Author: Tim Luscombe

When I ran my own business I was proud of the fact that I cared about the people who worked for me. I gave them every chance, treated them fairly and looked after them.

I found out that one of them had been more than a little devious. He was a salesman, on the road all the time, visiting the office perhaps once a month. I had weekly reports on his activity and phone calls during the working day, and he was generating what appeared to be a sensible prospect list.

Somehow, the prospects never quite turned into sales. When I eventually let him go I discovered that he had actually been working for another business whilst claiming to work full time for me.

Looking back, I could see when this had all started. He had worked for me for about 18 months by the time I let him go – or more accurately I had paid him for 18 months. I think he was not focused on my business for perhaps 3 months.

I liked Derek and he was a really professional salesman. His initial results were so good I had him “buddy” one of the other sales guys for a few days.

I didn’t see the fall-off in performance until too late. I was suffering from misplaced loyalty – I thought he would come good again, but my delay and inaction cost us money.

Working with clients I often see the same problem. What is clear to me, as an outsider with no relationship to the individual, is clouded and obscured to the business leaders by their loyalty.

Sometimes it is not an individual in the business but a supplier you’ve worked with for years.

In every case you need to separate the emotional connection from the business need and do the right thing for the business.

If you don’t act, you are not doing good. You may be doing severe damage – perhaps even putting the business and all the others who rely on you at risk.

Weigh up all the facts and make the business decision.

Many of my clients are not very good at training and developing their staff, but to be fair that was also true throughout my career in the corporate world.

I remember being sent on a management training course after my promotion to lead a team, but that it was almost a year after I started in the new role that I went on the course. I’d made my mistakes and learned on the job!

I also remember it was a residential course in London, so we took advantage and the family had a couple of days touring the sites. My son must have been about 8 when he asked me what I had been doing that day and I was able to truthfully reply “playing with Lego”

Why wouldn’t you train your staff? There are no good answers, only excuses. Not enough time, it’s too expensive and so on. It’s not seen as a priority for the business so gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

There’s an old joke about a conversation between the finance director and the managing director that goes:

FD “What happens if we train them and the leave?”
to which the MD relies “What happens if we don’t and they stay?”

It’s not just the time on the training course though. If you don’t put into practice what you have “learned” you haven’t really learned anything. You may have had an entertaining time (any trainer worth their salt will have made the sessions fun) but that’s all.

That’s a lot like the bookshelf in many offices, groaning with business tomes from the great and good, most of them unread. Take a look around your office – I know I have a few and I am sure you do to. My speaking colleague Nigel Risner calls the phenomenon “shelf development”

If you don’t take time after the training to put it into action, you wasted your time and money. If you don’t read and absorb the lessons from that book, you wasted your money.

I’ve always been a great believer in people. I don’t think many people set out to fail in their jobs, or set out to fail to complete a task or a project.

I do think there are a lot of managers who find it difficult to let go. They insist on telling their team what to do – sometimes in great detail – and quite often forget to tell the team why they are doing something.

The worst of these are the managers who forget to communicate altogether, so that the team carry on doing what they have always done. The fact that the boss wants them to do something else passes them by – the boss didn’t tell them, he expected the team to be telepathic!

You might be thinking “That would never happen here” but what if you go into a board meeting at the end of the day. You have a detailed and somewhat heated discussion in the board meeting and agree to do something different. You leave the meeting to find everyone has gone home for the day.

That night, your mind is buzzing, working out all the ramifications. The following morning, you have worked out a plan and you stride into the office & start issuing instructions.

The team weren’t in that meeting; they weren’t part of the debate. You’ve changed direction and they don’t know why or where we are all going!

An alternative management strategy is to manage by setting expectations. You focus on the outcome, not the tasks that might lead to the outcome. The team working for you have a series of goals. They know what you are expecting, and it is down to them to make it happen. You are empowering them to get on, use their brains and skill to get to the desired outcome.

If you couple this management style with supportive language and actions “Let me know what help you need to achieve this” you’ll really engage the team and get fantastic results.