Nepotism

Why it’s bound to exist in your company

You think you treat people fairly and that you make decisions objectively. We all do. But the trouble is that in reality, no one does.

Here’s a simple experiment. A group of people were asked to identify the best candidate for a job:

A woman who was intelligent.

Or:

A man who was streetwise.

Another group was asked to identify the best candidate for the same job:

A woman who was streetwise.

Or:

A man who was intelligent.

In both groups more people chose the man, indicating that the group overall was biased towards the man.

Why you can’t be objective

This is because we are all subject to influences that we are completely unaware of. We can spot them in others – sometimes they are blindingly obvious and you wonder how people can be so unaware.

If everyone in the two groups choosing between the man and woman had been completely objective then the proportions of ‘streetwise’ and ‘intelligent’ would have been the same for each group.

Clear criteria and standards

This is why it’s so important to have really clear criteria, measures and standards for making decisions.

When you delegate decision-making the most important thing to do is make the criteria clear. To do that, ask yourself:

What’s important about ________?

For example:
“What’s important about this equipment?’

or

“What’s important about the way this new process is implemented?”

Then make sure that the people you are delegating to are really clear about the criteria.

Managing your manager

If your manager is poor at delegating these things, just ask him or her the same question. Then, when you have made the decision, show how you have met the criteria.

For more help managing people get our Management Essentials booklet set

Should you have mystery candidates?

Have you checked the quality of interviews in your company recently? I’ve been working with some clients who have been for interviews in a range of different companies and organisations.

Hearing their experiences has been quite depressing. It's made me ask myself it we should have mystery candidates, in the same way that shops employ mystery shoppers.

Bad interviews

These are just a few. How do you know that your standards are better than this? We have ‘mystery shoppers’ perhaps it’s time to have ‘mystery candidates’.

One candidate was sat aghast while her interviewers argued amongst themselves about the position. They hadn’t even agreed what it was, and this was the second interview.

They were over a week late getting back to her.

Poor skills

Another candidate was told he would be asked competence-based questions and was asked questions that didn’t really apply to the job, and weren’t competence-based questions.

He did his best to build some rapport with the people interviewing him as they walked to the room, but the interviewer seemed to be lacking in any social skills.

Poor administration

A third candidate was told that the final decision would be made in a meeting of all the assessors at the end of the day. Yet, before that meeting took place, she was told she hadn’t got the post. We discovered they had appointed the internal candidate.

Another organisation, ‘did not have time’ to update the job descriptions and person specifications so ended up recruiting people into senior posts who did not have the required skills.

These are just a few recent examples.

Bad questions

As part of my training in how to be interviewed I have a section on how to answer really bad interview questions. They are the ones that people who have not been trained properly on how to interview tend to ask. Things like:

“Why should we give you this job?”

“If you were in a lift and saw a member of staff acting in a way that is against our diversity policy, what would you do?”

I keep hoping I will be able to leave this section out, but unfortunately it’s still necessary to prepare candidates.

Why these questions are so bad
Just in case you are wondering why these questions are so bad, here’s an outline:

“Why should we give you this job?”
Your objective in an interview is to find out if the individual has the skills and behaviours to do the job. You have only a limited time to do that. You need to spend that time gathering useful information that will enable you to make a decision.

This question is perfect for those with the “gift of the gab”. They will be able to impress you with their clever answers. However, these are often not the people who do a good job. There are lots of other questions that will give you much more reliable information.

“If you were in a lift and saw a member of staff making racist comments, what would you do?”

This is a hypothetical question, so the reliability of the answer is very low. If you want to know whether someone could handle a situation like this, ask

“Have you ever seen a member of staff making racist comments? “

If they say they have, then:

“What did you do?”

If they have not been in this position, you could ask them what they would do, but remember, this is just what they think they would do (or what they think you would like to hear). It’s not reliable.

These examples are all real and give a very bad impression to candidates. Make sure it’s not happening in your organisation. For more help with questions, see our booklet "Questions Made Easy"

You can get some help in recruitment here in our booklet "How to Interview Successfully"

Strategy – the right one for the right situation

Are your strategies up to date?

We all have strategies that we use in particular situations. If you want to be successful you need to make sure you are using the right strategy in the right situation.

Do you remember your parents making you finish all the food on your plate when you were young? They may have even said you could not have your pudding till you had finished your vegetables.

That was probably a useful strategy to get you to eat the healthy food with all the vitamins in.

Out of date strategies

Now you are older, are you using the same strategy? This strategy is not a very good one for maintaining a healthy weight. You need a different strategy, because your objective is different.

But we tend to get comfortable with strategies that we grew up with.

Do not interrupt

When you were young, were you told not to interrupt others? Not to speak till you were spoken to? Many people were.

Others grew up with a strategy of interrupting when they wanted to speak.

If you are from the first group in a meeting with people from the second group, you will have trouble being heard.

The right strategy

Neither strategy is wrong, you just need to know which to use when.

The strategy you choose depends on your objective and your situation. But many people don’t consciously make a decision to use a particular strategy; they just carry on doing what they have always done, even though the situation has changed.

It is time to review your strategies and see which are working and which need to be updated.

Start with checking your objectives and what you are doing to achieve them. Is it working? If not, it might be you need to change your strategy.

How to increase creativity

I think creativity is natural in many people but what happens is you find systems that seem almost deliberately designed to stifle creativity and innovation.

Here’s a common one and how to avoid it.

Consistency

You often hear people saying that they want everything to be consistent. This is very often the case when you are talking about training courses and workshops.

I’ve even had clients draft out objectives like:
Ensure all the modules that are run are consistent.

The trouble is – which you will immediately know if you have been reading any of my material on objectives – you could achieve this by running consistently bad workshops.

As long as they were all as bad as each other, you would have achieved this objective.

Making everyone do everything in the same way means that no one has any room to be creative.  There is a place for this. We don’t want people doing ‘creative accountancy’ or being creative when they are supposed to be running procedures in nuclear power plants.

But there are many situations where we do want people to be creative and to innovate.

Standards of achievement

The way to do this is to have an objective around the standards. What you usually want in these situations is for everyone to at least meet a certain set of standards.

Having an objective about standards means that people are then free to exceed the standards and come up with innovative ways to improve.

When that happens you can find out what they are doing and repeat it in other areas. Then you raise your standards.

Creativity and innovation

In this way you will ensure that you get constant improvement from creativity and innovation and your minimum standards are met, which is probably what people wanted in the first place when they were talking about “consistency”.

5Big Change Mistakes - 5 Not Learning from Past Changes

There can’t be many organisations that have not had to implement changes in the past. Unfortunately from the way some of them implement each new change, you would imagine that they have never done it before.

One reason for this is that many of the people who like and enjoy change are the kinds of people who don’t like planning and detailed careful work.

So they just go ahead with a change and, before the dust has settled and they have checked if it has had the desired effect, they are onto the next change.

Bad managers

There are some managers who are brought into a department purely to implement changes. You have probably seen them yourself.

I came across a particularly bad one recently. She had been rotated into a department to ‘gain experience’. She made a complete mess of it and left the members of the department not only to implement the changes but also to sort out all the extra problems she had caused.

The results of your work

If you don’t have to stick around to see the impact of your work, you can be left thinking that it’s all gone very well. So it’s really easy to make the same mistakes time and time again.

If you have to live with your mistakes you are likely at least to be motivated to do it better the next time.

Learn from your experience

Ideally you need to set out clear goals and objectives. Then make sure you have all the tools in place to ensure you can measure your results.

Yes, it does take time, but it means that, next time, you can do it a lot better.

What should you measure?

Identify what is important to you in this situation. When I was a production manager, the most important things were getting the output and keeping the quality up.

When we had to make a big change, these were the things we checked. By focussing on these, you can plan your change more effectively.

A difficult change

One of the most difficult changes I had to handle was when a very popular supervisor who worked for me retired. It was hard to imagine that anyone could fill Anne’s shoes. She was one of those ‘larger than life’ characters.

I had noticed that output was often reduced when the department lost motivation and suspected that people would be very de-motivated after Anne had left.

I was a very young and inexperience manager when I worked with her, and she taught me a lot. Even now, as I write this, I still feel tremendous sadness at losing her. Not only was she extremely skilled in her job, she was a great friend and fun to work with.

I remember her telling me that she bought her Christmas cards in the January sales every year. That probably gives you an idea of how much planning she did.

My plans

We organised a surprise party and all kinds of other events to celebrate her retirement.

But on top of this, I put a huge amount of effort into planning how we would keep up the output after her final day and keep up the motivation in the team. It paid off. In fact, the output was higher the week after she left than it was the previous week.

Out of respect for Anne, I never mentioned it. But I did learn that you can implement changes effectively if you learn from your past experience and build on it.

Christmas cards

Every year, as regular as clockwork, on 1st December I received a card from Anne. Then, about ten years ago now, I had a card from her husband saying she had passed away, a change I wasn’t quite as well prepared for.

For a summary of five big mistakes when implementing change see this article


5 Big mistakes to avoid when making change

5 Big Change Mistakes - 4 Bad Communication

Much of the so-called resistance to change is caused by it being communicated badly to those who are impacted by the change.

I heard of one company that decided to close down a large site. A senior manager came over to talk to everyone about the changes and the closure in a big meeting.

One individual asked him: “Do you regret having to close this site?” “No.” Was his reply.

I don’t think I was the only one shocked by that unfeeling and callous response. It certainly didn’t smooth things along.

Decisions about change

When you have to make decisions that will impact others, it’s vital to think about the needs of those individuals. One of those needs is often to know why the changes are taking place and how the decisions are made.

By not explaining the reasons you make it easy for all kinds of rumours to develop.

Worse still is that people perceive the changes to be unfair. If they don’t know the reasons they will speculate. When people are dealing with changes they don’t like, their speculations are likely to be more negative than positive.

Unfairness

Part of your brain, anterior insular, is finely tuned to pick up any hint of unfairness. This is because being treated unfairly is a sign that you might be rejected from your social group. So any hint that this is the case signals danger.

As a result you can feel actual physical pain. So it’s not surprising that people react badly to these situations, especially when the communication is poor.

Recognise people’s feelings

If you are able to think this through and be honest and straightforward in your communications, implementing change will be a lot easier.

Bad communications

Another client told me that he received a phone call one day from his manager saying he needed to be at a particular hotel at 9am for an announcement but she couldn’t tell him anything else.

You can imagine how he felt that evening and what a good night’s sleep he had.

The trouble is that his manager had been told she was not allowed to let people know the contents of the announcement.

It’s this kind of misguided communication strategy that really causes problems.

Good communications

One of the other managers in this same situation broke the rules and told her people about the announcement but also added – “You will still have a job at the end of it". Her people were much happier about it.

Telling people the worst

Often you shy away from giving bad news because you just don’t know how to do it. I was astonished to hear, years ago, that doctors did not get any training in how to tell people their relatives had died. I’m sure that’s changed now (I hope so). But I’m not sure that industry has moved very far forward on this.

When you have to give bad news

People don’t always hear bad news, or understand it correctly. A colleague of mine spent years trying for a baby. Finally she went to see her doctor. He was astonished. She’d had her ovaries removed five years earlier so she was never going to get pregnant.

I can’t believe the doctor who removed her ovaries didn’t explain this was the case, but I can believe that she just didn’t hear what he had to say properly. And perhaps he didn’t explain it very well.

Tips for giving bad news

Use clear, simple language: “You will not be able to have children after this operation.”

Identify what the main concerns of the person on the receiving end will be and tell the person what you are planning to do about them:

“There will be a full compensation package for everyone who is losing their job. The details are on this sheet. Your pension rights will not be affected. For people who want to move, there will be some help. We’ll be giving information about that on Monday.”

Do not, as another senior manager did, start going on about how great your own new job will be as a result of the changes. It’s not the time, place or audience for that.

Have the information on paper as well as telling people. This gives them a chance to look at it when they have got over the shock.

Tell them several times. I know this can seem a waste of time, but people often need to hear the news several times before they understand it completely. It’s no good giving a two-hour presentation packed with complicated information (as one company did) and then complaining, “We’ve already given them all the information they need.”

Give people plenty of time to talk about their feelings and express concerns. Far from making things worse, this can really help people to feel better.

In short – imagine yourself in their position, with their background, skills and circumstances and treat them as you would like to be treated.

For a summary of five big mistakes when implementing change see this article

5 Big mistakes to avoid when making change

5 Big Change Mistakes - 3 No Clear Priorities

When you are making changes, often there are many things that need to be done, and it seems like they all need to be done at once.

People have to carry on with their everyday jobs, but they also have to make the changes.

Make a plan. This may seem like extra work when you are already busy, but it will save you a great deal of time and money in the long term.

Get the objective clear

Once you have clearly identified what needs to be achieved it’s vital to work out a plan. This can take some time and is more difficult when you are panicking.

The first step in working out a plan is to be really clear about what you need to achieve. Spend some time working out your objective and get it really clear.

Then work out your deadline.

I always like to leave a little leeway here, but it’s not always possible.

Make a list of your tasks

Once you have done this, one option is to work backwards from the deadline. This should help you to identify all the tasks that need to be completed in order for you to implement your change.

Don’t make it hard – check with the others who are involved and ask for their input and advice.

Estimate how long each task will take

Once you have a list of all the tasks, it’s useful to estimate how long each will take. Most people tend to be rather optimistic when they do this. So make sure you allow some slack for problems you haven’t anticipated.

If it’s something you haven’t done before ask others who have, how long it really takes and what their suggestions are for completing the task easily and efficiently.

Identify your critical path

You may also want to work out your ‘critical path’. These are the tasks that are linked and have to be done in a certain order and can’t be made shorter. For example, if you are cooking your Christmas dinner, the turkey is often the critical path.

You have to buy it, prepare it (with stuffing and so on), cook it and carve it. You can’t carve it while you’re cooking it, or prepare it while you are buying it. All the tasks have to happen in that sequence. And there is a minimum time for the whole thing that you can’t reduce.

If you buy it on Christmas Eve and prepare it then put it in the oven at midnight (depending on the size) it won’t be ready before midday on Christmas day. If you put it in the oven late or if the oven breaks down (as happened to a friend of mine) then the whole dinner is going to be late and you can’t catch up.

So this is part of your plan that you need to focus on and get right.

Finalise your plan

Put your tasks in order. What needs to be done when and who needs to do it. Be very clear about when tasks must be completed.

Let everyone know

Make sure people know what needs to be done first and why. This will make it much easier for them to prioritise all their other tasks around the changes you are implementing.

Keep people up to date with progress and any modifications to the plan. Give them reasons.

Be clear about other ongoing work and how it fits in and what needs to be done first. Make sure people get some help if their workload is going to be drastically increased.

For a summary of five big mistakes when implementing change see this article

5 Big mistakes to avoid when making change