Good Authority by Jonathan Raymond

Author:Jonathan Raymond [Raymond, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940858197
Publisher: Ideapress
Published: 2016-09-06T05:00:00+00:00

Learning to see accountability as a tool to help people own their strengths, rather than point out their weaknesses, is the essence of Good Authority. We get there first by changing our worldview, in all the ways you’ve read up to this point. And what will inspire us to change our worldview is a clear experience of the benefits. Our job as managers is to show our teams the personal benefits of changing, by focusing intently on how they relate to their work, and how that can translate into the rest of their lives. With all the noise and confusion that surrounds us when it comes to company culture and employee/manager engagement, it’s this kind of accountability that gives us a way through to the heart of things.

Before we go step by step through how to put this new mode of accountability into practice, we should spend a minute talking about how accountability is most likely happening now in your organization: Chances are it’s coming far too late in the employee development cycle, which results in a pattern we’ve come to call spontaneous management combustion.

Here’s what that pattern looks like: You hire someone. You hope that they’re going to fill the gap you’re seeing on your team. Usually—apart from the rare true mis-hire—they do some things well out of the gate. But while they’re doing some things well, you start to see their limitations. Sometimes it takes a few months, but it’s usually sooner than that. Some part of it is a skills limit: They don’t know everything you hoped that they would. That’s a real problem that needs to be dealt with through additional training on and off the job, but it’s not the problem that has the biggest impact on the team and on the culture as a whole.

The bigger problem you’re seeing is in their relationship to their work. Or, more specifically, how they respond to the challenge of not knowing what they don’t know. Here are a few patterns you may have seen that indicate the person you’re managing is avoiding their next step of growth: covering up or attempting to brush off the severity of a mistake; hoarding data; embedding themselves as a go-to person (aka: bottleneck) by creating a system or process that only they know how to use; resorting to quick fixes instead of asking questions and looking for root causes; asking for more time or resources beyond what was agreed on in order to complete a project, instead of coming to you to talk about what went wrong so you can work together to improve it; letting tension build with a teammate or between departments instead of coming to you for advice on how to handle it.

When you lack the skills to intervene, to name the dysfunctional behaviors and help people grow beyond them, these problems fester and expand. You start wondering whether someone is a fit before you’ve taken real action to poke around and find out. You hear the soft complaints from other members of the team but brush them off.

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