Good Ideas …
For Holding Up a Mirror

Holding up a mirror so that an employee can see his behavior and its impact doesn’t take an advanced degree in psychology. It can be as simple as asking the right questions after an event. Try these:

» How did you feel as you were approaching that situation?

» What assumptions were behind the choices you made in that discussion?

» What approaches did you use to manage or modify the situation?

» What impact did your actions have on others?

When you ask such questions with care and often enough, you will help increase his reflective skills and also encourage him to seek your feedback after events so that he will learn more about himself more quickly.

Once he has a read on his current behaviors, use these questions before an upcoming event to help him to plan his approach:

» Where are you feeling least confident in your approach to these interactions?

» At the upcoming client meeting, how will you make the client feel truly heard?

» Where do you think it is most likely you’ll make a mistake? How can you avoid that?

» What approaches can you use to help you gain client buy-in?

Pose these questions with sincere curiosity, and you will avoid a leading tone that implies you have the “right” answer. These ongoing and insightful questions can help put your employees’ self-awareness into high gear.

Keep your eyes open to patterns of ineffective responses to challenging situations. These challenging situations leave your employees feeling vulnerable because they do not have a handy way to respond. If you can engage employees during these tense, difficult moments that cry out for new self-awareness, you can encourage their self-reflection. That will go a long way toward helping them get out of the ditch and onto the higher path of valuable learning. Think about the advantages for yourself and your team. Employees who have taken that higher path are more able to minimize painful situations, push through challenges to achieve better results, and leave you with a lot less cleanup to do.

Four important patterns to watch for every day are emotional outbursts, being stalled by surprises and setbacks, negative reactions to unsolicited feedback, and lack of resilience in the face of obstacles.

Emotional Outbursts

It’s human nature to get defensive and justify acting out. But bad things can happen when your employees allow emotions to hijack their conversations and interactions. An occasional outburst under pressure may be forgiven. A recurring pattern, on the other hand, is cause for alarm and a call for you to intervene.

Sometimes you’ll meet a wall of defensiveness when you step in. Past experience with this seemingly immovable wall is the reason some managers don’t even try to intervene. The wall resonates with excuses like “I was stressed,” “He just wouldn’t listen,” and “She was a jerk.” EDMs overcome this obstacle by turning the conversation away from such evasive comments. They help employees see how their emotional and sometimes instinctive, automatic behavior has undermined their effectiveness. In so doing, they help them break a negative cycle.

Can you turn someone around in a single conversation? Unlikely. Instead, plan for a series of conversations with your employee to help her see the pattern over time. Little by little, she will develop a more accurate picture of herself and will seek out a better way. Alternatively, if her defenses are simply too high, have her dissect the behavior of a positive role model—someone who handles situations well. That arm’s-length exercise reduces the chance that she will feel judged and opens her mind to consider how she also could make those kinds of behavioral choices.

Being Stalled by Surprises and Setbacks

We all have moments of disappointment or surprise when we find out things aren’t going as well as we thought. Most employees can easily navigate the small bumps, but big bumps can stop them in their tracks. They may have missed a cue or two along the way or simply were heads down, getting the work done, and did not notice that they were about to collide with a big problem. EDMs are on the lookout for stalled employees, and when they see one, they step in with a one-on-one chat to soften the blow, lead to a quicker recovery, and create lasting insight. Your work here is to help employees in these situations adjust their attitude after being caught off-guard and help them bounce back from embarrassment or frustration. The work is to examine what happened and move on. The sooner the situation is addressed, the sooner the employees will be back to full steam ahead.