Work together
You need to find a way to work with the person you’re training and see what type of support and tutelage he or she is looking for from you to help his or her growth. So how you do know what works?
“One good way is to ask,” Moorehead says. “It’s not always management by manipulation. Sometimes management by communication works much better. You can’t ever go wrong with honesty. If I come to you as an employee and say, ‘Do you want me to check in with you every week? Or would you prefer that we meet up in the afternoons for a little while?’ I feel like they will probably tell you. Then I think it’s easy to gauge whether what you’re doing is working. Sometimes I try to gauge it on my own, but I find I get the best answers when I ask.”
Moorehead had the advantage of having a closer relationship with his boss than most since he was working for his father. But in a typical boss/employee relationship, sometimes all it takes is starting a conversation about what’s working and what’s not working.
“There’s success and failure every day, and when the failures start to become a lot more than the successes, it’s time to take a break and figure out what’s going on,” Moorehead says. “Just stay consistent with the amount of feedback. If you’re going to give somebody feedback every time you talk, make sure you give them feedback every time you talk. If you’re going to do a quarterly review, don’t start it and then stop it. Consistency is the key.”
Moorehead says one of the keys in his own development was the tone of the feedback from his father didn’t change when he made a mistake. He was given the opportunity to talk about it and work to find his own solution.
“It means giving you the chance to come up with your own plan, to talk through the fix and to accept fair criticism and then execute the next plan on your own,” Moorehead says.
“What it didn’t mean was, ‘Scott, that was a terrible idea. I’m really disappointed that you thought of it and it didn’t work out. Here’s how you’re going to go fix it. Do this.’ I would have felt dejected right out of the gate because it was my idea and I failed. Then all of a sudden you become scared to try. You’re a yes-man. ‘Yes sir, whatever you say, sir.’ I wanted a little bit of a say in what I thought went wrong and he allowed me to do that. That’s the key.”
If you’re not consistent with feedback and demonstrating a reliable attitude of, ‘Let’s work through this together,’ you create doubt.
“That’s when the doubt starts to form,” Moorehead says. “What am I doing wrong? Why has my boss changed the way they are managing me? What have I done? They would assume it’s something they did or that a decision has been made that they don’t know about. If you push too much, your employee or the person you’re grooming starts to worry that maybe they’re not making the right decisions. Whatever route you’re choosing for the person, stay consistent.”
