Charlie McMahon
What makes a good team? It’s when managers and staff have empathy but challenge to keep each other honest. It’s also when individuals value constraints and make the most of what they have first before asking for more. How are leaders building and nurturing honest and resourceful teams to meet the challenges of the faster, digital future?
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Transcript
Sanjog Aul [00:00:23]:
Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com, and the topic for today is building honest and resourceful teams, and I have Charlie McMahon, who is the CTO Emeritus with Tulane University. Hey, Charlie. How are you?
Charlie McMahon [00:00:39]:
I’m good this morning.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:41]:
Alright. Great. So, we have spoken about organizational design, and we’ve spoken about individual and team development on this show for quite a few years. This angle that we wanted to take is around the approach we take to building teams, which is, of course, you try to build, a conducive culture, try to hire right, etcetera, and it results hopefully in most cases a reasonably good team, but then it’s like, a living organism. It can shift based on what’s happening outside, the organization, and that has an impact plus an individual’s life and then also what’s happening within the company based on where you’re trying to go. So which means we have to keep a tab on what’s going on with the team and also the team individual team members themselves have to be honest with each other and at the same time given we will always have the resource constraint, they always have to be watchful on what they work with and are they maximizing the value which they can get out of the current resources or they keep clamoring for more. So how do we control that? How do we build an honest and resourceful team? That’s the focus. So given where we are today, and I always keep coming today everyone talks about the digital. So it’s digital now and then also the future is digital and there are a lot of changes happening, lot of disruptions happening. Do you think we could have a mechanism where we can have at any given time, if I take a snapshot of a team, we will be able to measure what’s the level of honesty they have, what’s the level of resourceful they have, so we know they’re doing the best they can.
Charlie McMahon [00:02:32]:
Oh, boy. That’s a really interesting question whether you can have a survey instrument or a crowdsource kind of instrument that gives you a gauge on that. You’ve probably seen that there are several kind of social media apps that come and go that judge your mood, and one of these is a tool that we kind of used at Tulane to check the, I guess, the emotional health of our students, faculty, and staff. It was primarily used for people that have displayed some concerning behaviors in their social interactions. Basically it was an app that lets you periodically at times during the day and randomly tell the app where you were and how you were feeling. Over time looking at those patterns you got to correlate the kind of things that made you happy and made you unhappy. I could see a tool like that being adapted to the workplace. If you had a particularly difficult group, to get to have positive social interactions and positive work-related interactions, a social media tool like that that lets you mine big data, in a sense about an employee’s happiness and associate that with what’s going on at that moment in time, that could very well give you insights into what might make a difference for correcting those behaviors.
Sanjog Aul [00:04:29]:
Now given the behavior, one is to tackle the behavior but then we are talking about the very DNA because when people are not behaving or they are faking a specific behavior that they are very excited or they are telling the truth but whether they may not be telling the complete truth, those things of course we cannot have an app to identify. So essentially what we are hoping is we do the right things and then believe and hope that the people who we brought on board and took the time to nurture will at all times when dealing with each other at a cafeteria or during a water cooler conversation, will give each other feedback and they will be honest yet be mindful and not caustic. What is the recipe to that?
Charlie McMahon [00:05:24]:
Well, I have a few simple rules that I have. I call them McMahon’s management mantras. In the three principal things that I do is first, I ask everyone to treat each other with dignity and respect. OK? And that goes it’s especially true for your team members. It’s especially true for your family. It’s especially true for yourself, and I don’t want to minimize treating yourself with dignity and respect. The next thing I ask from everyone is if you make a mistake, admit it, and then the final thing is if you do something wrong, apologize. Now these kind of behaviors don’t necessarily come naturally to everyone, but as you kind of said earlier, if it doesn’t come naturally to you, if you can mimic those behaviors, pretty soon you become more comfortable behaving in that manner. So I don’t know if that makes sense to you or not, but that’s kind of the way I approach it.
Sanjog Aul [00:06:42]:
So fake it till you make it?
Charlie McMahon [00:06:45]:
Well, in some sense, yes. Fake it till you make it or if it doesn’t come naturally to you, at least be cognizant that you need to be treating people with dignity and respect. Be cognizant that if you make a mistake, the best course of action is to admit it and then move on. If you do something wrong, the best course of action is to apologize, and even when it doesn’t come naturally to people, if you start encouraging them to behave that way, pretty soon they understand that it’s in their best interest to do so. So it may never come naturally to them, but if they can adopt those principles, it shows up in better workplace relationships and truly better self-esteem for the individual employee.
Sanjog Aul [00:07:42]:
So in the way we are moving forward in today’s day and age, we are becoming virtual and we are being asked to work with people who we may have never worked before or we will build, say, a project, you know, that whole agile environment. You create a project, you get something done, you dismantle, you move on to the next. You’re not necessarily going to work with the person who you worked in the previous project. So you are not essentially, working with people who get some time with each other off work or during the lean times if you will or the downtime for them to truly build a bond, and if I were to tell two strangers to say, hey, you got to be honest with each other, and second, I also tell someone to say, you know what? I am going to have you do a certain project. I will offer you some resources. They may not be superfluous, or they’ll not be surplus resources. So I want you to work with the minimum possible. There is no loyalty towards each other. There is no loyalty towards a manager or the organization. Then how do you foster such behavior?
Charlie McMahon [00:09:00]:
Well, so there’s a couple of things, and we’ve all seen the type of employee in particularly in technology, and maybe this is a stereotype that would prefer to keep the lights down low, work in the privacy of their office and never really interact with another person face to face. Typically these people can be very good at their jobs, but their social skills may not have the desire to have those social interactions that you get around the water cooler. A couple of things that I think have to happen. I’ll go back to my first principle to treat everyone with dignity and respect, but especially yourself, and part of treating yourself with respect is being respectful of others. I had a situation with a company that I was consulting with and the senior leadership team said our one of the groups in the organization just doesn’t treat the leadership with respect. How do you make them respect me? That’s a tough situation, but the way I approach it is first to make the employees respect themselves. When they understand that respecting themselves means behaving in certain ways towards their peers, towards their bosses, towards their subordinates, towards their customers, that can be transformative for them because it’s now focused on what’s best for them in a way that also improves the group dynamics.
Sanjog Aul [00:10:58]:
Well, Annette and I yeah. Go ahead.
Charlie McMahon [00:11:01]:
Well, the second thing I’ll say about that is you also have to have group dynamics that are self enforcing of the kind of behaviors that you’re looking for. One of the principles I have is that if you make a mistake, admit it. In the group, you don’t pull the wool over people’s eyes very often, particularly those people in the group that are working closely with you on a project, and so if you make a mistake, your colleagues and coworkers are gonna see it, and so you’ve gotta have a group dynamic that encourages people to own up to their own mistakes so that some of these management mantras that I have get self reinforced by the collective and not just depend on the individual to change their stripes overnight.
Sanjog Aul [00:12:03]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We will be right back and, Charlie, how about talking about empathy? And empathy is not something which you can tell, hey, you know what? You got to be honest with the other person or you have to treat them with respect. That’s more like parenting where you’re telling do this. Empathy is developed. It is something organic. It’s an emotion of sorts which is going to be voluntary, and that’s important for a team to really become a team in a real sense. How do you make that happen, or how do you foster an environment where empathy among team members is a commonplace? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.
Speaker 0 [00:12:57]:
Predict your company’s future by creating it. Is your workforce able to connect, exchange ideas, and share brilliance simply and securely? Create tomorrow, today. Empower your people to innovate anytime and anywhere with secure BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management and document sharing solutions. To learn more, visit blackberry.com/enterprise.
Speaker 0 [00:13:24]:
Patient-centered care requires a connected enterprise. Are you ready? If you’re looking to scale your healthcare IT efforts, visit redmane.com/health today. Whether it’s to connect data from multiple partner solutions or developing software for unique needs, RedMane can help. To find out how RedMane can help your company deliver on the patient-centered care promise, visit redmane.com/help or call (773) 693-3919. Visit today.
Speaker 0 [00:13:57]:
Your growing business needs a highly productive workforce, effectively communicating and collaborating without exposing corporate data to cyber attacks. Are you looking to balance security and workforce productivity? Move beyond short-term measures and securely scale your business with BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management Solutions. To learn more, please visit blackberry.com/enterprise. You are listening to CTN, CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.
Sanjog Aul [00:14:46]:
Welcome back. Empathy, which is supposed to be an individual trait, and that’s voluntary. Unlike telling them you gotta treat other people with respect, this is something that has to come from within, and there could be different reasons why it may not come in a given person and not necessarily that they’re bad people. It could be the situation. It could be the way they started off in a relationship or overall what’s going on in individuals’ lives. Can and should we try to control this?
Charlie McMahon [00:15:22]:
Well, this is a really interesting question and I’m glad that you raised it in this segment. Empathy is something that is more difficult than respect. I mean, you can give people rules for behaviors and you can put mechanisms in place to make them follow them, but having empathy for someone seems to be more of an innate understanding of how you relate to your environment. I think it’s appropriate to point out that some people simply have challenges with empathy that I will say are medically related issues rather than learned behaviors. As you point out, there are always times in people’s lives where things are going on that maybe you or your team doesn’t understand that cause people to be more self focused and more fragile emotionally and makes those empathetic interactions more challenging. The things I’ve done in the past that have been successful is to simply be aware of when people are behaving unusually. Most people are fairly empathetic and particularly when you’ve had time to work with people and you’ve built a relationship, you’ve built a bond with someone, it’s easier to feel empathy for them. It’s important to notice those people that empathy doesn’t come as naturally for, and provide some help in the interactions they have with the rest of their teammates and to have help for the rest of their teammates in how they appropriately understand and empathize with the person who may be lacking in empathy. As we were discussing earlier, this is probably the hardest part of the job as a technology leader, the manager of a team or a group or an organization is to figure out how to make the team function well, and certainly, a team that is lacking in empathy is not going to be very productive.
Sanjog Aul [00:17:55]:
So the example that you gave, if somebody is not good in certain something and they are having issues, then you try to help out. That’s more having a feeling of mercy or compassion. When we’re talking about empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, and that means a person to have an individual in the team to have achieved a level of maturity or has had the right background which developed empathy because there will be people who may not come from that background, they are just only about training for themselves and they have low self-esteem and there are other issues which will prevent the empathy from developing. So it’s not sympathy, it’s empathy we’re talking.
Charlie McMahon [00:18:46]:
Yeah. That’s I understand exactly what you’re saying and you’re right. That’s one of the reasons that it’s very difficult to instill empathy in your team members. Empathy unlike respect is not something that can be really mimicked. You can’t fake it till you make it. It’s not something that is necessarily a learned behavior. It is something that is part of your entire value system. The entire way you look at life and your relationship to other people. So that’s, I have to say that’s one of the more difficult aspects of managing team dynamics, because you don’t have as many levers to pull in order to instill empathetic behavior into the team.
Sanjog Aul [00:19:46]:
So do you think there is a way you could do something about it or we should just take it as a challenge and the jury is still out on how to approach it?
Charlie McMahon [00:19:58]:
No. I think it’s something you absolutely have to work for, work on, but it is fairly difficult. So for I’ll give you an example. You may have an employee who’s having a particularly hard time in their personal life, and so maybe they’re not contributing to the team in the ways that they have in the past, and you see your team members getting resentful and angry about that. Now if you could take, if you understand what’s going on in the person’s personal life that’s changed their behaviors, you might be able to explain that to your team members, and get them to understand and have an empathetic reaction. One of the problems that comes up is that many times those things that are going on in a person’s life that are changing their behaviors in the workplace are so private and so personal that you really cannot share them with the other team members, and so, now you’re faced with the challenge of how do you get people to have an empathetic reaction when they don’t understand the things that are going on at the root cause. All they really see are the negative impacts that say a person’s behavior may be having on them and the rest of the team. So it’s hard to — this is one of the toughest management challenges I think there are in IT leadership.
Sanjog Aul [00:21:39]:
Now, that said, let’s talk about the managers and the staff and of course there is a relationship that gets developed sometimes respectful, sometimes even hostile, and these things would, it could be fluid in some cases but over time hopefully the manager and the staff are able to work together, but then we also have a situation where because someone is, like, an individual is someone’s manager, there may not be as much honesty. So if a subordinate wants to and needs to tell the manager, hey, you’re not doing it right, or your idea is not as good, mine is better, but at the same time, you’re not mocking someone, you’re not insulting someone, but yet you are honest to each other because you have the right intent. How do you develop that?
Charlie McMahon [00:22:41]:
Well, so that’s, it comes back to my first principle again that you treat everyone with dignity and respect, particularly yourselves. So you’re right. Many times you have a situation where the person in charge of doing a particular task, whatever that may be, is probably the expert in your organization on doing that particular task, and if that person has a manager who likes to micromanage, who likes to not only tell you what to do, but tell you how to do it, then that can create conflict. Part of what I tell people when I’m trying to mentor them is that part of respecting yourself is to clearly and factually articulate the position you have, and explain why you think you’re right and why you think it should be done a particular way, whatever the circumstances are, but part of respecting yourself also is recognizing that you worked in an organization with a chain of command, a hierarchy, and that once you’ve expressed yourself, you have to accept and proceed with whatever the directions you have received are even if you don’t agree with them, and also, I finish this conversation that if you are respecting yourself and you truly feel that you’re being told to do things that are inappropriate, your obligation is to take yourself out of that situation. Find another opportunity where you will be happy, where you will be able to work with integrity, where you think your dignity is intact. It is probably the wrong approach to be subversive to try and work around the instructions that you’ve been given. Try to go behind somebody’s back to do it differently. So it comes back to, in my mind, making sure that you have respect for yourself and you act with integrity, even in those difficult circumstances.
Sanjog Aul [00:25:10]:
So we spoke about empathy. We spoke about honesty, and now let’s talk about caring, which is to actually be on the lookout to help that other person grow or help them succeed and actually remove roadblocks if you can or facilitate, or bring some opportunities to them. That’s like, if you were to start layering or creating levels of how a team can develop or how individuals can deal with each other, this could, I feel, be at the top after you’ve helped, help them become honest with each other and have empathy with each other then would come caring.
Charlie McMahon [00:25:54]:
Yeah. So I tell you, I think this is in a similar vein to all these other discussions. In some sense, this is an attribute that you have or you don’t have, and it’s hard to instill it. There are some things that management can do, and I think this is one of the easier of the challenges that we’ve talked about today. So if you as a manager or an organization value that kind of behavior, it needs to be known and shown in a variety of ways. So you may have periodic recognition of those people that have not only done their job but helped other people do their jobs in significant ways. You need to have an opportunity to recognize formally. This may be with salary increases or promotions. It may be with recognition at a cake and ice cream gathering, one afternoon, but you have to find ways as a manager to value those behaviors, which means you have to be watching for those behaviors and find ways to recognize when they are happening. When somebody has gone out of their way to help someone else succeed, you’ve got to recognize that as a manager and make sure that it is rewarded in the organization. That seems to be the most straightforward of all the topics that we’ve talked about today.
Sanjog Aul [00:27:36]:
So, yes, we will have situations where the team members may not truly work the way they are supposed to, and I’ll pick up on the comment, and we’ll take a quick break right now and we’ll come back, but the thing which I wanted to talk about here is should we discount an individual’s capability of being empathetic or being honest or being caring? Or should we take ownership because there’s a lot riding on these attributes for a team to develop and actually deliver what you want them to deliver. So where are we drawing the line? Do we, first of all, try? Is there anything we can try? And if we do try, where do we draw the line after which we say, you know what? This is a lost cause. We’ll just have to live with it, but to assume that people are just not built to be caring or built to be empathetic or honest, that would be skipping an opportunity to make a difference in that individual’s life in the team and then the organization, and that essentially the onus lies on the leader. Let’s talk more about it when we come back. Please stay tuned.
Speaker 0 [00:28:56]:
Your growing business needs a highly productive workforce, effectively communicating and collaborating without exposing corporate data to cyber attacks. Are you looking to balance security and workforce productivity? Move beyond short-term measures and securely scale your business with BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management Solutions. To learn more, please visit blackberry.com/enterprise.
Speaker 0 [00:29:27]:
Patient-centered care requires a connected enterprise. Are you ready? If you’re looking to scale your healthcare IT efforts, visit redmane.com/health today. Whether it’s to connect data from multiple partner solutions or developing software for unique needs, RedMane can help. To find out how RedMane can help your company deliver on the patient-centered care promise, visit redmane.com/help or call (773) 693-3919. Visit today.
Speaker 0 [00:29:59]:
Predict your company’s future by creating it. Is your workforce able to connect, exchange ideas, and share brilliance simply and securely? Create tomorrow, today. Empower your people to innovate anytime and anywhere with secure BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management and document sharing solutions. To learn more, visit blackberry.com/enterprise. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. Now back to the show.
Sanjog Aul [00:30:40]:
Welcome back. So, Charlie, we spoke about these three things. Empathy, caring, and honesty, and there was a comment you made that some people would not just do it. I just hope that that is not a gross assumption, that’s not a generalization managers are making all day because I’m sure as a leader you would never assume that this person is like this, not basically labeling a person and there is a risk of managers doing that all the time and giving up before they have actually put in the required effort to turn around situations and people and teams.
Charlie McMahon [00:31:23]:
Well, you’re absolutely right. Our organizations are made up of all kinds of people and you need all kinds of people, and just because folks don’t fit a certain mold or pattern, doesn’t mean they’re not valuable contributors and doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve the mentoring that you would give to any employee, and all of us in IT in particular, have had the stereotypical employee that is absolutely brilliant. If you give them a task and go away and leave them alone, they do outstanding work. It’s fast. It’s accurate. They understand the requirements and you’re pleased with them, but they are lacking in some of the emotional maturity that we’ve been talking about today. I think as managers, you have to recognize that you have all kinds of people and give people opportunities to contribute in ways that they can be successful. I do think though that some of the types of work that we do require good social interactions and good team participation, and so if you find yourself in a situation where the type of work that you need to get done is dependent on these healthy team dynamics, you’ve got an obligation to try and make sure everyone has an opportunity to fully participate in a healthy way in the projects that you’re working on. You can’t simply write people off, but there does come a time when you have made appropriate efforts, and the person is not part of the team in a way that is healthy and beneficial to the team, that you do have to move on and make other choices. Fortunately, all of us have robust Human Resources departments that make sure that when we have those situations that we are being fair to the employee and we are being fair to the organization at the same time. Not just writing people off, but making legitimate good faith efforts to integrate everyone into a successful team.
Sanjog Aul [00:34:00]:
Let’s talk about resourcefulness, which essentially is a trait of any entrepreneur or any progressive individual, right, who has an intention to getting things done. Now there are of course the extremes as whiners who always will find what’s not working because of which they’re not able to move forward, but then there are others who will take a reasonable effort in trying to use what the resources they have but then when they are not seeing what’s conducive to them they make noise and try to ask for more. How do you develop that extreme sense of resourcefulness that an entrepreneur has and he takes pride in it? In each member of your team given that the number of initiatives you want to take on in this digital era or even otherwise the things which you have to juggle at individual team and organization level will always exceed the amount of resources we have. So being resourceful actually is a competitive advantage for a company and that too at an individual level. So if this was really focused on, there could be a lot more an organization can accomplish, but 1, do we understand what’s the level of resourcefulness? Is there a measure that we have developed? Or we just take it as a nature versus nurture? And if either case, how do you develop it? Especially in the case if you think it’s nurture.
Charlie McMahon [00:35:36]:
So this is a question that not only is in IT, but in almost any endeavor that you have, commercial endeavor. Resourcefulness is indeed a competitive advantage. Sometimes you build organizations that do not encourage or foster resourcefulness, and sometimes there are good reasons for that. If you’re in a highly regulated industry, as an example, if you’re in banking, you have to be very careful about straying from the standards that the institution has endorsed. So the first thing you’ve gotta do is find out whether you’re an organization that values resourcefulness, and then you’ve gotta find ways to recognize it. You’re always gonna have people who are quite happy to do the minimum they can to get by. You’re gonna have people that are really hard workers, but they stay within the lines. You set out the rules and they do everything possible within that framework, and then you’re gonna have people that will look at the problem and come to you and say, if we attack the problem differently, if we use a different product or a different approach or a different platform that we could do it better and faster or we could achieve superior results. If you’re an organization that values that, that needs to be made apparent to the workforce, and when people get rewarded for being creative and being innovative and being resourceful, more and more people will be encouraged to do so, but if you have an organization that punishes people for trying because it’s just we have to recognize that when you’re being resourceful, when you’re going to do something that’s not proven, you’re gonna have failures mixed in with those successes. If you’ve got an organization that is punishing people for trying something new and different and resourceful versus an organization that is rewarding those efforts, that makes a difference in how the rest of the workforce behaves.
Sanjog Aul [00:38:15]:
So the way you describe resourceful, are you referring to being entrepreneurial? Because the way I see resourceful is having the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome any difficulty or any hardship or finding creative solutions to a problem which otherwise may look insurmountable. Well that may be a little different than someone doing an experiment. So when you do experiment, that is you’re trying to pilot something or you’re trying to do a proof of concept, but let’s look at it this way suppose you want to do a pilot even a company wants to do a pilot but that will take you money and you do not have the money so how do you shave it off from somewhere else or how do you get creative in terms of finding the resources to get ahead in whichever direction you are going? That’s being resourceful.
Charlie McMahon [00:39:13]:
Yeah. So, I let me draw on an experience I had very early in my career. I was talking to a person from Firestone, and a friend of mine, was being interviewed for a job, and so the person doing the interviewing painted a scenario and said, what would you do if you had a project that you just knew was a good project, but whenever you ask for approval to do it, it was denied because they didn’t give you the resources or whatever. What would you do? And what he was trying to get at was would you give up, and say, okay. That’s not what my boss wants, what the company wants, or would you persist and try and find a way to do it even though it wasn’t maybe officially recognized? You’re taking a risk when you do that, and what the person was looking for was that individual that would find a way to come back and say, hey, here’s a here. I’ve figured this out. Let me show you the results rather than asking, rather than giving up when he’s told you don’t have the resources to do it. Just stick with things that are already approved.
Sanjog Aul [00:40:45]:
Would you call that courage, though? Would you call that what you just said? Is it courage? Because the person went against the grain. He did, he said I’m going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Would you call that courage versus being resourceful?
Charlie McMahon [00:41:01]:
So, it may be a bit of both. In some ways, I think you can’t be resourceful without being courageous. If you’re—but I can see, I think what you’re getting at that there are ways or times or circumstances where you can be resourceful. You can approach a project or a problem differently than conventional thinking, and so you’re really working on a proof-of-concept process. You’re just finding a way to achieve it with fewer resources, faster, whatever that might be, but generally, I think those are related concepts that you’ve got to be courageous in some sense to be resourceful. Because when you’re resourceful, you’re really going outside the bounds of what is normally accepted, and there’s always going to be some risk whenever you’re doing things that have never been done before or doing them differently than they have been done before.
Sanjog Aul [00:42:07]:
And to the way you mentioned that, okay, if you want people to be resourceful, you just grant them immunity. Is that what you’re saying, go figure it out? And if in the process of figuring it out, you then go out of bounds, it’s okay for you to do that, or you draw lines or boundary lines around it?
Charlie McMahon [00:42:26]:
Oh, I’ll tell you, there are always gonna be boundary lines. If you try something that you really believe in your heart is the right thing to do and you have a bad result, someone gets hurt, the company loses a lot of money. There will be consequences for that, but when you’re building an organization that encourages resourcefulness, absent those big expensive failures, you probably should give a pardon or immunity for minor indiscretions. This really is gonna go back to the corporate culture though. If you’ve got a really buttoned down corporate culture that says, you tow the line, then you’re not gonna have a resourceful creative workforce. So there’s gotta be some some level of the other way. Don’t get punished for trying. If you get punished every time you try and fail, then you’re not gonna have a creative resourceful workforce.
Sanjog Aul [00:43:53]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and talking about resourcefulness, Charlie, one is to not curb somebody’s desires to go out of bounds and that’s where you draw the boundary line. That’s a great problem that at least somebody is willing to be resourceful. Then there are many other times when people are simply saying, you know what, tell me what’s next because I’m already burnt out or I’ve got way too many things you want me to get done, and I’ve already have a more than spilling plate. So then you have environments where people are not willing to be resourceful, but you cannot be shepherding people to be resourceful. This has to come from within like any other attribute that we spoke about today. What do we do to have people be excited enough or really wanting to be resourceful? What can leaders do from the position they are working with their managers and organizational support that everyone as an individual comes as a powerhouse who is willing to give it all they have to make the most of the resources which are scarce in the first place to deliver the best outcome. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.
Speaker 0 [00:45:09]:
Predict your company’s future by creating it. Is your workforce able to connect, exchange ideas, and share brilliance simply and securely? Create tomorrow, today. Empower your people to innovate anytime and anywhere with secure BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management and document sharing solutions. To learn more, visit blackberry.com/enterprise.
Speaker 0 [00:45:36]:
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Speaker 0 [00:46:10]:
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Sanjog Aul [00:46:54]:
Welcome back. So great problem if an organization has a bunch of, I would call them mavericks, who want to go out of bounds and be resourceful and create something which someone could not even imagine, but then most organizations have issues with many people working on many things but they are simply not stretching themselves in the interest of being resourceful. Who is at fault here?
Charlie McMahon [00:47:24]:
Yeah. So I tell you, I believe that’s a management issue when you have employees that get complacent or get satisfied with simply doing what they’re asked and seem to have lost the curiosity or the interest in going a little bit beyond what the basic job requirements are. I think that’s a management problem. Of course, I believe in the 80/20 rule. 80% of your problems are management induced, and 20% of them at most are directly related to the employee. So in situations like you’ve described, it’s up to the manager to recognize that he’s got people who are — I don’t want to say coasting, but maybe not going the extra mile or that have become a little bit stale or a little bit burned out. What I do is try and identify some stump work projects that I am interested in. So we talked about resourcefulness earlier. Managers have to be resourceful as well as individual contributors, and one of the ways that I’m resourceful as a manager is to have some things, some projects that are maybe not officially sanctioned, but if we could pull them off would make a dramatic difference to the organization. The tendency is to want to go to your stars and say, okay, here is my all-star team and ask them to work on that project. I have found many times you get pleasantly surprised by going to the people that you’ve just described. People who are in your organization for a reason. They know their stuff. They are good employees, but maybe they’re feeling a little bit stale or someone else has been getting the limelight, been getting the choice assignments. Ask them to work kind of behind the scenes in a low key way on a project that can make a difference for the organization, make a difference for the company, and see if that opportunity helps revitalize their spark, their interest in contributing all they can. As the Army recruitment said, be all you can be. I think it’s the manager’s responsibility to recognize and provide those opportunities for people that might benefit from that little bit of change, that little bit of extra attention, that little bit of opportunity for them to distinguish themselves and actually shine in the organization.
Sanjog Aul [00:50:28]:
No. We are looking at the companies, which are working towards these areas, right, and there would be some leaders who will focus on it and as the leaders change or managers change, how do we get this honesty and resourcefulness and caring and empathy, those types of sentiments, do not get impacted with the change of regime, if you will?
Charlie McMahon [00:50:58]:
Okay. Whenever you change leadership, that is traumatic for the people that have remained behind. If you get a new boss, that means there is some uncertainty. Many times there’s a perception that you’re getting a new boss because the old boss wasn’t doing something right, but they weren’t meeting the expectations of senior leadership in the organization, and so there’s some trepidation that kind of permeates the organization. We don’t know what’s coming next. We don’t know why this is happening, and you may lose your signal, your focus, or your understanding of what your role in the organization is. I come back to my first principle. You have to respect yourself, and part of that is understanding that you know your job, you’re good at your job, you are a valued contributor, and that needs to show in your interactions with your new management, your new boss. Not, I it’s different from saying you’ve gotta be confident, but you have to be confident. You have to understand that your value as a person, your value to the organization has not changed just because you’ve got new leadership. Now you get a new leadership, a new person comes in with a different style, and so some of the team dynamics may change and some of the interactions with your boss may change, but if you approach them in a respectful, in an honest way, as we talked earlier in the program, you’re gonna be just fine in that transition, and I hate to say this, the incoming management has to recognize that and has to be aware that there has been a disruption in the force, and they’ve gotta come back and be sensitive to the team dynamics, and try and do things that recognize where the team was being successful and encourage those activities, and where the team has not been as successful, bring other techniques and opportunities that can help improve that performance. So I don’t know if that helps our listeners out there, but recognizing that change in leadership and change in even key members in the group disrupts that dynamic, and you’ve got to be sensitive to it until an equilibrium has been reestablished.
Sanjog Aul [00:53:57]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much, Charlie, for sharing your views on how leaders can build honest and resourceful teams and treat each other with empathy and care so that the end outcome is we all win with the newer environment that we’re dealing with and outcomes we’re looking for. So thank you so much.
Charlie McMahon [00:54:19]:
Happy to be here. Thank you.
Sanjog Aul [00:54:21]:
And listeners, please like us on Facebook, search for CTN. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and please do subscribe to our podcasts. We are on iHeartRadio, Spotify, TuneIn, SoundCloud, Stitcher, a lot of different places. So please find us and listen to us and give us your rating. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CIO Talk Network. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week. Take care and God bless.
