CULTURE | How to be the boss your people deserve. w/Barbara Mitchell & Cornelia Gamlem

Barbara Mitchell & Cornelia Gamlem, human resource experts and authors of multiple award-winning books, share insights from their latest book, "The Decisive Manager." Learn to work out complicated people issues, address problems, and get everyone on track to succeed.

Learn: 

• How do you manage the asynchronous working environment? 5:00
  • Adjusting to asynchronous working environments.
  • Best piece of advice to embrace the new mindset.
• Not all employees work in an office or have the return to work kind of situation. 6:59
  • Not all employees work in an office.
  • The younger generation is the future of the workplace.
  • How to build trust with team members.
  • The importance of having a predictable schedule.
• If you invite employees into conversations, they may have better solutions to the way the work is being done. 11:40
  • Inviting employees into conversations to build trust.
  • A more collaborative leadership style is needed.
• It’s all about listening to each other and using technology. 13:45
  • Collaboration starts with listening and listening to each other.
  • Using technology for collaboration.
  • Giving employees leeway to do things the way they think is best.
  • Challenges for business owners.
• How to get the right people in your organization. 17:23
  • Hire the right people.
  • The employee experience, who you hire, how you onboard them.
  • How to avoid ghosting during an interview.
  • Treating every applicant as a very important person.
• Make sure you’ve got a process that brings people in -. 22:20
  • The importance of having a process to bring people in.
  • Rescaling or upskilling.
• When it’s time to end a relationship that isn’t working out. 24:50
  • Graceful endings. Barbara and Cornelia

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Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

And now taking care of business your hosts Greg Moen and Shai Gilad.

Craig Moen: 0:08

Welcome to business owners radio episode 229. Our guests today are Barbra Mitchell and Cornelia Gamlin. Authors of the new book, The decisive manager, get results, build morale, and be the boss your people deserve. Together, Barbara and Cornelia have written four books to help business leadership, Find, Hire, engage and retain the best available talent. They both have extensive corporate executive, HR leadership experience, and now work in consulting roles helping clients find the solutions to the most challenging HR and business issues facing them today. Good morning, Barbara and Cornelia, welcome to business owners Radio. Thank you. Glad to be hearing. Good morning. It's great to have your two on the show. And we've been doing a lot of research on how many books you've had. And there's just some fantastic, deep, deep conversations, and data and information here that we can all walk away from making our day a little bit better. But I gotta ask, you've written great books together, what drove you to write this one? Look, warbirds star because this book was really her idea. And then I can chime in. We wrote another book a few years ago called The managers answer book. And it's in the q&a format, as is this book, The decisive manager. But what I suggested the Cornelia is in the managers answer book, we tackled all kinds of issues for managers, financial marketing, and a lot of HR stuff, since that's our background. And why not do one that was just focused on managing people just focus on the challenges that especially business people have on dealing with employees on a daily basis. So that's where this came from. And last year, we had released our 10 year anniversary edition of The Big Book of HR. And when we first wrote that, we had that same feeling that there's a lot of good information in here. For business owners, it wasn't just a year for the, for the HR professional. So we thought, writing the second book, and question and answer format, was a good way to complement it, you know, the decisive manager gives some quick overall ideas. But if you really want to delve in more to some of these subject areas, I would also invite readers to look for a copy of The Big Book of HR as well. So here's so much about the changing working climate that's out there. And certainly shinai. And our clients have been experiencing it. To a great extent, I was wondering, from your perspective, what you're seeing in the current world these days? Well, we're seeing a lot of use the word confusion, but I'm not sure it's the right word. I think it's anticipation of what's coming next. We've been through a rough couple of years. And now I think organizations are beginning to settle down and say, Alright, how do we make this work, we're not going to go back to the way things work, we're gonna have to deal with a very changing culture and a different kind of employees, who is now wanting a lot more involvement in making decisions, and just being part of the whole process. So I think we're seeing a lot of that going on, and kind of people feeling their way. And we tried to handle that by just talking in each of our sections about what is happening, and how do we navigate? And that's the word we keep using how do we navigate that? How do we fix it? Or how do we make it back to where it was? And how do we navigate what we're dealing with right now. And boy, that's a lot of challenges, especially for small business managers or people in the just in dealing with people who are seeing things a little bit differently than they did three years ago. And I think one of the other things won't when we talk about some of the almost the chaos that we were thrown into one of the issues that I think managers are really struggling with, you know, it's not so much the work from home, the demands to come back to the office. But it's that work is being done differently now. It when everybody was in the office, work was kind of going along at the same pace, and everybody was working on things at the same time during the same hours. And now that that employees have more flexibility, somebody may find their best working hours or first thing in the morning with somebody else might say you know later in the afternoon or went into the evening is when I do my best work. So it's adjusting to that asynchronous type of working environment? And how do I manage that. And I think that's one of the things that is challenging managers an awful lot, because they can't walk around and actually see what people are doing at any given point in time.

Shye Gilad: 5:17

So let's talk about that a little bit, I think, you know, so much has changed in the world of human resources. And it's so great to hear terms now, like talent management, for a field that so often has been marginalized, which is insane, since Absolutely, our most valuable assets are actually the people that we're able to attract, and bring into our companies. And so as you mentioned, right, the the world is changing quite a bit very rapidly. And a lot of business owners are feeling kind of left behind in that change, because many of us started our businesses in a very different world of just a few years ago. Often entrepreneurs come from corporate environments, just like both of you did before you started consulting, and launching your own firms and ventures. And it almost feels like there's a generational tension. And what advice do you have for us, if we're just trying to embrace this new mindset,

Craig Moen: 6:15

best piece of advice I can give, it probably sounds a little simplistic and Pollyanna, but it has to do with how you value your employees and how you let them know that you value them. And that by treating them, like a human being, not just your employee. But I think one of the things that managers are struggling with now is that we need to get to know our employees, we need to build that wonderful word of trust has to be so important in today's working environment and our working relationships, employees have to trust their managers trust the organization in very different way from perhaps when they were all together in one place. I also just want to throw in here that we also are well aware that not all employees work in an office or have the return to work kind of situation. You know, a lot of us workforce works in jobs where they have to be in the workplace, like hospitality, like retail, all of those kinds of things where maybe it hasn't changed as much on flexibility of where people work. But it certainly can be different from when they work or how they work. And the other thing you mentioned, che is the different generations that we're seeing in the workplace. And I think for a lot of us that were bitten by that entrepreneurial spirit. After we spent some time in corporate America, we kind of used those experiences as our model and said, This is how we want to model our business in many respects. But with all of the rapid changes, I think we also have to look to the younger generation who are entering the workforce, because a they don't have those experiences, but they grew up in a world that's so different to us. They're not afraid of using technology. In fact, that's what they grew up using. And so they're the ones that are also helping to reshape and matches where we work and how we work with even better processes. You know, even if they're in an environment where you do have to be in the workplace every day, they're going to be more apt to say, you know, maybe if we introduced this piece of technology, or started using this platform, things would flow a little bit better. And we could get a lot more accomplished. So I think there's a lot to be said to having these conversations across generations. And understanding how they view the world because they're the future too. And they're going to help to shape what the world is going to look like in the future. And I think that's why we're in an exciting time. Now, because we all have that opportunity to start to look at what was it that we were always used to what was it that always was? And how can we improve on that? And how can we change it to make the world of work better for everybody?

Shye Gilad: 9:09

Yeah, I love the way that you phrase that Cornelia, we really do have some great opportunity, which comes with any kind of a change, right? So taking this innovative mindset and saying, Okay, what can we build on here? And what is true about this new reality, then that makes you want to go back to something Barbara mentioned, regarding trust, right, and this idea of managing people, and there is a little bit of inequity in the marketplace where some types of jobs, people are able to work remotely. And you talked earlier about how we can leverage that since maybe they're at their best at different times a day. And that could work very well for some businesses, but others, you know, still have to be at a location. And so when we're trying to build trust, is you know, sometimes we're disconnected. And then sometimes again, we have people that have to be unloaded. question that's just part of the job. What are things that we can do differently to start to build trust with our team members?

Cornelia: 10:08

First thing I would say, especially for those who have to be in a workplace, like the grocery store clerk or the the nurse, or someone that works in a place where they have to be physically, at that place, what we're hearing a lot is people just are desperate to have a schedule, that they can predict longer than a day or two, so that they can plan their lives a little bit better. While they have to be in physical location of the workplace. If they know their schedule is going to be the same for two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. They can help plan their childcare responsibilities, and other things. We hear these horror stories of people who don't know from day to day, what shifts they're supposed to be working on. How on earth can they plan their life, if they don't know if what hours, they have to be at work. And I know that their scheduling software, there's all kinds of ways that organizations can change. And I think it's the mindset of managers having to know how to plan a little bit better, and deal with their workflow. But boy, does that build trust if an employee knows what it is they have to work, and how their manager just acknowledges that they have a life outside of the office. So that's one thing you do is edible, appropriately and with with a little bit of forethought as to how this is going to impact the person as opposed to the employee.

Craig Moen: 11:40

And also, I'm going to kind of build on that. If you invite employees into conversations, I mean, and it can be a conversation around scheduling and what hours work best for you. And how much lead time do you need, if we do have to change your schedule, you know, or the days that you're going to be on and off, the employee feels like they're part of the process. And that's a big piece of building trust within a workforce. But even taking it beyond just scheduling issues. If you start to listen to your employees, they may have better solutions to the way the work is being done or the work flow, it gives them that opportunity to say, Hey, I'm the frontline worker, I'm the one that does all of the hands on work. Let me tell you what's working. And let me tell you what's not working. And if you listen to them, and you don't take their concerns seriously, if they make suggestions that maybe you can't implement, that is the time to have a discussion to say, Okay, I really like your ideas. But these are some of the barriers that will prevent us from doing it or prevent us from doing it now. But we'll certainly you know, keep your suggestions in mind for the future as things change. That's also another way is to really solicit their ideas to solicit their input and implement some of the things that you can and explain why you can't implement other things.

Shye Gilad: 13:12

Yeah, I think what I'm hearing from both of you is that the times really demand a much more collaborative leadership style,

Craig Moen: 13:21

that salutely,

Barbara: 13:22

you have hit on something that is so critical now and and I think that's one of the things that managers of any kind of organization are struggling with, because that great phrase about what you did to get here isn't going to get you to the next level. What Got You

Craig Moen: 13:42

Here Won't Get You There, thank you. It's why we work well together, we help each other out. So I think if managers can begin to think maybe putting aside what they thought they knew about how to manage and just say, Okay, I've got a different kind of employee population, I value them. I want them to stay because we know how hard it is to find new people to fit into your organization. So how can we make this work? How can we use that great word of collaboration, and all starts with listening to each other as Cornelia mentioned, and then it starts to build on using technology is a phrase that we throw around a lot, because we really dislike it. And that phrase is, well, we've always done it this way. And if you stop even having those words in your vocabulary, and be open to how could we do this differently? How could we collaborate if we're not in the same space? Well, we know there's great technology that can be used for collaboration. There's all kinds of ways to put this together. Now if managers are open to trying something new trying Something different, and making it work. A friend of mine had mentioned, he spent a lot of years in management in the healthcare industry. And he always felt that you build trust with people by asking them to do something, rather than telling them to do something. And when he used the word telling, he meant it, as you know, using it as a directive, you must do this. And you must do it this way. He said, when you ask somebody, it's just like I mentioned, it's inviting them into the process. And if there's an opportunity to give them some leeway to do with the way that they think is best, they are going to do a much better job with it, because they're going to take some ownership over it. Versus on I've been told to do this. So I'm just going to complete this task. Now, of course, there are some things that you do have to be a little bit more directive on, because there may be causing effects down the road or something has to be done this particular way. And then there's a reason for it. So if that's the case, then you need to tell the people why you're directing them to do it in a certain fashion, because there will be consequences if it's not done that way.

Shye Gilad: 16:12

Yeah, I think one of the challenges for business owners that are growing businesses, right, so they obviously need to recruit, they need to retain, they need to motivate all of the things that the decisive manager really talks about that both of you have spent so much time researching and understanding. And I want to address sort of this resistance that I hear a lot from employers that are saying, you know, I'm working so hard to create structure within my business, so that I can be more strategic in the things that I do with my time daily, because I have to be in order to be successful. And I get it, I want to build trust, I want to create a better environment for our team, you know, better culture, but there's so many demands on my time. And so how can I as a business owner, as as a leader, how can I be more deliberate about my approach? Have you thought about structure and how business owners can create that so that they're actually creating these interactions, right, where they are asking good questions where they are bringing people in, where they are being more collaborative, you know, how can they systematize that?

Craig Moen: 17:23

Well, shy, I would just say that this starts even before the systems that you have in place, because it starts with what you mentioned a moment ago, hiring the right people, you can't do anything, if you don't have the right people in your organization, if you don't hire them for the tasks that you want them to do, or for their own attributes that they bring to your organization that you might need. But if you don't have that basic of the employee, whatever structure you have, is pretty much irrelevant, until you get the right employee. And something that we talk a lot about these days is the employee experience. It is who you hire, how you bring them into the organization, how you onboard them, how you develop them, how you engage them, and hopefully how you retain them. It's all part of an experience that they have with you. And if you start thinking about that, before you start thinking about the structure, or how you're going to put that together or how you're going to strategically manage your business. I think that that's the basic that many people forget about Baker's thinking, well, there's people out there that I can hire, I'll train them and they'll do the job. It's not quite that simple. We need people that are really engaged in the work that want to be with you and really want to contribute. And that all starts in the hiring process. And taking it from there. As Barbara said, You've got to find the right people. And you've got to take your time finding the right people, when you've done your own research around getting the right candidate or the best available candidate that you can, rather than just kind of pushing it through, then hopefully, you've hired somebody that you trust. And then you can start delegating to some of these people. And let them know that, you know, it's your expectation that this is how you want them to build trust, with perhaps the folks that they're managing, or even with some of their colleagues and peers as they're interacting with others in the organization. But if you bring the right people in at the forefront, and you have some trust in them and you develop that trust more, you can become more comfortable in delegating a lot of the day to day responsibilities to these folks. So you're freeing yourself up as a business owner to be a little bit more strategic and to say okay, I can kind of not really sit back but I can turn my attention to some other things. things that will help to grow this organization.

Unknown: 20:03

Barbara and Cornelia, this is fascinating. I have clients that have great employee environments, and they're very engaged. Adding to that they're looking to bed more people with specific skills. And in the recent times, six months, they're really having a tremendous challenge finding qualified candidates, and carry on if they do find someone that reads well on a resume, they'll invite them to the first conversation, either by phone or in person for their first round of conversations for an interview process. And dates are set times are set, and they're no shows never to be heard from again, it this is not just one random occurrence. This is happening all over. And we're wondering, any insight there? What have you guys run across,

Craig Moen: 21:00

we certainly hear the same thing from our clients as well. The ghosting is just rampant, but on both sides. And I think it's one of the things that organizations really need to examine how they bring people on board. I've heard so many candidates talking about how they and have an interview, they have a great interview, they spend a day with an organization. And then they never hear from the organization. Again, there's no closure. And that begins to taint that organization's reputation. And that reputation carries far and wide. Don't think that people don't talk about, well, I interviewed at the XYZ company, and I posted me. So I think it goes both ways. I wish I had a magic wand to tell you how you could make sure it doesn't happen to you. But one of the things that we talk about a lot is treating every applicant as if they are a very important person from the very beginning. And not making it difficult for them not scheduling 14 interviews in one day with no bathroom breaks or no time for lunch, we horror stories about how applicants are treated are really quite deep in in our world. So don't think it's just the applicants. And I don't know if that's helpful to your people. But make sure that you've got a process that brings people in, I talked a moment ago about the employee experience, there's something that's really very, very big now in the HR world, called the candidate experience. There's actually awards given for organizations that do a good job of bringing candidates on board. So your clients can can perhaps learn a little bit better about how to bring people on board, and how to treat the candidate with great care so that they want to work for you. And that may help a little bit it won't solve the ghosting problem. I'm sorry to tell you. And if I can answer that, I mean, first of all, I I live outside the Washington DC metro area. Now I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and experiencing the same problems here. I talk to a lot of HR people who say, you know, they just having a hard time getting qualified candidates. And yeah, sometimes the good ones are the ones that don't show up, you know, they had some promise. And it's just not happening. But I think it's something else that business owners can be thinking of, is as you're growing your organization, and you need more skills, perhaps it's time to look internally at some of your current employees and say, What can I do to help develop them or to raise their skill level, it's often referred to as either rescaling or upskilling, depending upon whether they need new skills, or just need enhancements to what they're doing now. And if you're doing that, first of all, you're gonna have a good reputation. As Barbara said, the employees going to feel valued, they're going to stick around for a while, because you're giving them some challenges, and some new things to do. And they may even know somebody that can help to backfill some of the positions that perhaps they're vacating, because they're moving on to a new opportunity within the same organization. So that can go very well for your reputation. But it also adds so much to the employee experience because it sends a message not only to the employees that you're promoting up and that you're developing, but even to people around them saying, Hey, this is an organization that cares. I want to hang around here for a while because there may be a new opportunity for me in the near future.

Shye Gilad: 24:47

And let's talk about the flip side of that for a moment. I know one thing that your book touches on is this idea of graceful endings, right? So on the one hand, you know yes We're having challenges in the marketplace, people not showing up. The ghosting thing is definitely real. I hear it from all across the country. But what about when it's time for us to end a relationship that just isn't working out? So many of us struggle with this, you know, we have some process in place, but it can always lead to some really uncomfortable conversations. And I know that both of you, Barbara and Cornelia, have been involved in workplace conflict books as well, right, the conflict resolution handbook, the essential workplace conflict handbook. So you're no stranger to this conversation? What can we do better when it comes to terminating employees? And why are we typically so bad at this?

Craig Moen: 25:43

I think one of the reasons we're so typically bad at it is, we wait till the end to start to have some of these difficult conversations with employees, especially if we're talking about employee performance, you know, we look at performance management and say, Hey, this is something we do once a year, okay, that's over with, it's done, you know, we've gone through that cycle, on to the next thing, where a good manager should be providing feedback constantly and on an ongoing basis to employees. And as you start to recognize things that are not going well, whether it's a performance issue, or if it's just the way that they're behaving in the workplace and its conduct, you need to address that right away, as soon as you say it. So you can start to put the employee on a corrective course. And this way, the employee has been given fair notice that says, hey, things aren't working that well. So if it turns out that it doesn't turn around, if there is no improvement, it's a lot easier to have that conversation at the end, because you've got your documentation. And hopefully, you've been keeping documentation, where you can point to and say, remember, we had this conversation, three weeks ago, you were asked to do these things. So you were asked to change this behavior, and nothing's changed. And, you know, we can maybe give you one more opportunity to make some adjustments. But if we don't see any improvement, if we don't see any change, we're not going to have any choice but to take some other management action, and it could be termination. And you know, those almost sound like key phrases, prescriptive phrases, but it's really the way you need to approach it and let people know, from the very beginning, this is what you expect, if they're not meeting those expectations, then things are gonna have to change. And one of those changes could be a parting of the relationship. One of the things that we talk about a lot when we talk to each other, is the idea about a very simple way of looking at management is a good manager sets expectations and then hold people accountable. And if you think about it, just in that one sentence, it can really change how you manage, we have to be clear about what you expect from people. And then you have to hold people accountable. And one of the things that we see over and over is having a non Performer in an organization can have a really negative impact on the rest of the workforce, who's picking up the pieces if the person is not doing their job. And so one of the things we want managers to think about is, as Cornelia mentioned, that ongoing feedback, daily feedback, hourly feedback, especially Generation Z employees and millennials, they don't want both feedback once a day, or maybe once a week, they want it minute by minute, how am I doing? Don't forget to let me know how I did in that presentation, or whatever it is. Sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's corrective. And then what I'm working with a lot of my clients on right now is something calling them quarterly conversations, where the conversation not a performance management kind of, we're gonna sit down and like you're going into the principal's office, but you have a conversation about how are things going, how am I as your manager supporting you? What can we do better? And if you do that, as often as once a quarter is the guideline, it can be month to month, it could be whatever, but just having that conversation rather than having a formal Will you put numbers on a sheet to tell somebody how they're doing? So I think having the performance periodically, and then if things go off the rails, then you've got exactly what you need. The employee knows, must say I've been through far too many of these. We're having had to terminate people and almost always, an employee knows that they're not performing well. Especially they know it if you been giving them feedback all the way along. It's never fun. It's never the thing that managers go to work and say, Oh, good, I get to fire somebody today. Hopefully never you have that kind of attitude. But it is part of being a manager. And we need to learn how to do it, do it well, and make it so that it's a win win for the organization, as well as the person who may need to go on and, and work someplace else and be productive. You know, a very simple formula. And I know I've written about this, and at least one of the books, if not in several of them, is called what so what? And now what? And the what is what's going right? What's going wrong? What's happening? What have you observed? The so what is what's the impact of what I've just observed, and it can work for both positive and negative situations, it might be at what I noticed, you never get a certain task done on time. So what well, that impacts other people's ability to get their work completed? And then the final piece of it now what is what is it that we need to see changed what needs to be improved? And of course, if it's something positive, you just kind of flip it? And then now what is? Where do we go from here? What do I want to see you keep doing? How do I want to help you to develop it so you can do it even better, so better benefits the organization?

Unknown: 31:31

Hi, Brian Cornelia, thank you so much for joining us today. We really had a great deep conversation. I appreciate it so much.

Barbara: 31:39

Thank you. It's been an honor to be with you. We've enjoyed it.

Craig Moen: 31:42

Yeah. And Craig, we certainly hope your listeners have learned some things and that they've been enlightened around some of the ideas about what it takes to be a good manager to be a good decisive manager.

Unknown: 31:54

We really appreciate that and wonder, is there anything else you'd like to leave with our audience today?

Craig Moen: 32:00

Well, we certainly want to invite everybody to visit our website. It's www dot Big Book of hr.com. But it's not limited to that first book that we wrote, you can find information about all of the books that we've written and where you can pick up copies of them. We're also very active on social media. So you can find us of course, on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, we do a blog every week, and we also do a newsletter once a month. We hope people will connect with us and take advantage of our expertise. We learned a lot from the people that we work with all the time. So we look forward to connecting with your listeners as well. And if you're interested in my blog, you can find that on the website as well.

Unknown: 32:48

Our guests today have been Barbra Mitchell and Cornelia Gamblin, authors of the new book, The decisive manager, get results, build morale, and be the boss your people deserve. You can learn more about Barbara and Cornelia, as well as find links to their books, content and social media. All on our website at business owners radio.com.

Announcer: 33:11

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