facilitative leadership

A Facilitative Manager – Part 5: Demonstrate what you can’t have too much of: Integrity

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By Oliver W. Cummings

May 22, 2020

To recap, in addition to a set of fundamental characteristics, (decision-making ability, assertiveness and motivation to achieve, social sensitivity, emotional stability, and appropriate self-reliance and courage levels, for example) the facilitative manager will:

  • Believe, but not too much (covered in Part 1)
  • Care, but not too much (covered in Part 2)
  • Feel, but not too much (covered in Part 3)
  • Foster trust, but not too much (covered in Part 4)
  • Demonstrate what you can’t have too much of: Integrity

Each of these balancing acts is important to establish and enhance the manager’s working relationships with their subordinates.

On 02-28-2020 I posted the Middle-Manager’s Relationship Hierarchy, reproduced here with the addition of where Integrity fits. As you can see, I believe that integrity is critical to all levels of your relationship with your employees, peers, supervisors, and clients.

Integrity

Integrity is such a strong underpinning of forming and maintaining strong relationships that I thought it would be worthwhile to emphasize it again. Integrity plays a huge role in the expression of caring, sensing the deeper feelings of a person and communicating about them and in forming trust as noted in earlier posts. But integrity also makes your self-management much easier, too. First, let’s give a functional definition to integrity. I believe integrity is an abiding characteristic that a person exhibits in a congruent way in any situation or circumstance the invites other than upstanding, ethical behavior.

Integrity is equated with honesty, forthrightness, truthfulness and like terms, but it is really more than any one of these individually. Integrity is the authentic and reliable expression of sound values translated into actions in a known situation. You must spend some time knowing what you stand for. As Aaron Tippin sang in the country song, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

And, you must walk your talk. That is what authenticity is all about. Think about your values, the company’s value system and the expectations held by your customers, employees and other co-workers and know where your limits are.

As a manager of a performance consulting group that did many surveys asking sensitive questions about topics that company executives were very interested in, I had to understand and apply standards to which I subscribed as a professional program evaluator and expected employees in my group to follow, as well. The professional standards included, for example, a commitment to hold data from individual survey respondents as confidential unless they knew in advance of answering the survey questions that their identity could be communicated to management.

In a specific instance, one of the evaluators in my unit was in possession of survey results that showed unfavorably on one of the departments involved. That evaluator came to me to say that the director of the other unit had demanded to see who said what from his unit. I had the evaluator communicate that she could not provide individual data since it was a unit policy to keep individual results from surveys such as the one in question confidential and to suggest if the director needed to follow up that I would be happy to discuss it with him.

As insurance, I then removed individual identifiers from our files for that survey in order to make it impossible for the evaluator to communicate the requested information if the request were taken further. In this case the explanation of unit policy was enough and no further request was made.

The point is, it is important to know where you will draw the line. The people who work with you also need to know that you have and will reliably exercise certain ethical standards.

Think about it.

  • What is your definition of integrity?
  • Would you have deleted the survey respondents’ identifying information in a situation like the one described?
  • Should I have delivered the message to our client myself, rather than having the evaluator do it?

12 Things for Middle Managers to Think About in Relation to the Pandemic

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By Oliver W. Cummings

1 May 2020

Fundamentally, the act of being a leader involves followers and knowing what to do is not sufficient to inspire followers’ trust; knowing how to go about what you do is what makes for real leadership. And, the “how” is very much tied up in facilitative relationship building. This is true in the best of times, but if everything is going along pretty much as usual, our attention to the relationship building can become routine, or even a little lax.

But, when a crisis hits, those relationships are brought to the forefront and when the crisis is a big, for-real deal, – rather than a normal crisis, like the disruptive entrance of a threatening new business model, as Amazon has been to many retail business establishments – I mean a for-real big deal like the Covid19 producing pandemic, then the metal of every unit leader is tested.

For those faced with job losses, including their own, it is a big deal – how to handle the situation that you may never have faced before, like going from a bread-winner to standing in a bread line for hours just to feed your family.

For those faced with continuing to do business as usual, the challenges are real and a big deal – a firefighter is still expected to respond to a fire alarm, rescue people, infected or not, if need be, and put out the fire.

And, for those whose unit demands continue but under very different constraints and challenges can be horrendous. Think about the doctors and nurses taking care of Covid19 patients at their own personal risk, unable to go home to their own family after work for fear of infecting them, unable to provide for a family visit – or even to show a reassuring smile behind their PPE – to a patient in distress, and dealing with a disease for which there is no known cure.

In each of these three circumstances the beyond-normal manager competencies of facilitative behaviors become hyper-important:

  1. Believe in what can be done by a committed group of people and that, even when they are not able to achieve what they set out to do, they are positively motivated.
  2. Understand and feel, empathically, what others are going through so that you do not tread on their feelings unknowingly.
  3. Genuinely care about others; and, when what you have to do is detrimental to them in some way, be sure that you do it respectfully and compassionately.
  4. Build on the trust you’ve managed to earn and keep true to your trustworthiness.
  5. Above all, maintain your integrity through the whole process.

Trust and integrity go hand-in-hand. Interpersonal trust is a two-way process and is tied to common experiences. In a time of crisis people look to their respected managers for a steady hand.

Done with honesty and commitment to doing what is right based on a solid understanding of right from wrong (aka, done with integrity), these things will help bolster your trust relationships with your employees:

  1. Be predictable. A key to cultivating trust is consistency of behavior.
  2. Handle the pressure. Be where you need to be, doing what is most important for you to do – and be sure your folks know where you are and why – in this way stay “visible.”
  3. Tell the truth and keep your promises. Getting caught in a lie or breaking a promise will do immediate and usually long-lasting damage to your trustworthiness.
  4. Show concern for employee’s and other units’ rights and issues. Such concern provides a sense of security that you will not take unfair advantage.
  5. Be accurate and forthright in communications. To the extent you ethically can, you should provide adequate explanations of decisions and actions.
  6. Share some control, but make decisions decisively, timely, and with the information available. Smart delegation and participation at a decision-making level with employees is effective.
  7. Demonstrate your competence and resolve to deal with the complexities of the circumstance. For others to trust you they must first believe you are competent (to do the job, to make the decision, to exercise sound judgment), and that you intend to win.

A Facilitative Manager and Covid19

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By Oliver W. Cummings

29/04/2020

Bill asked a question in the previous post on the facilitative manager and trust. In essence the question was, “In relation to the pandemic, is trust ‘flipped’ in that we need the workers to trust us more than we need to trust them?”  It is an important question.

In the first of this series on the facilitative manager I introduced the manager’s relationship hierarchy. It looks like this:

Starting at the bottom of the hierarchy, employees acknowledge that you (the manager) have positional authority, for example, to make an assignment.

As you demonstrate competence (for example, in technical, business and interpersonal skills), the relationship moves up the hierarchy to recognition and acceptance. A more solid relationship in getting the job done.

Trust, is a complex and critical pivot-point in building the relationship; it is based on the perception of your integrity. Competence is a prerequisite, but integrity allows others to believe that you will act consistently and fairly in any situation.

Confidence, results from your fair use and exercise of power and judgment. An employee may trust you personally, but not have confidence in your ability to employ power and judgment in your job. You may be perceived to be trustworthy, but ineffective on behalf of the employee in a given circumstance, like, for example, when the business is adversely affected in a pandemic.

At the highest level of the pyramid, mutual commitment, you and your employee have shared goals that address both business and individual needs. Each of you, in a sense, has the other’s back.

A circumstance like the closing of businesses and resulting dramatic changes to business models that may result from the effects of Covid19, can damage or destroy interpersonal relationships that have been developed to the confidence or mutual commitment levels.

If the circumstances allow the managers to handle the situation well, by keeping some level of stability for the employees and making sure that the phrases, “We’re all in this together,” and “We’ll get through this together,” have genuine and transparent meaning, such relationships may survive at the trust level and that makes for a foundation to build on when the business returns to whatever its new normal will be.

Handled poorly, however, (for example, by ignoring reasonable safety practices in the management decisions surrounding doing business during the disruptions caused by the pandemic or in the restart of operations as restrictions are lifted), trust will be perceived to have been betrayed, and at a minimum, recognition of mangers’ competence will be damaged. Such management missteps, even in (maybe especially in) dire circumstances, make it necessary for managers at all levels to restart their relationship building almost from the bottom up with their former or existing employees, as well as with potential new hires.

Bill’s question was, “Is trust ‘flipped’ in that we need the workers to trust us more than we need to trust them?” I go back to my basic premise that personal trust is a two-way street, grown out of shared experiences. The circumstances of the experiences certainly modify the way trust is developed and maintained. And, yes, managers need to be trust worthy in their exercise of management decisions in the emergency.

For trust to be preserved in the manager—employee relationship, however, the manager must also understand and accept the employee’s perception of what is a fair in the circumstance. So, even if the manager is unable to act in accord with the employee’s definition of fair, s/he must accept that it is the employee’s perception, and trust that it is genuinely motivated.

What It Takes to Be A Facilitative Manager – Part 4: Foster Trust, But Not Too Much

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By Oliver W. Cummings

4-17-2020

This post focuses on the fourth of the things beyond using good foundational management skills that the facilitative manager will do.

  • Believe, but not too much
  • Care, but not too much
  • Feel, but not too much
  • Foster trust, but not too much
  • Have something you can’t have too much of: Integrity

Each of these balancing acts is important to establish and enhance your working relationships with your subordinates.

Foster Trust[i]

The trust developed between individuals should be (and usually is) based in part on the circumstance and in part on the specific experiences within the relationship.

In a management relationship, what counts as trust, how much trust is healthy, how trust is damaged and what must be done to recover from a damaged trust relationship are all issues of importance.

As you strive to drive relationships higher in the Manager’s Relationship Hierarchy achieving trusting relationships is pivotal.

The failure to achieve an optimal trust level with an employee, co-worker, or client seriously limits your ability to collaborate, inspire confidence and achieve any acceptance of a mutuality of interests. Lack of trust limits effective cooperation and communication, decreases cohesiveness in the organization, and increases the complexity of transactions and exchanges within the organization.

Trust involves an individual’s recognition and acceptance of their dependence on someone else and is the manifestation of their control of that dependence.

The more dependence one person has on another, the more vulnerable they are to that other person’s decisions and behavior. Trust is bolstered by a sense of assurance that one will not exploit that vulnerability.

Early in a relationship trust is generally based on cultural and organizational structures and formal sanctions that are designed to deter untrustworthy behavior. For example, an employee can be confident that labor laws apply and that the company hierarchy or human resources functions will provide some protections. As a manager, you have a similar set of structures, policies and rules upon which to rely.

But very quickly, trust becomes based on direct knowledge and experience. Research has shown that with continuing contact, the level of trust between individuals changes little after 18 months of a relationship[ii]. Therefore, the first months of a manager’s various relationships are critical.

During these first months, you need to initiate and sustain increasingly fine-grained levels of trust with your employees, peers or superiors. Here are some keys to developing trust.

  • Be predictable. A key to cultivating trust is consistency of behavior. Exhibit unpredictable behavior and you invite others to rely less on you and to build in protections against your variable behaviors.
  • Tell the truth and keep your promises. Getting caught in a lie or breaking a promise will do immediate and usually long-lasting damage to your trustworthiness.
  • Show concern for employee’s and other units’ rights and issues. Such concern provides a sense of security that you will not take advantage of the more vulnerable person in the situation.
  • Be accurate and forthright in communications. To the extent you ethically can, you should provide adequate explanations of decisions and actions and provide open and timely feedback to employees and other co-workers.
  • Share some control. Participation at a decision-making level with employees is effective. Learn and use effective delegation techniques to leverage yourself and inspire your staff at the same time.
  • Demonstrate your competence. For others to trust you they must first believe you are competent (to do the job, to make the decision, to exercise sound judgment, etc.). If you are not competent you cannot be predictable, reliable, and accurate – in other words, you cannot be trustworthy.

Trust is fundamental to cooperation. It is pivotal in establishing relationships that transcend the ordinary work-for-a-paycheck mentality and move the relationship onward to levels of confidence and mutual commitment.

Optimum trust is regulated by several factors, including the particular situation and how critical the interdependencies are to individuals’ mutual success, the relative power of the individuals, past experience of the participants with each other, and the opportunities each participant has to use sanctions on the other for transgressions or betrayals.

A number one rule is, “Do not betray a trust.”

What you are likely to hold high as a manager in deciding about trusting employees (competence, and reliability) is different from what the employees will care most about in judging you (integrity, benevolence and openness). What they see in you will be magnified and remembered more clearly than what you see in them. You are always on. You are a role model and your behavior and attitudes always count.

But Not Too Much

And, I should add “Not Too Little.” Remember, trust is a two-way proposition and that blind trust (that is, too much trust on your part) is an invitation to opportunism on the employee’s part. Too little trust in either direction in the unit can lead to suspicion and a propensity to protect one’s self in unnecessary and unproductive ways. Both conditions set the stage for failures in your unit.

You need to be trustworthy, but so does your employee (or your supervisor or client). I am reminded of President Reagan’s admonition to “trust, but verify.” You must always exercise your management responsibilities to plan, organize, measure/monitor, and make adjustments as needed for the best interests of the unit and your parent organization.

Next time: Integrity

What do you look for in your staff members to satisfy yourself that they are trustworthy?

[i] This post is based in part on a review article: Tschmannen-Moran, M. and Hoy, W. K. (2000). A multidisciplinary analysis of the nature, meaning, and measurement of trust. Review of Educational Research, Vol. 70, No. 4, pp 547-593.

[ii] Gabarro, J. J. (1978). The development of trust, influence, and expectations. In A. G.

Athos & J. J. Gabarro (Eds.), Interpersonal behavior: Communication and understanding n relationships (pp. 290-303). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

What It Takes to Be A Facilitative Manager – Part 3: Feel, But Not Too Much

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By Oliver W. Cummings, 4/3/2020

Feedback from my previous post:

I’ve been using this space to provide a little continuity for this series of posts on facilitative management. This time, however, the pandemic has intervened, and I am foregoing comments on the prior post.

Instead, I am going to provide some things I learned from the best boss I ever had. Bud was, in my view, a facilitative manager and now, after a couple of address changes and a few years of not being in contact with him, he took the initiative to reach out to a couple dozen colleagues from the time when he was our boss.

It has been a surprising and gratifying string of communications among these reconnected people from 20-plus years ago. In an exercise in some training program I took sometime in that 20-year span, I responded to the question, “What did you learn from the best boss you ever had?” That was Bud, and here was my answer:

  • Leadership is ½ attitude, ½ action, and ½ attention.
  • Good management is marked by a focus on outcomes, taking down barriers so your people can accomplish the outcomes you expect, recognizing those accomplishments and the people who made them, and being quietly loyal to those you manage.
  • The way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas; base them on good foundational knowledge – read a lot and synthesize.
  • You should surround yourself with people who complement your skills or who are better than you technically, rely on their expertise.
  • Postponing personnel decisions can be poisonous to the rest of the staff, so make the tough decisions when you need to.
  • Hire initially for characteristics you will need if your employee gets promoted.
  • Hire for personal qualities, fit to the organization, and basic skills – you can train the rest.
  • Invest in people as if they are going to stay with you forever.
  • Question everything (with integrity).
  • If the system is fouled up, fix it from within.

While Feel, But Not Too Much was not among my answers, I think it applies as well.

******************************************************************

Facilitative Mangers

Here is what I mean by that statement about the third of the things beyond using good foundational management skills that the facilitative manager will do.

  • Believe, but not too much
  • Care, but not too much
  • Feel, but not too much
  • Foster trust, but not too much
  • Demonstrate what you can’t have too much of: Integrity

Each of these balancing acts is important to establish and enhance your working relationships with your subordinates.

Feelings are the basis for rapport and fuel for common understanding. Feeling, in your role as a middle manager, involves being able to “walk a mile” in the other person’s shoes. In the psychological literature this is called empathic understanding, that is, understanding your employee’s feelings, ideas, and experiences from their frame of reference.

Common or shared understanding encompasses not only literal content but meanings and affective elements, as well. Understanding your employee at this deeper level lays a path to developing stronger trust, confidence and mutual commitment. Communication for a facilitative manager is at this deeper than typical level.

To develop your ability for accurate empathy you must know, and perhaps work on, your own attitudes about others. You should hone your active listening skills (part of really understanding what the employee is trying to convey) and your other facilitative communication skills.

As a facilitative manager you will:

  • Employ Stephen Covey’s[i] admonition to seek first to understand, then to be understood
  • Suspend judgment on another’s action or interpretation of events until you know why the individual reacted in the way they did
  • Practice active listening
  • Bring your own parallel feelings (from personal experience) into the discussion in order to
    • assure yourself that you truly understand the individual, and
    • demonstrate to the individual that understanding or correct your misunderstandings in real time.

It is in your self-interest to work toward accurate empathic understanding of employees and others in your business relationships, and to develop those relationships to the highest level you can reach on the Manager’s Relationship Hierarchy.

At the same time, it is important to recognize the limits that you need to place on feelings and not do too much. It is inappropriate, for example, to go so deeply into the individual’s feelings that the employee’s privacy is threatened. You are trying to understand the totality of the employee’s experience in a given situation, in order to facilitate their work-related responsibilities, not more.

How do you feel about feelings?

Next time:

  • Foster trust, but not too much

[i] Covey, S. 1989. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster

What It Takes to Be A Facilitative Manager – Part 2: Care, But Not Too Much

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By Oliver W. Cummings

Feedback from my previous blog post, What It Takes to Be A Facilitative Manager – Part 1: Believe, But Not Too Much

A comment and question: It seems to me that teaching is a possible “missing link” in many leadership skills sets. Is there a responsibility for middle managers to see themselves as teachers?

In a word, “Yes.” One of the manager’s tasks is to facilitate new hires’ incorporation into the unit and a key way to do that is for the manager to participate as a trainer in orienting new staff orientation. This may not sound like much, but the manager is positioned to talk very intelligently about things new staff need to be know about the culture of company and the unit. The symbolism showing that management places value on the training the unit does is an important message as well.

Through continued training involvement the manager is helping to meet one of their many obligations. That is: to help prepare successful employees and successors, not just for staff positions in their unit, but for their own replacement, too.

********************************************

This post focuses on the second of the things beyond good management skills that the facilitative manager will do.

  • Believe, but not too much
  • Care, but not too much
  • Feel, but not too much
  • Foster trust, but not too much
  • Demonstrate what you can’t have too much of: Integrity

Each of these balancing acts is important to establish and enhance your working relationships with your subordinates.

Care

From a study of commitment that I participated in several years ago, the major things that employees said made them want to stay with an organization, in order of importance, were:

  • Challenge and involvement in the work (a sense of personally adding value)
  • Caring and communicative supervisors and a nurturing organizational culture
  • Flexibility in assignments, hours, and a comfortable work environment                               
  • Coworker relations
  • Opportunity for professional growth and training
  • Compensation and benefits (excluding flexible work hours)
  • Recognition and feedback on work done
  • Company resources available to support the work

Note that caring, communicative supervisors is the second most important factor for employee retention. This is a significant finding and consistent with Gallup’s findings derived from over a million employee interviews.[i]

A manager who cares about his or her employees is more likely to create a work environment that influences the additional retention factors listed above. A caring manager genuinely wants input and involvement from employees and values and is influenced by their input. A caring manager learns what motivates an individual employee to feel they are adding value to the unit and makes asssignments accordingly.

Further, to develop a sense of personally adding value, the employee must exercise a certain level of authority over their work and make independent decisions about the work. As a facilitative manager, you want to build a collaborative relationship, including trust and confidence with your staff. With that kind of relationship, you can leverage more decision-making to your staff, give them more authority over their work and, thus, increase the value they add in your unit.

Caring about and amping up what the employee is expected to do is not only an important employee satisfaction factor, but also a key management leverage point. How you handle assignments and work environment issues, professional growth opportunities, training, and recognition and feedback are all impacted by your facilitative behaviors. So, care.

“Know me, know my business” was a powerful message from the research for In Search of Excellence[1]. Though the book was focused at the level of the company, the same call can be made for the individual staff member in your unit. What know me, know my business says implicitly at the individual level is care enough about my unique issues to learn about my (personal) needs and my needs on this job. 

Many demonstrations of caring can be done simply and easily.  For example, stopping by an employee’s work site to simply ask how things are going, and then listing attentively to their response, lets the employee know you are interested in their work. Or, sending a relevant article or message that contains information you know would be of interest to the employee, but from a source they are unlikely to access otherwise can be a small message that I was thinking of you and your work today.

But Not Too Much

Why do I say not too much? Caring is not guaranteeing that an employee’s every want will be met. Caring must be balanced across all employees and other key stakeholders. Further, as a manager you must attend to company needs and general unit needs, along with individual employee needs. It is a wise manager who demonstrates genuine caring and at the same time balances competing interests by intelligently prioritizing where to place attention at a point in time.

Next time: Feel, but not too much.

How have you shown an employee you cared about them and their work?

Have you seen a manager engage in more care than was healthy for the unit, employee, or themselves? What happened?

How do you know when to amp up the authority you can delegate to an employee?

[1] Peters, T. J. and Waterman, Jr., R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: lessons from America’s best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row.

[i] The Gallup Organization thinks it has identified the 12 core elements for attracting and keeping the best employees. The core elements, derived from interviews with more than 1 million workers over the past 25 years, are in Buckingham’s book, “First Break All the Rules”(Simon & Schuster Inc.)

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need?

3. Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

4. In the last week, have I been recognized for good work?

5. Does my supervisor seem to care about me?

6. Does anyone at work encourage my development?

7. Do my opinions seem to count?

8. Does my company’s mission make my work seem important?

9. Are my co-workers committed to quality work?

10. Do I have a best friend at work?

11.ln the last six months, have I talked with someone about my progress?

12. At work, have I had opportunities to learn and grow?

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