Define: time-out

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 :)

Define: costumes

I had a boss once who told us, "inefficient people cannot pretend forever." This was in relation to someone supervising our team then, and didn't do a very motivating job of it. He would make us go on overtimes without clearly identifying what we needed to do. He would ask us to go to work over the weekends, and we find ourselves sitting with no workload. He would yell at people in the room to the point that some ended up crying on the spot with the shame and humiliation. He would accuse some co-workers of conspiracy and confront them as to "what they're up to". In a nutshell, he was terrible.

After a while, the horrible superior did leave. And so, I held on to that statement the higher boss made, to the point of it being a sort of mantra for me. Whenever I encounter difficult situations brought on by difficult people, I say, "inefficient people cannot pretend forever."

At some point though, you meet different people, and you see a wider view of the world, and you realize, aren't we all in reality, inefficient? A friend of mine likes to use the Peter Principle - you are only promoted to your highest level of incompetency. So, really, all of us are inefficient at some point. All of us reach a stage when we can't pretend anymore.

At which point, we start to actually do the job we should have been doing. We stop pretending to be the "face" of the job we thought we should project. Once we reach the point when we can't pretend anymore, we start thinking, "well, I've done all the things the self-help books, and management modules and MBAs taught me to do, and they don't seem to work." So we bring in ourselves, costumes and perceptions shed off, the self who got hired to do the job in the first place.

So, while that statement is still true to me - inefficient people cannot pretend forever - I don't render it applicable now to just the "difficult" people whom I think make life frustrating. It's a statement that applies to me now. With any given new task, project or job, I have to make sure that my "pretend" phase is short, because that's the phase I'm most inefficient. I'm too busy looking the part, I have little time to actually act the part.

Define: cheerleader

Just a year back, I shudder at the idea of people management. I know myself and I know that it's not my strength. No, I haven't actually tried it full time before, but with all the projects I've handled, taking care of the people involved, motivating them, disciplining them and all that, is just the hardest aspect.

Sooner or later though, everyone needs to go through a "growing up" period. I can't be an individual contributor forever. As I age and take on bigger, decision-making roles in the workplace, I need to work with people and guide them to reach their potential. Sometimes, it includes listening to all their blow-by-blow accounts of how their day went. Sometimes, it means prodding and prying until they open up and help me understand the real challenges they face.

A boss said a few weeks back that a people manager's job is about cheering team members on. I have pictures in my head of myself walking through the office aisles with pom-poms and streamers, yelling "you go!" While it looks fun, in real life, it's exhausting, and I think the reason why that is, is because to be able to cheer someone on, you build up these happy, positive thoughts in you, and transfer them on to someone. With each employee you cheer on, you are a few ounces of positivism less within your own supply. Unfortunately, there's no Gatorade or energy drink you can drink to replenish your own happy, positive thoughts immediately. The only way to replenish them is either by getting them from someone else (i.e. be cheered on yourself), or rest for a while and recover. All these combined - exhausting.

Yesterday, I walked into a room of hopeful individuals in our company who were taking an exam needed for them to be promoted. When I opened the door, all 5 fresh, young faces looked up in a mixture of panic and effort to appear composed.

Here are the people I work for. Here are the reasons why I do what I do. I am no longer young, no longer a part of the twenty-something bunch boasting of high potential. In people management, I am now part of the bigger world whose responsibility is find and develop those twenty-something bunch so they reach their potential. In essence, I need to ensure that these 5 people, and all others like them stay focused on that exam, stay focused on their goals, and more importantly, find those goals early in their career life. For that brief 10 seconds, looking at all those faces, I felt replenished with a whole month's, maybe year's worth, of positivism.

With that, I go back, pick up my pom-poms and do a somersault. Figuratively. I never learned how to perform one.

Define: reciprocation

Jeepney rides, my downtown Manila equivalent of long walks, are good times to think and reflect. There's something about the time spent alone confined in my own "upong siete pesos" space that allows me to brainstorm about things I need to do ("upong siete pesos" is an expression roughly saying that one should only occupy the space paid for in public transports, which in jeepneys is 7PHP, currently.) Naturally, I was thinking about what to write about in my blog, an exercise that I only do at the back of my head when inside the office premises. By the end of the jeepney ride I had several ideas jotted down in the other part of the back of my head, meant for notes.

I had a thank you message from a guest house I stayed at in Cebu last December. I wrote a review about them in Trip Advisor relating our experience with them. The message said that the honest review helped put them back in the competition. Another traveler also liked a review about a restaurant we ate at in the same city. He didn't think the dishes in my photos were appetizing, but he appreciated how the review was written, with information and descriptions.

Yesterday I met with two good friends (make that three, including their son), the brains behind Prodigal Concepts , and shared laughs about the blogosphere clique that we move in at the moment, about the shameless posts and reposts, tweets and retweets, links and promotions we do for each other.

I guess being an active participant online is not just about knowing how to maximize your search engine and find the best deals/travel locations/reviews/movie schedules through the internet. It's also largely about giving back. In order to get content to search from, we need to throw back content out there. Through the back and forth sending of comments, tweets, links and posts, writers and authors can get feedback on their work and improve the material they produce online.

So, while I have a thousand other things I wanted to write about from my jeepney ride, I thought it's best to talk about the importance of giving back first. We post and repost partly because we want to help other active participants remain active, and partly to promote their cause, which in some cases may be difficult to attain, such as buying Meg a Jaguar, but hey dreams can come true, who am I to judge and all that blah blah.