Over the last few years I have observed that there are lots of things that could be better in how we operate, things could be smoother. It would be wrong of me to say that everything we do in our jobs is perfect, it is not. But in all teams, there is an immense amount of will and drive to make things better and it is matched by knowledge and competence to get it done.
Last night, as I left the building, I bumped into someone, and we had a chat and it made me realise that there is a vital ingredient missing in getting things done and that is “assuming the best rather than the worst.”
Now again it would be wrong of me to say this is unique to any one organisation. It isn’t. All organisations greater than 1 person have politics and some dysfunctional behaviours. But if we can recognise those and work to resolve them then perhaps, we can smooth the way to success in our ambitions.
When I talk to people and they tell me that “you can’t get anything done and it is best to just do it under the covers” then I wonder … How much are we all holding the problems in place? How much do our assumptions colour our actions. If we assume that there is no point trying, then we don’t and the problem becomes its own reality.
As you can imagine, I get many escalations coming at me from a great height but often they would not have needed to happen with so much heat, if people had assumed the best and picked up the phone.
Talking.
It is an amazing antidote. After all, we are all colleagues, all in the same organisation and all aiming for the same things.
However, there is a behaviour which we could well do with learning particularly for people in a leadership role at any level and that is recognising the team you are in rather than the team you lead. This is a basic tenet of the 21st Century Leadership programme that you may have heard about. Easy to say but what does it mean?
It means:
- assuming the best of your colleagues as a starting point. Please remember no one comes to work to do a bad job. I don’t wake up in the morning and think “I know, I am going to try and stop X from doing their job”
- If one of your team has a complaint about another team ask them if they have talked to that team, if they haven’t then encourage them to do so.
- If you are on a visit to an office and there is a lot of criticism about “the centre” or at the centre there is a lot of noise about the countries then ask if they have checked back recently. Do we really know what it is like in a local office? Or at the centre? Are we holding the problem in place?
- If someone gossips about another team then we should be firm, we don’t do that. Call it.
We have a cultural norm called Critical Loyalty and what that means is if I have a problem or need to give feedback up, down or sideways I can do so in the right way, in private and ideally using my voice (e.g. phone or face to face) but in public, I am completely supportive of my colleague. We discourage moaning. If you moan without action e.g. You don’t seek to solve it, then you are holding the problem in place.
For senior managers we absolutely must model the right behaviour. If someone moans about another team…. then we should encourage that person to feedback direct. The gift of feedback is a good thing.