1. Communicate an error to an employee and a work team. The situation is this: one of your employees in the marketing department has made a mistake when calculating the margin left by one of your new product lines. “To start with, it has to be done in private. Individually or with the team that made the mistake. Privacy is key ”, explains Marta Romo, coach and partner of the consultancy Beup. “You have to find concrete examples of what has happened. You cannot go on saying: You are a disaster… You cannot use qualifying adjectives. You have to talk about concrete facts: One day, you did this and the consequence was this. You have given me this and it is like this, when I asked you to be like this, Romo continues.
“When there is a mistake, you have to make him able to recognize it. You have to lead him / her through questions, so that he / she is the one to accept it. For that, the best thing is to create a safe environment in which the person can recognize that they have made a mistake. If he thinks a penalty is going to be applied to him, he will go on the defensive, ”he adds. “First offer a positive feedback, then a negative one and ends with a positive one. This feedback is very easy to use. At the same time that you deliver a criticism, you reinforce good behavior and ask for improvements in behavior ”, he adds Carmen Salinas Ruiz, independent coach.
“You can say, for example: This report is very well presented, I think we should go over the balance sheet part, but the graphics are very powerful. It's funny how the word “but” can be anything but empathetic…. The simple act of moving it around in a sentence changes the effect on the person who receives it. If you tell an employee: I really like how you treat your customers, but I think you have to improve the presentation of the product, does not sound the same as: I think you have to improve the presentation of the product, but I really like how you treat your customers”Continues Salinas.
2. Recognize your own mistake before your staff. You were absolutely convinced that you had to start selling in the German market this year, that you didn't have to wait until next year, even though your middle managers were recommending otherwise. You have dedicated resources to prepare for the launch that, finally, has not been possible and you have taken them from other projects that had greater viability in the short and medium term. Come on, the one who has made a mistake is you.
“It is powerful to see a boss admitting a mistake: it gives you credibility and shows maturity. However, the error has to serve for something ”, sums up Marta Romo, partner of the BeUp consultancy. “One of the keys to the error, both of a colleague and of your own, is to transform it into the question: What have I learned? When people are committed, the suffering of making mistakes is borne by them. No one has to come to crush. Professional people suffer when they do it wrong. As a boss, you don't have to delve into the wound, but rather listen, frame the dimension of the error and relativize it. And talk about your own mistakes: I was wrong about this once. With a client I had to accept the mistake I had made. The question is: What can we do to avoid it in the future? You need to know why it happened –redo the steps– and see how it can be avoided ”, adds Pilar Jericó, coach and partner of BeUp.
“Circumstances cannot be blamed for what happens. You have to face your mistake. Blame must be adapted into responsibility. What has it had to do with me? What does it have to do with the other? Responsibility always leads to action ”, he continues. Without forgetting that “you have to talk about it because people need to vent. If they don't talk about it with you, they will do it later in the hall, with your partner. That's where it breaks down. If you talk about it with them, you can control it, ”says Jericó.
3. Regain your credibility. What if you have lost your credibility as a leader? You have made a mistake and you have not recognized it in time or, unmotivated by the economic situation, you have left your employees with the feeling that the situation is over you, that the company moves by inertia and that you are not by their side . What do you do in situations like these? "It is not easy to generalize, but if we want to regain the credibility of our staff, we must first recognize that we have made a mistake, propose action measures and actually execute them", proposes Pilar Jericó. “It is important to manage the expectations of your staff. After an unfulfilled behavior, in which you have not been up to par and you have failed, you are in the spotlight - especially in the short term - immediately afterwards. In that case, you have to take action. All this has to do with what you do, speaks much louder than what you say. You have to put your full attention on the question, What things am I doing? ”, Says Romo.
4. Defend the (regular) results of your company before your investors
You have not achieved a profitability of the 2% in your first year, one of the demands of your investors in the company. Your company sells, but a multinational in the same sector has entered with an aggressive pricing strategy that has reduced sales. “To begin with, you don't have to fill it with frills. It has to be a precise and brief statement. And you can't do it from guilt, poor us style. That's boring. In this environment it is appreciated to hear something like: I have made a mistake in these forecasts. The feeling of wasting time before an investor, and going round and round, is terrible. Ultimately, it is also about managing your own fear and making proposals while acknowledging the error. I have learned this and have taken these steps to resolve it later. You have to go to the investor with solutions: We have made a mistake. We thought that the market was going to go this way; in the end this other has happened. I have learned that I cannot trust this data. And thirdly, looking to the future, I am going to raise this, this and this other ”, proposes Jericó.
5. Defend an unpopular decision with your employees.
As a measure to save costs, you have decided to close on Fridays, with the consequent cut in salaries - proportional, of course, for all employees, including bosses and yourself. “When you have to defend an unpopular measure or project, you have to know how to manage, from the start, the resistance of the people. For this you have to anticipate their justifications in advance and prepare to answer them. They are going to try to boycott the project. It is not the same to communicate bad news, than something that will not be accepted by the majority. In this sense, it is necessary to know how to manage the boycott ”, assures Romo.
Prepare for the boycott
“It is important to accept that they are going to boycott you. Also know that they are going to give you justifications and what they are. For example, if they tell you that they don't have time, your answer should be: Okay, I know you don't have time, neither do I, we are all very busy. They can also tell you: There are no resources ... And you must answer: Yes, it is not the best time, we do not have resources. If you play along with them, they will continue to justify the boycott. Also, if you tell them: If you don't have time, take it out, they will come up with new justifications. It's about preparing yourself for resistance. This way you recognize their right to disagree and allow them to protest. The message has to be: This is what to do. I understand that you don't like it. I understand that you don't have time… but that's what you have to do ”, according to the BeUp partner.
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