Q. What advice do you have for holding employees accountable?
You have to do it in a fashion where you’re trying to encourage people and try to let them see how it’s going to benefit them without them feeling that you’re micromanaging what they’re doing, so it is a balance. There are certain techniques that you might use with one professional that with another might not be as acceptable, so you need to understand their personalities and how they respond. I don’t think you can say there’s one magical way.
You try to get to know the person. There might be certain words that are very sensitive to them when you’re trying to constructively critique what they’re doing. So you understand the way they talk and the way th
ey communicate.
For example, there are some people I can go up to in an open office and say, ‘Where are you on these professional goals?’ and other people wouldn’t respond to that well, especially if they were behind. So even if it would have just been a normal question, you know if somebody’s a little more sensitive about being judged by others. Then you need to adjust your approach.
Generally, you’re going to be a little more reserved or conservative on how you approach them originally. So I wouldn’t take the liberty of saying that in front of someone who was new until I got to know them. Trial and error would be not a good thing because you could lose someone’s confidence very early on for something that you should have known better. That’s part of a leader’s job is get a feel for what is going on and that just doesn’t mean in general — it means with each individual.
Q. What role does integrity play in this?
Even if someone didn’t follow what you wanted them to do [and] they made a mistake, you don’t embarrass them in front of the rest of the professional team. You talk to them in private: what happened, how it happened. So you’re respecting them as a professional. That’s where you really get the trust in the relationship, both at the professional and personal level.
It really starts at a personal level. They have to have some faith that when they tell you something, if they ask you to keep it confidential, that you will keep it confidential. When an employee comes and tells me something personal about them, I tell them, ‘I am not going to tell anyone else about this unless you want me to.’ People come to you in confidence to try to get some guidance just from a personal standpoint, and if they can’t trust you with that information, for sure they’re not going to trust you on the business side.
It’s a continuum of trust. You can’t turn it on and you can’t turn it off. It’s either there or it’s not. To me, integrity is respecting someone’s request that you keep something of a personal nature confidential.
When you’re working with someone on client matters and someone asks you to take an edge that you know really isn’t proper but you might be able to do it, that’s when I see the integrity come on. You say, ‘No, we have to call the client. These are what the standards are. This is what we need to follow and we’re not doing this.’ So it starts there professionally. It’s just a continuum of what you do every day in your professional and your personal life.
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