Wednesday, September 17, 2014
You?ve heard of seagull managers, haven?t you? I first heard about the concept from Lyle Ball, long-time friend and client who currently serves as chief operating officer for
MultiLing, a Provo, Utah-based company specializing in Intellectual Property (IP) translations.
Ball has worked with several start-ups over the years and has witnessed many founders, inventors and investors do their best to make a lot of noise in the few moments they appear and then fly away.
?The seagull manager is a huge interruption to a generally productive workforce,? says Ball. ?They suck the joy and satisfaction out of the good work you are doing, rather then reinforce it or build on it.?
The concept of seagull management actually began as a remark in a book,
Leadership And The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, where he describes these notorious leaders as the ones who ?fly in when there?s a problem, flap their wings around and make a lot of noise, crap on everyone, and then fly away.?
Not an appealing concept. But we?ve all known a few. Perhaps you?re currently working for a seagull manager. (I?ve personally been partnered with several.) Or, heaven forbid, perhaps you?ve become one yourself.
You know the signs. The boss is highly detached from the team, with little concept of what?s actually happening and very little productive communication with the members of the team. Their motto is ?when I see you doing something wrong, I?ll let you know about it.? Generally, they let everybody know about it.
In the quiet hub of activity, the seagull leader descends like a hurricane. ?What are you working on?? ?How about you?? ?What?s this?? ?I said I wanted you to collaborate on this project. That means three heads in front of one computer. Get into that conference room and get on it, right now!?
There?s little point in explanation. Heads scurry in fear, generally until the boss has left the building, and then return to their former higher productivity tasks. Sadly, they are able to produce their best performance when the boss is away. Yes, as David Sturt (O.C. Tanner Executive Vice President and author of O.C. Tanner Institute?s bestselling book,
Great Work)
and co-columnist Todd Nordstrom note in their recent Forbes post on
bad bosses, sometimes the worst bosses bring out some of our best learning experiences by teaching us ?what not to do,? or by simply providing us with exercise in being resilient.
But who wants to be the leader or manager who people learn to succeed ?in spite of? instead of genuinely contributing to their team and member success? In the Blanchard Leadership Chat, author David Witt provides a few tips to
help leaders avoid this terrible fate.
1. Make sure you know what your people are working on. MultiLing?s Ball agrees. ?To me, this means I actually have to take the time to understand and value the individuals and their work process,? he explains. ?Listen to their concerns. Encourage them to provide input and innovate. Don?t shut them down by drowning out their voices with your pontification on
?how it ought to be done.?? The original thinking of your employees could create avenues to great work
you hadn?t even dreamed of.
2. Identify everyone?s development level for their specific tasks. Assigning the right tasks to the right level of people is key. Are you correlating tasks and people properly? I learned this lesson the hard way following one of the only firings my agency has made. The individual had been coaxed, coddled, encouraged and finally threatened and warned. When the firing finally took place there were 34 pages of documentation. But the employee was stunned. ?Yes, I knew I was doing a poor job, but I had no idea it could mean the end of my employment,? he said. We were stunned. The individual sued for unemployment pay and won. The reasoning for the stunning verdict? ?He was incapable of doing the job you assigned him,? the evaluator stated in the ensuing report. ?So succeeding in the position you hired him for was beyond his control.? We had made a bad hire. Eventually, the individual did find success in another line of work. But because we?d misaligned him, his growth and contributions did not occur on our watch.
3. Schedule regular meeting time. Employees are hesitant to communicate with the boss when there?s no avenue for doing so provided. Make the time available by putting regular meeting times on the schedule, and keep the commitment to make the discussions occur. Then, when the meetings happen, ensure that the sessions actually do foster meaningful dialogue in both directions. Don?t use these valuable opportunities as the boss?s chance to spew like a firehouse (or, as in Blanchard?s analogy, to cover your employees with ?crap.?)
How does your current leadership style measure up to this thinking? Do you have some room to improve? I welcome your thoughts.
