When your team won’t do what you ask them to do
Spoiler alert: you are the problem
I tried really hard to find an answer to “how to motivate your team when they say they don’t have time,” on Google, but came up short in my search.
I tried typing it in a few ways, but still came up with nothing.
Last spring, I took on a new role as a director of a department. Previously I was a marketing strategist who worked with a set of clients paving the way and connecting the dots from what they wanted in business to helping them achieve it.
I took the same approach with my team.
Where I started to get off course is with all my integrated plans of coaching, developing and providing tools, the feedback changed from “I’m not getting enough support” to “I don’t have time for all of this.”
My first reaction was, “Hmmmm. I thought you wanted support…so I gave it to you and the tools to help your job become easier and make yourself better. But you still don’t like it. I don’t get it.”
Focus on your attitude first
I’m still working through this, but I’m starting first with my attitude. It’s really easy for me to think that I would have responded differently when I was in their shoes.
The fact of the matter is we have incredibly smart, capable people working for us.
I am no better than anyone on my team. In fact, they are more skilled than me. That’s why I’m in leadership vs. honing a special craft or skill set.
In getting frustrated, I solve nothing. I only add to the problem and begin to build unnecessary resentment and burn out.
So I’m not approaching this dilemma with the attitude that I know better and they are against what I’m trying to do. I will focus on living in the solution.
Finding the solution, always
My original answer to the lack of training and structured professional development we had was to create a full-on program that consisted of the following:
- Monthly training theme
- Within that theme, a 1–2 hour in-person/virtual in-person training led by someone on the team for added professional development and leadership training.
- Two weeks after the training, Mastermind groups would meet consisting of a mix of team members who don’t normally work together in order to discuss follow up from the training and implementation challenges
- An optional book club that meets twice a month. The book falls in line with the monthly theme to give the team an extra “oomph” in their skill set.
- All of the activities equated to 3.5 hours a month of work. Totally doable, right?
Here’s what happened.
Extra trainings got added from other departments. This resulted in a lot of extra training hours that stressed the team.
Those leading the training felt stressed that they had to put something together outside their normal workload.
Not all trainings were viewed as helpful or relevant to everyone on the team.
Mastermind groups were slow to get up and running.
People didn’t understand unlimited book policy.
But the #1 thing that stung: “It’s one more thing, to be totally honest.”
Ouch.
My beautiful training program that I worked so hard on and made so much sense is “just another thing to do.”
I have two choices now. Throw the training program away and call it day (with a chip on my shoulder, of course), or choose to refine it. I’m choosing the latter.
Iterate, then iterate some more
What’s next for me is to take the feedback and outcomes I’m seeing and adjust.
Next month, I’m scrapping the in-person 2 hour training for a half hour on-demand video training. This solves the time commit issue for both viewers and trainers, but still accomplishes my goal of education and leadership opportunities.
I’ve made it more clear how to opt into book club and am working on adjusting the meeting time so more people can attend.
Get to the root of the problem (hint: it’s not that your team doesn’t have time)
But those iterations are micro and specific to my situation. What I’m really learning, and how it can help you, is understanding how to push through the attitude of “no time.”
We’re all busy. We all have personal lives outside of work. What we don’t all have is an equal ability to prioritize our time. I’m including myself in that I know that’s something I can always improve.
There are two concepts I’m focusing on right now to improve this issue on my team:
- Emotional agility
- Good management
Emotional Agility
Emotional agility is a concept by Susan David that helps people get out of their own ways. This is actually my selection for November’s book club.
I’m still reading it right now but here are some highlights (actual paper highlighted with my pink highlighter because I’m old school and prefer hard copy):
“Our minds slip into default mode…This is why specialists are often the last ones to notice commonsense solutions to simple problems, a limitation economist Thorstein Veblen called the “trained incapacity” of experts. Inflated overconfidence leads old hands to ignore contextual information, and the more familiar an expert is with a particular kind of problem, the more likely he is to pull a prefabricated solution out of his memory bank rather than respond to the specific case at hand.”
In my world, this to me says if we become overconfident, we will not really be solving for our clients, especially in digital marketing when things change so much. We have to continually educate ourselves and watch for our tendency for “trained incapacity.”
There are also four “hooks” David describes that show us why we stay the way we are/react the way we do. If you can start to recognize these in yourself, you can work to stop doing them.
- Thought-blaming — “I thought the client was going to QA this page, so I didn’t.” When you blame your own thoughts for your actions, you eliminate the idea that you had a choice in the matter.
- Monkey-mindedness — “awfulizing” the worse case scenario. “The client didn’t answer my email. She must be mad. If she’s mad then she’s probably going to complain to my boss. If she does that, then I might get a warning, or maybe even fired today. OMG, why isn’t she responding to my email?!” Total. waste. of. effort.
- Old, out-grown ideas — doing what worked in the past, even if it’s an expired idea. “In the corporate world, I never showed feelings at work. This should be the same when I work with clients in an agency because that’s professional. They never need to know that I’m a human on the other side of the relationship.” If you’re a consultant and your job now is to build a true partnership, it’s 50/50 and up to you to find the mature way to nurture the realtionship. (This was a hard one for me).
- Wrong-headed righteousness — the irrational need to be right. “I know I sent the client an email and said it on the phone. I can’t help if they forgot because I know for a fact I said it 50 times.” So what? Being right doesn’t solve your communication problem.
By starting with these hooks, I can help my team break past barriers they put on themselves for success. Which leads me to focus #2.
Good management
Fun fact: I’ve been a manager 2 other times in my career, and I wasn’t very good at it. Third time’s a charm, right? Let’s hope so!
The sad thing is I didn’t realize I wasn’t good at it at the time. I was trying hard, my team liked me, etc, but I was ineffective for a multitude of reasons.
Fortunately with age I’ve been able to reflect and realize this. I am also fortunate in that I am very clear what success means for our company and how my team is needed to achieve it. That makes prioritizing much easier and I know what we’re working on is the right stuff to be working on.
My responsibility as a leader is to communicate “the why.” When I fail to do that, it’s no wonder my team doesn’t understand their priorities.
Along with my own improvements, I’m also looking at improving the leadership within my team. We went from being fairly flat to having 2–3 tiers of management in a short time span. My goal is to become a better leader and help those on my team who have their own teams also become better leaders themselves.
That’s such a vague thing to address, but I think it’s most important to know becoming a better leader is a never ending quest. What I can do is create a syllabus for core concepts and open the conversation so we all learn from each other.
This is partly why MarketHer exists, a video podcast I do with two of my team members on women’s leadership and growth. It’s really fun to watch them come to realizations and grow with the show, just like I do.
This is why I have created mastermind groups.
This is why I instituted one-on-ones across our department.
And that’s why I’m starting with emotional agility. Before we can effect change and growth of our team members, we must get in the right mindset.
The primary beauty of strong management is to help me understand what barriers people really have. When they say they “don’t have time,” that means they aren’t prioritizing and need help. We now have the right people in place to help. And it’s my job to help them be effective, servant leaders.
What do you think?
So rather than take the easy way out and blame those who see your focus as “just another thing on my to do list,” turn it around on yourself and what changes you need to make not only in your approach but the systems you have around your team to enable their success.
I’m still a work in progress, and would love to know any additional ideas or things you’ve done to address this issue on your team. Drop a comment and please recommend if you liked this article so I know to keep them coming!
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