A primary principle of managing and coaching is believing in your people. If you can’t or don’t believe an employee can succeed then don’t coach him and quit trying to fix him. Managing is about turning talents into performance and understanding that you can’t put in to someone what what God left out, in other words, you can’t fix people. A fundamental problem many managers have is actually thinking they can fix someone. What’s really odd about this is that quite often managers will adjust standards and expectations to fit the employee and in the manager’s mind the employee is now meeting the new standard and he is now fixed. That is, until he breaks again (and he will) and then the standards are adjusted yet again to accommodate and “fix” the employee and the vicious cycle begins. Pretty soon you have an organization with no standards and a “come as you are” and “do as you want” culture. By this time your best people have left and everyone is now looking at each other wondering why things don’t get better, why we can’t keep employees and why the manager now becomes the fireman (putting out so-called fires throughout the day).
Solution…
Stop spending time creating/adjusting policies and expectations in order to accommodate poor performance and behavior. Start seeing the potential and talents in your people. Set clear standards and expectations for them. Hold them accountable. Believe in them. Reward them. Then watch them step up. And better yet, you’ll begin to see many of them exceed your highest expectations. You’ll go from hiring the first person you can get, to recruiting the best and brightest.
Understand that not every employee is right for every organization or department or job. You can’t fix people to fit your systems and processes and if you continue to adjust your organization, it’s standards and expectations to fit every employee then you will have just created the the foundation of protecting the status quo. Nothing will ever improve, initiatives will fail and organizational goals will be nothing but a dream.
Bottom line… Start Believing and Stop Fixing.
