Business Relationships Archive
Tis’ the season to over commit.
It’s almost January 1st, when many of us begin thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. We vow to lose 20 pounds, save 10% of our income, get promoted at work, take an exotic vacation, be a better partner, etc. etc. Also known as “how to set yourself up to fail” in five easy steps. The reality is we might do one or two of those things, if that.
Why not set yourself up to win instead? Instead of setting huge goals that are unlikely to happen, why not set more realistic goals that you can and will likely to do?
If you manage people, perhaps you’re thinking about how you can be a better manager in 2013. Or you may be thinking about how you can accelerate your career. You may decide to meet with your employees more frequently, or ask your boss for more feedback, or ask for new and different work. You may think that doing these things will help you strengthen your relationships with your employees and your reputation, and advance your career. Doing any of these things might help you strengthen your business relationships and help you get ahead. But they might not, if those things are not important to your employees, your boss and/or your organization.
In 2013, put energy and resources into the things that truly matter to the people you work with, rather than the things you think they think are important. And the only way to know what the people around you really want and need is to ask them. Don’t assume you know what is important to your boss, direct reports and coworkers, ask them. Ask more. Assume less.
There are countless examples of managers who went to great lengths to make their employees happy. They gave bonuses, cool projects, and time off. And their employees quit anyway. Or, trying to make a manager happy, employees stayed late, beat deadlines, and took on additional work, and still got a mediocre review. Rather than doing what you think others want, ask them!
How about this for a New Year’s resolution — ask your boss, direct reports and key customers these questions as you begin the New Year:
- What’s the most important work I did in the past 12 months?
- What’s an area, in 2012, I exceeded your expectations?
- How did I let you down?
- If I could do one thing differently this year that would make the biggest difference for you and/or the organization, what would it be?
- Where do you think I should focus my energy in 2013?
- It may be intimidating to ask for feedback from your peers and direct reports. But you won’t know what to do more, better, or differently if you don’t ask.
The right answer to feedback is always “thank you,” regardless of what you really want to say. Saying “thank you” makes you a safe person to whom to tell the truth and makes it more likely you’ll get more information in the future. So bite your tongue and respond to all feedback with, “Thank you for telling me that. I’m going to think about what you’ve said and may come back to you to discuss further.” They’ll be relieved, and you’ll strengthen your professional image.
It’s easy to assume what others want and are expecting from us. The problem is we’re not always correct. Thus we expend energy doing things that others don’t find valuable or important, otherwise known as wasting time and resources.
Your time and budget dollars are valuable. Use your time and money for things that others actually want, versus what you think they want. In 2013, dial it back. Make realistic, attainable goals that are aligned with what the people around want and need. And in return, you too will get what you want and need.
Take advantage of the last day to get a free box of Candor Questions with a purchase of $75 or more candor products.
Many of us have seen our friends, coworkers and even manager do really dumb things at the company holiday party.
Here are list of my favorites:
- Having a few too many drinks and sharing confidential information
- Wearing a dress that shows the people you work with more of your body than they should see
- Showing moves on the dance floor that you don’t have
- Hooking up with coworkers
Your company holiday party is a company event, and anything you wear, do, or say is grounds for gossip the next day at work.
Don’t become the topic of conversation the day after your company holiday party.
A few rules to live by at your company holiday party:
- If you wouldn’t want a picture of you wearing it hung up in a conference room, don’t wear it to the holiday party.
- Don’t get drunk at a company event, ever. If you get ‘chatty’ after two drinks, then two is too many.
- If you wouldn’t say something to someone at work, don’t say it at the holiday party.
The last rule: Help your friends and coworkers by stopping them from making career limited moves at company events. Rather than watching the train wreck go by as your friends say and do things they shouldn’t, gather your courage, and tell them it’s time to switch to club soda.
You may feel like you can’t give this type of feedback. It is hard to do, unless you’ve made an agreement before the party starts to do so. And even if you do make an agreement to tell people when they do something dumb, it’s still hard to do. But it will probably feel almost impossible if you haven’t set the expectation in advance.
So make a deal with your friends at work. If anyone says, does, or wears something really misguided to the holiday party, you will tell each other without negative recourse. And if all else fails, and you break ever ‘rule’ listed here, just call out sick for two weeks after the company holiday party, because that won’t raise any red flags at all.
You need something from Suzanne. Suzanne tends to ignore your emails. So in frustration, when sending Suzanne requests, you begin Cc’ing your boss and Suzanne’s boss. This has happened to most of us.
People Cc people who don’t really need to receive communications for a few reasons:
1) Sometimes people really aren’t sure who needs to know the information. So just to be safe, they include others. This can be quite innocent.
2) Sometimes people want others to know what they’re up to (a.k.a. they’re seeking recognition). This is not necessarily bad. It’s important to share what you’re doing for the organization, and cc’ing ancillary people on emails can be a very smart thing to do.
3) Lastly, sometimes people are afraid they won’t get what they need from the email recipient, so they Cc lots of people. This is typically not so innocent.
What should you do when someone Cc’s the world when emailing you, and you fear that it makes you look bad?
I suggest speaking directly with people who Cc others on emails. The conversation could sound something like this, “I noticed that when you email me you have a tendency to Cc other department heads. For example, last week when you asked me for the year-end numbers, you Cc’d my boss, Lisa in Marketing, and Bob in Sales. I was wondering why you’re doing that?”
Then stop talking and listen to what the person says.
Depending on what s/he says, you can respond with something like, “I will always strive to provide you with what you need. If you don’t get what you need from me in a timely way, by all means escalate your request, and go to the people above me. But I’d really appreciate if you’d come to me first and give me a chance to fulfill your request. Would you be willing to do that?”
If the person says something like, “I just think Lisa and Bob need to have this information. I have no other agenda,” you can respond with something like, “I don’t think they need this information, but why don’t we ask them. Would you be comfortable with that? I’ll send them both a message and Cc you, letting them know we talked about this email chain, and ask if they want to continue to receive the messages. How does that sound?”
You never know why someone is doing something, even if you think you know. Ask!
I encourage you to say something versus nothing. If you say nothing you’ll likely make decisions about the person and about your working relationship that may or may not be accurate. If you say nothing, the behavior is bound to continue.
People change their behavior for two reasons, positive and negative consequences. No consequences, no behavior change. No one likes to be ‘called on’ their behavior. Often a conversation like the one above will make the person uncomfortable enough to stop doing what they’re doing.
Reply All Etiquette:
More innocent than Cc’ing the world, but equally annoying, is the reply-to-all email. Someone in your office sends around a joke. Seventy-five people feel compelled to reply to all with their feelings about the joke. When I see things like this, I count how much money in lost wages companies are spending, that is, after I’ve put a pen in my eye.
To prevent reply to all emails, the person who initiates the first email can put in LARGE FONT, “Please reply only to me!”
You can also bcc people on the initial email so the reply’s don’t go to everyone.
It also takes only one person who asks people to stop replying to all, for the email chain to stop. And it’s perfectly appropriate to do this. The email could sound something like, “Going forward, please only reply to Brian, versus replying to all. Thank you!”
When things in the workplace frustrate you, it can be easier to say nothing than to say something. Saying nothing will also help nothing. The frustration is still there. The relationships are still damaged. Gather your courage, and save your office mates a lot of time.
Sometimes we ask people for feedback when we don’t really want the answer.
• Do I look fat in these pants?
• Do you think ______ (insert name of person you’re dating) is right for me?
• Was I rude to ______ (insert name of person who annoyed you)?
• Did I do a good job on ______ (insert project)?
Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered. If you do ask, don’t get defensive when you get an answer you don’t like.
If you ask for feedback, people may just give it to you. When they do, make it easy on them. So they’re willing to do it again. Don’t get defensive!
Every time we get defensive, we train people not to tell us the truth. And it doesn’t take many instances of dealing with our defensiveness before people learn that telling the truth (as they see it) is just too hard. So they stop. And we continue dating the wrong people, while wearing the wrong pants.
The right answer to feedback is always “thank you”, regardless of what you think of the feedback. It could sound something like, “Wow, that’s really disappointing. Thanks for telling me.”
If you want someone’s opinion, ask for it. And accept whatever they say graciously, regardless of what you actually think. And if you don’t want honest feedback or can’t take it without saying “thank you”, don’t ask.
I received lots of emails last week about performance appraisals gone wrong. Some made me sad. Some made me sigh. And the ‘best of’ the worst was so outlandish it made me laugh out loud. Really laugh out loud. Not that LOL thing we overuse.
The ‘best of’ the worst examples of performance appraisals are below.
Bad example #1: Giving mixed messages.
• Giving an employee working on a long project gift cards as a reward and then during the performance appraisal telling her she did the whole project wrong and had to start over.
Bad example #2: Waiting too long to give feedback.
• Giving an employee a performance appraisal six months late.
Bad example #3: Being lazy.
• Using the employee’s self appraisal as the final appraisal, without the manager adding any of his or her own comments.
Bad example #4: Never awarding the highest rating possible, to anyone.
• If a one is the best rating and a five is the worst rating, no one ever earns a one.
Bad example #5: Holding people to expectations and standards but not sharing those expectations.
• Not clarifying at the beginning of the year what the expectations are and what a good job looks like.
Bad example #6: Never giving employees feedback about their performance.
• Writing performance appraisals and documenting performance issues, but giving none of the written or verbal feedback to the employee.
Bad example #7: Giving small amounts of vague feedback.
• Giving little to no data in the review because the manager didn’t work closely enough with the employee to observe performance directly and didn’t ask others in the organization to provide feedback.
Bad example #8 (I received this example SEVERAL times): Providing only a written appraisal.
• Handing an employee a written appraisal while in a meeting with other people and never having a conversation.
This is just hilarious:
“During my annual performance appraisal I was asked if I was manic. After a moment or two of trying to understand what my supervisor meant by the comment, I finally asked. My supervisor replied, “Well, you are so upbeat about your job all the time, I just thought you were manic. Nobody can be that happy about working here.””
The winner for being the ‘best of’ the worst:
My manager tossed my performance appraisal on my desk saying, “Just look this over and sign it. I want it back by the end of the day.” Of course, the appraisal was full of feedback and expectations that I had never received.
I told my manager, “There is a lot of information here that was never discussed with me. I would have liked the opportunity to discuss these issues before it showed up in my review.”
The manager replied, “See this is why I didn’t want to meet with you! I knew you would react badly! Just man up, take the feedback, and sign the thing! It’s due to HR today.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Managers: If you do a little better than these ten examples of performance appraisals, you’re outperforming your manager peers. Sad but true.
Employees: You are responsible for your career happiness, success, and satisfaction, not your boss. Ask for expectations at the beginning of anything new and for regular feedback.
Take your performance into your own hands:
1. Don’t wait for your boss to set expectations. Ask your boss for his/her expectations. Get very clear on what a good job looks like, before you start working on a project and/or when the year starts.
2. Write annual goals and review them with your direct supervisor at least quarterly. During your regular one-on-ones, ask for feedback. If you don’t have regular one-on-ones, start. Ask your boss’s permission to schedule a one-on-one at least quarterly to update him/her on projects and to gather feedback.
3. Ask for regular feedback on pieces of work as you complete the work. Don’t wait until the end of a project to get feedback.
4. Ask for feedback about your overall performance once a quarter.
Ask these questions:
• How am I doing so far this year performance wise?
• What mistakes have I made from which I need to recover?
• What aspects of my work have contributed most to the organization?
• What do I need to do between now and the end of the year to ensure a positive performance appraisal?
The performance appraisal system doesn’t have to be rife with challenge and lead to disappointment. Take more control over your conversations and thus your outcomes.
No matter how much you like and get along with your boss, your boss is not your friend. Nor is your boss your confidant or venting buddy.
Unless your boss follows you around all day, every day, she is not aware of all the things you do at work. And if she does follow you around, she probably needs more to do, which I doubt.
Given that your boss often doesn’t see you work, the only exposure you may have to each other is during one-on-one and group meetings. So be careful how you behave during these meetings.
I’ve made lots of career mistakes . . . once. Here’s a mistake I made before launching Candid Culture. I’m hoping you won’t replicate it.
In my last job, I was lucky enough to have a great boss. He was a good coach and mentor. He supported me, gave me exposure throughout the company, and always had my back. We didn’t cross paths much at work, except during our regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings.
I’m what some might call passionate. I have a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong. And I can be critical of those who I think don’t do the right things.
I would often share my frustrations with my boss. The head of that department didn’t do this. This person made a bad call. So and so was making my employees’ lives hard. I wasn’t complaining, well I kind of was, but not without a purpose.
One day my boss called me out on my passionate (and at times critical) style. He said that if I was so impassioned during meetings with him, he assumed I was equally vocal in meetings with other people and departments.
This wasn’t the case. I was very careful in how I managed myself with other people in our company. I understood the importance of good business relationships and knew that people work with the people they want to work with and around the people they don’t.
But my boss didn’t get to see any of those interactions. For the most part all he saw was how I interacted with him during our meetings. With no other point of reference he was left to assume that if I vented with him, I did this with other people. If I got a little too soapboxish about an issue with him, I must do the same in other meetings. I didn’t do those things with other people, but he had no way to know that.
My boss and I had a good relationship and I felt comfortable with him, probably too comfortable. I was politically savvy with everyone but him.
Your boss is an appropriate person with whom to express frustration, but manage how you do it. Don’t vent to vent. Every topic you raise should be with the aim of problem solving. Keep things honest but positive. Vent and complain at home, or with someone who doesn’t know the people you work with. Or better yet, spare your friends and family, and take your frustration to the gym, or the shoe department, whatever your preferred form of therapy.
Assuming you have limited exposure to your boss, make the time you have with her count. Put in front of your boss only what you want her to see. I’m not saying to be disingenuous or brush problems under the rug. Speak candidly, but manage yourself with your boss as you would with any internal or external customer.
If you stayed out until two in the morning and you’re dragging the next day, your boss doesn’t need to know that. She will assume you’re not on your game that day and that will be a check mark in the negative category for lacking good judgment and commitment to your job and the company. If you had a bad date, your boss doesn’t need or even want to know. If you think someone you work with is a dolt, ask for help in how to work well with him, and keep your opinion of his acumen to yourself.
Your boss has limited time and exposure to you. Manage yourself by showing him your polished and professional self.
Even after working in the corporate arena for 18 years, I am amazed at how much people talk about other people. I’m a little embarrassed that gossip in the workplace still catches me off guard. I used to live in New York City. How can I be this naïve?
Last week I talked with a friend I used to work with. She still works for the company where we worked together. She told me that Michael, one of our old coworkers, was job hunting. “How do you know that?” I asked. She said Bob the IT manager had told her, and Lisa the marketing director had told Bob. Lisa is friends with Michael. Michael must have confided in Lisa, who told Bob, who told my friend, who told me. I have, by the way, changed everyone’s names, so as not to tell the rest of the world that Michael is job hunting. But in the event that you have an open job that would be a good fit for Michael, perhaps I should put his real name and email address here.
Michael trusts Lisa. But Lisa clearly isn’t trustworthy. I’m sure she thinks she is, but clearly, she can’t keep information to herself. Lisa trusts Bob to keep a secret, but clearly Bob can’t and neither can my friend.
So what does this say? Everyone is a liar and no one keeps confidences? No, I’m actually saying neither of these things.
I really believe that people think they keep a confidence when they share information like this. We rationalize telling ourselves, “I only told one person, and Bob won’t say anything. I trust him. And Michael wouldn’t mind if I told Bob. They’re friends. And even if he did mind, Bob needs to know because if Michael leaves it will impact IT.” And so it goes.
I’m not telling you this to make you paranoid. I’m saying it to make you careful.
I have started to assume that whatever I tell someone will be told to someone else. And it makes me more careful about what I say and write, especially what I write. Don’t put anything in an email you wouldn’t be comfortable being forwarded to someone else.
You may be wondering how this is possible. There is no one who keeps a confidence? How can you run a business like that? Anything I tell someone will be told to someone else? Not if you’re talking to an outside consultant, a business coach, your attorney or accountant, but inside your organization, yes. People have a tendency to share gossip in the workplace with their inner circle –the people in the organization they’re close to. So be careful. Watch what you say and to whom. And assume that whatever you tell someone may go elsewhere. Consider the upside –you can use your coworkers to share news that you don’t have time to broadcast yourself.
Unfortunately people taking phone calls via speaker phone, listening to music without headphones, and entertaining a posse’ of visitors in his/her cube is not limited to the movie Office Space, which should be required viewing for anyone who works with other people.
Cubeland can be loud. And most people are hesitant to ask our coworkers to quiet down. We’re afraid of the conflict. We don’t want our coworkers to dislike us, talk poorly about us when we’re not there, or kill us off. So we suffer in silence, hoping the person will get a clue that he’s making us crazy. He won’t. If he knew the phone calls bugged you, he would have already stopped making them.
You may find it incredulous that your coworkers don’t know how annoying noise in cubeland is. It’s an obvious, no brainer. How could they not know?
Much of Candid Culture’s work is dedicated to people feeling more comfortable telling the truth at work. But even with books, and training on how to establish candid relationships and tell the truth, speaking up is often challenging. So know that if you are doing annoying people at work, they are not likely to tell you.
Here’s what you can do: Avoid annoying people at work. For your convenience, I’ve made a short list.
- Conversations, music, and phone calls taken on speaker phone in cubicles. Take the meeting or conversation to an empty office or conference room.
- People who are late for meetings and text or email throughout meetings.
- People who start most sentences with, “No we can’t do that, and here’s why.”
- People who say they’ll do something and miss the deadline every time.
- People who borrow your stuff and don’t return it.
Look at how much stress I’ve saved you. Now you don’t need to give the people you work with feedback, you can just forward them this blog, which is a passive aggressive form of feedback. But it beats throwing their phone out the window or hiding out in an empty office so you can actually get some work done.
If you choose candor instead (which I, of course, prefer) simply say, “It’s hard to work when music is playing, or when you’re on your speaker phone, or you’ve got visitors in your cube. I know space is at a premium. But if you’d be willing to take the conversations elsewhere, I’d really appreciate it.” Done in twenty seconds or fewer. And no one died. You can do it. And if you can’t, call me, and I’ll do it. It’s always easier to have these conversations when they’re not your own. But it will cost you a bag of chocolate chip cookies or perhaps a Candor Bar.
The sprinkler guy just left my house, after teaching me the nuances of how sprinklers work for TWO hours. I don’t want the details about how the sprinklers function. I don’t care. I just want them to work. And I told the sprinkler guy this. But he insisted on teaching me –a.k.a. dragging me to each broken sprinkler head and having me observe as he repaired it. Exasperating! Then he billed me for his time. Without the lesson the visit would have been 30 minutes and $45. With the lesson, it was two hours and $130.
Read your audience. Are you putting in too much work?
Where are you over communicating? Who’s reading all of those PowerPoint presentations and reports? Just because you’ve created that report for the past five years doesn’t mean it’s still necessary or desired.
Ask your internal and external customers (everyone you work closely with) how they want to receive information, in what format, and how frequently.
Ask internal and external customers:
- Do they prefer to receive information in bullets or narrative form? Detailed or big picture? Graphs and/or charts?
- What information is important and what is unnecessary?
- Who needs to receive the information? People have enough to read. Most people won’t be insulted to receive one fewer email.
- How often do they want to receive the information?
I am hesitant to change processes when I begin working with an organization, assuming there is a good reason they exist. But when I ask why we do certain things as we do, invariably no one can tell me. I am often told, “We’ve just always done it that way.”
Don’t change things just to change them. And before you make a change, consult those who are impacted. Ask what people want and what they don’t. Then make changes. You may just pick up 10 extra hours each week and reduce your and others’ frustration 20 fold.
Most professionals spend their work day constantly checking email. An email comes in, and we feel compelled to reply. We put aside the project we were working on and promise ourselves we’ll get right back to it. But then we receive five more emails, and so most days go. As a result, many people start doing their actual jobs at 5:00 p.m.
When was the last time you did an hour and a half of actual work without being drawn into your inbox? My hunch is, not in years.
Email has become a noose and an albatross.
I too have fallen into the constantly checking email, time-sucking trap. Every email must be returned immediately. Or worse, I open emails, read them and say I will reply later, but never do. I promise myself I’ll go back to the old, unanswered messages only to get distracted by the many more emails that have piled on top of the existing emails. Older messages get buried, never to be returned. And I, in turn, become a seemingly unresponsive flake.
The days that I discipline myself to read my email only after working on a project for a good chunk of time, are the days I get the most done and feel the most in control of my day. We have all started our work day with a well-intentioned list of things to do, only to find that at the end of the day we did none of them. This lack of control feels terrible and is unbelievably stressful.
Most time management books and training programs recommend checking email at certain intervals during the day –once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once at the end of the day. Read an email once and resolve it. Reply, delete, or forward the message to a more appropriate person. But this is hard to do. What happens if we don’t reply immediately? Will we look bad? What will we miss?
One of the keys to having a balanced life and true down time is to be disciplined about how you spend your working hours.
What if we made July, check-your-email-every-three-hours month? How much more would we get done? How much more relaxed and free would we feel?
I’m going to try it, and I’m expecting you to keep me true to my word. If you send me an email and I reply immediately, you’ll know I have failed and have been sucked into the Outlook vortex of lost time. But if you read my reply, I’ll know you’ve been sucked in too.
