Tip #2 on Being Professional:  Managers and Supervisors, Listen Up!

Another type of communication that is unproductive – or harmful – is blaming other people. That’s when Person A tells Person B that someone else is responsible for a problem or mistake. Shane was a good example of the fallout from blaming. A new manager, he was disappointed with his 3 team leaders. “I give them deadlines but they never get things done on time. What should I do?”

It made no sense to me, because these were smart, qualified people who seemed serious about their jobs. I asked Shane if it would be OK for me to meet with each of them, one-on-one, to see if I could get an idea about what was happening. “Sure”, he told me, “but don’t expect much.”

What I learned from the 3 meetings was that each of those team leaders had been promised certain things that had not been delivered:

• Erin was still waiting to hear about whether she was going to get tuition reimbursement for the classes she was taking to bring new technology solutions to Shane’s department. She was halfway through the semester and had started processing a loan to cover the gap.
• Stephen didn’t know yet whether he was going to be able to book his flights to visit his family in London. The price on the flights was going up every day, but a key meeting date for his team still had not been finalized.
• Sheryl was the newest team leader, and had not yet received the bump in salary that went with the move up from being a team member to a team leader. She didn’t know how long it would take to be processed, or whether it would be retroactive to her leadership start date.

All three were “on hold”, waiting for Shane to let them know when he would have the information that would eliminate their suspense. Stephen said, “Shane tells us that he is waiting too. He blames another VP – or another department, or sometimes just “corporate – for not getting back to him. We think he could get a decision, but he tells us it’s complicated and he doesn’t make it a priority.”

The fact that the team leaders were not reliably delivering on-time results to Shane might have been a deliberate form of payback. But I could see that they were just discouraged, and maybe taking Shane’s message to heart: Timelines don’t matter, and getting some details resolved quickly is not important when there are so many other things that need to be done.

Shane had not seen the pattern of delay-blaming- waiting until we talked about all 3 team leaders having such similar problems.  He got those decisions resolved the next day. “I see that underneath my excuses for not getting things done was a nasty habit of not taking timelines seriously,” he told me. “I’m going to put due dates for work and decisions of all kinds on our team calendar – then we can talk about them in our weekly meeting.”

Blaming others is too easy – and everyone sees through it anyway. Take charge of your commitments and get stuff done. Sometimes it makes everyone else around you step up to being more accountable for their work too!