Managing People

The Difference between Coaching and Feedback

November 3, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi 4 Comments

Perhaps this is a matter of semantics; but in my leadership consulting, I help managers identify the following nuances between coaching and feedback.

In the following discussion, ‘feedback’ refers chiefly to corrective or “negative” feedback. Appreciative or “positive” feedback in the form of honest praises, approvals, and compliments are just as essential as corrective feedback. As I’ve written in previous articles, great managers communicate corrective feedback and appreciative feedback distinctly instead of interspersing them in the form of “feedback sandwiches.”

Differences between Coaching and Feedback

Coaching is preparative. Feedback is corrective.
Coaching focuses on possibilities. Feedback focuses on adjustment.
Coaching is about future behavior. Feedback is about past (and current) behavior.
Coaching is inquiry-oriented. Feedback is scrutiny-oriented.
Coaching stems from developmental needs. Feedback stems from judgmental needs.
Coaching is about assisting employees reach their goals for the future. Feedback is about helping employees understand what prevents them from reaching their current goals.
Coaching is about advocating optimal performance. Feedback is about reinforcing appropriate behavior.
Coaching is more about helping employees grow. Feedback is more about helping employees not fail. (Both coaching and feedback are about helping employees succeed.)
Coaching guides employees in the direction that suits them best. Feedback ensures that employees uphold espoused values and meet expectations.

Successful People Earn Trust Using These Ten Cs

October 27, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of the most important aspects of being effective at work—as professionals, managers, or leaders—is earning and upholding others’ trust through our actions, not through our words. We earn trust by making and honoring commitments. We earn trust slowly but can lose it in an instant.

Here are ten elements that can help you earn your constituencies’ trust:

Competency. Develop your expertise in everything that is fundamentally important to your role, team, organization, company, or industry. Be knowledgeable and resourceful.
Cause. Develop, articulate, and agree on a vision of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and empowerment. Define a path and guide your organization’s way forward.
Challenge. Stretch yourself. Push the boundaries to help people accomplish more. Channel people’s collective strengths and capabilities. Push the limits of their thoughts and actions. Expect excellence.
Connectedness. Foster an environment of collaborative commitment. Build spirited teams. Value and celebrate diversity. Provide inclusion. Build team cohesion.
Concern. Get to know the people you work with. Be approachable. Create a workplace where people feel genuinely cared. Grow, train, and retain people. Recognize their individuality and encourage them to strive to do their best.
Credibility. Act with integrity. Do what you commit to. Do the right things for the right reasons.
Consistency. Be steady in your purpose. Be open and honest. Set clear standards. Communicate and act consistently so others don’t need to guess what your motivations or intentions are. Communicate and lead from the front. Be visible. Be transparent and forthright, especially during tough times.
Continuity. Respect and honor the past. Be willing to learn from past failures and successes.
Commitment. Fully dedicate your resources to a task, especially when times are tough. Once you’ve undertaken to do something, invest the necessary effort and actions to make it happen.
Celebration. Recognize employees for all levels of achievement—for big projects, service milestones, and day-to-day accomplishments. Celebration helps fuel human accomplishment.

A Fast-Food Approach to Management // Book Summary of Blanchard & Johnson’s ‘The One Minute Manager’

October 20, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The “One Minute Manager” is one of those best-selling business books that I’ve heard a lot about but never actually read, until recently. First published in 1982 and subsequently translated into dozens of languages, this book has sold over 13 million copies. Legions of managers and HR-trainers swear by this book. Organizations around the world have distributed it as mandatory reading to their employees.

The book’s central ideas are simplistic and cliched:

When managers treat their employees right and give them clear directions, they’ll feel good about themselves and develop into happier, more productive workers.
Employees learn only through positive reinforcement when they do something right and through sharp criticism when they do something wrong.

Written as an allegory, the “One Minute Manager” follows an aspiring young manager who discovers the one-minute manager when seeking to find and learn from an effective manager.

The one-minute manager is rarely seen around, doesn’t like to participate in any of his staff’s decision-making, and makes only brief appearances to reward or reprove. His minimalist approach to employee management consists of:

One-minute goal-setting, where the manager discusses the employee’s goals frequently and resets them when necessary, and
One-minute praising and one-minute reprimand, where the manager gives specific, immediate, and direct appreciative or corrective feedback on how he thinks the employee is doing versus set goals. While reprimanding, the one-minute manager takes care to separate the performance from the person; he chastises the behavior, not the person.

Oddly enough, the authors encourage managers to shake hands or touch employees’ shoulders “in a way that lets them know you are honestly on their side” and then encourage, reassure, and show support.

There’s nothing intriguing, stimulating, or profound in this book to justify its popularity. Perhaps its simplicity was intentional—the fable-like narrative quickly grabbed attention. It struck a resonant chord in the 1980s and catered to a sense of urgency within organizations to quickly and easily make managers effective.

The One Minute Manager’s fast-food approach to management focuses on just two elements of what managers do: goal-setting and giving feedback. There’s nothing about employee development, delegation, compensation and benefits, teams, and other important elements of a manager’s responsibilities.

Recommendation: Skim. This book is an introductory quick-read for new managers who may be particularly inexperienced with setting goals and appraising employees.

When Delegating, Acknowledge Possible Errors

September 25, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Earlier this year, the ever-brilliant Ben Casnocha wrote an interesting essay reflecting upon his “10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman,” the co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent Silicon Valley investor. As Hoffman’s chief of staff for two years, Casnocha worked on strategic aspects of Hoffman’s many personal and professional projects. The two also authored “Start-up of You” (on career management) and “The Alliance” (on talent management).

Casnocha’s “What I Learned” essay is full of helpful management and leadership insights. Here’s one on delegation:

If you’re a manager and care seriously about speed, you’ll need to tell your people you’re willing to accept the tradeoffs [of delegation]. Reid did this with me. We agreed I was going to make judgment calls on a range of issues on his behalf without checking with him. He told me, “In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10-20%—times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation—if it means you can move fast.” I felt empowered to make decisions with this ratio in mind—and it was incredibly liberating.

Idea for Impact: When Delegating, Acknowledge Possible Error

Managers can’t do everything. They must accept that they’ll need to delegate tasks often, knowing full well—often with good reason—that employees may not do those tasks as well or as fast as they managers would themselves.

To build confidence in employees’ skills in handling delegated tasks, managers can give employees a few initial low-risk tasks. As the manager gets more confident with the employee, the scope of delegated authority can expand.

Nobody makes optimal decisions every time. Demanding perfection from employees is unrealistic. Clarifying expectations, negotiating limits, expecting mistakes, and establishing confidence can be incredibly relieving and empowering to both managers and employees.

Goals Gone Wild: The Use and Abuse of Goals

July 7, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

An article in The Economist (7-March-2015 Issue) discussed the side effects of goal setting, more specifically the perils of overprescribing goals. This article echoes my earlier commentary on “The Trouble with Targets and Goals.”

The Economist article mentioned a Harvard Business School paper titled “Goals Gone Wild” by Lisa D. Ordonez, et al. This engaging literature review discusses many of the predictable side effects of goal setting on individual and organizational performance:

When goals are too specific, they can narrow people’s focus. People tend to fixate on a goal so intensely that they overlook aspects of a task that are unrelated to the goal. Even if unrelated, these overlooked details may be significant enough to warrant attention.
When people are assigned too many goals, this can encourage them to concentrate on tasks that are comparatively easier to achieve.
When goals aren’t afforded an appropriate time-horizon, they can distort long-and short-term priorities. Short-term goals can steer people toward myopic behavior that harms their organization in the long term. Conversely, long-term goals can be vague about the immediate course of action and obscure what’s required in the short term.
When goals are too challenging, they can discourage risk-taking. As a result, people may use deceitful methods to reach their goals or even misrepresent their performance levels—they may exaggerate their feats, conceal underperformance, or claim unmerited credit. The authors acknowledge the complexity of setting goals “at the most challenging level possible to inspire effort, commitment, and performance—but not so challenging that employees see no point in trying.”
When goals are complex, specific, and challenging, they can push people to focus narrowly on performance and neglect opportunities for experiential learning.
When goals are comparative, i.e., when goals pit employees against their peers, goals can hinder cooperation between people and even create a culture of unhealthy competition within a team.
When goals, by definition, try to increase extrinsic motivation, they can subdue people’s intrinsic motivation. Goals can challenge some people far more or far less than necessary if the intrinsic value of the job itself is already deeply motivating.
When goals fail to consider individuals’ skills or prior achievements or when they are not tailored enough, they can be too easy for some and too difficult for others. On the other hand, customizing goals can lead to feeling of discrimination or favoritism.

A Warning Label for Setting Goals

The authors propose a clever cautionary graphic sign and conclude,

For decades, scholars have prescribed goal setting as an all-purpose remedy for employee motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.

Idea for Impact: Set objectives that are not only well designed, but also challenging and attainable.

Collegial Goal-Setting and Goal-Monitoring?

April 28, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

An article in The Economist (7-Mar-2015 Issue) mentions a new trend in setting and monitoring goals. The “Quantified Work” system lets employees collaborate with each other to set targets for their peers.

Apparently, this collegial system has improved performance and transparency at Google, Twitter, Intel, and Kroger, among other organizations. “Quantified Work” is a checks-and-balances system which allows peers to set and monitor goals for each other. This both enforces accountability and ensures that goals are neither too hard nor too easy.

Kris Duggan, CEO of BetterWorks, the Silicon Valley startup behind “Quantified Work,” argues, “The traditional once-a-year setting of employee goals and performance review is totally out of date. To really improve performance, goals need to be set more frequently, be more transparent to the rest of the company, and progress towards them measured more often.” Amen to that.

Interestingly, the article mentions that achieving 60–70% of the goals thus set is considered normal rather than a failure. The article also cautions that salary raises and bonuses should not be linked to these goals. I deduce that “Quantified Work” is more for collaborative task-and-deadline management than for meaningful employee performance assessment.

In my consulting practice, I have tested collaborative task management. It’s not as efficient as it purports to be: employees tend to get carried away and spend more time adding goals and checking performance than doing actual work.

The Trouble with Targets and Goals

March 17, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In a well-known 1992 Harvard Business Review article as well as a book on translating strategy into action, Robert Kaplan and David Norton explained the need for a “balanced scorecard.” They encouraged leaders to develop tools with which to monitor the performance of any organization. The authors explained, “Think of the balanced scorecard as the dials and indicators in an airplane cockpit. For the complex task of navigating and flying an airplane, pilots need detailed information about many aspects of the flight, like fuel level, airspeed, altitude, bearing, etc.”

Goals are effective apparatus—a persuasive system indicating what achievements matter the most to an organization. Well-defined objectives, expressed in terms of specific goals, often direct an organization’s performance, sharpen focus on the execution of the organization’s strategic and operative plans, and boost productivity.

In terms of an individual within a company, goal-setting is especially important as a way to provide ongoing and year-end feedback. You can give employees continuous input on their performance and motivate them by setting and monitoring targets.

Still, there are four things to look out for when setting and managing targets:

Some organizations get so overwhelmed with setting and meeting targets that managers tend to adopt whatever behaviors necessary to meet the goals set by their superiors.
Some organizations get carried away and set too many targets. While goals are beneficial, having more of them is not necessarily better. In fact, too many targets can lead to stress, muddled efforts, and organizational atrophy. In this instance, employees feel as if they’re being asked to throw darts in multiple directions all at once. Adding to the confusion, priorities can even conflict with one another—e.g. decreasing production cycle-time while not hiring more workers or buying more equipment. According to a 2011 study by consulting firm Booz (now named Strategy&), 64% of participating global executives reported facing too many conflicting priorities. The celebrated management consultant Peter Drucker famously advised his clients to pursue no more than two priorities at a time:

Develop your priorities and don’t have more than two. I don’t know anybody who can do three things at the same time and do them well. Do one task at a time or two tasks at a time. That’s it. OK, two works better for most. Most people need the change of pace. But, when you are finished with two jobs or reach the point where it’s futile, make the list again. Don’t go back to priority three. At that point, it’s obsolete.

Sometimes, organizations can be so eager to reach a target that they institute an overly aggressive system (unreasonable “stretch goals“) in an attempt to drive people to heroic levels of performance. Instead, it’s best to have goals that represent what senior management thinks ought to happen, not the contents of their wildest dreams.
When grading an employee’s performance depends heavily upon that individual meeting his targets (e.g. bonuses promised to salesmen who achieve certain revenue targets,) it can pit employee against employee. This tends to create an unhealthily competitive environment with colleagues scrambling over each other to get to the client or show off their achievements to management. Conflicts and rivalry between employees is one of the dominant criticisms of the individual performance rating system and the forced ranking system that many companies currently practice.

Idea for Impact: In goal-setting, less is more and simple is better. A few well-chosen, consequential targets and goals can sharpen an individual’s or an organization’s focus and boost productivity. Too many targets can lead to stress and even disaster.

There Isn’t a Shortcut to the Top

March 27, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Good college basketball players are often persuaded not to turn pro during their junior years because, once they start professional basketball, they are expected to play regularly and will miss the chance to get extensive coaching and work on their fundamentals. Instead, they are encouraged to stay for another year at college and bear the opportunity costs.

Likewise, a sound understanding of the fundamentals of a business and worthwhile operating experience cannot be skipped.

The Fast Track to the Top May Look Attractive

Organizations are full of young high-performers who seem to have the right pedigree, are sharp and ambitious, and have impressed their managers with some early achievements. As soon as they have “proved” themselves, HR succession programs tend to fast-track high potentials to the next challenge even if they are not entirely prepared, thus unintentionally setting them up for stressful transitions, bitterness, or eventual failure.

In many instances, young employees are so determined to move up the corporate ladder quickly that they don’t remain in one position long enough to master the right skills and learn from mistakes. They thereby risk accumulating a very large gap in their knowledge and skills.

Idea for Impact: Work on the Fundamentals as You Build a Career

Before making your next career move, perform a realistic self-appraisal and consider how the move may support or impede your longer-term goals. See my previous article for a list of questions to assess your chance of a promotion or a lateral move.

One of the most important skills for career success is the ability to synthesize business requirements and adjust your management approach to the conditions at hand. Each new responsibility should involve an incremental challenge that requires new learning, new approaches, and a chance to demonstrate improvement in your managerial judgment. As a career coach, I recommend staying in one position for one or two business cycles to adequately learn about the nature of the business, test fresh approaches, impact the business, and get feedback on your work.

Furthermore, not all career moves need be up the ladder. Even though most careers follow an upward trajectory, many successful careers consist of a mixture of lateral and upward career moves, each with additional responsibilities or opportunities to build experiences in different market, product, or geographical contexts with prospects for promotion in the future.

Don’t be Rude to Receptionists and Support Staff

December 17, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of the quickest ways to fail in an interview is to ignore, be discourteous, or be disrespectful to receptionists and support staff.

Some job candidates believe that they do not need to be at their best behavior in front of support staff, and then “turn it on” for the professionals who will actually interview them.

It is a common fallacy to assume that the relative position of a person on the corporate ladder is predicative of how much influence that person has in the organization. Rank, experience, and influence do not always correspond. People with influence are those whose opinions are important—not necessarily because they rank high on the org chart, but because they have acknowledged expertise, experience, or because of their association with people of authority.

Job candidates: a condescending attitude could cost you a job offer. Be courteous around everyone you meet and watch what you say. Assume that every person—the receptionists, assistants, and support staff—may have an input into the hiring decision. They will convey their negative perceptions to the hiring managers.

Nobody Likes a Tattletale: Do Not Play the Office Cop

February 8, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

A co-worker takes twice as many days off as your company allows. The receptionist is frequently on the phone with her boyfriend. A team member goofs off all the time and never gets his job done. To top it all, your easygoing boss does not seem concerned about all these. Convinced you should tell on others? Thinking of complaining to your HR in the interest of fairness?

Do not play the office cop. Because, nobody likes a tattletale. Moreover, it’s is your boss’s job to keep an eye on everybody at your workplace and correct them if necessary, not yours. You have some influence over your peers, but no authority. Hence, you cannot control them.

Examine Your Motivations

Tattling is a common trait during the formative years of life. Children tend to feel compelled to notify elders when siblings or other children do something wrong. By taking on a parental responsibility under the guise of being helpful, young tattletales use a socially acceptable way to tell on others and get them in trouble. As children age, they learn to discern between when to keep a secret and when to inform on others. Some never seem to outgrow the need to tattle or gossip and bring these traits to the workplace.

A tattletale is usually motivated by selfish reasons. Therefore, examine what is behind your own desire to inform on someone. Are you bothered more by your boss’s laidback attitude rather than the behaviors of your colleagues? Are you trying to draw positive attention to your own righteous adherence to the rules? Is your intention to gain acceptance by management and be seen as a dependable employee? Are you seeking to curry favor with the boss? Or, do you sadistically enjoy having your colleagues punished or embarrassed?

Don’t Rob the Workplace of Trust

A tattletale quickly destroys team morale and brings about increased conflict in the workplace. In successful organizations, team members set high expectations for one another and push each other to work smarter. When you do complain to your boss, you do not want to raise anything that may seem trivial or vindictive.

If you observe an incident that might constitute a breach of ethics or is significant enough to affect your team, you have every right to blow the whistle through the established channels or a whistleblowing system even at the risk of being branded a tattletale. The standards of decency require you to talk directly to anybody who offends you before going to your boss. If a peer persistently interferes with your work or sabotages your projects, you should privately warn the offender that if it happens again, you would report it to your boss.

Wisdom Comes from Knowing What to Overlook

Control the impulse to be worked up and tattletale on issues that have little to do with your own work. Let your resentment subside. Be quiet and keep your head down. If someone’s behavior is genuinely in the way getting a job done, wait for a manager or HR to identify and fix the problem.

For now, think of ways to ask your lenient boss for some extra time off for yourself.

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Managing People

Differences between Coaching and Feedback

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Idea for Impact: When Delegating, Acknowledge Possible Error

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The Fast Track to the Top May Look Attractive

Idea for Impact: Work on the Fundamentals as You Build a Career

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Examine Your Motivations

Don’t Rob the Workplace of Trust

Wisdom Comes from Knowing What to Overlook

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