The word “A**hole” gets carelessly tossed around these days. I personally have used this colorful and flexible adjective to describe everything from ill-performing Redneck drivers to Spongebob Squarepants.
For the record, I have a managerial man-crush on Jack Welch. A managerial genius who, throughout his career, was regularly portrayed in the press as a world-class A**hole.
One of the reasons Jack was awarded this label was because he insisted on being honest with people about their performance. Brutally honest.
He insists, that while A**holish in nature, the application of targeted, focused “Brute Honesty”, can be the difference in an organization excelling above expectations vs. languishing in mediocrity.
I witnessed a “collision” of sorts of when this Welch Lesson, the thesis of “The No A**hole Rule“, and a managerial situation recently came together.
We had an employee who, for the sole reason that no one had ever informed them otherwise, labored under the impression that their job performance was on par with expectations. When a new manager came in and delivered a substandard evaluation, it was devastating and was met with great amount of emotion and anger.
“I could have been working on improving myself and my performance all this time, if someone had only told me.”
Very few managerial sins loom larger than failure to provide your employees with regularly-scheduled, sincere and brute honest evaluations that are based on comparison of employee performance vs. clear, quantifiable goals.
To do otherwise is gross negligence, because when time gets tough, your management may be forced to cut those who are delivering the least amount of value. If you have to cut someone you have routinely given a “meets expectations” evaluation and told that they were “doing a great job” only because you wanted to be a nice guy (or woman), then you are severely damaging your employee.
Brute Honesty - “Bob, you have missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you need to improve next quarter or we will have to make a change.”
A**hole – “Bob, you have missed your numbers three quarters in a row, but times are tough right now, hang in there and we’ll get them next quarter.”
In “The No A**hole Rule” Robert Sutton actually maps out the areas of the country with the highest and lowest occurentences of the A**hole affliction. With my last three employers being in Boston, Princeton, and Atlanta I concur with Mr. Sutton’s findings that the highest rate of affliction occurs in the Northeastern part of the country, with the lowest occurrence in the Southeast.
The upside of the A**hole affliction is that “incompetent attitudes” do not survive long enough to infect others. The sales teams of my Northeastern employers were the most well-managed. Forecast reviews were painfully honest, with clear accountabiilty leveled on every member fo the team. Anyone who tried to “BS” their way through their pipeline were called out publicly.
There was never a question about where we stood and what we needed to do to move forward. While there were uncomfortable momemts, each member team, especailly those what were performing, felt comfortable in knowing where they stood in the eyes of management.
Regardless of the 700bil bailiout, we got some tough times ahead. If you are leading a sales team, I strongly recommend you have a heart to heart with every member of your team. Let them know where they really stand, if their numbers stink, let them know. If thier attitude is counter-productive, let them know that a bad attitude is worse than bad numbers.
1 response so far ↓
Sales Tips // October 9, 2008 at 10:57 pm |
I think that you should always be honest with your people but in times like this where companies need less of a reason than most to let people go, you really need to prepare your people for whats to come.