Page 132 - Becoming a Successful Manager

Eliminating Weeds from Your Departmental Garden 123

The process begins with a statement to the department
expressing your desire and asking for each employee’s help to
achieve it. Using your own words, the message you want to get
across is essentially this:

In addition to the departmental mission, which is expressed in
our mission statement, I, as manager of the department, have
my own private mission. It is to create an environment in which
all employees feel motivated to perform their respective jobs to
the best of their abilities and are encouraged to act responsibly
toward one another. To ensure that both of these objectives are
fulfi lled, distractions, which are like weeds in a garden, must be
reduced to a minimum.

Clarify for your employees that “weeds” are attitudes, behav-
iors, and/or actions, either yours or your employees’, that are
toxic and do not serve the best interests of the department and its
members. You can refer to the various characteristics of a weed
presented earlier in the chapter, and you may even want to distrib-
ute copies of the description so that employees can have it readily
available as a reminder. (See the Appendix for reproducible text.)
The fi nal step in reducing the opportunities for weeds to
enter your departmental garden is requesting that employees take
responsibility for being problem solvers and avoiding negative,
weedlike behaviors. If every person in the department, including
you, makes a conscious effort to create a positive, fertile working
environment that’s free of weeds, then everyone will benefi t.
In addition to expressing this message to your current employ-
ees, when you hire new people, make sure they are problem solvers
and not prone to defensiveness. Although you can never be 100
percent sure of hiring people who are free of weedlike inclina-
tions, you can increase your chances by listening carefully to their
responses to your questions. In particular, listen to their descrip-