If you don’t make waves, you’ll drown

by Dave Anderson

They’ve been around forever; clever clichés that encourage you to play it safe and go with the flow. 

• Don’t mess with success.
• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
• Don’t make waves.
• Be happy with what you’ve got.

In the context of growing your business, these folksy saws are world-class crazy. In fact, the marketplace is littered with failed managers who embraced these feel-good phrases and led their organizations down the yellow brick road and smack into a wall of irrelevance.

As a leader, your job is to challenge the process in your enterprise. You must challenge conventional thinking, your people, your policies, your strategies and your assumptions that what made you successful in the past will get the job done tomorrow.

Your job is to mess with your success because if you don’t someone else will. Your task is to show your team whatever success you’ve attained in the past is a stepping-stone and not a pedestal. Some of you got your business just the way you wanted it, stopped challenging the process and now, months or years later, it’s killing you.

Real leaders don’t lay in bed at night dreaming about how great things are because the one thing that strikes terror into their hearts is the prospect of being stuck on a plateau. Thus, they continue to disturb the equilibrium in their organization. They know predictable organizations are less responsive to changes, and this places them at maximum risk.

If you haven’t challenged the process lately or enough in your organization, here are a few places to start.

Make waves by attacking when things are going well
The No. 1 time people let up is when things are rolling along. They lose their urgency and intensity and start to coast. Just like the football team that jumps out to a 21-point lead and decides to sit on the ball and play not-to-lose instead of play to win, only to break their own momentum and end up losing. The same happens in business.

When things are going well you must stay in attack mode. The best time to set a stretch forecast or to take a risk is from a position of strength. The best time to implement change or make a big decision is when you have momentum because it’s less noticed. The best time to train is when things are going well, to keep people sharp and let them know there’s still room to improve. The best time to remove a poor performer is when you’re on a roll. 

But too many managers really blow this one. They have a good month, and rather than punting the perennial under-performer in order to preserve momentum and reinforce standards, they give their laggards a stay of execution because, overall, the business made money. 

This is shortsighted. It costs far more when your weakest link breaks momentum, saps morale and creates distractions when you’re on a roll than it does when you’re in a rut. Challenge conventional thinking by attacking when things are going well. Don’t sit on the ball. Run up the score.

Make waves by setting uncomfortable forecasts
Psychologists say if a goal is too high or too low, people don’t get involved. A forecast that is too high overwhelms people. A forecast too low puts them to sleep. 

Studies show motivation is highest when there’s about a 50/50 chance of pulling it off. People should not be able to reach a forecast with a business-as-usual approach. All this psychobabble you hear about creating a stress-free workplace is insane. Without pressure to perform you’ll have to go in every day and ring a bell to wake people up.

An effective forecast forces change, risk and high-impact decisions concerning people and strategy. When your expectations are too low, you presume incompetence. And when you presume incompetence, unwittingly you start to create it.

Your job is not to make people feel warm and fuzzy with a safe, doable forecast. In fact, if you’re not stretching people, you’re not leading them. If you have managers who resist being stretched, get them a job at the DMV and get yourself some real help. All great performers want to be stretched. They want to find out how far they can go. They want to test their limits and their team’s limits.

If your people don’t welcome the challenge that comes with stretching, you’ve got the wrong people. And, bold goals and elaborate strategies are absolutely irrelevant when you have the wrong people, because a great dream with the wrong team is a nightmare.

Make waves: Conduct brutally honest employee reviews
A survey conducted on my Web site showed that more than 50 percent of workers say they’ve never had a formal employee review, much less a brutally honest one. This is an indictment of clueless management.

Brutally honest employee reviews keep people alert, focused and in a stretch-mode. In order to grow, your people need fast, frequent feedback. It must be direct and constructive. They must know where they stand in no uncertain terms. This means that candor and truth trumps political correctness and sugarcoating.

Brutally honest employee reviews reinforce strengths, acknowledge solid performances, and confront shortfalls and deficient behaviors. Reviews allow you to devise a strategy to help each team member develop personally and professionally.  That’s what coaching is all about: observing, analyzing and offering feedback on performances.

You should do this on-the-fly during the workday but must also formalize your feedback in brutally honest employee reviews. I recommend a formal review once each month with each of your direct reports. Waiting any longer than one month impairs performance because delayed consequences, good or bad, are ineffective.

If you think you don’t have time to offer monthly and formal feedback and coaching to your people, then you have no clue as to what your real job as a leader is, and I’d like to take this opportunity to express my profound sympathy to the people suffering under your neglect.

Make waves by either fixing or firing bad managers
You have a significant obligation to invest in the development of your managers. There’s simply too much at stake to take shortcuts here.

Lousy managers leave scars on the esteem of their people. They attract turkeys and smother eagles. They don’t manage to win; they manage not to lose their jobs. They break momentum, sap morale and create a culture of chaos in your business. 

You must become less tolerant of ineffective managers. And, you must have the courage to fix or fire those who get results but do so on the backs of people, because the long-term havoc they wreak on your culture, reputation and employees is incalculable.

Nothing in your organization will get better in a measurable or sustainable manner until your leaders do. Nothing breathes fresh life into a workplace or brings a faster turnaround in results and morale like replacing a lousy manager. And if you know you have a bad manager, err on the side of moving too quickly to replace him, don’t err on the side of giving him six chances.

Bad managers should be given less time and less rope to get the job done than poor subordinates because they compound the misery in a department more quickly and deeply than any other position. Don’t bond with these pretenders-with-titles for the sake of loyalty either. Consider instead, the 10 people suffering under the bad boss, and your decision to remove him is much easier.

There is nothing you can do that reinforces your standards, enhances your personal credibility, protects your culture and exemplifies support to the rest of your people like removing the burden of a bad manager from the backs of his or her team. If you don’t make some waves on this point you will certainly drown.

Dave Anderson is the author of the book No-Nonsense Leadership. He is a peak-performance author, trainer, speaker and expert on leadership and sales. For more information call or visit www.LearnToLead.com.

back to top                                          back to online exclusives