How to Help Your Employees Avoid Failure
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Preventing Conflict with Peers
Building compatible teams, fostering a culture of candor, implementing 360° reviews, and providing conflict and diversity training will go a long way to ensure that conflicts with the boss are avoided. They can also help eliminate conflicts between employees.
No one can deliver their best results in an environment where they don’t get along with their peers. Peer conflict increases attitude problems, office tension, and absenteeism. It typically will impact not only individual performance, but also customer service and corporate morale.
In today’s world, where cross-functional teams thrive, the opportunity for peer conflict is greater than ever. We routinely force individuals with inherently different styles to work together. We mix engineering, sales, marketing, and R&D providing little more than a common goal. While such diversity can greatly aid the creative process, it also increases the likelihood of conflict—and raises the risk of failure.
Proactive management can put a stop to a bad situation before it snowballs. Just as in dealing with conflicts with the boss, the objective is to avoid peer conflict or discover and fix it before failure occurs. Once again, a combination of personality assessment, candor, feedback, and training for both managers and employees will greatly aid in preventing peer conflict. And of course if all else fails, mixing up the teams is an option.
Preventing Conflict in Values, Ethics, and Style
You can teach skills. You can help people gain experience. But you can’t change an individual’s personality. Forcing a square peg into a round hole does nothing more than frustrate the peg and damage the hole.
To prevent conflicts in values, ethics and behavioral style, there is only one solution—hire right! Placing a clock-watcher in a dedicated and highly focused team will probably create a great deal of dissension. Turning an engineer into a salesman might just drive him and the other sales people crazy. And both situations may culminate in turnover. Hiring the wrong people is a sentence to failure.
Preventing Skill Deficiency
Some people fail because they truly can’t do the job. This may be the result of poor hiring procedures, inadequate training, or people being promoted beyond their level of competency. The best way to prevent failure due to skill deficiency is to verify hat you have the right person for the task—whether you’re hiring, re-organizing, or promoting. In hiring, don’t rely on resumes to determine skills. Test those skills in a manner closely related to how they will be applied in the work place. Consider computer-based testing and in-box simulations. Test problem-solving capabilities. A very bright candidate might not have exactly the right experience, but he or she stands a better chance of quickly mastering previously unfamiliar tasks.
Proper training is also critical. No one can succeed without the right tools, and training is one of the most essential. In today’s hectic work environment, training can often be overlooked. New hires are brought in to help out, but nobody has the time to teach them all they need to know to be truly effective. Whether through formal training, apprenticeships, or on-the-job training, make sure that your employees are taught the skills they need to succeed.
Reduce Failure, Hire Better
Many people who fail at their jobs probably shouldn’t have been given those jobs in the first place. The best way to reduce failure is to make better hiring decisions. Hire more than skills and experience: hire people who will be a good fit with their manager, their co-workers, and your corporate culture. Assess behavioral traits to determine a better fit. A structured interview process designed with the guidance of HR professionals, supervisors, and employees who are already top performers in the relevant positions can offer a much clearer forecast of future performance. Such a process will ensure consistency and fairness, improve the quality of information gathering, and will greatly reduce the chances of error. Hiring right gives people the best chance to succeed in the workplace.