Why don’t they get it? Why do I have to repeat myself? Why can’t they just do it without having to check in with me? Sound familiar? My first response, have you ever been asked to do something and not give the “what, why, how or to what extent?” One’s initiative or driving force/decision making machine is driven by what creates empowerment. Is that your real question? Have you empowered your team to make decisions and to know what to do in the face of all the situations they will face? The easy answer is that they just don’t get it. The hard answer is you may have caused their lack of ability or capability to do “it”.
While this may automatically seem like motivation, you are mostly right. Motivation, we have shared, is an individual’s internal drive which stimulates a behavioral choice. I place initiative in a zone just outside motivation whereby one’s same internal mechanism that relies on a degree of empowerment to make the choice.
Empowerment to do “x”. Empowerment is challenging without three ingredients: Knowledge, Boundaries and Context. Knowledge is the nature and the “what & how” in the job. Boundaries are the “to what extent”. Context is the “why”. While we may wonder how the team does anything while we are not in the store; my question is have you set them up to succeed and empowered them properly when you are away?
How about these questions?
How do you go about managing your employees when you’re not in the store without calling and actually working on your day off?
People will do what they want when you are not there. Even the best people with the best of intentions will still choose what to do when you are not there. So by embracing this concept, how do managers ensure the choices are the right ones, or, at worst, as close as possible to the original expectation? Define what, why, how, to what extent and role-play the crap out of the situations. And follow up, follow up, follow up (old saying “inspect what you expect”).
As far as ‘what about when I am not there’. People will believe what they want to believe in. You cannot make anyone believe in something. You can help them see relevance and value through sharing stories, analogies, case studies and asking them to come up with solutions to issues and problems. Helping people Buy-In or the creation of some type of process to cause Buy-In is perhaps the most sought after skill in all of management. Be relevant, be authentic, be consistent, be flexible and be open. These things create the positive atmosphere. The belief thing will be up to them. Do not focus on motivation; stimulate ways to make their job easier and better. And let them collaborate with you in making the tasks or their actions real in the store.
How do managers maintain the newness, energy and the verve as time passes? We get comfortable, so how do we keep the initiative and energy?
This represents an incredibly hard thing to manage. You can only manage (and lead for that matter) what you can control. I cannot control Skippy’s motivation in any given day. I can absolutely control how I deal with his behaviors on the floor. This means I must develop a course of action which constantly follows up with the expectations. This means giving feedback (especially a lot of positive versus negative), demonstrating what good looks like, coaching, measuring, posting results, sharing best practices and success stories. Here is the thing, everything fades to a degree. In our business, there will be something else which takes precedence. To think we will always have the same degree of energy is unrealistic. So we must schedule and follow up with how expectations are being represented by our team. It is impossible to over-communicate something which is important culturally.
Managers are tasked with getting things done through others. You decide to what extent they get “it” done. Last thought…it’s simple. Train, trust and tell ’em how they are doing.
Cheers