Effects of INCONSISTENT management

Consistency in the workplace helps employees feel secure about their work responsibilities and workplace demands. Consistent management builds trust, respect and credibility and will encourage a rational and reliable behavior. 

Inconsistent managers are a nightmare. 

It is always very hard to work with such people because you never know where they stand and they cannot be trusted. They appear at times to be physically present when their brain has left the building. Sometimes they show empathy sometimes they act as small dictators.

Other than a tremendous annoyance, does leader's inconsistency really cause harm?

YES!

Inconsistent management can damage the morale, self-esteem and productivity of the employees and even impact the overall success of an organization. The potential impact on performance is considerable.   

Let’s take for example inconsistency in commitments.

One of the most demotivating and exhausting aspects within teams at workplace is the wasted time, attention and effort on initiatives or projects that are great and important for a few weeks or a few months and then ignored as leaders move onto the next “hot” idea. If you have committed to a course of action, be consistent and follow-up, seeing it to its end.

Managers who are not consistent in their decision making and behavior will create fear and uncertainty throughout the team.

A manager has always the attention of his team members and he needs to show the same positive and consistent face them.  Of course, we are all humans and not all mornings are nice and shiny. However, self-control is absolutely necessary in order to avoid outbursts of anger, mixed messages, or other destructive and morale-sapping leadership behavior.

How do employees naturally react to inconsistent management?

They don’t trust their manager anymore. They will doubt any advice, guidance or promises and they will act accordingly.

They will start skipping hierarchical levels and go to those managers that are consistent and reliable.

They will approve, but not agree. Most employees are afraid of conflict especially with their managers and therefore, they will never tell their manager directly that they don’t understand a decision or that their manager is acting out of character on a certain occasion. They will simply nod and smile and go back to their office thinking “Here we go again. Another nonsense and useless decision.”

They will have a very slow reaction to the guidelines and requests of the manager. All of their time and energy will be spent talking about or complaining about their manager and about his irregular moods or missteps and work won’t get done.

Consistency makes very often the difference between failure and success. Even the best business plans will fail without a dedication to consistency.  

About self-responsibility at workplace and insanity

Self-responsibility can be defined as the state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something within one's power, control, or management. 

Whether in personal life or at the workplace, when something goes wrong or it doesn't go the way we want, most of us try and find excuses or to find the people guilty for the situation. There will always be someone else or a certain context we can blame and if we can’t find anything rational, then we choose to think that we had bad luck. 

This way we move on and doing the same things we did before because we are convinced the problem was somewhere outside of us or out of our control. We hope that the people around us will do things right next time, we wait for a better context or for the good luck to come. Taking the responsibility for our actions and for our lives is not the most comfortable way, but is for sure the way to change those things in our lives that we are not happy with.

The best thing about realizing that we are responsible for what is going on in our lives is that, this implies the fact that have also the power to do something in order to change the things we don’t like. We don’t need to wait for others to do things better or for a turn of good luck. We can do something right away and it’s up to us to decide what or how we will do it.

In the workplace environment, avoiding responsibility can be easily recognized whenever we hear statements like: “We could have finished the project on time if the Accounting would've given us the right calculations” or “The meeting would have been much more successful if we had a better agenda.” Each of these statements exemplifies what it means to place blame on another member of the team, rather than working to solve the problem as a collective unit. Moreover, individuals tend also to place the blame on others for their under-performance. Affirmations like “I could have reached my objectives if I had a better training” or “I could work more effectively if my colleagues would be more organized” are examples of situations where self-responsibility is avoided. This attitude will only create unnecessary animosity among coworkers and managers and will definitely have a negative impact on the performance and motivation of the employees.

If we are honest to ourselves, we will be able to recognize all the situations in which we are shifting the responsibility for our professional mistakes or failures on external factors. This is the first step in taking personal responsibility. 

The next step is to think about what our role in that specific situation was and what we could have done differently or better. Although every one of us has different tasks to accomplish, there is always something everyone can be doing to have a more positive and progressive impact on the workplace as whole. 

The link towards positive change is to take action in order to avoid future failure or mistakes. If we are not sure exactly what would be the most important or the best thing to do, we should at least try to do something different until we will find out what is that thing that brings us where we want.

         

            Acknowledging our part of “guilt” will make us learn and act differently in the future. Otherwise, we will do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. 
This is what Albert Einstein called Insanity. 

Self-presentation in interviews - Practical Tips

Tell us something about yourself. 

This is maybe one of the more underestimated interview parts of all. Everyone thinks it’s such an easy task to talk about ourselves and most candidates don't prepare at all for this. Talking about ourselves it sounds easy because we know very well what we have done and what our responsibilities were. However, in an interview we might discover that things are not so simple. If we don't prepare in advance, we will end up saying things that are not so relevant for the employer, that don't make too much sense or we will talk too much about the less important things.


It happens to me quite often, when I talk to candidates prior to the interviews, to hear "Self presentation, yes...I know what to say...I have been to many interviews before". My question 'Were those interviews successful?' makes them wonder and be quiet for a while.

Having a good self-presentation will help us to draw the attention of the interviewer(s) to the best of our strengths and away from your weaknesses. Ideally we should prepare a tailor -made presentation for each and every interview. If this seems too much, one option would be to write our highlights into bullet points and adapt it to the type of job we are applying for.

Usually approximately 2 minutes should be enough for the self-presentation. Here are the main points that should be included in the speech:

• personal background,
• educational background,
• achievements in our past or current employment;
• one or two examples of projects/responsibilities/achievements relevant for job we are applying
• our future career goals and how the job we are interviewing for would fit into our plans;
• summarization on why we are at the interview (explain how the job and our expertise would contribute both to the company and our career goals in the most satisfying manner).

Self-presentations should be prepared in advanced and before going to the interview we should ask ourselves:
Is the presentation interesting, overall?
Am I able to present the highlights of my achievements and strengths accurately?
Am I matching my skills to the needs of the vacancy the interview is for?
Am I confident when I am speaking?
Is my style of speaking clear and loud enough, fast/slow enough?

After having our presentation ready, it comes one of the essential parts: practice.  We should be careful to maintain a continuous flow, have a confident tone but not being too loud or arrogant and exclude the breaks of ‘aaaaa’/ ‘hmmmmm’ from our speech.  

What also always helps is to be critical to ourselves and after every interview to think about the way we presented ourselves. Recognizing the moments where we could have said things in a better way will help us to improve from one interview to another.

And remember that having many interviews doesn't necessarily mean that we are also good at it.  

“You can do it!” - why encouragements can fail

Managers have more than other people the power and tools to influence people’s lives. Employees look up to their managers for examples and for feedback. They try to learn and find those qualities who could also make them successful.

Self confidence is a quality that can be trained and that needs to be feed with constant reassurement so that it will stay at a high level. Even the people who have generally a high level of self confidence go through moments of uncertainty when they need someone to tell them “You can do it!”

It happens quite a lot to hear encouragements from our managers but somehow only a few of these incentives have an impact on us. Why? Maybe because we don’t appreciate those persons, because we think they are just saying it to make us feel good or because they don’t know us good enough to be able to estimate if we can do what we want or not.

I was asked many times who is the person who influenced my professional life and whom I appreciate as a professional. My thoughts go always to one of my first managers because he encouraged me to pursue my dream. He said I have all it takes to achieve what I want and he is convinced I can do it. For me it meant so much, specially because I was at the beginning of my career and I was not sure if I had chosen the right area to work in. His words had such an impact on me and motivated me to work very hard for what I wanted professionally.

Thinking back, I realize that this specific encouragement had such a positive impact on me because I had a great respect for that person, I was impressed by his career and we worked together for enough time so that he could see my performance and potential. And there was something else. There was something in the way he talk to me. I had the feeling he is honest.

The risk of encouraging someone is to be perceived as fake and therefore cause more damage than good.

We shouldn't say “You can do it!” to someone if:

• we don’t know the other person good enough to tell what are his\her skills and abilities
• we think the person can’t do what she\he wants but we say it anyway because we find nothing better to say and we think it can’t hurt
• we don’t have enough information about what the other person wants to do
• we don’t have any examples and arguments to support our encouragement.

For some people it is natural to make positive and effective encouragements, however most of us need to learn this ability and to refine it in time. I find this to be an essential ability for every manager because this will help to build up and maintain an increased employee motivation. Employee who have a high level of self confidence can also have a great performance and do whatever it takes to reach the goals of the company.  

When the training ends - learning, behaviors, results

"All men by nature desire knowledge."Aristotle

Training at the workplace provides both the employees and the company with benefits that make the costs and time invested worthwhile. The only condition is that the employees will also apply what they have learned  during  the training.

At one training I have been a couple of years ago the participants agreed at the end of the first training session that they will adopt and implement a certain working model for 40 days. After this time, there will be a  second training session and the employees will have to report on how did the implementation of the method go, what were the results, what was their general feedback. What do you think it happened?

Form a group of 10 people:

-  3 said they tried to apply the model for a couple of days but they returned to their old system because it was more convenient for them

- 5 applied just some parts of the model and only occasionally

-  2 people applied the model entirely and through the whole period of time

Of course this is just an example and it can’t be generalized. However, I realized one again how important is to measure the effectiveness of training.

Most training sessions, especially those that are done  with  an external trainer, usually end with  a questionnaire regarding the perception of the participants. This  kind of  measurement is only showing if the participants were generally ‘happy’ with the training but they don’t give any information on how much they have learned, what is the probability for them to apply the things they have learned and most  of all what are the end results.

The organization through the line managers and up to the board of directors should be the ones having the greatest interest in evaluating and validating the training and learning. In this regard they should ask for support from the trainers and  most importantly to support all the that is being presented during the training.

On the other hand, every employee has the responsibility to take the most of every training and apply it, at least when it comes to the ones paid by the company. More than a moral responsibility this should be seen as an opportunity for personal and professional development. Applying the new things learnt in training will take us most of the times out of our comfort zone.  Nevertheless, as Kristen Wiig said: ’When you go out of your comfort zone and it works there’s nothing more satisfying.’