Each summer, I receive more than one hundred new graduate HR students across a couple of sections of the Labor Issues and Conflict Management course I teach at Florida International University, in the Master of Science in Human Resource Management program. The first week, we spend an extended period of time reviewing the course syllabus and previewing a roadmap of the content that awaits them in the ensuing weeks. Eventually, we get through some performance management materials and land at disciplinary action, progressive (or cumulative, rather) feedback. and crucial conversations. I have made it a habit in this class session to sneak in a meme of Batman I had seen several times over the years.
It reads: “My boss told me ‘Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.’ Now, I’m sitting in a disciplinary meeting dressed as Batman.”
This admittedly silly, exaggerated example is meant to elicit a chuckle (I try to get my students to laugh along the way … I really do), as well as to illustrate an example of a manager providing feedback to an employee who clearly was misunderstood. That ambiguity is attributable to the party that delivers the message. Heck, in contract law you often see contested, ambiguous terms being interpreted in favor of the party that was not responsible for the unclear language.
There are so many examples in the workplace of conversations that take place between a manager and employee, after which the manager walks away thinking she has given a cle11rd directive and the employee walks away clueless as to what was intended. Perhaps the subordinate is too embarrassed to ask questions to confirm or deny what he thinks his manager was just telling him. After all, better for people to suspect that you are dumb than for you to open your mouth and eliminate all doubt, right?
Wrong.
In order to have harmonious working relationships, top-level performance, effective collaboration, and everyone in the kayak rowing in the same direction, you need to have clear communication. As I tell my students, and anyone who will listen to me in my non-teaching HR work, “Everything begins with clarity:’
Emotional Intelligence
If you don’t believe me, take it from another guy whose name might ring a bell – Daniel Goleman. Years back, this famed psychologist penned an article titled, “What Makes a Leader” (promoted by the Harvard Business Review as a must-read). In that article, he discusses the idea of emotional intelligence being a better predictor of success than traditional notions of knowledge, skills, and abilities that historically had been used for identifying talent. He defines the different levels of emotional intelligence, but in doing so starts with self-awareness. You see, in order to be an emotionally intelligent leader who can identify the emotions of others and regulate one’s own emotions to perform well under stressful situations, one first must possess some ability to recognize their own emotions. I like to think (hope?) that I have a pretty good ability to identify my own emotions, to self-regulate, and to coach myself out of situations where I might really want to respond in a crappy way to someone who is trying to get under my skin. The first step is recognizing that it’s even happening so that you can head it off before it’s too late. When I see my team exhibiting behaviors that I think could be problematic, I provide that feedback so that they can begin to recognize it. Sometimes, the employee is well aware of the behavior and is actively working on it. Other times, however, it comes as a genuine shock.
Clarity In Your Work Environment
According to psychologist Kurt Lewin, our behaviors are a function of two things: who we are and the situations we’re in. As you go through your career, you very well may develop and learn and grow, but the greater variable is probably going to be the situations that you are in the places you work, and the managers you have (with their good and bad behaviors alike). Think about how motivated you might have felt to put in that extra effort for the manager who you really liked, and instead how you maybe found yourself looking for excuses to call out from work when you had that lousy manager. The leadership styles they use make a huge difference.
A couple of years after his work on emotional intelligence, Goleman published work on the different types of leadership styles (“Leadership That Gets Results”), in which he discussed the direct correlation between a manager’s behaviors and the resulting impact it has on the subordinate employees and how it feels for them to work under that manager’s direction. This feeling which we call organizational climate has a direct impact on employee performance.
From there, psychologists George Litwin and Richard Stringer identified that the climate could be divided up into six different sections or dimensions. All six dimensions need to be in place for an employee to be in an environment most conducive to bringing out their very best performance. The first of these dimensions is Clarity. Basically, do employees even know what is expected of them? If not…
- How can they be expected to do that job to a high-quality standard? (Standards)
- How can they be expected to be self-starters and to demonstrate high levels of initiative in the performance of that work? (Flexibility)
- Will they readily accept accountability and ownership when they inevitably get it wrong, because they didn’t understand what to do in the first place? (Responsibility)
- Will they feel proud of the work they have done and really feel like they are doing critical mission/vision-aligned work? (Team/ Company Commitment)
- Will they be recognized and rewarded for their perhaps misguided efforts? (Rewards)
As illustrated by these questions, the remaining five dimensions of climate are hard to hit if you are missing clarity from the very start. In order to ensure that you are creating a climate that is going to be motivating and setting up your employees to thrive, it all begins with clear expectations. Everything flows from there.
Clueless and Unaware
Rounding out “le tour de psychologie” in this article is another pair • David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who worked together at Cornell. They noticed some trends with respect to individuals and their self-awareness. Their research demonstrated that when people have little self-awareness as to their abilities, they tend to overestimate how smart and capable they might be while underestimating those around them. Maybe you have that family member who is very vocal about their opinion on a matter, even though they do not seem to be very educated on the topic. It happens in politics all the time, with folks on both sides of the aisle – red and blue alike. As Dunning and Kruger put it, “Those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize It.” In other words, some folks are going through life thinking they are way smarter than they really are, and they are actually so clueless about their gaps in knowledge that they don’t even realize that there are gaps. They overestimate their abilities and think they’re doing just great. There’s a reason they say, “Ignorance is bliss:’
According to their research and the concept it yielded (creatively dubbed the Dunning-Kruger Effect), they discovered that as individuals received feedback and improved information about their abilities and performance, they began to realize that they didn’t have it all figured out. In fact, they begin to lower their self-assessment of how incredibly brilliant and great they are, and maybe begin to feel a bit self-conscious about their deficiencies and how many things they have begun to realize they actually didn’t know. Maybe that political issue wasn’t so black and white after all … it’s actually pretty gray, and there’s a lot of nuance to it. “Huh … I guess I had it wrong:’ said nobody on a social media political argument ever. But perhaps they read something or walked away from a disagreement with a new piece of knowledge that they researched and discovered to have a nugget of opinion-bursting truth to it. This improved awareness of ones’ self (metacognition) is the key to moving out of this “bless his heart” category of competence.
A workplace example is a poor. performing employee who Is clueless as to how bad he is at his job, perhaps because he has such a poor understanding of how he ls doing and what the job even requires. There are two issues here – a lack of clarity as to job expectations, and a lack of clarity as to his actual performance. He is doubly failing. Unfortunately, odds are this employee was not done any favors by his manager. All too often are the instances of people being hired and immediately thrust into a job for which they were Ill-prepared, not trained properly (if at all), and then held accountable for not getting it right. Or managers who are too cowardly to give constructive feedback because it doesn’t feel good. Well, now your employee screwed up for the last time and got fired … how did that make you feel?
At the other extreme, you see really astute and talented folks who don’t ever feel like they know enough or are performing well enough In the workplace. They underestimate their abilities and overestimate those of their colleagues – the inverse of what we see with the first group. These are your company’s top performers, who are often so good because they obsessively focus on their areas of improvement. That friend of yours who was always in panic about how he was not going to do well on a test, but consistently walks out of it with a top grade.
In the workplace context, I have seen glaring examples in a workforce reduction scenario. I recall a time in government when we announced we had suffered a reduction in general revenue for the upcoming fiscal year, and would need to eliminate several positions as a result. We were transparent about the methodology for identifying which positions would be eliminated, including the assignment of retention scores for all staff that were comprised of performance evaluation scores, longevity, and (reducing the scores) disciplinary actions that were in the employee record. Even though we told everyone how we were going about the process – the equivalent of showing them the answers in the back of the textbook- I had some of our very best, top-performing employees freaking out and worrying that they were on the chopping block because they had fallen just short of being perfect in the preceding year. Heck, one of them was working In a role specifically focused on performance excellence and quality improvement. She was a superstar. Yet, all she saw were the flaws and areas where she needed to improve. They were microscopic (and there were hardly any), but they were all she could see.
Putting It All Together
When we identify those talented newbies who we want to hire and bring into our organization, it is important to avoid the temptation to throw them to the wolves right away. People deserve to be provided clear expectations as to what will be required of them – before being hired and after. No bait and switch or selling a bill of goods only to surprise them with the bad news that the exciting job they were promised is actually going to be miserable. Give them position descriptions that actually reflect what they’ll be doing, too. Not some vague document that briefly notes some duties but relies heavily on the ‘other duties as assigned” section for 90% of the time spent at work.
From there, managers need to be specific in their directives and instructions, so as to avoid confusion. I learned the hard way from an employee who would consistently nod along to what I said, tell me he understood my instructions, and then promptly go back to his desk and do the work incorrectly. Since that experience, I have made it a habit to ask my staff to repeat back to me my Instructions, confirming that they understood what I had shared. I also like to follow up conversations with bulleted emails, touching upon the items we discussed. This provides the employee the benefit of written instructions to reference should they forget or be confused, and – for the cynic in me – provides that documentation that an unemployment hearing officer will want to see as proof that I had provided the employee with notice of a job-related expectation. As HR folks, we all know documentation is critically important.
Finally, you need to provide meaningful performance-related feedback. Don’t pull your punches, out of fear that it will make the employee feel bad. You are not doing anyone any favors by withholding that Information. You might make excuses that you’re doing it out of concern for how the employee would feel, but it’s more likely a selfish motive of you yourself not wanting to feel bad. You may be trying to protect yourself… not the employee. Bad news doesn’t get better with age. So … rip off that band-aid and let them know so they can take steps to improve. Provide your folks with the clarity they need so that they can get back to being the best versions of themselves that they can be.
By the way – that first week of class at FIU … I spend plenty of time on the syllabus so that everyone is clear as to my expectations and what we will be covering. No surprises. Also … I may or may not be the guy who dressed up like Batman. No comment.
