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I’m teaching myself how to program.  A colleague of mine, who has been programming for decades, comes over and asks me how it’s going.  I try to (naively) show off how much I’ve learned by demonstrating a script I wrote, which abruptly fails as soon as I run it.

“Hmm,” I say, and try to step through the code to see if I can catch what I did wrong.

My colleague immediately start throwing his hands on my screen and telling me I’ve probably made a mistake here, here and/or here.

“I know,” I admit. “That is why I’m trying to figure out where exactly I’ve made it.”

“WHY?” He yells. “Just type these characters after this line right here [hand in front of my face, on the screen]: ‘E’, ‘R’, ‘R’ –”

“Wait a second. Why am I doing this? What am I writing?”

“An error output code! Why would you possibly waste your time looking for the error when the script can just tell you what it is??” He was getting visibly agitated…

“Well,” I try naively to defend myself, “I want to test myself on whether or not I remember the syntax well enough to see the error by myself.”

“That’s stupid.”

“…Well then, I’m stupid.  …Was there something else you needed?”

Being an expert means that you are used to dealing with very complex issues, not silly ones.  That is why experts take all measures to fix those silly issues in as easy a manner as possible (so they can go back to focusing on the big ones).  As a result, they see other people’s focus on those small problems as a total waste of time (as it is, for them).  However, as a novice at something, trying to do things manually is sometimes the best way to learn, and relying on the easy way out is a last resort (for when deadlines are approaching and your solution is not…).

Therefore, experts/experienced professionals, don’t invalidate the learning process of the peons.  You may actually shortchange their progress.  Let us struggle a little bit with it, because if we struggle and come out on top, we’ll know immeasurably more about the problem and the system than had we just taken a cop out.

If you want to help, ask if you can be helpful first.  Some people may feel embarrassed about not understanding something and may not want to admit it or ask for advice (just yet.  If this is carrying on too long, kindly insist on helping).  Those who do will probably proactively approach you.

And, just so you know, just because we don’t (or can’t) do it your way initially, doesn’t mean we’re stupid.

Also, using that word to describe us makes us want to plan your eminent demise… so…

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Walking up to my building today, I encountered a man and his 3-4 year old daughter standing in my path towards the door.  I tried to make eye contact and smile at the man, who, conversely, tried everything possible to pretend he doesn’t see me.  His daughter, not yet old enough to engage in such deception, simply stared at me.  Giving up my attempt at courtesy with the man, I turned, smiled at her, and said, “well hello there.”  She just continued to stare, quite rudely I thought.  Shrugging, I just continued to walk towards the door.  The girl ran after me, in order to hold the door open for her dad.  I gently gave her the door to hold and said, “here you go,”  hoping to incite at least a mild “thanks.”  Instead, she just kept looking at me.

Manners are a vicious cycle–if your parents don’t have them, chances are you won’t either, and that will detrimentally effect how people perceive and interact with you.

If and/or when your parents insisted on your using good manners, chances are they didn’t give you a reason why you should.  As you matured, however, you probably noticed that people behaved differently towards you depending on whether you were courteous or not.

Unfortunately, something as simple as manners matters dramatically in the corporate world.  Your levels of courtesy towards your peers, subordinates and superiors can mean the difference between whether you get a promotion, whether your employees are productive, and much more.  In a 2007 survey, 95% of executives and managers stated that good manners matter when it comes to advancing a person’s career in their company, and that is especially true in smaller organizations, where interpersonal relations are both more frequent and more crucial to the success of the business.

Simple choices of words and subtle gestures make a huge difference.  Some examples are:

• Adding “please” at the end of a request. Doing so makes the person you are asking feel like she’s doing you a favor by obliging, and that makes her feel all important, which translates into a higher likelihood that whatever you asked for will be done and done well.
• Adding “so much” to your usual “thank you.” In this day and age, a thank you is kind of expected (which means that if you don’t even say that, you’re going to have some co-workers feeling mighty unappreciated).  Therefore, to get a similar outcome as that in the above point, add a little extra oomph.
• Smiling.  Grinning at someone conveys that seeing him/her is something positive for you.  It also signals recognition and acknowledgement.  All good things.
• Looking up from your desk/computer/documents as soon as someone addresses you. You’re busy; everyone knows that.  However, giving someone your undivided attention is an important signal.  It means that what the other person is saying is important and worthy of your attention.  And don’t wait to finish what you’re reading before looking up, either.  That sentence/email/etc. will be there in a couple of minutes.  If you are honestly slammed with work, close your door.  That way people will know not to bother you.

The overarching theme here is that good manners in the workplace are actually extremely motivating.  They are also a source of self esteem for anyone who comes in contact with you.  Dale Carnegie is famous for saying that if what you do and say makes a person like himself more, he will instinctively like you more.

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The real difference between the two is the internal self-image you have of yourself as a manager and how it manifests itself in your behavior towards your team.

Confidence = setting yourself up in the mind of your team as a reference for when any of them have questions or make mistakes; making yourself available but generally not imposing your expertise; having your people want to come to you.

Arrogance = micromanaging your team and intruding your knowledge on them, regardless of whether you were asked to or not; checking up on others and consistently proffering advice; having your team choose struggle and head-banging-against-wall rather than coming to talk to you.

A confident manager feels comfortable in his professional and managerial skills.  It’s a quiet and internal confidence, one which doesn’t require you to flaunt your abilities.  An arrogant manager, on the other hand, feels the need to constantly reiterate his/her skills to others, likely out of insecurity.  The difference in behavior that results from the difference in your self-worth is often compounded by the reaction your team has towards you.  A confident manager gains respect of his team, reinforcing his/her sense of self; an arrogant manager incurs behind-the-back ridicule and frustration, reinforcing his/her insecurity.  Additionally, the team dynamic created by a confident manager is one that promotes reaching out for help whenever necessary—as opposed to prematurely or after having wasted too much time attempting to solve the problem—and therefore creates a more efficient and effective work environment.

Break the vicious cycle.  Get yourself to a place where external affirmation and education is not necessary to your self-image.

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Silicon Alley Insider today mentioned a Nielsen study about America’s TV watching habits across multiple platforms (TV sets, mobile phones, the web).  It was not that surprising to me to find that, in general, many of us watch way too much TV, but I can’t decide whether I’m surprised or not to learn that 44% of online video content is watched at work.  The more I repeat it to myself, the more I lean towards not surprised.  When you consider the daily amount of time that an average person spends at work as opposed to awake at home, I’m actually surprised the percentage is not higher.

It is curious to me, however, how employers will react to this statistic.  I have a number of friends who work for companies that either block content sites like YouTube or block all non-essential web usage (except for maybe an hour at lunch).  I understand the [flawed] logic in doing so: companies believe that blocking sites like YouTube will prevent employees from wasting company time surfing the web, keep them from being distracted,  and make them more productive.  However, anyone that has exchanged a series of 40 emails or 2 hours of instant messages with the employees of those firms can attest to the fact that blocking content will never accomplish those goals.

Why?  It’s because no matter what you do, people who do not want to work will find ways of distracting themselves (and usually others).   If it’s not YouTube, it’ll be cnn.com.  If not cnn.com, it’ll be a chain email.  If not an email, it’ll be office gossip.  If blocking content is how you aim to keep people motivated, you’re doing it wrong.

This brings me to another important point.  Blocking various degrees of the internet from your employees sends them a really bad message.  It says that you don’t trust them.  You don’t trust them to motivate themselves and to get their work done.  It says that you know better what they should and should not be doing during the work day.  This action of censorship is akin to parents implementing TV parental control.  Do you really want to treat your employees like children and do you think they’d respond well to being treated as such?

Additionally, just because people watch a couple of YouTube videos, doesn’t mean they’re slacking.  While it’s possible that some people may spend obscene amounts of time on these types of sites, most people will just watch one or two quick videos and return to work.  In fact, I would argue that getting a mental break from something you’ve been looking at for hours is actually a good thing and may make you more productive when you return to it.

However, if you feel the need to block YouTube, it’s probably a sign that you have much bigger problems:

• You have a problem with employee engagement.  Many people who watch YouTube clips at work do so for the sake of a brief intermission.  However, the people who spend extended time on the web do so either because the work is not engaging and they’re bored or because it’s frustrating and they don’t want to deal with it.  If it was absorbing and/or fluid, or your employees got a feeling of deep satisfaction in doing it, they wouldn’t need to find escape in the annals of the interwebs.  It is worthwhile to evaluate the work flow and responsibilities of employees that you believe to be doing the extensive web-surfing.  While it’s possible you will unearth that there are just slackers, it’s more likely that you’ll find something you can fix.
• You have a problem with time allocation.  It’s possible that you’re not keeping your employees busy enough.  I know from personal experience that when I have a ton of work to do, I unplug from everything (I don’t even return any emails that don’t say “URGENT” until what I have to finish is actually finished).  Extensive web browsing could be a sign that your employees are under-utilized.
• You have a problem with performance evaluation. For most positions that I can think of, it shouldn’t matter what you do as long as you get your work done, done on time, and done well.  Most of the time, you shouldn’t be evaluating an employee’s time management skills but their accomplishments (or lack thereof).  You should reprimand an under-performer for under-performing, not for watching YouTube.  Alternatively, then, does it matter whether other employees do some browsing during the day if they’re still able to perform and/or over-perform?  People generally browse the web during the day with full knowledge that it means they will have to stay later to finish their work.

Firms should therefore think hard before applying censorship.  There are amazingly successful companies out there that do not block anything and some that do.  Again, it’s important to not react to the TV-watching statistics in a moral way (“browsing during company time is BAD!”) but in a rational and analytical way.

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Seth Godin’s short-yet-always-insightful blog post today talks about compliance being easier to teach than initiative.  Our educational systems and, historically, our work culture has reflected this unfortunate fact.  I call it unfortunate because progress and success, on all levels, requires initiative.  We are finally in a stage of economic and technological development in which many companies realize the value of having innovators versus followers as employees.

Don’t kid yourself if your company has only gotten as far as this epiphany, though.  Hiring creative and proactive people is not enough.  To take full advantage of those peoples’ skills, you must have a corporate policy and culture that both encourages and rewards initiative.  A previous post of mine talked about what happens when you hire brilliant people to do dumb jobs; hiring initiative-taking people and slapping them with bureaucratic restrictions has the same outcome.

Communicate to your employees that it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.

When I interned at a defense contractor in college, I once came up to my manager and told him I could do a task that was taking 3 hours in 20 minutes, if I could make certain changes to the process.  He was 100% for it.  He immediately told me to go fill out an official suggestion form, describe the change fully, have the CFO sign the pink copy, the internal auditors sign the yellow copy, come back to him for his signature on the green copy and mail the original to corporate…  What did I do?  I sure as hell didn’t fill out those damn forms for a stupid little meaningless process (and so I bet the company still does it the same way even today…).

Red tape to implement process improvement discourages initiative and innovation. Instead of having employees run every potential by management, tell them that if they have ideas [that in their judgment would improve how business is done or add to the bottom line without burdening costs] to just roll with it and see how it goes.  If you take away the barrier to trying new things, new things will be tried. If they don’t work out, it’s still better to say, “You know what, I thought this would be great, I tried and it turned out I was wrong.  But I did it with good intention.”  Forgiveness is much easier to get under those circumstances.

Encourage ownership.

If an employee feels like a process is his own–tied to his name, his performance, his reputation–he will feel more compelled to take initiative with regards to it.  If it’s his manager’s baby, however, he won’t care how inefficient it is (unless it affects his work time) because he’s not the one taking the fall for it or having to answer for it.

Reward [attempts at] initiative.

Managers must recognize that it takes balls and dedication to stand up to you and tell you your old stuff needs to go and then put in the extra hours of work necessary to make the old stuff better, respectively.  My demonstration of initiative is a sign that I care about the company and am willing to work harder because of it.  That in and of itself is pretty awesome and should be rewarded.  You have to tell me that I have your complete support, that I should take all necessary steps to make it so, and that you will devote time and energy to go through the results with me when I’m done.  You need to realize that your support and show of confidence is part of the reward.

Additionally, when my initiative has actually resulted in meaningful change or accomplishment, publicize the hell out of me and the awesome work I did and try to apply my suggestions through the group or firm.  Getting recognition like this makes me feel really good about having taken an initiative and encourages me to do it again (because, hey, who doesn’t like the occasional pat on the back?).

Lastly, make sure you have a compensation and promotion structure that rewards those who take initiative in addition to doing their duties instead of those who do only what they’re told .  No matter how smart I am, I’m a Pavlov creature, so visible rewards get me to repeat my actions.  What does that mean for you?  A cycle of innovation.