Six Limitations to a Successful Workplace

Everyone wants to be successful at work. People want good performance reviews, raises, promotions, interesting job assignments, and a personal sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Many people want to go beyond their personal success to include success for their teams or departments too. They want to meet organizational goals, have satisfied customers, enjoy good group morale, and work well with others. Personal and group successes contribute to a sense of self-worth, build confidence and competence, and make people feel good about their abilities and futures.

We have observed six workplace problems that limit these desired individual and group successes. Sometimes the problems are temporary but, in many instances, can become part of the culture of an organization. At their worst, they can compromise even the best employee talent and the strongest executive determination. In the face of certain persistent workplace problems, people either develop ways to get around them or become resigned to the futility of investing any further effort.

• Lateness. In many workplaces, people regularly arrive late for meetings, finish jobs after their deadline dates, or don’t respond in a timely manner to emails, phone calls, or memos, even the ones marked “urgent.”

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  Jeannette, an inventory control manager, says, “Our agency’s finance team consistently sends us budget information, but on the finance team’s schedule instead of ours. We need a lot of advance notice to purchase some items. When we cannot get the financial information to plan our purchasing, we miss other deadlines. Even when the team says it will be on time, it is not. This is a chronic problem for us.”

  Although lateness is frequently attributed to personal qualities, such as procrastination or laziness, it can become an organizational problem weakening communication between divisions, geographical regions, and hierarchical levels. Lateness, like many other performance problems, can be cured by altering our conversational patterns, especially by adding Performance and Closure Conversations (see Chapters 4 and 5). When managers make specific requests for on-time performance, and follow up on the group’s overall timeliness, lateness declines across the board.

• Poor Work Quality. Even when people are prompt and work is finished before the deadlines, work products may be incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriately packaged or presented for their desired use. Computer programmers, for example, may knowingly leave “bugs” in their code in order to meet project deadlines even though they are aware they will create expensive “rework” later. When work fails to meet standards or specifications, extra work is required to make it right, wasting time and resources and contributing to employee frustration and customer complaints.

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  Kate, an insurance account specialist, complains about poor quality, saying, “Our sales representatives give us bad data, or only part of the month’s numbers instead of all of them. We go into the database and try to get the information we need ourselves, but sometimes we do not know where to look. We end up doing two jobs—theirs and ours. It’s very frustrating.”

  Problems in quality may be due to a lack of talent, incentives, or attention to detail, and, over time, they can undermine the work ethic of all employees. It is possible to improve quality by improving the use of all four types of conversation on the part of managers and supervisors. Understanding Conversations in particular can restore awareness of goals and support alignment on how to measure and observe exactly what we mean by “quality” (see Chapter 3). Closure Conversations will support accountability and highlight the processes or materials that contribute to resolving quality breakdowns (see Chapter 5).

• Difficult People. Some people are just difficult. People who are uncooperative, rude, disrespectful, or unwilling to adjust to workplace requirements and changes can make it difficult for other people to be productive or satisfied. Whether caused by a health issue, a personality problem, or an unresolved grudge, difficult people add to the burdens of everyone in the workplace.

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  John, a systems analyst, tells us, “Our decision support team leader is very unpleasant to work with. He is mostly nonresponsive and when he does respond, he blames us for the problems we are having. We ask him for things but he does not even make a note of it, so we know he is not going to remember or take action. My analysts are tired of hearing his criticisms about how we should have anticipated the problem and avoided it. So now we don’t go to him as much as we should, even though he is smart and knows our technology better than anyone here.”

  When people are difficult to work with, we would prefer to stay out of their way rather than “deal with” them, but that choice turns one difficult person into everyone’s problem. We can turn many difficult situations around if we are willing to modify our conversational pattern, especially by using more Closure Conversations to reduce the carryover of problems from the past (see Chapter 5) and refresh the Initiative Conversations to remind people of the new future we are working toward (see Chapter 2).

• Lack of Teamwork. When people who are (or should be) working together toward the same goals begin to have trouble communicating or coordinating their work, we say they are lacking teamwork. In reality, team members may not share an understanding about the purpose of the team, the ways they need to communicate with other groups or internal customers, or the “best practices” they should be applying to their daily work.

  Anna, a project manager for a new marketing campaign, claims, “We don’t have any teamwork here ever since Tammy and Milt had a big argument in the conference room in front of everybody. Tammy has a group of seven people who have continued to do their job, but now they are doing it without Milt’s input. Milt has printing expertise that Tammy’s group does not have, but he will not meet with Tammy’s group any more because he says the group was disrespectful to him. We have deadlines for quality and client service here, but everyone is paying attention to the personality feud instead of focusing on the work. It seems like the team is more about individual psychology than everybody working toward goals.”

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  Personal agendas or unclear objectives and practices can undermine a team’s synchrony, but we can restore teamwork by revitalizing the use of all four types of conversation. Initiative Conversations provide the context in which people are invited to put their personal interests in line with a new proposal (see Chapter 2). Understanding Conversations help people clarify their roles and adjust job responsibilities appropriately (see Chapter 3). Performance Conversations spell out the specifics of results and communication requirements to achieve the goals (see Chapter 4). Closure Conversations help support people in completing conflicts or disappointments from the past (see Chapter 5).

• Poor Planning and Workload Overwhelm. Today, many people have more work to do than time in which to do it. New technologies, changing priorities, project scope creep, and “putting out fires” all contribute to a problem of overwhelm, a lack of planning, and ineffective scheduling habits.

  Andrew, who works in a small advertising company, says, “My boss is my biggest interruption. At least twice a week, she bursts into my office, panicked, carrying projects that would normally take days to complete and wants them done immediately. I cannot plan my work because everything could change in an instant and I am falling further and further behind on my promises to clients. I can’t keep up with what I have and she keeps giving me more.”

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  It is easy to believe that there is nothing we can do about an increasing workload or a manager or employee who is not planning properly. Yet, it is possible to gain more control over your workload by adjusting your conversational pattern, including better use of the Performance Conversation techniques for making complete and effective requests and promises (see Chapter 4).

• Insufficient Resources and Support. One way to improve productivity is to tighten job constraints and specifications so that people need to become more creative and innovative to get their work done. But creativity and innovation will disappear if the tightening goes so far that people can’t do their work properly.

  Jackie, a customer service manager in a sales firm, reports, “The overall level of work has not changed, but our headcount has gone down so much that the work cannot be completed by the remaining people. I now have the work of three people, and our quality is beginning to suffer. Last week the company received seven customer email complaints, but we still cannot get the staff and telecommunications support we need to improve service. I don’t know who to talk to about this, but if we don’t take care of our customers, we’ll all be out of business.”

  Many resource and support problems can be resolved by changing a conversational pattern. Performance Conversations are especially useful, as they encourage people to tie their requests for resources to promises for performance, thus opening a new dialogue for resource problems outside the usual “scarcity” model (see Chapter 4).

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Although treated separately, these six limitations can reinforce and aggravate each other. Late or poor quality work, for example, undermines teamwork and increases the workload on others. Poor planning and insufficient resources result in late work, poor quality work, and workload overwhelm. Difficult people are often those who are late, do poor quality work, and undermine teamwork. The six limitations also contribute to distrust, lack of confidence, and ill will often found in poor working relationships, which in turn contribute to the occurrence of the six limitations. In Chapter 6, we will show you how several managers combined the four types of conversation to resolve the six limitations outlined above.

The good news is that we can reduce or eliminate the six limitations by updating our conversational patterns. Abraham did it, as did Michelle, Jason, and Tori. In each case, it requires knowing the four conversations to make things happen and improve productive relationships. It also requires being willing to consider that your own pattern of conversations could be a factor in holding the current situation in place.

Is it true that your talk is the cause of those limitations? Not necessarily, but it is a powerful point of view to take because it puts you in a position to introduce changes. If altering some of the conversational habits in your workplace can reduce or eliminate the effects of the six limitations, it will be worth the effort.