October 15, 2008

MANAGING PERSONAL CRISES

By Leocadia Burke, Ph.D.

Every manager has had to deal with a subordinate who is experiencing a personal or family crisis.  It may be a death or illness of a family member, or a personal trauma, such as illness or divorce.  Generally, the manager’s first reaction is to be sympathetic and supportive.  The subordinate’s diminished performance and time lost from work are understood and accepted.

But more often than not, crises are not short lived.  Their consequences continue and so does the subordinate’s behavior.  Although the responses will vary from individual to individual, certain effective managerial practices apply to all significant personal and family problems:

1. Accept the fact that a subordinate for whose work performance you are accountable will experience stress and his or her performance may be altered.  As a consequence, you may have to adjust schedules: yours, your subordinate’s, and others’.

2. Be ready to cut some slack for the troubled subordinate, but continue to expect that certain standards of performance will be met.  Sometimes an overindulgent manager can legitimize or even encourage feelings of dependence and powerlessness.  However, consistent—though modified—expectations can help the subordinate call on his or her reserve of strength.  One psychologist whose son was hospitalized for an undiagnosed illness said, “Knowing that I had to get up each morning, go to work, and deal with the real world kept me going in the face of the unknown of my son’s condition.”

3. Assess the degree to which the subordinate’s behavior is appropriate.  Is it of prolonged duration?  Is it so severe that it is disrupting the workplace?  How responsive is the subordinate to your managerial counseling?  Professional counseling may be in order, but it is not up to the manager to make psychological diagnoses.  The manager can suggest counseling as an option, but only within the context of work-related performance.

4. Be helpful and understanding, but try to remain objective.  Becoming personally involved in the problem brings your own needs into the equation and complicates the existing problems even more.

5. A manager will be more effective if he or she maintains a degree of distance.  Taking over the problem or attempting to solve it is intrusive, inappropriate, and may infantilize the subordinate.

6. Be alert to your own feelings.  How comfortable are you when a subordinate increases his or her dependence on you?  Acknowledge that you may be feeling angry that this problem is disrupting your high-functioning department.  As long as you do not act out the anger inappropriately, do not feel guilty. You are not a bad person for feeling angry.  Make certain that any resultant feelings of guilt do not cause you to overindulge the subordinate.

Like it or not, managers do become involved in their subordinate’s personal lives if only as it affects the workplace, but never more so than when the subordinate is experiencing significant personal or family problems.  How effective managers are at these times can spell the difference between a subordinate who returns to maximum functioning and one who never makes a full recovery.  

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Leocadia (Lee) Burke, Ph.D., is a senior consultant and heads the executive-coaching department at The Levinson Institute.  She has been with the Institute since 1980, during which time she has taught at leadership seminars for managers and officers of several hundred corporations.  Dr. Burke can be reached at (603) 532-4700 or elburke@comcast.net.

NO OFFENSE MEANT

“I hate when you use the word ‘subordinate,’” a reader once said.  “It’s militaristic and outdated.”

I have to use the word, even in this decade of “flattened” organizations and empowered employees.  “Subordinate” is a strong word that emphasizes hierarchy and the power relationships that inevitably characterize higher animals and humans in organizations. Even in the most egalitarian team, an informal hierarchy soon arises.

No good substitute for “subordinate” has come along.  “Direct report” is awkward.  To call a subordinate an “associate” is often an effort to deny or mask real power differences. Interestingly, substitutes for “superior” abound: superior, higher-up, boss, manager.

Managers wisely use the word “subordinate” with sensitivity to their listeners.  In The Levinson Letter, however, I must address power issues head-on in order to help managers gain and use power effectively.

SMALL SUCCESS

"Small is better," says Erich Leinsdorf, former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  Leinsdorf now prefers chamber-sized ensemble pieces because “the huge orchestra is a residue of hyper-romanticism and has run out of gas.  The future belongs to smaller... instrumental combinations; this has already been proved by the popularity of all sorts of Baroque music with young people,” he wrote in a recent Boston Symphony Orchestra program guide.

There’s a lesson here for managers.  No matter what product you make, when people perceive bigness as too impersonal (failing to meet their individual affection and dependency needs or not allowing them to move toward ego ideals), they tune out.

DON'T LEAVE THEM HANGING

When The Levinson Institute does a “pulse” project, we undertake to establish for a company how people feel about their work, about major changes, and why they feel that way.  Management may be trying to reverse declines in productivity and other unwanted disruptions. “In that process, we take it as a given that we owe follow-up to everyone who talked to us, as well as to management,” says our staff member Lee Burke, Ph.D.  “Our feedback allows employees to voice their concerns and for both sides to feel that communications have been improved,” she says.

It’s good psychological practice for a manager, too, to make a point of following up with everyone who provides information, or otherwise affects the performance of the manager’s role.  It goes beyond thanking (although that’s part of the dialogue) to include consequences and comments.  One boss told his group, “Thanks for your help getting materials ready for today’s meeting.  It was a great success, and I think we’re going to land the account.”  He then gave people an opportunity to comment.

Such feedback only takes a minute, and it steeply increases the chances that the connection you’ve made will be positive.  “On the other hand, when people think, ‘You never got back to me,’ they feel put down,” says Dr. Burke.  Over time, she says, that feeling can harden into anger.

LOOKING BUSY IN THE NINETIES

She’s running for a cab to the airport while barking orders into her cellular phone about what she's waiting for on the fax machine when she gets to her next hotel.  “What a go-getter!” says her boss.  “I love her enthusiasm.”

I find that frenetic movement and perpetual motion often disguise problems.  Impulsive managers may hide behind their busyness, because they are emotionally or intellectually incapable of diagnosing problems, identifying options, and seeing how a particular decision will play out down the road.  Perpetual movement can conceal underlying depression, too.

When emphasis on speed and motion comes at the expense of judgment, that undermines performance.  It also cuts into the time people need to connect with others in order to meet affection and dependency needs.

Force frenetically busy people in your work unit into regularly scheduled, un-cancelable meetings, both to make them connect with others and to supervise their judgments.  Make them sit still for frequent feedback on their performance.  Don’t let the cry, “I’m too busy!” deter you.

OUT OF BOUNDS

A senior manager described his outward-bound-type training experience as “a waste of time.”

Most managers who have experienced these sessions said that they had seen no lasting effect on working relationships.  Some people even found the experience frightening or humiliating.  While people often experience a sense of closeness after confronting a challenge together and depending on each other’s help, back in the organization, daily reality soon erodes those feelings.

In psychological terms, trust means that a person is willing to depend on someone.  Everyone needs to depend on others and to be depended on.  But you can’t create trust overnight.  Trust that lasts is built up over time, through the complementary support of people who help you do your job, and whom you help.  Trusting a colleague or a person who reports to you means you expect him or her to discharge responsibility well. If the person can’t do that trust is lost, no matter how intense it was in the outdoors exercise.

Managers can build real trust in the office by extending help and support to co-workers and to the boss, by providing frequent, timely, and honest feedback to people who report to them, and by providing plenty of information in order to reduce people’s natural suspiciousness.

AT HOME OFF THE RANGE

During a recent trip to France, I was struck by how familiar and comfortable French managers are with languages, cultures, and environments not their own.  I question America’s ability to compete globally while handicapped by the parochialism and anti-intellectual bias of many managers.

In its recent study of our competitive position, Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1989), the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity warned that “many Americans pay scant attention to life beyond the nation’s borders.”  Our educational system reinforces our inward-looking bias and fails to open windows onto the world.  Until recent times, our frontier tradition—the seemingly endless challenge and opportunity within our own borders—served to isolate us.

The American anti-intellectual bent also derives from our frontier tradition. We come to prize the man of action above the thinker in an environment where sheer survival often had to be the goal. But the world has changed, and today the importance of conceptual ability is becoming obvious as our managers face off against more selectively educated Europeans.

REAL MEN DON'T SAY IT

You’re doing a spectacular job. Why won’t your boss say so?

1. Giving praise actually makes some people feel guilty.  They’re uncomfortable with power, which they unconsciously feel they don’t deserve.  The authority to praise feels uncomfortably close to the power to criticize and to hurt.

2. “I hate that mushy stuff.”  For managers raised in the macho-military tradition, the expression of any positive sentiment threatens their tough-guy self-images.

3. Some managers unconsciously subscribe to Theory X.  They fear that subordinates will slack off and “rest on their laurels” if they’re praised.  Most people, in fact, are inspired to greater efforts by praise.

If your boss is the Scrooge of compliments, there’s no harm in telling him that you’d like more feedback.  Suggest a method for getting it on a regular basis: a brief monthly meeting, for example, so he won’t slip back into his old habits.  Be prepared with specific questions (“What did you think about how I handled the Jenkins account?”) to help him get started.