Typically, these problems are no big deal; that is, unless they sit unattended and festering in a stew of frustration and conspiracy theory. That's when employees' issues cease to be with the situation and start pointing directly at the manager.
All they had to do was tell you that something was bugging them, right?
At each of my weekly team meetings, I set aside about 20 minutes for a peeve session, when my team members know it's OK for them to vent about stuff that's driving them crazy. I make sure the griping never gets personal or too acerbic, and obviously serious interpersonal conflicts and other HR-type issues need to be handled offline. But otherwise, I leave the floor open for any comments team members want to make. Sometimes their peeves are just the natural frustrations that come with a paycheck, but I've also found that peeves discussed in these group feedback sessions are an invaluable source of ideas for improving both process and product.
Over the years, some managers have complained that my little gripe sessions just give my team license to take potshots at other groups. My response has always been that there's no way I can keep employees from complaining about work and their colleagues; I just want them to get in the habit of doing it out in the open and not behind closed doors, where criticisms cease to be constructive and start being divisive. Certainly, I've needed to tweak the practice a bit to keep these sessions from getting out of hand, but using the following tips, I'm usually pleased with the outcome.
Be patientâ€"it takes a while to get going. Being a natural loudmouth, I'm always amazed at how long it takes team members to warm up to a weekly gripe session. Just remember that however willing people may be to complain to their friends, actually saying it out loud in a room full of their peers, not to mention their boss, can be absolutely terrifying. After all, grumbling opens them up to the possibility of being criticised too, and nobody likes that. My best advice here is to encourage your strongest team members to take the lead by discussing fairly safe peeves for a couple of weeks while the rest of the team catches on. If you feel the need to jump-start the process yourself, pick a known topicâ€"inadequate documentation or service from a vendor, for exampleâ€"which the team can largely agree on without ruffling any internal feathers.
Make sure real-time peeves come up at the meeting. When an employee brings a small problem to your attention during the week, tell the employee to raise the issue during the next peeve session. I've found that this not only helps in building team members' confidence, but it also gives me a chance to see if one team member's seemingly minor irritation is actually a systemic nuisance that's wasting a lot of my guys' time.
Make sure everybody shares a peeve on a regular basis. Remember, the entire rationale behind holding regular gripe sessions is the fact that your team members do have problems that need to be openly discussed. If they are unwilling to talk about even relatively small issues in the safety of a team meeting, how are you going to get the real feedback you need to fix more serious problems down the road? Don't make the peeve session an obligation or graded homework assignment, but if you notice that a team member has taken a bye for a few weeks, let that person know you expect to hear something next week. Don't confuse silence with assentâ€"nobody's that consistently happy at work.
Agree with valid peeves, but don't hesitate to play devil's advocate. Just because you honestly want to hear your team members' gripes doesn't mean that you can or will do anything about them. Making your employees understand that every one of their complaints isn't going to be tangibly addressed is probably the toughest hurdle in successfully managing the expectations that come with gripe sessions. Of course, you'll need to rely on your tact if some young admin says he doesn't see why the company can't just tell the stupid end users to run the latest freeware productivity suite on Linux desktops; in time, you'll find helpful allies in your veteran team members who can share their perspectives. You'll often find yourself asking your team to look at small irritants in a broader context of a project's deliverables or the company's goals. That's a great exercise not only for your employees but for you as the managerâ€"never forget that the all-macro issues over which managers obsess actually live or die in the daily work of your frontline team. If there's a disconnect between the two, you need to know about it.
Make sure somebody who might take healthy exception to a peeve is in the room. One of the first adjustments I made to my gripe session formula was to start inviting representatives of my teams' closest lateral partners to attend our weekly meetings. Invariably, these partners don't have a lot to say as we move through the week's status reports and business updates, but when the peeve session comes around, they get engaged. After all, that's the whole point of this exerciseâ€"you're showing your team that it's important to discuss situations openly with the people who are directly involved. You'll find that after a couple of bumps, a little chaperoning is all that's required to incorporate this all-important third-party perspective into your sessions. And on a political level, it's a good way to ensure that other managers know you're not just taking potshots at their teams.
Make team members who have peeves do something about them. This one is my favorite. If you go a couple of weeks without giving a team member a follow-up assignment based on a gripe the team member brings up at the weekly meeting, you're probably doing something wrong. I usually ask the employee to set up a meeting to decide a documentation convention or to get some answers from another team about a problematic handoff. Wrap up the assignment with either a memo or a report at next week's meeting. This is a perfect exercise in constructive communication: identify a problem, discuss the issue openly, and then fix it.
Set time aside after the meeting to follow up. I usually spend 30 minutes on the day of my weekly meeting on brief follow-ups with team members who I sense have issues they didn't want to discuss during the gripe session. If appropriate, I encourage the employees to speak up at the next meeting, but often I find that the issue really does need more discreet attention. If nothing else, just the cultural exercise of having my guys complain in a controlled environment helps me spot individual morale problems.
You'll see the ultimate benefit of teaching your guys to gripe constructively when they start doing it outside the team meeting with their peers and internal clients. It's one of those soft-skills things you can't measure. But I credit my teams' little peeve sessions for much of the professional growth I've seen in some fairly challenging employees with reputations for being ill-tempered or combative. Complaining is just like any other work activityâ€"if you're going to do it, do it right.
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excellent article!Lots of pure reasoning and very helfull team management process...