Establish realistic expectations for
employees. You want to establish goals that represent a challenge, but at the same time, you
don’t want to establish goals
that are just not achievable.
There’s a trap in all of this. … If
you ask people to set goals for
themselves, often they will set
goals that are too aggressive.
Sometimes, of course, they do the
opposite — they set easy goals
for themselves. It’s the responsibility of the leader to adjust those.
You have to have the ability to
recognize when someone has put out a goal for themselves
that they can’t achieve, and you
then have to gently and sometimes indirectly adjust that so
it’s a goal they can achieve.
Learn how your employees work.
Some people are steady and
methodical workers, and
they’re working their way calmly and steadily through everything and keeping their nose to
the grindstone. Other people
work in spurts — they put out
huge output for a few days or
weeks and then go for some
time when they’re not doing
much of anything.
If you have someone who’s
steady and methodical, then you
set goals that are consonant
with that. You set a large number of intermediate goals, so
they’re always working toward the next one.
Whereas with people who
work in spurts, sometimes
you’re better off just giving them
the general objective and time
frame and letting them use their
own waves of energy to tackle
this thing. I don’t think it’s a
good idea to try and jam everyone into the same cookie cutter.
You have to observe their
behavior. Sometimes they’re
aware of it themselves, but
oftentimes they’re not. You
might have some person who’s
in the second category … and
they might not even think of
themselves that way.
You have to be conscious of
the actual behavior and performance of people, rather than
relying on their own self-assessment or presentation of themselves and their work habits.
Everybody wants to present
themselves as steadily working
and never having any down-time, and of course, we know
that’s not true; only a small number of people are like that.
Create an open atmosphere. If
somebody feels they can’t get
something done by the time they
thought they could, they will tell
you that well in advance. If you
give someone a project and say
you’d like to have the project
done in two weeks, there’s a big
difference between them coming to you after the two weeks
are up and saying, ‘I wasn’t able
to get it finished, and it’s going
to take two more weeks,’ that’s
one thing. Another thing is for
them to come to you after three
days and say, ‘I looked at this and scheduled it all out, and
there’s no way it can be two
weeks, I need four.’
You’re better off knowing that
earlier than later. If people think
that they can’t honestly tell you
about what their capabilities are
and what they think they can
do, then they won’t tell you, and
you’ll be scrambling at the end.
If people see that’s what happens when you honestly say you
need an extension on a project,
then of course they won’t ask
for one. You have to refrain
from doing those things.
You have to convey the message that if somebody honestly
says that they need to change
the schedule of something that
they’re working on, you need to
have it be seen and known that
they get credit for that.
HOW TO REACH: Franklin University, (614) 797-4700 or www.franklin.edu
