Unleashing The Power Of Rubber Bands (8 page)

When the group had come up with the original idea to remove the awards, they had planned on replacing them after the all-staff meeting. Unanimously and vigorously, however, the staff overwhelming chose to leave those words in place of the awards and only to take them down as they were replaced by new awards, which they were determined to win.

Now, the point of this story isn’t simply about winning awards. It is about keeping people motivated, tapping deeply into that God-given desire and ability to create and innovate. How do we as leaders leverage defining moments for momentum? How do we recognize the signs of stagnation or decline, and do the work of leadership in reminding people what a great thing it is to work, to strive, to generate, and to build?

How do we learn to use the right touch and not to pileup relentless requirements for work that makes the soul weary? How do we clarify that continual call for people to give their best in such a way that stimulates ideas and moves us to new levels? How do we create an environment where everyone knows that no matter how great the past was, it will never compare to the future?

There is often an enormous
disconnect between the
vision of an organization
and the events that make up
the daily calendar pages of
the organization’s leaders.

As leaders, we need to answer these questions. And perhaps, in doing so, we’ll experience the most defining moment of all.

A final thought on defining moments and the momentum they shouldcreate: There is often an enormous disconnect between the vision of an organization and the events that make up the daily calendar pages of the organization’s leaders. While vision can be a defining moment in an organization, often day-to-day responsibilities seem to have no connection to the realization of that vision. This inevitably leads to discouragement for leaders, teams, and organizations.

I know this well, not only because I have encountered the problem many times in coaching others, but also because it was pointed out to me during my time as a leader in the health care industry. I had a boss who was great at regularly sitting me down and going over my daily schedule to see if it aligned with my goals and the vision of the department. Too often, it did not.

His gentle question, “How will these activities result in the goals we have set?” was annoying but clarifying. I guess I just thought the vision fairy was going to come along and produce the vision while I engaged in activities that had no connection. I hate it when I am wrong.

However, a simple exercise both for individuals and for teams is to “audit” each other’s calendars from time to time. Just have a simple discussion about what you are doing and why, and then speak about each other’s choices, paying particular attention to the question “Does this activity move us toward our vision?”

“Does this activity move us

toward our vision?”

With that simple question, my boss was able to help me use that as a grid for how I filled my days. Up to thatpoint, I had always felt busy but not always effective. And that is a frustrating feeling: overworked but underchallenged, spinning wheels with little to show for it. With such a little shift, I was much better able to make good decisions about what I said yes to and what I said no to. No small feat.

Spending our yeses on activities that create movement toward the vision is very inspiring because we can see the progress. When I started leading Axis, my boss gave me a handwritten half sheet of paper with three simple goals on it. I carried that paper inside my calendar for five years. It was my compass. I can’t do twenty things well. I’m not even sure I can do six things well.

But three? Now I have a fighting chance.

bad person . . . bad fit . . .
Big
Difference

SO, I DIDN’T ACTUALLY
get fired, but if it had been anything more than a two-week temporary job, I would have.

I should have.

During my sophomore year in college, a friend asked if I would fill in for her for a month while she and her husband went to visit family. She did administrative work for a company that developed the plastic coating for the insides of dishwashers.

Sounded fascinating.

I wanted to help out a friend.

How hard could it be?

It was a disaster. No, let’s put it more honestly . . .
I
was a disaster. Some people are really gifted for administrative, detailed, and orderly work. Some are not. Who knew it could be so difficult?

Well, pretty soon I knew, and not long after that, the boss and others on the team knew. I remember sitting in that office, typing on carbon triplicates. Some of you who are younger will have absolutely no idea what a carbon triplicate is, but suffice it to say that any typing mistake took an act of Congress to correct. This was before the days of the backspace key for easily correcting mistakes. In those days, your mistakes were rather permanent, changed only with copious amounts of Wite-Out on each of the four carbon copies, leaving a reminder of your errors.

Every day I left the office with my purse
stuffed
full of mistyped carbon forms. My purse was only full after I had surreptitiously packed the restroom trash can, being careful to lay paper towels over the top so no one could see what I had put in there. I folded a few into my pants pocket and found a drawer that no one was using and made it my personal hiding place.

What took my friend minutes to type—with no errors—took me hours, and I am not exaggerating. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the filing system. The questions that people asked when they called in seemed to be in another language. I began to understand that I had vastly under estimated the complexity of the world of heat-resistant plastic coating.

I was so grateful that it was a slow month; I wouldn’thave lasted two days if it hadn’t been. That said, I lasted two weeks. Fortunately the boss was a big fan of my friend, and her job remained hers even though I didn’t work the last two weeks. I think the way he put it was, “You know, Rob and Susan have some extra time these next two weeks, and I really think they can handle this.”

I had become an obstacle to the business. (I still wonder if some units actually made it to their correct destination or are sitting in some cargo hold in East Asia.) And the leader had the courage to do something about it. I am pretty sure I heard a collective sigh of relief from the team as I left.

There is a big difference between a bad fit and a bad person. Leadership is about having the courage to make that distinction. Too often, we hide behind the belief that someone is a bad person, when the reality is, he or she is simply a bad fit. Many organizations and certainly many churches have allowed people to remain in positions (paid or volunteer) for which they are poorly suited. Everyone suffers when that happens.

The organization suffers.
When someone is in the wrong position, vision, strategy, and results usually suffer. The church or the ministry department or the business fails to live up to its God-given potential. The organization is crippled in its efforts to be all that it could be. That is not God’s design for a church or an organization.

Individuals suffer.
When a person is not well suited to his or her role, the people who work with and for that person inevitably languish in some regard. They either fail to get the support, recognition, or resources they need to do their jobs, or they are neglected in areas of discipleship and growth.

It is one of the fundamental jobs of a leader to make sure that the right people are in the right positions in an organization. Leaders who take action and initiative to make sure this is the case engender trust. Those who don’t, cultivate cynicism and mistrust.

Certainly, systems can provide an infrastructure to support the alignment of the right people in the right positions. Things like hiring according to job descriptions and giftedness, 360-degree reviews, performance feedback, and one-on-ones are all necessary to accomplish this.

But the right person in the right position is more than a systems issue. Out in front of the systems must be the willingness to intercept entropy at its earliest signs, the courage to have difficult conversations, and the ability to set deadlines for resolution. A leader’s observations and questions for a person who may not be the greatest fit for a position will help move this process along in healthy ways. The bad fit may be in areas of character or competency or both.

To overcome the bad-fit syndrome that plagues so many organizations, you need to tackle it from two directions. First, you will need to start right where you are, taking a look at those who might possibly be in the category of bad fit. You will need to find out if that is the case, and then lead those people through a process that either shifts them into a position more suited to their abilities and strengths, or moves them out of the organization in fair and honoring ways.

Second, you must take a look at the “on-ramp” in your organization: hiring. How well does your company do at the very beginning of the process to make sure that the fit is strong? This goes to issues of knowing what your values are and asking questions in an interview setting that check for alignment with those values. Do you allow a wide variety of people within your organization to participate in interviews so that you have a great cross section of opinions? Do you consistently call a candidate’s references to be sure you get a fully orbed picture of his or her track record? This is not an issue of “good people”; it’s more complicated than that. There are good people in every organization. This is an issue of finding good people with excellent abilities inthe area for which they are being hired.

For many of my years in leadership, I seemed able tohire well in most areas—except for administrative assistants. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was, but I think one of them was that I vastly underestimated what it took to do that job well. I didn’t realize that, like any other job, the skills needed to do this role required specific and unique abilities. Embarrassingly, I think I figured that anyone could do it. The obvious irony here was that I sure couldn’t.

So I hired a great woman as the key administrative assistant for our department. Never mind that she was basically an artist. She was a good person. A
really
good person: likeable and fun, filled with great energy, helpful. Those are all significant qualities, but the one thing she couldn’t do was administrate.

Details got overlooked, balls were dropped, and follow-through was poor. Our work was suffering and people were getting frustrated. But every time she would bounce into my office with her notepad, I found myself fooled by her earnestness, and I would think,
Okay, this will be fine
. And then it wasn’t.

One day in my office, after we finished going over a long list of things she would need to redo, I just stopped. I looked her in the eyes and said as kindly as I could, “This isn’t working, is it?”

And then I didn’t say anything else. Her eyes filled upwith tears and they started spilling down her face. Without saying anything, she just shook her head.

After a few moments I said, “I think you go home every night resolving to do better tomorrow. But I don’t know how good it is for you to keep trying harder at something you aren’t good at, all the while not doing the things you are good at.”

She listened and nodded. Then the words just came pouring out of her. She had been miserable. She was trying
so
hard. She felt terrible about not doing a good job; it wasn’t like this was a secret she didn’t know. She knew very well how poorly she was doing, and she hated it. She thought that trying harder might help.

But you see, she was an artist, and artists don’t make the greatest administrative assistants. Certainly there may be exceptions, but she wasn’t one of them.

And you know how easy it is to get frustrated with someone who isn’t doing a good job? She was even more frustrated than I was—with herself. And honestly, as a leader, I had to admit that I had let her down. After our conversation I felt terrible, realizing how keeping her in that position had done her a terrible disservice. I owed her more than that.

As we’ve already seen, one of the most significant jobs a leader must do is to get to know his or her people, and out of that knowing, to be sure they are positioned according to their levels of character, competency, and energy. This woman and I had a wonderful conversation after the tears, and I pretty quickly moved her off staff. She has now written a number of best-selling novels and has been very successful in her life’s work—once she was positioned to do what she does best.

This process takes time, and that’s why one of the most important things to do is to work on finding the right fit during the hiring process. It’s
a lot
easier to increase your success rate that way. Having to deal with people who are already in the wrong position is a lot more difficult and time consuming than it is to fill the position well in the first place.

When the wrong person is in the wrong position, the cost to the organization, in terms of morale and security, is high. So a leader has to be committed to that process. Max DePree often talks about leadership in terms of obligation—what we owe.

Leaders tend to have strong personalities, and strong personalities don’t often like to think in terms of obligations. But there it is. Leaders are obligated. It is inherent in leadership. We are obligated to many things, not the least of which are clarity, expectations, feedback, and follow-up. We owe it to those we lead—not to mention the organizations in which we do that leading—to makeaccurate observations of their abilities and gifts and engage in honest conversations about their performance.

Time consuming, difficult, and necessary.

Leaders are obligated
to many things, not the

least of which are clarity,
expectations,

feedback,
and follow-up.

Duty bound and obliged.

A few years back, one of my associate directors came into my office and made an observation. He laughed and said, “I’ve been watching you, and do you know that when you have someone on our staff who is a poor fit, or for one reason or another isn’t working out, you ask them to read
Let Your Life Speak
by Parker Palmer? And if we have someone who is a great fit but might be contemplating a move, you ask them to read
Finding Contentment
by Neil Warren?”

Honestly, I hadn’t noticed. Funny how the subconscious works sometimes. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right.

We had a guy on our staff who was a terrific guy. Good person. And when he was first hired, he did a great job. But over time, he had either outgrown his job or he needed more challenge than we could at that point provide for him. Either way, things had shifted. He started coming late to meetings and staring at his computer during them. (Don’t even get me started on that one!) Generally, he was doing a pretty mediocre job all around.

But he had been with us long enough that I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to give him more time and understanding. I waited six months before having a direct conversation about the entropy I was seeing. That was five months and twenty-one days too long.

I was obligated to have that difficult conversation with him at the first sign of entropy. Here’s the deal: Probably about eleven times out of ten, the answer to your most burning leadership issue is to
have the conversation
.

I know, I wish it was a different answer too. But it’s not, so we might as well start practicing now.

Have the conversation.

When a conversation is going to be difficult, or when I’m not really sure what is actually going on or what thecore issue might be, I have always found it helpful to start out with observations and questions. Savethe direct statements for when there is unhealthy resistance or a blatant refusal to see the truth. Observations are not judgments, and they provide common ground for understanding. Observations imply that this is simply something you are seeing from an outside perspective and that you acknowledge there may be something you are missing or are not understanding correctly. Observations leave room for explanations that will completely resolve everything.

Questions imply the need for more information. Now of course you can ask a question that isn’t really a question, but rather a statement or an accusation. Those are not the kind of questions I am talking about. Real questions, the kind that help you to get an accurate picture of the situation and/or realize you need to talk to other people, help you to fill in the blanks and cross-check. At the very least, questions help you to start the conversation out on a level playing field.

And if it turns out you are on to something, you have started the conversation in a way that hopefully will position you to move toward resolution. These difficult conversations will have give and take, truth and grace, embarrassment and hope. You will have to listen, speak with boldness, forgive, understand, hold accountable, and ask for apologies. And then, most likely, you’ll have to have more conversations before it is all over. If your response to all of this is “I don’t have time for this,” you are neglecting the obligations of leadership. Sorry to have to be the one to say it. I didn’t like it the first time I heard it either.

Another thing these kind of conversations do is to createleaders who know what is going on in their organizations and allow everyone in the organization to know that they know. So many leaders are clueless about so many important things—not micromanaging kinds of things, but things like recognizing and responding to bad attitudes, poor work ethics, excuse making, blame shifting, underperformance, cynicism, and lack of results. The conversation at least implies that this is
not
okay.