How do you as a manager deal with them? As a manager, at least a good manager, you have to be able to see, hear and help. How do you set this up for your people?

• You need to develop an open, trusting environment. People have to have the ability to speak freely. With no fear of reprimand. Start with the individuals on the team first, then make sure you take it to the complete team. Start small, then go big.
• Know you people. Think of the fear emotions… Some folks can deal with it themselves, they “fear” they may fail and they buckle down and do whatever is necessary. Others may shutdown. Recognize what works for each person and get to moving forward quickly.
• Push through the uncomfortable. Sometimes dealing with emotions can be uncomfortable. It happens. You as the manager need to make sure that you deal with the situation as early as possible to lessen the effect long term. Role play that discuss with a mentor, be honest and push through – you will be surprised at the end of it.
• Be real and yourself. Slow down.. The first thing that most people do is react. Slow down and think it through first. I know this is a broken record when it comes to be a manager. You have to set the example for your team. All eyes are watching you all the time. Make sure that you are being real. If you are having one of those days (like your folks), acknowledge it with them. Maybe they will have some insight for you! Last time I checked, you managers are people too.
• Ask others if they are feeling the same way. When in the team setting, go ahead and ask for additional information. Some folks are more vocal than others and sometimes we think it is just them. If you ask, you maybe surprised to see that more folks are in the same boat. Just afraid to speak up first. Once on the table, it can be worked.

Don’t think that emotions are not going to play in your teams. Be ready, be prepared and don’t be afraid. The sooner you confront, acknowledge and validate, the quicker moving forward can happen. All negative emotions can true to a positive, if handled properly. Same is true for positive emotions (passion). If you play that one up too much on your “rising star” – the rest of the team will be deflated or be negative toward that person. This is a very tricky subject, probably why that VP wanted nothing to do with it. You have to deal with it…

The visual one’s are sometimes extremely funny!

• How about when you see a person wearing a “Smaller is better t-shirt” and that t-shirt a XXXL and it is tight on the person? Sitting in the food court of the mall…
• Ever go to the beach and sitting on the bench are people in normal beach wear (swim suits, sun glasses) and one bench down there is a person dressed for winter (long pants, winter jacket and a wool knit cap)? Which is it…
• Posted signs do this all the time – How about the “Not an Exit” posted on door – with the “Exit” sign right next to it.. Just look around – I bet there are plenty more examples.

The one’s I really want to discuss in this post are the ones that we get as employee’s or maybe give as managers. More verbal in nature. How about these examples:

• Performance message that goes like – “good job, but…” The old but sandwich! I wrote in detail on making sure that as a manager you don’t do this.. Check it out!
• Ever hear – we need to be the best at providing top level quick  customer service (get your respond time down to seconds rather than minutes). In the sentences to follow – the staff is hearing make sure that you take the time to make the customer feel important. Listen to them, relate their words in your communication back.
• The mission statement says we are going to provide a top level superior education using the best practices to provide an A+ rating. Really wanting all students to work hard, continuing to grow academically and challenging themselves everyday. Sounds good.. But when it comes to providing academic achievement awards – everyone needs to get one (we do live in that world today – everyone needs to get a trophy).  How many top learner’s were there in the class (25/25).
• Another performance review, but this time it is going over team goals. Using data is a great thing – using the right amount of data is a tricky thing. I happened to work in a group that had data for just about everything. We reviewed it monthly. Each metric had a goal… Where the mixed messages came into play – is when two or more competed with each other. Example – on time delivery, quality and on-budget. It is extremely funny to listen to the managers talk about them, ask questions and then redirect. Great job on 100% on-time delivery, but we had a missing in quality or the cost was a bit too high. Again – that “but” sandwich.

Plenty of this goes on! How do we stop sending and receiving these messages? For me – I do a couple of things…

• Never use “but” in a sentence… Practice, practice and more practice. I have told my employee’s that if I use “but” they have the opportunity to call it out. Right away!
• Confused are you? Then ask questions.. I pretty much get confused when I first hear something that is sending a mixed message. It is like my radar – so, stop and get clarity. Ask questions to help you get the understanding necessary to move in the right direction.
• Call it out! Here is where trust comes into play. Having a good working relationship with your team can make this really easy. Using a sports analogy here – having a way to call foul (or penalty, or throw the flag) is necessary. This opens up the discussion – no one is at fault – we have something that needs to be cleared up.

How do you normally react doing those tough times?

• Maybe a little short with answers to questions?
• How about frustrated when things are not going right?
• Start micro-managing your team?
• Little slow with answers to tough decisions?
• Take a day off when a key deadline is due?

Hopefully you did not say yes to any of these behaviors. These were not made up examples, I have seen them throughout my working career. I can almost put a face and a name to each of them. As I have written in past blog posts, learning from ours examples (both failure and success) can be very helpful to you in the future. I have taken those bad examples above and changed up how I perform under extremely pressure.

What I typically do is:

• Insure that the pressures that I am under are not outwardly visible to my team. I try to maintain my positive and cheerful attitude everyday that I in the office.
• Sometimes this is extremely difficult, at the very least, I communicate to my team what is going on. Letting them know the pressures and how they can help, usually is a good thing.
• Come in a bit early and stay late if needed. I always like to get in early to help me with quiet time. Helps me focus on what is important. I want my team to understand that I am here, no matter what.
• Prioritizing and delegating workloads. Work assignments may need to be shifted in order to meet some extreme deadlines. Asking the team their input on how best to accomplish this has been helpful in the past. Sometimes, a team member may have a skill in something that they don’t especially care for doing, but when times are tough – they step up and get it done.
• Pressure situations need to bring out some creative solutions – more minds working on that creative solution the better.
• Most importantly – Be myself! At the end of the day, your character and being true to yourself is what matters. If I am not happy with myself for any reason – I am the only person that can fix it.

How best do you handle those pressure moments?

It started back in that very first assignment as a new second lieutenant in the US Army. My assignment was motor pool officer in a reserve engineering company. We had plenty of vehicles and a bulldozer. I went out and got certified to operate every one of them. My commander was shocked by this. It sort of chalked it up to brand new reservist. Later on, the commander came to realize that this was a good thing. My platoon was working well – they aced everything that was set in front of them. It was something that had not done in quite sometime. Our Inspector General inspection was that first fall and I was tasked with taking the inspectors through the motor pool paperwork, equipment inspections and whatever they wanted. We aced that too! In fact, the Inspector General called out the fact that I was certified on everything and actually performed operation of the bulldozer perfectly. Having heard that and watching how well my platoon worked together – I learned that this was a good thing. I continued this practice with every other position that I had since.

Sometimes I would get some very strange looks from my managers. Why are you doing that? I would always bring up that very first ever work assignment with the US Army… I would make them a promise that it would work or they could find someone else to do my job. I am still surprised to this day, that many managers do not take them time to learn how, perform the tasks and understand exactly what has to happen to get the work done.

If there is one simple piece of advice to get to any new manager – walk a mile or so in the shoes of your team. Get to know exactly what they are doing. If you company has a certification program for the work – complete it. The time that you spend doing that were be paid back to you ten-fold. Your team will thank you. You will have a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together. You will also be a resource to making the work get done – if needed. All good stuff for a team!

• Lack of follow-through on commitments made.
• Openness of communication.
• Amount and availability of communications.
• Incompetent or poor decision-making.
• Incompetent job performance.

Maybe those examples hit home a bit. Are you experiencing them as well? It is always easy to point out a problem or run the other way.. Thinking back on my overall 28+ years, I have had to work through the above concerns many times. What did I do? What did our team do? What could you do? Here are some of my basic working relationship principles that I have tweaked over the years.

If you are a manager:

Believe in your team — their motives, knowledge and skills..

• Spend some time getting to know each team member’s capabilities, interests and skills.
• Understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Take advantage of the full capabilities of your team. Work to fix shortcomings.
• Share information with team members that will allow them to understand their tasks and how they fit into the bigger picture.
• Have faith in team members to set appropriate objectives. Let them do the doing..
• Delegate decision-making authority: This one maybe a bit tough depending on your companies overall decision-making processes. Figure out what decisions go where – and share it with the team.
• Negotiate realistic expectations, then have faith in team members’ ability to deliver what we get paid for.

Provide honest business communication..

• Share the good, bad and ugly results.
• No question – Tell the Truth – always; no sugar coating, no politics, no spin doctoring.

For the team (managers and teammates)

Demonstrate open, honest communication at all times..

• Your word is your bond!
• Share information that is important to others — no hidden agenda.
• Explain reasons behind statements, requests and decisions.
• Recognize healthy friction as a key to critical thinking, and respect another teammate’s right to disagree.
• Criticize constructively by sticking to the issue and not getting personal. Try not to think why someone is doing something.

Make realistic commitments and keep them..

• If you say it, then do it!
• Do not overcommit. It is too easy to always say yes.. If you can’t do it, say so.
• Admit you don’t know something. I would rather hear, “I don’t know. Let me get back to you.” Then some made up answer.
• If you find, because of changing circumstances, you can’t keep your commitment, say so early and rework the commitment together.

Work together – you are already there..

• Be responsive to one another’s needs by offering, and accepting assistance.
• Speak up early – especially if it is bad news. Never shot the messenger! We just saved ourselves a bunch of time.
• Always bring forth potential solutions rather than drop a bomb.

Is this the complete answer? No. I see this as a foundation. Level the playing field for yourself and your team…

Related articles

• Keys to Empowering Your Staff (stevebellnow.com)