New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

One of the struggles for family businesses is how to grow the business and whether or not to add outside employees.  I've written on this topic before (click here to browse addtional posts) and one of the most difficult situations you will face as you hire employees is the one of trying to get them to act as you would.  Do they interact with customers in the same way you would?  Do they operate with the same degree of care?  How can they possibly steward the business as well as you would?  As you struggle with these issues in your business, consider the advice in this article excerpt on employee performance.

Want a high-performing workforce? Teach all your employees to feel just as responsible for your business as you do.  One strategy is to avoid fixing every problem yourself. Give problems back to your direct reports. Then probe more deeply to encourage self-awareness and initiative. Ask tough questions such as, "How long have you known about this problem? What have you done to address it? What prevents you from correcting such problems? How would you redesign our group to encourage more initiative?" These questions prevent your people from blaming others. And they refocus employees on their own contributions to problems -- as well as their responsibility for fixing them.

The Idea

What’s the key to flourishing in the 21st century? Getting better performance from your employees. And the key to better performance? Employees who take personal responsibility for their own behavior and their company’s success. This means that when workers see a problem, they know it’s their job to tackle it. And this includes figuring out how they might be contributing to it.

To shoulder this responsibility, employees must learn to understand their own behavior. Few managers realize that typical communication tools—employee surveys, focus groups—actually discourage this kind of learning. These tools don’t foster the deep insights and individual accountability that organizations need to navigate complex change—and survive ever-stiffening competition.

What does encourage insights and accountability? Genuine employee empowerment—starting with managers who can relinquish their command-and-control mindset.

The Idea in Practice

Discouraging Employee Responsibility

In most companies, top managers assume virtually all responsibility for employees’ well-being and the corporation’s success. They simply ask employees for superficial information and then act on it. They don’t encourage employees to expose their own feelings, limitations, or conflicted motives.

Example: At Acme, managers conducted an employee survey to address failing morale during a down-sizing period. The survey results contained an important contradiction: Employees expressed strong job satisfaction but also complained about managers’ tight rein on power, and doubted their candor and competence.

The CEO took radical action to address employees’ concerns, including firing top managers and training others to be more forthright and take more initiative. But he overlooked a vital insight: Employees felt job satisfaction precisely because management never pushed them to take personal responsibility for Acme’s performance. Employees had learned to depend on management for their welfare.

Acme failed to encourage employees to reflect on their own behavior and attitudes. This oversight discouraged workers from taking initiative or risks—two critical capacities Acme needed to stay competitive.

Encouraging Employee Responsibility

• Don’t just “fix” concerns. Give them back to employees. Probe more deeply to encourage self-awareness and initiative. Ask tough questions such as, “How long have you known about this problem? What have you done to address it? What prevents you from questioning and correcting problems? How would you redesign our company to encourage more initiative?” These questions prevent employees from blaming others, re-focusing them on their own contributions to problems and their responsibility in fixing them.
• Don’t make promises you shouldn’t keep. Don’t just tell employees what you will do for them. This spawns dependence. Point out unreasonable employee requests. Highlight the challenges of your markets, and support employees’ creative responses to those demands.
• Respect your employees. We expect leaders to stand up and take their punches like adults. To expect less from employees is condescending. Demand that all employees take personal responsibility for the organization’s success by focusing on their insights, not your solutions.

Excerpt from an article by: Chris Argyris

Source: Harvard Business Review