“Stop Making Sense” is one of the best concert movies ever, but that’s not the topic of this blog. What I want to address instead is a phenomenon that happens every day in organizations, with results ranging from sub-par to disastrous.

To understand this productivity-killer, we have to back up a bit first and understand what this term “sense-making” is all about.

It sounds a little abstract, even nebulous; maybe one of those terms that crops up in leadership development from time to time that confuses as much as enlightens.

In fact, sense-making is a very clear and fundamental practice in anyone engaged in knowledge work. (By knowledge work, I’m creating a contrast with an assembly line, in a factory, where what happens is sheer production. Knowledge work means when people work with ideas, plans, budgets, meetings, customer requests and so on.)

Sense-making is operating when employees figure out how to spend their time, what to prioritize, how to respond to problems, how to write a document, how to participate in a team, or how to manage conflict. Sense-making simply means people do what makes sense to them. It means that senseless activity, which we often call stupid, is low- or no-value, and a pretty sure path to failure.

Knowledge workers make dozens or even hundreds of decisions each day, large and small. You’re making one right now by choosing to read this blog instead of doing something else.  All these decisions are based on how they make sense of the environment, themselves, their colleagues, the mission, values and many other factors.

Good sense-making produces good results.

So, if all this — no pun intended — makes sense, then let’s explore a pretty insidious challenge to sense-making that employees talk about a lot, but not usually in the context of sense-making. Here’s how it works.

When employees do not really understand what is going on, they cannot be good sense-makers. This would seems to be a tautology, but it is so much more than that, and here’s the problem: I have talked with hundreds of organizational supervisors, managers and leaders over the years, almost all of whom identified one central, pivotal problem they face. That problem is a lack of time.

With incessant demands, rapid change, downsizing and rising customer expectations, one of the first things to go is good communication with their staffs. They’re too busy!

So, given this climate, they almost always fall back to giving instructions, hoping the work gets done well. The only thing missing is the information that allows the employees to make sense of what they are being asked to do.

This leads to several things. First, the risks of error go way up because there is no effective error detection circuit any longer. Lacking the larger context in which they are operating, employees’ decisions become much more of a gamble.

You hear this all the time when employees exclaim – almost always after hearing how what they did was wrong or bad, and then the vital information being supplied on why that was the case – “Well, if anyone had just told me . . . (insert information needed for sense-making).”

How in the world do you get anywhere without a good map?

The second thing that happens is motivation plummets. Human beings are not wired to do anything that they do not get the point of. Certainly, in an emergency or in the very short term, they can tolerate it, but over the long haul of work, not knowing how the work connects to some larger purpose (that makes sense), they start to phone it in, treat it as a box check, and when asked why they do that work, respond with a shrug of the shoulders.

But the final effect, and the really dangerous one, is what happens when employees stop making sense. Essentially giving up on trying to connect the dots, add value through questioning, thinking, probing, exploring, reflecting, they just do what they’re told. When this happens, mental muscle mass starts to wither, employees take the path of least resistance, and start to punch in and punch out. Capability long term starts to erode.

You see this in a tragic way in change management efforts, when new behaviors or new ways of thinking are needed. Terrified employees have no idea how they will step up to higher cognitive capabilities.

You see, they have been taught that their thoughts, ideas, questions, insights and other sense-making mechanisms aren’t valued. They have learned that those above them are too busy to share context, let alone hear the context that they hold.

This is more than just a workplace quality or productivity issue – it is something like an existential death. Employees who feel that their thoughts don’t matter, and aren’t wanted, lose a vital part of themselves.

You can see this in employees who tell stories of organizations where the sense-making stopped. They appear somewhat lifeless, ground-down, unmotivated and sad.

Wouldn’t you be?

There is a very direct way employees can reach this condition. When they are told, “When I want your ideas I’ll ask for them,” or “Just do it,” or “You’re not paid to ask questions,” they are hearing what amounts to the end of the line.

So what is a supervisor to do?

One of the ironies of this work in development and organizational supervision is that the answer is often what has been actively resisted. It was there all along, it was just avoided.

So let’s make this really simple. There are two things:

First, give employees real responsibility to make sense of the terrain and make good decisions on what to do.

You may say “What? They don’t really know what’s going on. That’s how we got to this problem in the first place.”

And the response is something like this: Imagine your own boss telling you he or she doesn’t have time to tell you what is going on – to supply the information you need to make sense. As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that working for you?”

The fact is, it doesn’t work for anyone — you or your employees. So you have to choose a path that leads to development, growth, learning, accountability and results. This means taking time. (And it’s probably a fraction of what you fear. It doesn’t have to take all day. It may take 5 whole minutes.)

You can set this up by saying something like the following: “Here’s what’s really going on.” Or, “Let me give you the background.” Or, “Here’s the scoop.” And then tell the story.

Now, I know what some of you are fearing. You think the employee will mess it up – do something that is wrong or bad.

You’re right. Some employees, sometimes, will get it wrong. So make peace with that. They’re just like you.  They’re human, too.

A good risk mitigator would simply say, “Don’t bet the ranch on someone without much experience or demonstrated performance in judgment.” Hand out work and context consistent with their abilities and performance so far.

The other part of this is that the inevitable mistakes are actually beautiful opportunities to supply whatever information was missing. Dissecting what went wrong can lead to tremendous learning. It’s part of the package.

The second thing to do after supplying context is to ask the magical question: “What do you think?”

This is a direct invitation to supply the sense-making that the employee holds, and with any gaps, misperceptions or distortions, to provide what is missing. Give them information they can use to do better. This process of actually thinking about what would work well is actually what knowledge workers are paid to do.

It’s that simply really.

But here’s the kicker, and what many fearful supervisors almost never think about: As employees flex their sense-making muscles and engage in work that adds value – even with the mistakes along the way – they become more competent, more powerful, better able to respond to demands.

In the category of truly insidious, there is an issue here with the fact that some supervisors want to keep employees disempowered, in order to keep themselves firmly in control. They don’t want questions, or even worse, a different and better perspective to arise, lest they look bad.

This is so hopelessly counter-productive and bordering on evil that there is not space here to do this topic justice.

So, bottom line, it’s pretty easy: Share information, ask people what they would do, then let them get on with the work. Help them learn from mistakes, celebrate great results, and watch how the team’s capability flourishes.

A final note. After more than one year in a role as a product manager for Management Concepts’ Professional Government Supervisor Program, today is my last day in that capacity. I am delighted to be moving into a new role that will greatly increase my work with clients, who are struggling with the kinds of issues I’ve been writing about it in this blog. It also means this is my last blog.  However, please continue to check in regularly as there will be new bloggers continuing to share their supervisory insights on the GovSupervisor blog

I have enjoyed sharing my perspectives on workplace issues and opportunities, and hearing from some of you. My greatest hope is that somewhere along the line, an idea, a practice, a tool helped you in some way.

Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2013.

One common criticism of the work of supervisory development is that “it’s all common sense.”

Depending on what you define as common (and leaving aside for the moment the sometimes profound differences among people in such definitions), this can be true.

One participant in a workshop some time ago made this point, but the woman sitting right next to her immediately followed with, “I could never do all these things!”

You see, we sometimes reply to the criticism with the comment that common sense is not always common practice.

And as has been said, “To know and not do is to not know.”

This was brought home in a vivid way in a training session when the group worked itself into strong agreement on the point that they needed to support each other. Sometimes, when groups get into this mood you can almost feel the nice, positive, even righteous vibe. It feels so good to talk about.

The practice part of the talk came up in the same day when one group member became so upset over something that had transpired in the group that she had to leave the room. In tears.

Now, you would think that if there were a test of group support it might come in a moment when a group member was so upset that she broke down.

But this group went right on talking about the issue (scheduling) and practically pretended that nothing had happened.

Talk about the elephant in the middle of the room.

I think there’s a reason that most faith traditions have people show up about once a week to relearn, rehear, reintegrate and reconsider lessons that they may or may not be implementing in their lives.

It’s easy to sit there and hear messages about all the things the different faiths preach. It’s another to live your life that way.

It’s not so dissimilar from learning about working with other people, supervising and leading them in ways that work for everyone, get results and leave something meaningful behind.

I suspect that as long as human beings are in charge, there will be something of a gap in our intentions/expressions and our behavior. This is the stuff of feedback, self-observation, assessments and a myriad of other things that are part of raising the game.

And if you say it’s common sense my question is: So how often do you do it?

It had been a long, eventful week and I was greeting the weekend from the comfort of my favorite chair with a cappuccino when my wife came into the room to tell me she had discovered a secret of life.

Well, two, actually, but the second is the point of this blog.

OK, if you were wondering what the first is, it’s to do work you love. That’s actually very relevant to supervising people, but we’ll have to come back to that one another time.

For now, here’s the secret – the second one — she wanted to share: Hang out with really great people.

Having just returned from a reunion of Georgetown leadership coaching program types, and feeling the intellectual and emotional stimulation of a truly phenomenal bunch of people, I could really relate to Secret No. 2.

So what about you and supervision?

One thing I’ve noticed is that when we – anybody – spends time with negative, cynical, never-satisfied, complaining, low-horizon, don’t-bother, ain’t-it-awful, let-go-of-hope, bitter people, (and I think younger people sometimes refer to “The Haters”), we can find those parts of ourselves emerging. It’s like we fall into sympathy with the mindset, and may starting thinking to ourselves (or expressing to others), “You know, it actually really is pretty bad when you stop to think about it.”

Whether you call it mood contagion, the bad apple in the barrel, limbic system resonance or anything else, it’s a very real effect.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. And here’s something of a secret supervisors can use: Find other supervisors who are known for being great and buy them a coffee. Make it a good coffee. You know, a gourmet coffee.

And while you’re having this coffee, ask them about how they supervise others.

In doing this, you are going to hear the source code for great, effective behaviors and communication that work. This source code is the content AND structure of their thinking – how they interpret challenges and opportunities, what they have already experienced, assumptions they make, how expansive and accurate their perspective is.

Let’s say you’re struggling with two employees who are locked in conflict. You want to tell them to just get back to work, but you know that’s a little unrealistic. Easy, but not effective.

You may hear your new best friend say something like: “I always ask each of them to just listen completely to the other person – no interruptions allowed – go away for a day or two, and then come back and respond.”

The genius in such a move is that people really have to open up to the other perspective, and instead of deflecting that with arguing or mental gymnastics, they have to sit with it for a while. In such a context, they may start to see at least seeds of truth, and even if in a begrudging way, start to open up to a different way of seeing things. They also appreciate having their day in court to tell the story from their perspective with no interruptions.

This is just an example – there are easily hundreds, where someone playing the game at a higher level can give you some tips and ideas. I always say the best moves are stolen – no one has a patent on wisdom.

Another example might be that you are confused about what motivates employees. Another supervisor might ask you, “Have you asked them?”

Just four words might create the shift for you.

If you play tennis you know there’s a standard recommendation that if you want to get better, play against someone better than you. You are forced to raise your game.

So, find other great supervisors, find a good coffee shop, spring for the gourmet coffee, and access the source code of a later version operating system that they find runs well.

The supervisor was in disbelief, then shock, then rage, and finally full-out sobbing as she heard the staff talk openly for the first time about what it was like to work for her. For many years, she had run the place, doing whatever she thought was right, getting work done, thinking things must be OK.

But the results were getting less and less OK, and so a consultant had been called in. He talked with everyone, asking questions, noticing things, and finally convening a meeting in which people got honest.

It was fascinating to watch the supervisor. At first, the idea was that “nothing is wrong, why are we wasting time talking about this?” Etc. Then as the staff’s feelings came pouring out, she became more and more uncomfortable. One person said it was impossible to disagree with her. Of course, she disagreed with this (cue rimshot on the irony drum), but here came the others, saying the employee was speaking the truth.

Her two personalities also came up: would it be the nice, reasonable boss who showed up today? Or would it be the holy terror? She denied this, but did so in a way that didn’t leave much doubt that boss No. 2 was probably never very far away.

And then the consultant delivered the payload. He said that the people needed to be fixed before the business could be fixed.

This is not much of a stretch if you think of work as a series of relationships through which work gets done. (If you take a purely mechanistic view of work – that is it nothing more than people-neutral processes, then we need to drop back 10 yards and address some different, even more basic things.)

But here’s the kicker: Virtually no one thinks it is he or she who needs to be “fixed.” (This may not be the best word that could have been used, but the meaning is clear.) And as long as the problem is always “out there,” we engage in blaming, finger-pointing, denial and rationalization, and the longer it takes to fix the organization.

The truth is, few people have the stomach, will, courage or desire. It is initially deflected by eye-rolling, dismissive talk of needing to get the real work done, focusing on the job, not getting touchy-feely, and so on.

It is, for the most part, an unconscious dodge. By unconscious, I mean people are not really aware of what they are doing. They don’t consciously say to themselves, “Hmm. This is starting to feel uncomfortable. I realize I may have to tear up some basic patterns of how I supervise, communicate and interact, and I don’t really know who I would be if I did work that deep.”

Instead, it takes the form of railing at the world – at least the world of employees or anyone else in the way of feeling right. What’s wrong with them? Why don’t they get it?

The issue is forced when multiple people are lining up to say what the denial is all about. The escape hatches get sealed, and the supervisor has to confront his or her own behavior, whether it’s micromanagement, unwillingness to listen, hot-headedness,  or any of the other sins that show up so frequently in surveys and conversations about supervision. A 360-degree assessment can serve this purpose.

When this happens, the supervisor may invoke the final defense, which I heard expressed once: “Everyone here is crazy except me.” One woman I coached blamed her abysmal ratings on the structure of the government agency in which she worked. The org chart was to blame.

So what is a supervisor to do?

First, you have to realize that supervision really is about relationships – the communication, interaction, trust level, confidence, support, guidance, mentoring and on and on. If you accept that premise that the relationship matters, then you can see that in any other relationship, good communication about what is happening really matters.

Accordingly, the most important move a supervisor can make, particularly if he or she suspects anything like the above, is to ask employees what they are really thinking and feeling. This is a radical move for supervisors who believe their only real job is to tell people what to do. It reverses the flow, and opens the supervisor to this thing called feedback.

Let us pause here to re-establish a central premise that virtually all supervisors would agree with: that it is important to give employees feedback on performance. Right? So why is it any different when the employee also has a title of supervisor?

The response of “That’s just not how it works,” apart from being a circular argument, reveals a central issue with power, information, accountability and performance. If the title is the shield, what does that say about the capability or willingness of the supervisor to improve? Wouldn’t anyone wanting to improve actually want feedback?

And here the issue of whether one is strong enough to hear the tough stuff comes up. It actually takes a strong supervisor to hear things that may be uncomfortable, without pulling the rip cord.

The advent of the 360-degree appraisal means we are living in interesting times. This is now an institutionalized device by which this feedback is happening. In working with clients and coaching them around their results, a clear divide has emerged for me: those who are interested in the feedback, want to know others’ perceptions and are willing to work on themselves, and those who don’t want to know, dismiss the data, or attack the feedback givers.

The question is which camp you want to be in. It can be either, but one can lead to growth, development, better communication and relationships and trust. The other to stagnation.

A final point about the scenario described at the beginning. The person facilitating the feedback was Gordon Ramsay, the infamous chef on all those television shows. It was one of those episodes in which a restaurant gets turned around. He said, quite well, “You can’t fix the restaurant until you fix the people.”

So true, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s a restaurant, government agency, non-profit, religious organization or the PTA. When people come together to get something done, stuff is going to happen, and perceptions are going to emerge about whoever is supervising.

The question is what do you do with that?

In the business of supervisory development, we have a favorite old story that makes a powerful point. Here it is:

A supervisor says to an employee, “Bring me a rock.”

So the employee responds, proudly delivering a rock to the supervisor’s desk.

“I didn’t mean one this big!” the supervisor says.

So the employee brings back a smaller rock.

“I didn’t mean tiny!” the supervisor says. “What’s with the extremism?”

So the employee brings a mid-sized rock. But it’s not the right color. Too grey.

So the next rock is brown. But it has sharp edges, and the supervisor wanted rounded edges, like one from a riverbed.

Finally, a rock that meets standards gets handed over.

At this point, many people say “Phew!” and life goes on. But not in this blog. There are several important things that happened – or didn’t – that bear analysis.

1. If you think this is a silly story, recall a time when you wrote a document, it wasn’t “right,” and you kept rewriting until finally you had the rock – excuse me, document – that was up to the mystery standard.
2. If you can remember such a time (and if you didn’t you’re lucky), you can also probably remember the frustration and stress you felt. This can’t be good for anyone.
3. It’s just possible that your boss wondered about your motivation, intelligence, work ethic or ability to focus. Just saying.
4. Finally, we are talking about a really expensive rock. If you calc your salary and the time it took to keep getting rocks, it’s a big number.

What’s the takeaway for supervisors?

If people keep bringing you work products you don’t want, you might consider – before getting too judgmental – if you have been clear about your expectations.

The old saying about SMART goals can help here. You’re probably familiar with it. It stands for

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

It may sound corny, but if your goals meet this test, there’s a lot better chance employees won’t bring you results that don’t help.

So the head of the Windows operating system is out at Microsoft.

Just a few months ago he was the hero, having pulled off a rescue of the much-maligned Vista operating system.

He was (and I guess still is) apparently brilliant.

So why the axe?

The one word that kept coming up when people described his management style was “abrasive.”

Maybe you know someone who is abrasive. It’s often characterized by impatience, voice raising, intimidation, arguing, even threats. This kind of personality keeps others one edge, wondering what’s next, and when a caustic comment or even explosion is around the corner. It compromises their communication.

It makes you wonder, if courtesy of abrasiveness you can lose a top job at Microsoft even after achieving hero status, what’s going on?

The fact is, you can usually get by with smarts and technical competence – even brilliance — and horrible people skills, but only for a while. Eventually, whether you call it karma, the chickens coming home to roost, or divine justice, the road runs out, or perhaps more appropriately in this case, the window closes.

There is always this debate on what really matters in the workplace, and many people come down on the side of just getting the work done is what matters.

But today, you need technical smarts/accomplishment AND people smarts. You need intellectual and emotional intelligence. That is, if you want to work with other human beings.

And here’s a key point: the technical and people skills are not mutually exclusive. Anyone can learn the people skills needed for everyone to do their best work.

A great place to start if you want to work better with other people and avoid career-stopping moves in the classic old book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. It’s beyond the scope of this blog to even summarize the many powerful messages in the book, but everyone I know who has read it says it ranks up high as one of the best expressions of emotional intelligence ever written.

Sometimes in life, it’s hard to know how you’re doing. The measurement may not be clear, people may not give you any feedback, and the goal itself may be fuzzy.

However, in supervision there is one way to keep really good track of how you’re doing in the eyes of those you supervise. I learned this one the hard way many years ago while supervising a group of journalists in London (another career), and here it is:

The more you rely on your positional power – your authority — to get things done, the more trouble you’re in.
In most of the military, this would provoke an immediate argument, since the dominant theory in use there is still behavior by direct order. (I completely support that in emergencies, or when the unit needs to take the hill. But I’m talking here about the garden variety federal workplace where information is managed, problems are identified and solved, people work through obstacles, surprises and the unexpected, etc. This is the stuff of knowledge work.)

Outside a battlefield context, use of the “Because I’m the boss, that’s why” badge may get you the immediate result you need – and I am overlooking here the potential for malicious compliance and the underwhelming result of token compliance – just the bare minimum.

Even if you get that short-term result, here’s what you have set into motion:
• Employees who feel they aren’t asked about what needs to be done, and who then feel that their working perspective doesn’t matter.
• Chronic disempowerment, which you will discover the hard way when you are scratching your head wondering why people don’t take the initiative more.
• To be frank, bad feelings, including resentment, irritation and anger, which do not exactly help interaction, cooperation and commitment in time period 2.

Since reciprocity is a fundamental law of human nature – the value of fairness is rooted in it – it’s important to understand that people psychologically “get even” in ways direct and indirect. The symptoms identified above are examples.
There is an old story from the Navy about a reviled captain of a ship. He managed to anger just about everyone he came into contact with. One day the ship’s anchor was laying unchained on the deck of the ship. The captain walked by and barked, “Get rid of that anchor.”

Guess what the crew did.

We’ve all heard the metaphor of the rudderless organization, usually when leadership is ineffective, but in this case there was, literally, an anchorless ship. Just following orders, sir. And you can probably imagine the laughter below deck later.
One way to think about this dynamic is through the lens of product and process. That’s perhaps a fancy way of saying you can focus on what work gets done (product), or whether the way that work gets done strengthens or weakens the levels of trust, communication and motivation among people (process).

Or both.

One reason to care about process stuff is that you really need it down the road, like when you need the team to really organize quickly to get something done that’s hard. A group that has goodwill toward the supervisor will jump on it. If the social capital account is bankrupt, you can expect lots of questions, hesitation, foot-dragging, hemming and hawing, excuses, glances at the watch, sudden awareness of other commitments, and other behaviors that are not going to get you closer to the goal.

Reciprocity is a fundamental law of human nature. Or, as one speaker once put it, “Everybody always gets even in the end. Someone else said “You reap what you sow.”

There is an alternative to all this, and it is to get work done (process, again) in ways that get the supervisor the “what” (product) they need.

So what’s the secret sauce?
• Give employees lots of information and help them understand the challenges.
• Help them feel like their ideas and effort are part of the solution. They are connected to the issue.
• Ask them for their best ideas on how to meet those challenges.
• Give them feedback on good and bad ideas so they learn.
• Express appreciation, support and encouragement when they come up with good ideas and good work.
• Empower them to do the work. Don’t micromanage, get controlling, dictating or dictatorial.
• Give them the support they need. When they have questions, get answers. When they run into obstacles, be a thinking partner to help them find a solution.
• Link their work to their larger development. Help them to see the tasks as part of the growth of their career, not random things that you need someone else to do.
• Finally, get a reality check periodically. How do they feel about things? Are they frustrated? Encouraged? Feel supported? Hung out to dry? Aware ? Clueless? Have an honest conversation in checking in with them.

There may be times when you get work done through direct orders, but the less often this is, the more effective you and your people will be. And if you today are getting work done just through orders from your higher GS level, you’re probably already in a lot of trouble – see bullets above.

Complimentary Webinar! Helping Great Individual Contributors Become Great Supervisors

Hear real-life examples of mistakes federal supervisors made, how they recovered, and how these “mistakes” increased the long-term effectiveness of the agency, team, and supervisor.

November 13, 1:00pm, EST- 2:00pm, EST

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If you’re ever in a group that is having trouble agreeing on much of anything, just ask if they know someone who was a great individual performer, got promoted into a supervisory role, and then stunk the place up.

This phenomenon has become almost an archetype. In fact, the Peter Principle – that people get promoted to their level of incompetence – was coined to describe just such a pattern.

Why would any organization do this?

The first reason is that people are not skilled at differentiating technical performance from leading people. That is, they do not have a good body of knowledge around what it takes to succeed in a profoundly interpersonal role – one where power is present, and where so much is at stake.

And so the people who decide on these things, not being sure what, for example, emotional intelligence, engagement or motivating behaviors are, just go with Andrew or Andrea Achiever. “Surely, they must be able to set the standard, to show the way,” they are probably thinking.

Unfortunately, being able to do the work, and leading others who do the work, are really different.

The second reason is even lazier, and that is sheer time. After some point, a person has been in the role a while, there is an opening, and they are next in line. It’s just a numbers/time game; nothing to do with competence.

It turns out there are some predictable problems in this shift. They include inability or unwillingness to delegate or allocate work fairly, poor conflict management, hoarding information and above all, just not making the shift from doer to leader.

These – and their solutions — will all be explored in a webinar Nov. 13 at 1:00 PM EST. Click here to learn more about this topic.

And in the meantime, we would be interested in knowing, what have you seen when people have successfully, or not so successfully, transitioned into a supervisory role?

You have probably been in all kinds of different teams over the years. That means you’ve been in good ones and bad ones, and you already know, for sure, there is a really big difference.

Life in a great team is usually exciting, energizing, fun and productive. Things get into a good groove.  Life in a bad team is . . . well, I won’t go into the adjectives since this blog is intended for polite company.

The things that bedevil teams often fall into two categories: technical and social. Technical problems include things like an unclear purpose, poor information systems, scope creep, not enough time or fuzzy goals. As bad as those things can get, the social problems are usually much more difficult. These include things like personality differences, fighting, hidden agendas, the sub-team that meets apart from the team to get its ducks in a row, people who don’t come to team meetings any more, and so on.

I fully realize that some readers of this blog may be saying to themselves, “Here we go again. Another piece on the people factor at work. Sigh.” (This is especially the case if their third Myers-Briggs letter is “T”.)

So in my continuing quest to convince people that people stuff matters at work, let me pose a difficult – even a trick – question. Here it is: How many teams have you been on that did not have people?

See how that works?

A few years ago I wrote a book titled The Five Commitments of a Leader. The second of those commitments is to the people at work. Here’s what that means in a team context.

Many teams are pretty transactional, a depersonalized entity in which team members just exchange work products, each person presumably adding value, and then the team shipping some kind of work product out the door. There is no real connection or spirit in the team, it’s just work.

This may be fine in many cases. But when the going gets tough, and problems crop up, the team may need more in order to stay above water and continue functioning.  Examples of this include either the technical or the social factors described above.

When trouble comes, there is a very basic question that can be asked of team members, the answer to which has radical implications for outcomes.

And that question is: Are the team members committed to each other?

If they aren’t, a variety of things can happen: indifference, bad conflict, bus throwing, blaming, attacking, defensiveness, counter-attack, meetings after the meeting, poisoned relationships, and sometimes a collapse of the team – the people just can’t work together anymore.

The alternative is that team members are committed to each other. That means that when they are interacting, they are focused both on the core work and how the communication and relationships are functioning. They are aware when other team members are having problems, feel overwhelmed, don’t have what they need, are confused or upset. They usually find these things out by caring enough to pay attention to the verbal and non-verbal signals, and explicitly checking, as in, “How are things going for you?” Or, “You seem pretty bummed out. What’s going on?”

Team members always have a sense of whether others in the team care about them. When that is present, it encourages a healthy communication and interaction, and that is vital for team success.

The problem is that teams are still pretty much a rogue structure in many workplaces. The org chart hierarchy is what rules the day, and the concept that there is mutual accountability (not just accountability to one boss) is a big stretch for many old-school types. They don’t think it’s in their job description, and not part of what they are all about. As the individual performer, they are about their own individual results, not a bunch of other people. They are committed to their own performance – hang the others.

(If we scale this up, we can talk about how departments can carry a similar focus – our own department’s performance is all we care about. At this point, serious organizational dysfunction erupts, but that is the subject of another blog.)

When you see someone in a team meeting talk over someone, ignore others’ contributions, grand-stand, (badly) criticize (constructive criticism is vital), dismiss or even humiliate others, you are seeing a lack of commitment.

As I have commented before, the military and sports teams understand at a cellular level how limited and limiting this strictly individualistic perspective is for performance. But knowledge organizations are still just starting to figure it out. It is new, and not everyone buys it.

If you are a supervisor, you can start with a few questions. First, do you model what you want to see by showing a commitment to your employees? Second, do you talk about commitment among team members? Is it even a topic of discussion?

Sometimes, seeing a video or reading about a great team can help people make the mental shift to a commitment to other team members. You cannot watch a sports documentary about a great team that overcame the odds without hearing frequent references to how team members had each other’s back. That’s commitment.

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It’s always unsettling when you’ve got a good thing going on, and then someone ups and changes the rules of the game.

That was how I thought many federal supervisors must have felt when reading the GAO report last week titled “Human Capital Management: Effectively Implementing Reforms and Closing Critical Skills Gaps Are Key to Addressing Federal Workforce Challenges.”

If you can get past that long title, and to understand the magnitude of the disruption, let’s review four of the fundamentals of the federal government.

• First, it’s a classic, traditional hierarchy. It goes top-down, with SES at the top, down through the GS levels, with supervisors and managers in the mix. If anyone has any illusions about how work gets done in the federal government, they should talk to supervisors who, very interestingly, are right in the middle. They are sometimes called the vital linking pin between the workforce and strategic plans.
• The second is that the federal government is process-oriented. In any large system, you have to have good, reliable, predictable processes. The whole thing falls apart from confusion if processes are not clear.
• The third is that people stay out of trouble best if they stick to their knitting. (See above on process.) This means understanding what is expected of them, and doing that. It is a very internal focus, centered around the agency, the part of the agency the supervisor is in, and patrolling that territory, keeping it clean and functional. Innovation is particularly challenging in the federal government (again, see the above on process) because people are rewarded for doing what the system expects. Just taking care of business here.
• Finally, many people get nervous when the law of the internal gets violated and people start reaching out across agencies. If you want proof of this, sit in on some of the conversations around who, at what GS level, will be in a meeting. People know that for the federal government to be effective, connections have to happen. But these are very hard in a very large system. The intelligence agencies still get dinged regularly for not sharing their information more widely with their sister agencies.

Your own experience may or may not map to these. After all, everyone’s situation is unique. But in talking with thousands of federal employees and supervisors over the years, it is clear to me these four items are reality for many people.

And so just imagine you’re a federal supervisor sitting at your desk, taking care of business, keeping your nose clean, and here comes the GAO, saying federal agencies have to be:

• Flatter
• Results-oriented
• Externally focused
• And collaborate with others

Just when you had a good thing going on.

So if we understand the GAO correctly, supervisors now have to navigate in an environment that is less hierarchical, or perhaps just fewer layers, focused on results, not just processes, looking outward (presumably toward customers) rather than inward, and they have to collaborate more.

When fundamental assumptions get changed around, it can be very hard to know what the right thing to do is. I’d like to suggest a way of thinking about these calls in order to make sense of them.

First, supervisors should think about who knows and who can do what more than the org chart. The org chart may not deliver what is needed anymore, particularly during times of change. To really understand that, think about positions that are unfilled when someone leaves.

An orientation toward the “who” and “what” capabilities can help supervisors unhook from the org chart and operate more nimbly.

The next two go together very well. Being results-oriented and externally focused are natural by-products of being customer-focused. Sometimes people have trouble with the concept of customer-focus in the federal government. More than a few federal employees have said “We don’t have customers.” Whatever you call them, there are people to whom you deliver some kind of value. It could be a report, analysis or recommendation, and that person may be inside or outside the agency, but it’s some work product that someone needs. That’s your customer. In fact, one way to think about it is that the entire organization is nothing but a value chain, with each person and workgroup doing something to create value. What goes out the door of the agency is the external piece, and all the supporting work to get it out the door is disciplined by the requirements for the final work product.

If the conversation shifts toward this stance, understanding what results are needed, and by whom, it makes it much easier to embrace these principles.

Collaboration is last. There are probably still pretty significant penalties for coloring too much outside the lines in many agencies. But if you can mount an argument that you need to connect with an external entity in order to meet the demands, you have at least a chance of collaborating.

One big problem with shifts like these is that they take time. Worse, for some people having grown up with an old set of rules, they are sometimes simply unwilling to make the stretch. Sometimes, they have to retire in order for the new program to take hold. But these new requirements will not go away. The more they can be embraced, the more effective the federal government can be.