In nostalgic moments in movies or books or any other romantic media, we always hear or see the phrase "this can change your life". Now that I am working with people, I realize that there really are moments that can change a person's life. One tiny decision that someone else makes for them, can spell the difference between success and failure in the future.
Therefore, if you are tasked to lead a team or work with people, remember these words: this can change some one's life. Take the context of corrective action memos. Oftentimes, we issue them to team members who, in a nutshell, have screwed up. However, it's important to realize that while for us, it may be just another company protocol we need to follow, for the person, it is an important, singular learning event.
One of the things I haven't done in my life before 2011 is issue corrective action memos to people. I had always been an individual contributor, and never had to coach, motivate nor penalize anyone in my teams at work. I had feared that the confrontation involved in these kinds of interactions can be intense and pressurizing. That I have to be on edge and alert to attack on these moments.
When I remembered that a few years back, these people were me, all of a sudden, coaching became easy. I tried to think back to the times when I would screw up at work and get very anxious at what sermon the boss is going to give me, and think back to how my superiors then handled the situation. Some did well, others didn't. Those who didn't do well, I can't remember anymore. I don't even remember what the screw-up was. Those who did well, I remember like they just happened yesterday. I remember what I did wrong. I remember what I was told. I remember how I improved after.
So what do we do then? Simple, take the time to put yourself in the person's shoes. Reflect on how this person is feeling now, what he/she is thinking, where he/she is coming from. More often that not, simply putting yourself in their situation for a second can remind you that you probably were in that position once, and that, consequently, will remind you of how you felt at the time. Were you embarrassed? Did you feel ashamed? Were you smug and thought you didn't do anything wrong? Were you assertive?
More importantly, you will remember how you felt about the person who gave you the coaching for it, and the corresponding memo. You would remember if you shrugged off the incident afterward because you didn't like your supervisor. Or if you cried afterwards for being yelled at or humiliated. Or if you quit out of anger.
Think of these situations as critical learning events. By the terminologies themselves, you are supposed to provide "corrective action", meaning after you have served the memo, you would expect corrected behaviour in the future to come. And for correct behaviour to happen, a person needs to learn from the experience. He/she needs to understand where the gap was, and what needs to be done to cross it.
Realizing it from this perspective has made coaching easier for me. Instead of viewing it as a session to point out mistakes, I now view it as a session to impose a time-out, a break in the system for both myself and the person, for us to think together about the screw up that happened. What I often find is that I too learn from the session always in so many ways, and it has now become a pleasant experience for me.
Of course, learning doesn't happen overnight, and that's the real reason we have "prescriptive (or -ion?) periods" for these corrective action memos. Well, OK, these roll-off/prescriptive periods are also for the benefit of tracking, so we all have a timeline of events. What we usually fail to remember though is that it's not always a prescriptive period for a corrective action to end its effectivity. In the context of learning, it's the period you're providing the person to "learn" from this mistake and prove that learning happened by demonstrating corrected behavior.
Throughout the prescriptive period, the person is going to stumble along the way, miss a few items here and there. But remember that these are all part of the learning process. We need to constantly remind the person to get on track, and tell them if they're doing a good or bad job. Even more important, we need to assure the person that their learning is important. That they are within a safe environment wherein even though we are monitoring for hits and misses as their supervisor, we are not judging them internally as human beings.
In the craziness of the daily grind, we often forget that at the end of the day, we are all the same person - someone trying to earn a living so we can go on with life. Sometimes, we get sucked into the daily motions of emails and meetings, that working with people become the last agenda in our minds, and we resort into tick-marking the items we need to do: have I conducted a 1-1? Yes. Did I document and serve a memo? Yes. Did I submit to HR? Yes. Did the person leave before I can hire a replacement? No. And afterwards think that our work in that event is done.
If it were all that easy and automatic, leading people would've been handed over to machines and computer programs. But it's not that easy. Because the tick mark that you squeezed into your busy calendar can change the course of someone else's life.
I opened my iGoogle account to get to my shortcut for my school's website, and got digressed instead to reading the Tumbleblog. Reading 'The One with the Online Dating Game' inspired me to take a few minutes to reflect and write, and maybe change some one's life. Thanks, Megzy, for always keeping me focused on what matter most :)
