Every moment you don’t deal with a problem employee, you are squandering credibility.

Your team and your boss all notice –your high performers in particular notice.

You just can’t hide it if you are tolerating poor performance or damaging behaviors, without imposing consequences.

There are managers who are known for dealing decisively and professionally with tough problems including people problems. Be one of them.

I’m talking about the “LOOK Better” side of this here – about credibility.  I’ll save the Business Impact/”DO Better” aspect for a future post.

Credibility is based on Results, Trust, and Confidence.

Tolerating poor performance shows you as someone who doesn’t “get it”, is indecisive, unfair (to the top performers for treating the low performers the same), and is not working enough to improve the business.

What can you do?

• Be honest with yourself – if a person is not performing don’t shy away from the situation or just hope it will improve.  Face it head on.
• Get your data together – start making notes as soon as it starts bugging you.
• After a couple of weeks you will have suffering + data vs. just suffering.
  And you’ll know if it is problem for real or not — and if it is, you will have data to support your actions.
• Get support from HR and let your manager know what you are considering, early in the process.
• Reinforce your standards and the level of performance you expect with the rest of your team, before, during and after dealing with a problem employee.

When you deal with performance problems head on and proactively communicate your performance expectations, you build your credibility with your top performers, your boss, and your peers – not to mention providing a positive energy boost for your team and the business.

Check out a podcast on Building Your Credibility

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I wish I had learned this lesson much earlier in my career:

• Credibility is a necessary factor in your success
• Good work alone does not build credibility
• Without credibility, everything else is harder

Or said another way, Credibility is a critical enabler to getting anything significant done.

Successful people get results. But they get results because they have the ability to get more support, approvals, budget, resources, etc. than everybody else.  It’s not just about brainpower, skills and delivery — it’s about support. They get support easily because they have strong personal credibility.

Successful people work fast. They can work fast because they have fewer stupid conversations like, “Why are you spending money on that?,  Why did you hire this person?  Wouldn’t it be better if you did this?”

Credibility is inversely proportional to stupid questions.

A specific version of this is the need to justify your budget, over and over again.  You thought it was approved.  Then you try to move on to more important work (doing stuff) but you end up needing to spend significant additional time to prepare and “sell” a special presentation just to explain your budget to get approval – Again.

Credibility gets you out of this mode.  People with high credibility are given the benefit of the doubt because their judgment is generally trusted.

Successful people have great teams. Great people respond to, respect, and keep working for people with high credibility.

Once you think about credibility as a goal unto itself, you can start building and maintaining it. Then you’ll get more stuff done, and waste less time defending your honor and your budget.

Here are a few ideas that build credibility.

1) Consistent Behaviors
2) Communicating
3) Spend less money

Consistent Behaviors:

The topic of a Personal Brand is a big topic for me, and will be the source of future blog posts.  But at the heart of a strong Brand, personal or corporate, is Consistency.  Your behaviors define your brand, and the behaviors you demonstrate consistently are the things people “know” about you.

Being consistently bad is better than being inconsistently good.  Being inconsistently good just sets people up for disappointment, and when people don’t know what to expect from you, your credibility goes down.

And if you don’t do some specific positive things on purpose, consistently, you run the risk of not being known for anything in particular — which is also not good for your credibility.

Idea for Action: Decide some positive behaviors that support what you want to be known for and commit to doing them consistently.  Listen to podcasts on Personal Brand.

Communicating:

Effective (brief, clear, and relevant) communications with people who have a say in your success, either because they directly depend upon you, or can impact what happens to you, is a fundamental way to build and maintain credibility.

It’s much harder to get support from people who don’t know you, haven’t heard from you in awhile, or who are confused about what it is you are doing.  Keep people informed and in the loop.  Build relationships with your communication.

Positive relationships can entirely eliminate stupid questions and obstacles.

Idea for Action: Develop a communication plan for Your Stakeholders and Influencers. Understand who they are, what they care about, and how they like to communicate and then communicate consistently in the right forms at the right times with them.  Work on this with your team.

Spend less money:

Probably the biggest way you can build credibility without personally bringing revenue into the business is to be known for reducing costs.

It is the job of every manager to find ways to do the things you are currently doing for less cost year over year.  This frees up room to do new stuff.  Businesses can’t just keep adding money to do new things.  You need to show your understanding of that, and do something about it.

People who proactively reduce cost without being asked have high credibility.

Idea for Action: If you go in just asking for more money every year, you will not be nearly as credible as if you say – “Here is where I reduced the cost of “keeping the lights on”; here is where I have applied that savings to fund new initiatives; and here is the (much smaller) budget required for these other new things.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day work and executing your business plan, but remember you will get much more done if you focus on building and maintaining your credibility.  Credibility is as much an enabler to your success as any business deliverable.

Many people feel unfulfilled in their work. 

They have the constant, nagging sense that they would
like to be, or should be, doing something different.

There are many different reasons people feel stuck:

• They don’t know what they should “be when they
  grow up”
• They like their job, but think they should be more successful, accomplishing or earning more
• They hate their job, but can’t walk away from the paycheck
• They know what they really want to be doing but it won’t bring in enough money

You can make a big improvement in your success and fulfillment by focusing in a very
purposeful way on what you are naturally good at and most enjoy doing — and then
incorporating those things into your work.

I certainly can’t do fully do this topic justice in a short blog post, but the idea itself is
worth focusing on and thinking through:

What do you love doing? And Why do you love doing it?

There are ways to incorporate the things you love about what you love doing into your work.

You need to get to the essence of what really matters to you, and make sure that you are spending time at work doing those things.

Given that they are not paying six-figure salaries to go scuba diving, skiing, visit museums, or spend time with family and friends, you need to focus on WHY you love the things you most like to do.

Is it the adventure, achievement, laughter, planning, being an expert, spontaneity, teaching, focus, challenge, teamwork, working alone, discovery, calmness, excitement?

When you really think about what you love doing, where specifically does the energy come from?

Once you clearly focus on what you are naturally good and, what you most enjoy doing, you can proactively manage your job description to be doing those things more and more of the time.

Here’s the BIG IDEA:

Great success is achieved not by doing a good job at whatever is thrown at
you, but by managing to put yourself in a position to do work that you are going to be great at.

If you do this you will:

• Feel much more like you are doing what you “should be doing”
• See your career advance much more quickly
• Become a more valuable employee
• Become a better leader
• Discover more interesting opportunities
• Get more recognition, relevance, and payoff
• Feel much more fulfilled in your work

You may want to change your work and life in a much bigger or more dramatic way, which is both fine and a whole other topic.

But you would be surprised how much more you can enjoy your current work, if you
maximize what you do to take advantage of your natural strengths and energy, and then tune your job over time so you can do what you are best at most of the time.

More resources on this topic:

• “What really matters to You?” Podcast.
• Working on your strategy for investing in your strengths is a big part of our Career
  Workshops.

I have observed this particular organizational
dysfunction throughout my entire career, but
have never put my finger on a root cause until
I recently read a book called The Leadership Pipeline*.

The first thing that jumped out at me was a comment about the career transitions from
worker, to manager of people, to manager of
managers, to functional manager, to general manager, to business manager, etc.

1. Making these transitions successfully requires not only new skills, but the need to change what you VALUE as you advance.

That is a big idea.  When you are the individual worker you value doing an excellent job at the work – the knowledge, content, details, tasks etc.  Knowing the details and doing the work well defines success.

However when you transition to manager of workers…

You need to Value the managerial responsibilities more than you Value the work.

Success is now about managing the people, the costs and timelines, and developing the next managers – not the detail and the content.  You need to value these managerial tasks more than the details.

Which leads to second big point for me:

2. People who miss this first value transition, sometimes miss it for the rest of their career.

They can end up in functional or general management positions, and then this dysfunction permeates throughout the whole organization. (There’s the root cause!)

They think that they must maintain the same mastery of the details and content as the people who work for them or they will lose credibility.  And they don’t know what they would even do otherwise!

So they never make the Value transition to the higher level role.
And then they:

• End up competing with their subordinates about who is smarter
• Continue to torture their team for inappropriate amounts of detail
• Waste everyone’s time doing deep dives into content
• Develop a culture around being a brilliant hero vs. building a high performing team
• Miss the opportunity to set strategic direction, lead the organization, and develop future leaders.

In essence, they squander their Leadership Pipeline.

People often ask:

What do I do when my boss requires even more detail than I do? and knows more detail than I do?  I’m afraid of losing credibility if I don’t stay deep in the content.

The answer has 3 parts.

1) Use this as an opportunity to connect your boss with your team, which is always a good idea.

Act as the broker of the detail not the owner.

Never be the one to personally carry detail upward.  Transparency and insight add value – moving detail upward degrades value.

2) Distract your boss from the details and help him see the necessary Value transition by proposing the kinds of measures he should be worried about. A few ideas:

• Organizational fitness for purpose (getting the right roles defined and assessing the talent)
• Developing processes and frameworks to measure and track what you need to know about the work getting done.
• Talent management/development plan.
• Process maturity around customer knowledge
• Strategic alignment around priorities and values.
• Process improvements which drive cost reductions
• Effective relationships with partner organizations.

3) Focus on the Desired Outcome (You knew that one had to be in there!)
If you can drive more conversations around key desired outcomes, the discussions and resulting actions will naturally gravitate to a less detailed, more strategic level.

Detail is crucial if you are the one doing the work.  But if you are the one managing the people or managing the managers, you need to make the value-transition to value the leadership and managerial work more than the detail and the content of the work.

That’s what the business and your team needs from you.

See also:  Building Capacity.

* The Leadership Pipeine: by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel. The premise of the book is that organizations do not typically do a good enough job developing leaders so they are always seeking external candidates for key leadership positions – i.e., they have not built a “Leadership Pipeline” internally.