Management vs. Employees by Hayes Drumwright

Author:Hayes Drumwright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apress, Berkeley, CA

Pain Sourcing and Saying “No”

I would like to make the case that one of the strongest things a leader can do is source the largest pain points from her organization so she can get up in front of them and tell the group she can’t solve the problems.

Let me give you a couple of examples of this in action.

Example #1: Large Healthcare Organization

We had a company approach us to help them better understand the results of a pulse survey they had run. The pulse survey had reported extremely low leadership scores for a certain leader in the org and HR wanted to validate why those scores were low, because his leadership thought he was doing a decent job leading his team. To get to the bottom of it, they ran a three-day session with the department asking the following question: “What are the biggest leadership issues facing this department?” They were informed the session would be anonymous and that, in order to improve the environment, their candid feedback was appreciated and needed.

At the end of 72 hours the dashboard from the session came in an overwhelming pain point voted to the top of the scoreboard. Over 90% of the department agreed that the biggest leadership issue was that the department had been understaffed and overworked for more than 10 months. It was hard to ignore the data when so many people in the department had voted on the idea. Some of the comments und er the idea were even more telling. There were comments like “I have personally told the leader that we are understaffed and he said there is nothing he can do about it. This is unacceptable as all of us are working extra hours to get the work done.” Another stated, “Our complaints about staffing have fallen on deaf ears” .

When the leader and HR got together the next day to review the results, the leader asked if he could hold an all-hands meeting with the team and have HR attend. They briefly discussed the plan and set the time for the meetings. The next day the leader stood up in front of the group and started off with an apology. He said he had heard their complaints about the staffing over the past 5-6 months and in the beginning had even tried to explain to a few of them why he couldn’t do anything about it. As the complaints kept coming in from a few of the more vocal people in the department, he started to discount their validity since he had already explained his hands were tied. He admitted he had no idea it was such a large pain point for the entire group until he saw the dashboard.

He then did something very important. Something that everyone should take note of.

He took a moment to explain the constraints put on him as a leader in the organization.

We have realized that employees rarely if ever take the time to consider the constraints on their leaders. But with his dashboard in hand, our leader knew he had an opportunity.

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