Many years ago, before we got married, I told my wife that I'd lived alone for a long time, and one thing I didn't do was rush to do
dishes and clean the kitchen on a daily basis. I always got around to it, but it wasn't a major priority of mine, other than rinsing
things off so I didn't get any bugs; I have this thing about bugs. She said that was okay, and thanked me for my honesty.
After being married about a year, she asked if I could just bring my dishes from my office when I was done with them, because I'd have a
habit of waiting until I had a few before thinking about taking them into the kitchen. So, from that point, I tried to remember more often
about taking my dishes to the kitchen.
After about another year, she asked me if I couldn't rinse the dishes off better, because even though I rinsed them, if there was food still
stuck in them it was harder to get off than if I made sure there wasn't any food on them at all. I then tried to remember that one, but I
wasn't good at it because I wasn't all that interested in staying in the kitchen longer than I had to.
Next it became "since the dishwasher is empty, can't you put your dishes into the dishwasher?" That seemed somewhat reasonable, so I did
start putting dishes into the dishwasher when I thought about it.
Then she asked me if I couldn't start washing off some of my dishes and letting them dry instead of putting everything in the dishwasher,
including my silverware, since we didn't always get around to turning on the dishwasher. I thought about that, and from that point, we
switched to paper plates and plastic silverware, and life, at least for me, has been pretty good from that point on.
Why did I tell that story? I have seen more times than not that style of management and leadership, where a manager asks an employee to do
something, then when they do it they add something else the employee forgot to do, or didn't do the way they wanted it, and then keep doing
the same sort of thing 3 or 4 times until eventually both parties are frustrated and the task still isn't done to anyone's satisfaction.
I've been known to do that in my past, however, instead of asking someone to do it over and over, I would just decide to do it myself,
then hope to remember to later on educate the person on what it was I wanted. However, if it was something that was relatively rare to
begin with, I know I never got around to educating that person.
Sometimes, managers expect people to read their minds and deliver exactly what it is they want. The problem, of course, is twofold. One,
people can't read minds, and two, even if they could, sometimes they're still not capable of delivering what it is you're looking for. I
remember trying to teach some people who reported to me how to put together a letter to send out to our customers, and finally realized
that it wasn't the sort of thing they were really equipped to do, so I eventually created a template and told them to just fill in the
proper information where it needed to go, and life was great from that point on.
When managers train in piecemeal ways, the results almost never end up being what the manager was hoping for. If you noticed in my story,
at a certain point I changed the parameters of how we did things in the kitchen and went in a totally different direction. That's easy when
it's just the two of us, but in business, could your department work as well if multiple people were thinking they were doing the same thing,
but everyone was actually doing something different, because they each modified procedures to give you what you thought you wanted and not
exactly what you wanted?
I remember a story of a hospital where the chief financial officer told the billing department that he wanted to see a reduction in accounts
receivables, and he didn't care how they did it. So, within three months, they saw a reduction in accounts receivables. What the employees
did was write off every new account that came in with a denial. Accounts receivables went down, but so did cash, and the chief financial
officer, who should have been able to figure it out, couldn't figure it out until he brought in a consultant who diagnosed the problem and
mentioned it in his report. The chief financial officer was angry, but what could he do at that point, since the employees gave him exactly
what he said he wanted, without any real direction?
I am against micro managing, but
I have always been for creating policies and procedures for the most critical of issues and making sure everyone
knows how to perform those tasks based on other policies. I've also always advocated making sure to have regular meetings to talk not only about
new things, but adding in current processes, to make sure everyone is still on the same page, and if not, either reinforcing what the procedures
are, or if someone came up with something better, modifying the process so everyone else can benefit from the newly known upgrade. Don't ever be
so married to a creation that your eyes are closed to improvements.
On some things, my wife will say to me "You should know that by now," to which I'll reply "It's obvious that I don't." Of course I probably do,
but I'm not always thinking of things the same way she is at the same time. That's fine for home, but in business, if you're the person in charge,
if you go around assuming that everyone else should know better already, or should know something, and you swear that you taught them that, you're
taking risks with your career that are unwarranted. If you positively know you've told someone something multiple times, and have the notes and
procedures to prove it, they should probably be let go. If you're unsure, don't take any chances and do the training again, making sure to document
it the next time around. As a manager, you only get so many chances to miss opportunities to make your team better before it's your turn to go.
Don't wait for your staff to switch to paper plates; constantly educate them on how to use the good stuff, and everyone will feel like fine china.