Tales from the Front Line

The Dreaded Rejection

melissadeangelo — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:00:34 +0000

We all hate being rejected, but at one time or another (or many times) we will be faced with rejection in our personal and professional lives. Recently, I had the experience of having to let people know they were not selected for a position on my team, which completed changed my perspective of rejection.

Remember that feeling after an interview, waiting and wondering if you’d receive that call or if you’d simply be forgotten as if the interview never even happened? Always that hopeful (and nervous) feeling when the companies’ number actually pops up on the screen, but when the person on the other end gives the bad news those feelings quickly turn to disappointment.

Having had several of the aforementioned experiences with rejection, I never really considered how the person on the other end of that phone could be experiencing the same amount of anxiety as me, though for different reasons. That is until my recent experience where I had to do just that…only my experience was face to face rather than over the phone, so I had to actually see the excitement turn to disappointment in a matter of seconds.

When the day came where I had to be the bearer of bad news for a position we were hiring for within my team, I was filled with
dread. I realized what it’s like to be on the other side of the table (or phone) and neither spot is fun to be in. Having to disappoint people is hard, but I do believe in being courteous enough to let the person know the decision and even provide them with feedback that may help them in their next interview.

No one likes rejection and it would be so much easier to just avoid it like the plague, but in doing so we miss an important opportunity to learn and grow from these experiences. A few key things I learned from
this experience:

Call or talk in person rather than sending some
generic letter.
Let people down with dignity.
Provide feedback, if possible.
Always leave a good impression of you and your company.

What are your thoughts on rejection: Would you rather know or not know? Is it easier giving the news or hearing the news?

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Are Disciplinary Write-Ups Really Effective?

melissadeangelo — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:28:21 +0000

Something happened recently that really made me evaluate my values as a leader and how I view the relationship between job performance and disciplinary action. While I believe there are cases where disciplinary action is necessary (e.g. stealing, violence, etc.), I question the validity of using disciplinary write-ups as a way to address poor job performance. In fact, it reminds me of being back in second grade where teachers used to give you demerits for talking while they’re talking or not raising your hand before calling out the answer.

So do write-ups actually improve job performance? Maybe temporarily because employees fear they
will lose their job, but are the effects long-term?

The bottom line is that if one of my employees is failing, I’m failing as their manager. It is my job
to take the time and effort to understand the problem, whether it be lack of training, personal issues, etc., and then coach the employee to improve their performance. We all make mistakes, we all have areas we can improve upon so let’s talk about them and figure out a plan of action.

To me, writing up an employee is like saying, “I’ve given up on you, and now I’m managing you out of here.” Is that really the message we want to send to our employees?

Please contribute your thoughts to this discussion. Are disciplinary write-ups an effective tool for poor job performance or a way for managers to avoid the real issues?

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What’s Growth Got To Do With It?

melissadeangelo — Thu, 26 May 2011 02:57:35 +0000

I strongly believe in promoting growth amongst your employees. I think it is one of those things that separates managers from leaders. It’s not enough for leaders to just talk about the importance of growth, they must actually act on it by helping their employees grow.

Recently I was involved in a situation with another manager regarding the growth of one of their employees that infuriated me and served as my inspiration for this post. I have an open position on my team that an employee from another team reached out to me to find out about applying for. It is company policy that all internal applicants speak with their manager before applying to more or less give them a heads up to prepare for their possible departure from the team. I told this employee that the position was still open, but that they needed to apply through the proper process (i.e. talk to their manager). To make a long story short, their management is making the application approval way more difficult than it needs to be. This got me thinking about reasons why managers would make it hard on employees to move into other opportunities where they can continue to grow by learning new skills.

As a leader, I have a lot of issues with this. In general, managers talk about how we want our employees to grow, however in practice this is frequently not the case. Often managers find ways of preventing employees from applying to other positions within the same company because they feel the team could not function if that person left (read: it would make life more difficult for the manager because they would have to find a replacement) or out of fear that the employee may surpass them in terms of success. Why should employees be punished for mismanagement of teams though? It is the job of a leader to not only encourage employees to grow, but also to have succession plans in place for the day employees decide to move on to another opportunity. As far as the fear aspect goes, managers need to put their egos away and think about what is best for their employees.

While I would hate to see anyone from my team leave because I really enjoy working with all of them, I truly want them to grow. From the moment I stepped into this supervisor position, one of my top priorities has been to ensure we have other backups on the team who have some knowledge of the program. In addition, our processes are well-documented (including all of that tribal knowledge that can only be gained from experience). This will ensure that my team will go on as people move up within the organization.

I’d like to challenge all of the leaders out there to encourage your employees to grow and to not stand in there way when they find the right opportunity that will enable them to do so. Have you ever had a manager who tried to block you from opportunities? Any advice on how to deal with other managers who practice this?

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And Now For Something Completely Different…

melissadeangelo — Thu, 26 May 2011 02:10:06 +0000

Ok, I must apologize for my second hiatus from this blog while I was finishing my MBA at the University of Nevada, Reno. For the past two years, I have worked tirelessly to finish what at times felt like an impossible feat, but it wasn’t impossible at all. I did it and I would highly recommend to anyone thinking about going back to school to just do it as well.

So now what? This is the question I have been asked many times over the course of the past few months. Well, now I get to focus on myself and my career. I can take all of the amazing things I have learned in the program and put them into practice. Though I did not graduate with a particular emphasis, the area I was most drawn to was management (read: leadership). This is very fitting given my current role as a team supervisor. I will be able to draw on the cases, research, and experiences of my professors and other classmates to become the best leader I can be.

Therefore, going forward this blog will document my experiences as I embark on this leadership journey, post-graduate school. I know I will not always be wildly successful as a leader, but as long as I learn from my mistakes I’m already ahead of the curve.

Ready, Set, Lead

melissadeangelo — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:23:52 +0000

As you may have noticed, it has been quite a while since my last post. Where I left off in January, I was discussing how I was moving into a temporary leadership role with a team I had just transitioned over to my employer while still maintaining my project management role. While I have enjoyed learning about project management for the past year and a half, I could tell that it wasn’t my passion. The past two months in my temporary leadership role have solidified this sentiment.

It is for this reason, I decided last Friday that I would leave my project management role altogether and permanently move into the leadership role as the team lead of 12 amazing individuals. I’m extremely excited about this opportunity as I truly believe it is a better fit for me and aligns with my career aspirations of being a people manager.

This role change means my blog will be changing as well (hence the new title, mission, and theme). Although my posts may contain pieces of change management because changes will inevitably occur that I will have to manage as a leader, but the content will be more leadership based. I will use my experiences to explore what it means to be an effective leader. In the past I relied on my research and my observations of leaders around me to theorize about effective leadership, but now I will offer my own perspective rooted in my journey as a new leader of a team.

Do you have any leadership words of wisdom? What does effective leadership mean to you?

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Setting Expectations

melissadeangelo — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 06:22:35 +0000

As with any change, expectations need to be set up at the beginning of the transition period to avoid unnecessary surprises (read: issues). This is what I did today in my first meeting with my new team. These expectations, of course, work both ways, so I wanted the team to know what they can expect from me and what I expect from them going forward.

Team Expectations

First and foremost, what I expect from the team is open communication. If they have a situation or an issue that they are unsure about, I want them to feel comfortable in coming to me. If I don’t know about it, I can’t support them or begin to help them fix it.

Of course we also had to go over some administrative expectations, such as work schedules and paperwork. While I do not want to micromanage the team and their schedules, we do work onsite with our client and are expected to perform a service. If people are not there, it makes it harder or impossible to complete our work. This goes back to communication though. I am flexible and willing to work with the team when their schedules need to be adjusted, but I need to be aware of it so that I can support them in finding a backup and providing our client with reasoning when asked where people are.

Leadership Expectations

I also let the team know what they can expect from me. Their previous employer did not support or engage with them individually or as a team. My goal is to change that. I have a lot of work to do in building trust and a team mentality with this group. Initially, I will not be sitting directly with the team, but I let them know that I will be over there a lot just to say hi and see how things are going. I think it’s so important for me to show my face so that they can actually see that I am around and available to talk to them whenever.

In addition, we will have weekly team meetings, which will be informal at first as the team gets to know each other and the roles they perform. Once our meetings have become more established, we will more often than not have set agendas for the meetings to discuss any projects, changes, announcements that need to be discussed.

On an individual level, I want to get to know everyone better. Everyone on the team can expect to have one to one sessions with me every two weeks. These meetings can be as brief or as in depth as they want, but I would like to have a consistent means of ensuring that my employee’s needs are being met and that I am aware of what they are currently working on.

I hope these initial steps of setting expectations and providing various avenues of engagement will help the team with the change in leadership.

What are some expectations you have set with your team? What are some expectations you have set for your leader?

When Change is Not Welcome

melissadeangelo — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 06:05:02 +0000

The time has finally arrived, my acquisition project is completed and it is time for me to move into my new role as a Team Lead for the group just transitioned over to my company. Now I will need to manage a different kind of change, my own, and how I will begin to think as a people manager instead of a project manager.

As a people manager my results will no longer be based on how far I am on any assigned project with my deliverables and budget. Instead, my results will be based on that of my employees. How are their results? Are they accomplishing what they have been assigned? Are they doing it efficiently? Why or why not?

As my first order of business, I will sit down individually with everyone on the team to listen to their input on how their jobs are currently going and how they think things could be done better. I have already had some brief conversations with members of the team who see room for improvement in a task or process, but are afraid to voice their thoughts to others on the team for fear that they will be met with resistance. I’m sure we’ve all worked with individuals who live by the phrases, “this is how it’s always been” and “that will never work,” but it will be my job to help the team work through this fear of change to understand that we must continue to challenge the current ways of doing things in order to transform the business. My strategy for handling these situations is to ask why and to charge everyone on the team to evaluate our current ways of doing things and ask why we do them. If there isn’t a good reason then we should come up with a better solution. Communication will be important during this time of change as I think people will be less resistant if we are open about why the change is necessary. I also want the team to understand that we aren’t making changes just to make changes, so the reasoning must be clear and open. As the trust builds and we collaborate as a team to make the business better, my hope is that more people on the team will feel comfortable in bringing their ideas forward.

What are some tips you have found useful in countering resistance to changes in processes?

Personal Change – On Becoming a Leader

melissadeangelo — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:00:36 +0000

With my vendor transition going live on Monday, I look ahead to my next endeavor. Though my work in project management is not finished, I will be helping out with a different kind of change over the next six months. As we work to stabilize the final team transitioned over to our organization, I have agreed to help as the team lead. This represents a change for me as well as the team as I help lead this organizational change.

Prior to the decision to make this change, the team was disjointed. People were unsure of who they were supposed to report to and had no real support system in place. I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with this team in providing the necessary support, but also bringing them back together as a team.

In addition, I want to bring all that I have learned from the transitions about effective communication and change management. Effective communication involves listening and engaging with my team members rather than simply talking at them. I want to get to know each member of the team to understand their strengths and goals so that together we can transform the business to be as efficient as possible. I will rely on their creativity and expertise in helping to make that possible.

Most of all I just want to be a leader that they can trust and respect. Though I have studied leadership quite a bit throughout my time in the MBA program at UNR, it is one thing to study leadership and another to actually do it. I know the qualities I look for in a leader and will work hard to exemplify them to the team. My top leadership qualities are:

Confidence
Honest, Open
Fairness
Creativity
Integrity
Has a clear vision and can communicate it
Can walk the talk

Though this organizational change is not without challenges, I am confident I will be able to use the insight I have gained from previous changes to navigate my way through and issues that may arise.

What are your top qualities in a leader? What advice would you give for a first time leader?

Go Live

melissadeangelo — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 06:15:19 +0000

Today I left work knowing that Monday is my final vendor transition project go live. Go live means the employees from the previous vendor will now officially be employees of my company. This is the third vendor transition I have been involved in/led in the past year and a half, so the feeling is somewhat bittersweet. On the one hand I am ready to move onto the next thing and on the other I have become comfortable (read: good at) these types of transitions. I was not always this way though. As mentioned in my previous post on learning about the importance of details in implementing change, I have learned a lot along the way that I was able to take with me in subsequent transitions and will be able to keep in mind should I do something similar again in the future.

In my first vendor transition, my biggest mistake was forgetting about the people. My focus was on the deliverables and the change itself and if people weren’t onboard that was their problem. I began to realize this was my problem. We had a serious issue on our hands in that the employees did not trust us. We thought if we told them they would have the same job that would be enough to ease people’s minds, but we hadn’t yet earned their trust in order to warrant such an assumption. Our communication or lack thereof, was all wrong. Instead of saying, “Nothing will change except the name on your paycheck,” we should have told them from the outset that there would be changes, but we will help them get through it. The main thing, their position, would remain the same, but change is inevitable no matter which company you work for and switching companies is a bigger change than just a name on paycheck. Different companies often do not have the same policies and procedures, benefits, organization structure, etc. Had we communicated the message differently, we may have avoided some of the pain endured early on. We learned from this though and were able to correct it. We began listening to the needs of the transitioning employees and shifted our focus toward them. They were the change and the deliverables would fall in line once we were able to gain the trust of the group and achieve stability.

In the subsequent two transitions, this lesson was used to develop a different approach to the transition. From the outset, our message was, “There will be some changes, but we will work through them. The main thing is that we value you and want to you transition over to us as we cannot run this business without you.” Our way of communicating had changed. Our openness and honesty enabled us to earn the trust of the employees, which enabled us to work through any attrition issues that arose.

Though this was my biggest lesson learned, there were several others as well:

There should be a resource plan in place for all key transition resources.
The leadership of the vendor team should be included early on in the planning as they know the peaks and valleys of the workload better than anyone and will be able to assist in setting deadlines and blackout periods.
Open communication allows for quicker resolution of risks and issues.
The project timeline and framework should be flexible enough to be adjusted according to the size and magnitude of the change transition.

What are some of the lessons you have learned when implementing change?

The Dream Team…Leading Change

melissadeangelo — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:44:15 +0000

To ensure that changes are completed successfully, a solid change team must be in place. This team must consist of members who understand the change and the magnitude of the project necessary to implement that change. The size of the team should be determined based on the severity and riskiness of the change (e.g. an additional step in a process vs. an entire process redesign or transitioning a group of 100 people vs. a group of 12), but in my experience the smaller the team the better. In addition, the team should be comprised of members from different backgrounds. Having all project managers, operational people, finance people, etc. could present an opportunity for the team to miss various aspects of the change due to limited viewpoints.

All members of an effective change team need to be working toward the same goal: implementing the desired change. This focal point will help in keeping constant communication throughout the project. In addition to maintaining a high level of communication, the team should establish clear roles and responsibilities so that no one on the team is left confused about who should be doing what. Having this in place enables the team to hold themselves and others accountable for accomplishing the agreed upon tasks throughout the project. Being able to see the completion of these tasks can also serve as a motivator to individuals on the team as it gives everyone the opportunity to own a part of the change and receive recognition for their work.

There are many decisions that will need to be made throughout the change implementation process. All members of the change team should have the freedom to give input and share ideas on how best to address various risks and challenges involved in the project. Allowing the various members of the team to provide their expertise can aid in finding quicker solutions to complex problems that may arise.

These are the main characteristics of successful change teams I have had the opportunity to be a part of thus far in my career. What are some of your good experiences with change teams? Is there anything that you would have changed about how your team worked to complete the project?