Be careful with what you say….and how you say it

“This store is not performing well!  You are not making the effort to sell more! The point of sale is a complete disaster and it hasn't been managed the proper way! You are losing your customer orientation! What are you going to do? I want solutions, now!” 

Yes I know, you must think that maybe I have just dramatized the situation, but believe me, I have witnessed feedbacks like this from some managers when they visited the stores. Why don’t we review another situation?

“I have been reviewing the figures, and the sales are far below the target, that is a 30% regarding the comparable period for the preceding year of sales, specifically they have been falling in frozen and fresh products, the point of sale has a worrying lack of product, I have accounted more than 15 missing sku´s….What is the problem with this issue? I am concerned about your customer   KPI´s. Customer traffic has been decreasing 10% in comparison with the same period the previous year, besides I received two complaints from our customers. I think you are losing your customer focus, it should not have happened, so we agree we have a problem and this store is underperforming, then how can we work to get solutions?”

In both stressing situations, a manager has the authority to express his own opinions about how the store is run, why it is not working properly and they are not achieving the goals. Which of them could be the best at driving the team to results and why?

We are always expressing opinions, it´s something normal and necessary; the problem is that we don’t realize that an opinion is different from a fact. I can say that John is 1’80 meters tall, it is a fact and I can add that John is a good man, it is an opinion, because maybe someone could think that John represents the evil himself, the difference is that in the first case I can take a measuring tape and easily demonstrate that fact, in the second situation, this issue is a bit more complicated.

Then if we know that, why are always confusing them? Why do we express an opinion as if it were a fact? “Anne didn't make a decision in the last meeting”, a fact, “She never makes decisions”, it is an opinion. Is it the same? How do we know that Anne is not making decisions in other situations? “The sales have fallen 30% in comparison with the same period the previous year”, another fact “You are not making the effort to sell more”. We don’t know what the problem is behind the drop in sales; maybe there are other factors and not a bad management. “The point of sale has a worrying lack of product, I have accounted more than 15 missing sku’s”, another fact. “The point of sale is a complete disaster and it hasn't been managed in the proper way”an opinion. Well, before stating this, we would need to check all the aisles, maybe we discover that somewhere the products are properly set, for example.

We are expressing opinions with each other every day, with ours bosses, colleagues, family, friends and we even give opinions about ourselves. How many times have we thought about things such as “I’m stupid” “I’m not able to do it”?

We are talking to each other all the time and our language is action because our own opinions affect the others, they show how we are and how we feel, they have the power to change our reality and to change the conditions that surround us, and we don’t realize it. Have you tried to confront and test your opinions before expressing them? When you do it, you will discover that you can’t prove them so easily.

Coming back to the example of the beginning, what would be your answer? What kind of opinions can help the team get the best result? The general ones that hurt them or the opinions based on facts and focused in the concrete problems? Both situations show opinions, but both have the power to build a different reality for your team.

What about you? Have you wondered what is the reality that you want to build in your company, in your personal life? We have to think about it.

Processes versus people

Recently, I was at a coaching training with 150 people and we were asked about our professions. I realized that hardly few of us were psychologists, maybe 10%, others, about 30%, had different careers and professions, and the majorities were engineers.

It is not strange, engineers are normally methodical, disciplined and they are always trying to reinvent new processes and systems to improve production. Obviously, it is a personal description, in fact mine, born of my experience working with this kind of profiles. But the discussion is not about engineers’ profiles, they are only the excuse I am using to introduce my topic. 

Processes are important for a company to survive in a complex market, they give the logical order an organization needs to get its RESULTS. They have to be known and understood by all the employees involved, respected and rigorously followed by everyone, so it is necessary to apply a tough discipline because if one part of the process fails, the rest of the team, and the most worrying, customers would be affected by it.

During the last 20 years, the main Companies, especially from the retail industry, have been working in their processes. A big effort has been invested looking for standard methods to save time and resources. I remember, in the nineties, when I worked for an important retail company in Spain that had just started to implant a plan to standardize all work methods.  During one of the meetings that was held to explain this project to all the Company managers, someone explained that if a manager was moved from one store to another, he should find the same processes, the same way to work. This idea, original in that time, is something usual nowadays, no one argues that Companies, no matter the activity; need a uniform  methodology, very important in the case of big companies with an important number of branches.

This focus in the processes and results has made a lot of companies choose managers with a high technical level, great executives who manage the teams towards clear objectives, using the right processes and instructions. Once, during a meeting in another retail company where I worked a few years ago, one manager approached me, very angrily, that he didn’t understand what happened with his sales, they were falling down, and he was doing everything, he was following all the steps in the right way. I asked him about his team, if they had all the processes clear as well as the objectives. “Of course!” He answered me and he added that everyone knew perfectly what to do. Then I asked him how he was sharing the information with his team, how they could know that they were doing the things in the right way. In this case his answer didn’t sound so convincing; he was so focused in the results and in the method that he forgot to maintain basic things such as motivation and communication with his own team. I don’t know, but maybe it was one of the reasons that explained the quality of his results. So what happens with our teams? Could we manage people like another process? Although there are certain processes like timetables, vacation planning and other similar HR issues, the answer is not so simple. The team management is more than a simple process, it is an art.  We can’t forget that behind processes there are people.

The conclusion is that however we have to acknowledge that managing processes and methods is very important for a company, the balance between them and managing people could determinate the future of an organization.

Then it is not a surprise that profiles like engineers, very competent in their own field, are being directed to rather trainings of management abilities to provide them with skills which allow them to lead teams. One way I used to convince my managers that the team could be easily managed was to present it like another process. Yes I know that it’s a contradiction, I said before that management is not a process, but what’s one of the best ways to teach adults? With examples that are directly associated with their reality. In this case, we can present it like a process.

A process, in which is important to respect all the steps, because if we don’t, it will fail, it’s like an engine, if we want to turn it on, we need to use technical roles, we have to apply them in all the cases. It could be the recruitment of our team, orientation program, establishing goals, doing objectives follow up and adjustments, training and evaluating to start again with new goals.

But it isn’t enough; we need to use our management roles, such as motivation, communication and leadership. If the first roles are the key to turn our engine on, the second ones are the oil we need to maintain our engine running in a perfect condition.

What about you? How do you manage your team? Where are you oriented to? Remember that the balance between both variables will lead you to a high performance team.