Understanding Gray Areas
Using company’s resource for personal issues, especially during working hours, is a big fat NO for workers in many companies. However, supervisors often have to deal with what we always call the gray areas, while at the same time closing one eye on activities and behaviors that legitimately forbidden. They realize that to expel these activities is more harmful than to benefit from it, because many employees have interest, and mainly personal interest, to be within the gray areas.
In some factories, where tools and materials are available, we can find some workers making personal stuffs out of it. Kitchenware, toys for their children, or window frames – all within working hours. Managers often deliberately indifferent about this, because they need these people when jobs need to be completed as fast and as good as possible.
And let’s take a look within a publishing house where a competent junior editor and a productive one, completing his personal novels within working hours. His managers somehow tolerate him, hoping in return they can count on a hardworking, loyal, and motivated junior editor.
So why does even all these talented workers have the same urge to break the rule? Research showed that they have the need to play their “job identity”. An identity that describe self picture showing someone trained within a specific field and making them part of that profession. A profession, perhaps goes as far as “profession”; the most important thing is how colleagues assess someone in the job
Many senior executives fail to understand the needs of “job identity” (so they often think negatively about this gray areas), could be that they themselves haven’t got their own identities. Executives often see themselves pursuing their own personal challenge, and that’s why, when they enter a company, they don’t understand the importance of job identity for their people. For example, an executive in a fashion company might not be a designer, and because of that, he could probably ignore the needs of a designer within the company of recognition from colleagues.
Instead of considering that gray areas is a dangerous issues, leaders can always try to understand the cause of why the gray area appears. It doesn’t mean that they have to accept all the activities within the areas. They would probably spend their time monitoring misuse of working time and other resources – with proper understanding of course, that these gray areas show that there are higher aspirations within workers; one thing that soon will be considered by leaders as a character of employees they look for.
Finding the right person might not always possible, but workers will be more involved and productive when their capabilities is admitted by their boss.
Source: Michel Anteby, Harvard Business School Publishing
Take Monkeys Off Their Shoulders
One of the primary duty of leaders is to develop their people, that includes sharpen their competence in problem solving and decision making. So you have to realize that the danger from load of tasks that will occur if you take over their works. But what if you are being held on a deadline and somebody ask you to handle ‘one or more monkeys’ – problems that should be dealt by sub-ordinates, popular terminology that was introduced by William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass in their article “Management Time: Who’s Got The Monkey?” from Harvard Business Review 1974.
Here are few tips that you can possibly do.
1. Let Them Work
To many people, the pathway to effective delegation starts with studying two basic assumption of their roles. First, a lot of managers believe that handling their people’s problems is a faster and more effective than teach them to handle it themselves. Second, they also believe that they know more from their people.
These assumptions, will only raise the need of managers to break the problem and make decisions, instead of delegating and empowering their men. To deal with this problem, you have to position yourself as a leader, not a manager. Managers deal with details, while leaders, on the contrary, raise sense of belonging and responsibilities in their people.
2. Ask, Don’t Tell
Professional delegator choose to ask their men, rather than dictate the solution to them.
The question “What is it that you think should be done?” stimulates people to come with solutions when they approach you. Another additional questions like “What is the effect of this action?” or “What is it that we need to pay attention to if we are to go your way?” could also reveal how far have they think about the solution to the problem.
3. Match Person With The Job
Avoid adding your current jobs with handling your people’s problem. This can only happen if managers delegate the right job to the right people, according to each competence and potential.
Steven R. Covey stressed about delegation based on interest. “Find out the best outcome and the most preferred job of your people” he said “Then combine their unique talents and interests with job needs. When people work with interest and desire, they don’t need guidance. They will eventually create creative solutions independently.”
4. Cultivate Independent Thinking
If someone manages to think independently and feel that he own his job, then he will definitely bring less problem to his boss.
Shane Pliska, Business Development Director of Planterra, a landscape interior company, uses “monkey rating”, a method extracted from Oncken and Wass’ article. “We ask the workers to self assess their problems with numbers,” she said. “One means your manager solved it for you. Two means your manager told you the solution and you follow the solution, three means you proposed a solution and seek approval from your manager, while four means you took action, solve the problem, and let you manager know afterwards.”
When people came to their boss’s chamber, managers will ask “what number is on your current problem?” To raise the sense of belonging, Planterra managers encourages their people to have number four on every problem as much as possible.
5. Connect Them With Resources
Connecting your people with resources will also help you reduce your load. Think about the term “resource” in wider perspective, like human, tools, information, and opportunities that can help your men to work independently. Being the matchmaker between your people to the resources is actually not hard at all, like “You can talk to Mr X in marketing division.”
So, take that monkey of their shoulders immediately, let them deal with their own monkeys, because you already have your own, right?
Why Most Of The Time We Are WRONG
- Listen more, don’t talk so much, even if you feel like talking, don’t do that, because when you start to talk, people listen, and you will not capture their thoughts this way.
- After done listening, don’t start by making statements immediately, instead, make questions and dig more.
- You may want to hear from more related people if there’re any.
- Then you can formulate a wise call that accomodate their needs and last but not least, your need also.
- After you make the call, see it through, because it shows your commitment and you will win other’s respect instantly by doing so.
So, being decisive is not a matter of how fast a decision is made. But how a decision is formulated is much more important. A slow, but correct decision is worth many times rather that a quick but wrong one.
