The brain has two states.
One is the “critter state.” That’s the point at which a person responds like a raccoon or a skunk or any other critter. The focus is survival. It’s fright-freeze-fight-flight thinking.
The other is the “smart state.” And that’s the point where a person is a human being – innovative, creative, collaborative, and emotionally engaged.
In the critter state, people are insecure in their jobs, they’re robots, says Christine Comaford, A Mill Valley, CA, leadership and business performance consultant and coach and a blogger for Forbes magazine.
In the smart state, they’re confident about their jobs and are ready to take on challenges.
A good administrator can turn a zoo of critters into a smart staff.
‘You come up with the solution’
An essential move is to start forcing staff to come up with their own solution.
When somebody asks how to do something, the traditional response is to tell that person how to do it.
But handing over the answer is no more that giving an order of “this is the way you have to do it.” And over time, “it creates a culture of order takers,” Comaford says.
Instead of spouting out the solution, lead the staffer to it with questions such as what would you do? And what do you do next? What might go right if you do that? What might go wrong?
It may be faster and easier “to rattle off the answer,” but for staff to take ownership in their jobs and do more than rote work, the manager can’t be the solver of all problems
Letting staff come up with heir own solutions “is like teaching them to fish instead of giving them the fish,” she says. And the benefits are several.
One is that the remember the solution and ask the questions again.
Another is that they get a sense of pride in what they do. “They don’t feel like cogs in the wheel. “
Yet another is that they get a sense of belonging within the firm because they are participating in its operations. “Everybody craves that.”
And still more, they often come up with different and better solutions that the administrator ever thought about.
The change doesn’t come over night, she says. But after about three questions that get a you-decide response, any employee catches on, and the good results start to set in.
What is it you want here?
Another crittermind-to-smartmind prod is to show staff how to shift focus from how perplexing the problem is to “what outcome do I want here?” and “how am I going to achieve that?”
Suppose a staffer comes in with the problem of an overwhelming flood of work.
At that point, the staffer is doing no more than bemoaning the dilemma. There’s no effort to solve it. The staffer in a frozen state.
Move things along with “here’s the problem; now lets look for the solution.”
Then help the process by offering a few suggestions, maybe laying out the priorities for the day and seeing which ones can be given to another staffer which ones can be done tomorrow. But phrase it all as “would it be helpful if…?”
“That taps into the problem-solving part of the brain.” It pushes the staffer out of the frozen state, because it forces a decision.
I need your help
The way the administrator gives directives also makes a critter v. smart difference.
When the boss says “my idea is X,” staff hear it “as a directive, and they go off with it.” After all, the boss can take away their livelihood.
Turn the directive into an invitation to think and participate. And the most effective way to do that is to say “Staffer A, I need your help.”
With a straight directive, there’s no participation, there’s no indication that the boss values the employee, and there’s no encouragement for creativity.
But a request for help “makes the big person small and the small person big.” It invites the staffer “to rise up and form a strategy.”
Not change, improvement
Another critter cure: don’t call change by its own name. Call it something else, maybe growth or opportunity.
Change is a scary thing, she says. Yet people don’t fear change itself. “They fear the paint that may come with it.” When people hear the word change, they fear that the real message is “we’re changing, and you may not matter in that new world.”
And that puts anybody in fright-freeze-fight-flight mode.
Don’t tell them something is a change. Say it’s a betterment or “we are improving.” Make it positive. People see themselves as part of growth. But change brings up images of getting left behind.
Meeting only to get things done
And then there’s the matter of meetings.
“People hate them because meetings are grossly inefficient” and cover information that could have been e-mailed beforehand. When people are forced to sit through a useless and too-long meeting, they become critters in a cage.
Make the meetings participatory, Comaford says. Leave out things like status reports that staff can read on their own and focus instead on “requests and promises.”
Request action: “Staffer A, will you get this finished by Thursday?” And then get the promises of delivery: “Yes, I’ll have it finished by then.”
Also, involve only the people who need to be involved.
And then end it.
The ideal meeting, she says, is no more than 30 minutes. “And 10 would be great.”
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