Skipping maintenance anyone ?

You can skip the maintenance of your car. Nothing major will probably happen. And you can do the annual program just the next year. Or maybe you could even skip next year as well !

Leadership programs seem to be the first to get cut when cuts need to be made. It is way easier than to do something about the inefficiencies, or to address the structural issues that have grown over the years. So it's the leadership program that is sacrificed to "help" the company.

An organization's leadership development program is very much like a car. If you skip the program for a year, nothing major will happen. People will not start to leave in droves. And you will most likely not be faced with an acute shortage of leaders. All seems well ... If you intend to come back to the original program the year after, doubt will have started to creep in ... Is this program really necessary ? Nobody seems to be able to identify any damage from skipping it last year ... And it did help us to save XYZ US$ ! The argument for restarting becomes even more harder. All of the sudden the investment in people becomes a new burden, since we managed without last year.

That's why a leadership program is like a car. You can skip for a year, but whatever you do further down the road, you can never recover what was lost in that year. The minor damage that occurred to your engine from using bad oil or a blocked filter can never be erased. In an organization, that damage can be at different levels. People who had been told they would be part of a specific program will start to doubt if the company is really serious about their development. In general, employees will feel that leadership development, for all the nice vision statements, is dispensable. And managers will feel they do not have the tools to fully develop their teams for the challenges of the future.

And then we sometimes wonder why our surveys show that employees are not engaged !

The tasteless sandwich

A few years ago, someone came up with a magical "sandwich" approach to give for-improvement-feedback to someone: say something nice, say what you really need to say, and finish up by saying something nice again. This became known as the feedback sandwich. And it became really popular.

The idea was that for the person receiving the message, it felt better to hear it smothered between two nice things, and the receiver would be more motivated to improve. But the sandwich did not become popular because it worked ! It became popular because it made the manager feel better about himself, and created the impression that "delivering" the feedback message was easier.

Giving someone straight feedback remains so difficult for so many managers. Someone recently admitted that he was not comfortable looking his subordinate in the eyes when giving feedback ! Others fall into the other extreme and pride themselves in being at ease telling anyone anything straight into their face ... whatever the consequences.

Giving feedback is not about delivering a message. We have email for that. The challenge with giving clear feedback - around needed improvements - is that for it to work, it needs to turn into a dialogue, into a real conversation. Not smothered in between layers of "positive" messages that have nothing to do with what needs to be addressed. You cannot prepare for or script out what will happen. You don't know what the other person will reply or argue or disagree with. It is exactly this unpredictability about how the discussion will turn out that you need to become comfortable with.

Creating a sandwich, or sugarcoating, or adding sweet topping does not make the feedback process more effective. It only destroys the taste, and the message. Practice dialogue instead.