably.  And I believe part of the change involves setting new organizational expectations that break down silos and erase arbitrary boundaries which prevent business teams from reaching their full potential.

I'd like to close with a quote from Rebecca Seibert in her contribution to Harvey Levine's Project Portfolio Management (which I am reading for Granite State College's excellent PM 806 course, "Managing Project Portfolios"):

“All hands on deck” means that very few handoffs occur in our team settings. The expression “that’s not my job” is not in the mind-set of the business team. If we need marketing information for a specific program and the marketing manager is occupied with other duties, it is not uncommon for the technology team member, for example, to gather that information and communicate it to the team. The lines of functionality are often blurred, allowing people with the appropriate skills to be empowered to get the work done.

We have a noble mission to advance that requires us to maximize the very limited resources we have.  For us, "all hands on deck" should be our call to action.

Worktime Expectations of an Ideal Employee

How does an ideal employee spend his or her time?  This is a question that I have to think about more deeply as I'm contemplating my own job responsibilities and those of others around me.

I suppose it helps to first define what "ideal" is, and of course, as with the definition of many buzzword terms, the answer is:  It depends.  Specifically, "ideal" depends on the mission and values of an organization.  What's more interesting is when you throw in another buzzword value that every organization wants: innovation.  How often have you heard that an organization wants to be innovative?  Most of us have heard leaders say, "We must innovate, because the alternative is to be left in the dust."

Coincidentally (and fortunately for me), innovation is being championed at Granite State College.  But just saying that we value innovation is not going to make it happen.  We have to first know ourselves what it means to be innovative and then to be able to teach others how to do the same.

In order for continuous innovation to occur, it must be built into our culture.  And in order for it to be built into our culture, we have to recognize that innovation and the continuous improvement driven by innovation needs to be adopted as every individual's responsibility.  To that end, I propose the following distribution of time for an ideal employee.

During normal work hours over the course a fiscal year, the ideal employee spends his or her time on the following activities:

• Running the trains: 60%
• Self-reflection: 2.5%
• Directed learning; structured training: 5%
• Innovation; self-directed with approval from manager: 20%
• Giving and receiving feedback up, down and across: 5%
• Engage larger external community of professionals: 5%
• Engage customers: 2.5%

In addition, I believe that a truly engaged and happy employee will spend further time above and beyond the scheduled work hours (perhaps during breakfast, lunch, dinner, nights and/or weekends) to:

• Connect more personally with colleagues
• Take advantage of employee benefits such as tuition waivers

I feel fairly strongly that this worktime configuration will work for individual contributors, but I am not sure how well it applies to managers and leaders.  However, one thing is certain to me:  Innovation is the key to sustainable growth.