Leadership Fundamentals

Do you have a “bad apple” on your team?

You must have heard the expression “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch”. In an office setting, bad apples are employees you must interact with who create a divisive or caustic environment which poisons relationships, generates mistrust, and will dilute the effectiveness of a team by distraction.

Bad apples stir up trouble like a mixing stick in a witch’s cauldron. They promote dissension and conflict. This spreads out across the entire team. Little by little, the team deteriorates, achievements lessen, unhappiness abounds and, in short, things are a big mess. It’s like a giant ball of wool that has been unraveled.

When the team is functioning at top level, it is because everyone wants everyone else to win. There is a great mix of cooperation, openness to new ideas, and a desire to learn new skills. Special efforts are appreciated by all, and all tend to strive to become a “giver”. Bad apples don’t work that way. It is to their benefit to focus everyone’s attention away from their own poor performance. Everyone is focused on all the chaos going on, so they don’t immediately identify the source of the chaos. I was guilty of experiencing — and falling for — the “smoke and mirrors” dance myself. In my case, it was a personal crisis of my own that caused me to delay my very much needed intervention. Eventually, I had to admit that no matter how hard my efforts, I could not salvage that employee/company relationship, because it required a good deal of effort by the employee, which was not forthcoming.

I write this post as someone who has had a failure.  I admit to it in the hopes it will help others. I’m not an expert — I had to learn from experience, like everyone else. I learned the most from my team, and thank them for their honesty and insight.

Once you’ve eliminated the negative personality, can the team be repaired? It can if your past behavior was primarily positive, and you’ve built up enough trust to sustain you through a poor decision. You have some good will there to help you, but once you get rid of the poisonous influence and its effect, you will have to work at it very hard. If you are a leader/manager who has let an employee divide your team, you may have lost their trust as the guardian of workplace harmony.

Oddly enough, in some instances, the resulting harmony and strength of the team will increase upon seeing your resolution of the problem.

What Your Body Language Says About Your Collaborative Skills

A good team is built on trust, collaboration, and mutual respect. Is your body language giving mixed messages about your commitment to those values?

Here are some of the most common negative body language signs which tend to erode work relationships and create a breakdown in communications:

• At meetings, you’re usually the last person to arrive. You tend to doodle when you’re bored or uninterested in the topic — you’re not participating
• When meeting with an employee, your eyes keep checking your watch
• When someone comes to your office to discuss issues or ideas, instead of letting voice mail messaging take over, you interrupt the discussion and take every phone call
• You’re abrupt and avoid eye contact when you don’t want to consider someone’s ideas. It says you are disinterested.
• You look impatient when a co-worker “drops by” unexpectedly. Yet some great plans and projects have been generated by just such office chat. Most people function at peak levels when the atmosphere is warm and sociable.
• Crossed arms indicates a defensive posture

Be More Effective by Applying the RIGHT body language:

• Arrive as promptly as possible at meetings. Take notes  so you can follow up on tasks and projects. Ask for clarification on comments
• Respect co-workers’ time as well as your own. If you’re meeting a deadline or otherwise tied up, show your willingness to set a time later that day or the next. Get the point across that you really want to meet once you’ve gotten your tasks done. Then give your complete attention during that meeting.
• Make constant eye contact. Be open and involved. If you have a time limit [maybe another meeting coming up], state it up front:”It’s 10:00 now. I have a meeting at 11:00 — if we need more time than that, we can continue at x:xx or we can meet tomorrow when I’m free and hopefully so are you.”

That about sums it up: Use body language to express trust, collaboration, and mutual respect. Read more about the importance of body language in Carol Kinsey Goman’s book.  (Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., is an executive coach and international keynote speaker and seminar leader for corporations, associations and government agencies.)

And who the heck is Suze Orman?
I haven’t been under a rock, I swear. I just had never heard of Suze (pronounced Suzy) Orman until I saw her on a PBS special titled The Money Class on March 8, 2011, for which she was the host, writer, and co-producer.

My immediate impression was a good one — she comes off as compassionate yet financially savvy, but I’m never one to let first impressions stand without further information to back it up. So after Googling her name and reading up on her, I went ahead and ordered  Suze Orman’s new book The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream– I’m told it is her 8th and that all 7 of her previous books were on the NY Times Bestseller List. With so much controversy surrounding this woman who is recognized as a financial guru, I knew I had to find out more about her via her own words.

Despite the fact that Orman declares the American Dream dead, she is a pretty good illustration of the potency of that dream in America while it lived strong. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois to working class parents, until she was almost 30 she was a waitress earning $400 a month. Today at 60, she is worth tens of millions of dollars, does speaking engagements all over the country, has her own personal finance show on CNBC, writes a finance column for Oprah’s O Magazine, and in 2009 Forbes named her #18 on their list of The Most Influential Women In Media. Not bad, eh? And I’m only giving you some of the highlights.

You may ask “how does a former waitress arrive at this point in her life?” She began her career in finance by applying for a job as an account executive trainee at Merrill Lynch. She got the job [at $1500 a month -- considerably more than the $400 per month she was making as a waitress] and after her training, she remained there until 1983.

From 1983 – 1987, she served as Vice President of Investments for Prudential Bache Securities. She then created and directed the Suze Orman Financial Group from 1987-1997. She’s won 5 or 6 Gracie awards (awards given to honor programming for women, by women, and about women). She has appeared on half a dozen PBS specials. As mentioned before, she is heavily involved in those specials. It strikes me that whatever Suze Orman is involved with, she’s the one doing the driving, the one controlling the outcome. What’s wrong with that? That’s part of the old American dream. You know — pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That was then. This is now.

With good reason, Orman is not optimistic about the financial future of millions of Americans. She says we must create a New American Dream. During an interview she did with Forbes, when asked about her financial fears, Orman said: “My only fear in life, when it comes to money, is what’s happening in the United States of America. The American dream is dead for the majority of America.”

“The middle class has disappeared,” she continued, during her Forbes interview. “We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out. I fear for [those] who have been kicked out of their homes, could be living on the streets and don’t know how to get another job. Many of the millions of jobs lost I don’t think are coming back. I am really afraid for the majority of Americans today.”

That is the topic of her new book The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream.

Sheldon Yellen, CEO of BELFOR, the world’s largest disaster restoration company, goes undercover posing as Tom Kelly and experiences frustration and anger at his shortcomings — particularly his attempt at struggling to hang drywall. Anyone who’s done it knows the awful difficulty of trying to hold that drywall up with your head and your shoulders, while attempting to drive enough nails in it to secure it so you can finish the nailing without bearing that load of drywall. Your shoulders ache, the sweat starts dripping into your eyes and burning them, your hand cramps up — Yellen was furious! “There’s gotta be another way. This is stupid already!” Later, he admits: “Hanging drywall is much harder than I ever imagined.” His trainer, Drew, tells him “Don’t let it get to you,” but later admits to the camera that “Tom’s” performance was “sub-par”. This day in the life of Sheldon Yellen was one of the worst he’d ever experienced –he had failed at every single task he was given — and he was near tears when he admitted later “I’m not used to failing” and “I’m probably just not as good as I’ve been told by everybody else in my business life.”

Sheldon Yellen as Tom Kelly

His undercover cover story is that he is competing with other candidates for a BELFOR job. As he packs for his journey, we briefly see a glimpse of his clothes closet– full of Gucci garments and accessories, from which he extracts items like work boots and jeans, as well as the wig which is part of his camouflage.

As a newbie on the job, he is given the tasks that usually fall to a newbie — jobs that don’t call for much expertise — jobs that nobody else really wants to do. Like packing up belongings to be removed for storage while disaster recovery is taking place [he almost crushes some items], or collecting a long-dead animal that was discovered behind the drywall removed at a water-damaged home. Power tools present another challenge to be overcome — the darn nails just won’t stay straight long enough for the drill to drive them in!

As always in these episodes, the unsung heroes of a company share their sometimes brave and painful private lives — like Brenda, unschooled and unable to pass the Watertech exams because she couldn’t read the instructions, although she knows the job and how to do it. Her life-embracing warmth and customer interaction does not show that she was once homeless as a child and for awhile lived in a boxcar. Then there is Jen, who can’t make all her bill payments and who was promoted a year ago to be a Watertech, but never given a pay raise, which she desperately could use.

What is the point behind these undercover shows? Is it to be amused at bumbling attempts by a CEO who portrays incompetence at even entry-level jobs? I don’t think so. It is because it allows us a peek into one small part of what makes a company great and at what helps create entrepreneurs — a willingness to expose oneself to the possibility of failure and then to step right over that possibility and move forward toward success.

As is usual in these episodes, upon the CEO’s return to the company’s headquarters, several – or even many – positive company actions take place at the direction of a CEO who has been given new insight about his company’s practices and the dedication of many of its key employees . Yellen is one of the most generous CEOs Undercover Boss has covered.

Sheldon Kellen, CEO, BELFOR

We can do some things wrong for the right reasons
At BELFOR, Yellen had made a conscious decision to freeze wages in order to refrain from layoffs, and to retain all of its employees. Who can argue with that? Yet, because of that decision, there were employees who’d received promotions and expanded duties without any additional compensation. They were hurting financially, and struggling to pay their bills.

As Yellen listened to their dilemmas, he was so touched that at one point he revealed his true identity to Jen, the employee who had been promoted without a pay raise, and who wondered if anyone in “corporate” knew she existed. Moved by her expression of those thoughts, Yellen pulled off his wig and glasses, revealing his own “corporate” identity to reassure her that they did indeed care. Near the end of the episode, Yellen and BELFOR deliver on this promise with a host of generous bestowals of financial compensation and bestowals for the employees shown.

Take the time to watch this episode online here: Undercover Boss

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

Lao Tzu, 4th Century Chinese Philosopher
Tao – The Way – Special Edition

One of the things managers frequently do is assume that because they are managers, they have all the answers. Frequently, they don’t. Even sadder is that they assume they do, based on the single fact that they are managers. Yet, it should be apparent that those who have the most critical information about a process are the very people who go through the process daily and bump their heads against its inadequacies. Why on earth would you want to change or replace a process if you don’t know why it should be changed in the first place? How would you know that the process that is replacing the original is not worse?

Getting the right information at the beginning of the project, before it is set in stone — especially if it has been outsourced and contracted for with a set of specifications — would seem to be extremely critical if the project is not going to incur cost overrun. Additionally, you can bet the project will probably be late, as review of its functionality [finally!] by those who are going to use the process reveals an alarming inadequacy.