Tripod Columns: Harry Goldstein

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onchange="self.top.podRedirect(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value)"> <option value="">Related Pods</option> <option value="Freebies">Freebies</option> <option value="MacComputing">Mac Computing</option> <option value="PC%20User">PC User</option> <option value="Second-Hand">Second-Hand</option> <option value="Smallbiz">SmallBiz</option> <option value="Travel">Travel</option> </select></td> </tr> </table> </form> <br clear="ALL"> <p>  <p> <p> <table cellpadding="5"> <tr><td valign="TOP"> <p> <p><img src="../../../../work/columns/img/www_subdomain/workinglife.gif" width="194" height="152" alt="the working life by Harry Goldstein"> <p> <b> <font size="+1"> <font size="+2">P</font>UT <font size="+2">M</font>E <font size="+2">I</font>N, <font size="+2">C</font>OACH!</font> </b> <p> <p>Published April 14, 1997<br><p> <a href="../../../../www_subdomain/work/archive/goldstein.html"><font size="+1">Previous columns</font></a> <br>by Harry Goldstein <p> </td> <td> <font size="+2">I</font><font size="+1">'ve never been able to endure much in the way of Total Quality This or Reengineered That, but when I moved into the ranks of lower management a couple of months ago, my boss signed me up for an all-day management seminar. When the day of reckoning came, I bopped over to the Park Central Hotel with a spring in my step. Hey, it was a day off work, right? And the topic was "Coaching Techniques in Management." Hey, I love basketball. I was sure we were going to talk about taking projects strong to the rim, crisp passing, waiting for a good shot, full court presses and blocking out for rebounds. Even if we yammered a bit about the wishbone offense and blitzing, strike outs and double plays, this was going to be fun. </font><p> <font size="+2">I</font> <font size="+1"> knew I was in trouble when I sat down and there in front of me was a word finder game. Could I find the words coaching, success, results, empowerment, goals, winning, counseling, innovation, risk, motivation, mentor, potential, gameplan, inspiration, strategy, celebration, communication, team, competition and encouragement? Besides being an insult to a fifth grader's intelligence, word finding games always make me nauseous, so instead I started taking notes on a slick-looking guy named Joe who was going around from one seminar participant to another, asking people about where they worked and why they were attending this particular seminar. My fellow would-be coaches were from all walks of American business, software makers, hairdressers, teachers, accountants, health care workers  most of them middle level administrators with an average of eight years experience in their current positions. Joe finally introduced himself to the whole group as our seminar leader and told us that the puzzle we were working was a metaphor for management. We had to learn to look at things in different ways. </font><p> <font size="+2">S</font>ome people oooed, others ahhed and a couple of us rolled our eyes. "We have a certain Standard Operating Procedure," Joe said. "But there are new things you can try, new ways of looking at situations, ways that can increase the influence with the people you call co-workers." </td></tr> <tr><td valign="TOP" width="160"> <font size="+2">Joe told us that as managers, we need to make deposits into co-worker's Emotional Bank Accounts.</font> </td> <td> <font size="+2">J</font>oe pointed out that adults need stuff explained to them in specific ways that make the information you're trying to convey relevant to them. Then he asked us to write down our answer to the following question: "I would be a more effective supervisor if:" <p> <font size="+2">"I</font>f I cared about supervising," I wrote. We then turned to whoever was sitting next to us to share a bit about ourselves and the answer we had written down. The guy I was talking to kept blathering on about his collection department and all his clients who were late paying up. I never got the chance to shock him with my acerbic ennui, because Joe was already spewing out Lesson Number Two (what was Lesson Number One? he was moving like greased, or greasy, lightning), "You can't change people." Lesson Number Three: "Lighten up and have fun." <p> <font size="+2">B</font>etween lesson two and three, Joe dropped the name of management guru Steven Covey and his book <b><tt>Seven Habits of Highly Effective People</tt></b>, wherein Covey coins several management-speak concepts like "proactive" and "win-win negotiating" and "EBA" (Emotional Bank Account). Joe told us that as managers, we need to make deposits into co-worker's EBAs so that when we need to ask them to do something, they will let us make that withdrawal without penalty. In other words, keep buttering up the people you manage so that when you have to put the screws to them, they won't mind too terribly much. In fact, Joe tried to tell us how if we worked everything right, if we manipulated our fellow co-workers like occupational chiropractors, we could actually make our co-workers WANT to do our bidding. Mooo-hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!! <p> </td></tr> <tr><td valign="TOP" width="160"> <font size="+2">Motivation was a key issue in this seminar and came in five easy-to-swallow parts.</font> </td> <td> <font size="+2">F</font>or good measure, Joe started throwing in a few sports analogies  play to your player's strengths, see how they work as part of a team, and most importantly, motivate them. Motivation was a key issue in this seminar and came in five easy-to-swallow parts. Make people believe that they have a stake in their jobs by showing them the Big Picture and how they fit in; teach people the cost of doing business by showing them the numbers; make the benefits obvious, WIIFM, What's In It For Me? (there was a Michael Jordan allusion in this one somewhere); progress on a task must be measurable ("to lose 20 pounds, lose 2 pounds 10 times"); and finally, synergy  the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. <p> <font size="+2">A</font>fter explaining these five keys to motivation, Joe made us switch our watches from one hand to the other, his wily way of making us understand that while change isn't comfortable, you can get used to it. Hmmmm. And of course, learning is a life-long process. Which is why Joe's mentors  Steven Covey, Brian Tracey, Tom Peters, Jack Canfield, the list goes on  have been so kind as to make tapes of their workshops, so we can listen to them over and over again. Joe encouraged us to visit the table in the back of the room during our first break of the morning, to hold the tapes in our hands, to feel the energy course through our fingers. Joe also wanted to sell us on the Fred Pryor seminar series, which is basically on taking more seminars. At $200 a shot, Joe had to be a very good salesman. And he was. By the end of the first hour, he had us eating out of the palm of his hand and clamoring for those sets of motivational tapes he was hawking in the back. He went on like this all day, tossing a few exercises at us, chattering a bit, cracking joke after joke after sales pitch after joke, while throwing in a few hazy management concepts along the way. </td></tr> <tr><td valign="TOP" width="160"> <font size="+2">Our solemn vow: "From this day forward, I will not shit on myself."</font> </td> <td> <font size="+2">W</font>hen we got back from the morning break, Joe confirmed my suspicion that he had started out in sales and that, in order for us to be good managers, we had to be good at selling things to our co-workers. Then he made us take a pledge, "From this day forward, I will not shit on my co-workers. From this day forward, I will not shit on myself." Performance reviews are snapshots, ways to measure progress. Lesson from the Karate Kid: Focus power one square inch. Notice trends and then focus your efforts there. Avoid assumptions. Good communicators set ground rules. Always form your communication with the receiver in mind. Use behavioral language and say what you mean by describing the exact behavior that you want. Paraphrase  "now lemme get this straight. What you're saying is..." Listen with your eyes. Use "I" instead of "you." <p> <font size="+2">L</font>unch. <p> <font size="+2">T</font>here's no such thing as procrastination  you're just deciding not to decide. Before making a decision not to make a decision, ask yourself, by waiting, what will I gain? Delegate tasks, but not to the same person all the time, because you risk boring them and incurring the resentment of your other co-workers. Emotional influence is important  tell jokes, learn how to relate to people, increase your Emotional I.Q. Why do people want to be on teams (not so much a question as a handy list). <p> <font size="+2">H</font>ow to build enthusiasm in the workplace: Never give cash awards. Give people little tokens of your appreciation when they do something really good. Link incentives to performance, you do this and you get that. People who don't get the prize get pissed off  what a great motivator! </td></tr> <tr><td valign="TOP" width="160"> <b>RELATED TRIPOD RESOURCES:</b><br> <font size="-1"><a href="../../../../www_subdomain/work/interviews/970116kushner.html">Interview with Coach Susan Kushner</a><br> <a href="../../../../www_subdomain/work/columns/hedgecock/eclectic/961014.html">The Coach of Your Dreams</a><br> <br>and don't miss<br> The International Coach Federation Homepage </font> </td> <td> <font size="+2">J</font>oe was like a sewer overflowing, precious management turds floating everywhere, and it was all I could do to grab one here and there, to hold them in my head for a moment before flushing them out. By the end of the day, I had achieved a certain clarity of mind and understood the American business variant of that very German concept  Will to Power. In order to enact all of these various techniques, to spend all of my time weedling, cajoling and manipulating my fellow co-workers, I had to find the will. I flipped back through my crammed notebook to that first question and my first answer  I'd be a better supervisor if I cared about supervising. No care means no will. No will means no promotion. No promotion means no power. <p> <font size="+2">F</font>ine. I'd much rather be the player taking the ball to the hoop with two seconds left on the clock than the coach with the bad comb-over chewing the towel and prowling the sidelines! I want to be at the plate with two strikes, two outs, bottom of the ninth and the winning run on second, not the manager scratching his belly and spitting tobacco juice in the dugout! Even though I hadn't bought into his rapid sales rap on the magic managers can work (or is it the spells they can cast? hey, do they do that with smoke and mirrors?), Joe had brought me to one of the great epiphanies of my working life. That was worth $200 for sure. Especially since my company had picked up the tab. <p> <hr><p> <p><a href="mailto:hargold@mail.idt.net">Harry Goldstein</a> is a writer and editor living in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Utne Reader, American Book Review, Promethean, AltX, word.com, and other periodicals. <font size="-1">© 1997 Harry Goldstein, All Rights Reserved </font> <p>  <p> </td> </tr> </table> <form method="POST" action="../../../../www_subdomain/bin/search/pursuit.html"> <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" align="RIGHT"> <tr> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="MIDDLE"> <a href="../../../../www_subdomain/work_money.html" target="_top"></a></td> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="MIDDLE"> <a href="../../../../www_subdomain/work_money/index-html/anchor_toc.html" target="_top"></a></td> <td valign="TOP" align="RIGHT"> <select name="pod_name" onchange="self.top.podRedirect(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value)"> <option value="">Related Pods</option> <option value="Freebies">Freebies</option> <option value="MacComputing">Mac Computing</option> <option value="Second-Hand">Second-Hand</option> <option value="Smallbiz">SmallBiz</option> <option value="Travel">Travel</option> </select></td> </tr> </table> <br clear="ALL"><br> <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" align="RIGHT"> <tr> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="RIGHT"> <nobr><img src="../../../../img/www_subdomain/lycos_power.gif" border="0" alt="Lycos Powered" height="15" width="91"> <select name="cat"> <option value="tripod_www" selected>Search the Tripod Web Site <option value="tripod">Search Tripod Member Pages <option value="lycos">Search the Web</select></nobr></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="RIGHT"> <nobr><input type="text" size="20" name="query"> <input type="submit" value="Search"></nobr></td> </tr> </table> </form> <br clear="ALL"> </td> </tr> </table> </body>