The Crying Child Problem

“I had some concerns at work, and at the point when they got really serious I decided to move on. I advised my manager accordingly. Suddenly I was the cynosure of leadership’s eyes. High-level meetings with senior folks filled my calendar – folks who wanted to explore what they could do to support me at work. People I had never met were now keen to engage in conversations with me about my career!”

Sounds familiar?

The old adage goes “The crying child gets the milk”. To engage with employees and have meaningful conversations around careers. aspirations, growth and development is always a good idea. Listening to employees who have concerns, understanding and then resolving those concerns is, again, always a good idea. The problem arises when this happens only when an employee says s/ he wants to quit – i.e. milk is fed only when the child cries.

This kind of situation sends many negative signals.

1.Employees will always be there.

It indicates that employees are typically taken for granted – a belief that “they want the job more than we want them to stay on the job”. Perhaps this arose from those days of yore when demand (for good people) was lower than supply, and so employees tended to hold on to a job no matter what.
A related problematic signal – we see the value in things and people only when we are about to lose them, or have lost them already.

To take employees for granted is not healthy – it will likely end in a lose-lose situation for the individual and the organisation.

2.A threat works best.

In such a case, employees tend to believe that the easiest way to get what they want is to threaten to quit. This is in the opposite kind of reality, where demand may be higher than supply. The belief is that organisations will do anything to hold on to people – and will tolerate even threats!
Other aspects –

• Encourages manipulative rather than authentic engagement
• Rewards attention-seekers, attention-seeking behaviour
• Recognition is about who threatens, who cries out loudest – not who deserves it the most

Again, this is unhealthy – it can lead to a slew of dysfunctional behaviours from employees (and leaders).

Focus on engagement

Authentic, human engagement at work has many benefits; I want to focus here on prevent (or minimise) this ‘crying child’ problem.

Here are three questions for leaders:

1.Who do you have conversations with?
2.What kind of conversations do you have with your people?
3.When do you initiate engagement, conversations with individual employees?

Who do you have conversations with?

People tend to have conversations with …

• People they like – with whom there is a rapport, some human connection, good ‘chemistry’
• People like themselves – who have similar interests, backgrounds, likes/ dislikes, and so on (this also includes people of the same gender, same generation, same qualifications …)

At work, leaders tend to have conversations with high performers, and of course very different kind of conversations with poor performers.

But no one can like everybody they work with. And any workplace is likely to have a mix of people (rather than an all-alike team of minions). Performance-wise, there is usually a big group of just ‘ordinary’ employees who show up, do the work, keep their heads down and get on with things. And this group, in my opinion, is the one that is least likely to have any conversations with the manager/ leader.

Observation/ Reflection: Who do you have conversations with? How can you expand the catchment area of people you have conversations with?

Action: Initiate conversations with people you are typically unlikely to engage with (you may need to do some planning and logistic manoeuvring). Start with the work environment … you can extend this practice to people beyond work as you go forward.

What kind of conversations do you have?

The pressure is high – for delivery, for efficiency, for waste-elimination. An outcome of this (maybe unintentional) is that people have less and less time for conversations. In the super-sensitive diversity-rich environments in offices today, there are additionally many rules of engagement (for example, “avoid topics like religion or politics”). Huge shifts in patterns of engagement with younger generations who live in the world of social media, shrunken family/ community, and AI add to the problem of “What to converse with people about? And how?”

As a result of these, it is easy for a leader to spend whatever time s/ he has for engagement solely on transactional and/ or superficial conversations.

Observation/ Reflection: What kind of conversations do you have? How much of time is on transactional or superficial topics? What non-transactional topics can you engage people on – even work-related but beyond transactions?

Action: Initiate conversations on topics you are typically unlikely to talk about. Remember, conversations are always two-way … you need to talk and even more importantly, listen.

When do you initiate conversations?

Once you expand the range of people you engage with, and the topics you engage with them about – it is an easy matter to plan when to initiate conversations. There are many possibilities (not mutually exclusive)

• At random, spontaneous
  Periodically (e.g. every month, or once in two weeks)
• Before or after a big personal event for that person (or yourself)
• Before or after a big work event/ outcome – especially a negative one

Observation/ Reflection: When and how often do you initiate conversations? What is most comfortable for you? (e.g. planned, or spontaneous?)

Action: Initiate engagement with employees. Don’t wait for the baby to cry. Invest the time and effort, and build an open mind. The rewards will be massive.

Author – Anand Kasturi, CFI Coach