"It's never enough just to tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it in a way that evokes power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way."

We love the straightforward advice from Ian David Moss in his blog posting on engaging Generation Y/Millennials in the workplace. It includes tips like:

• Have things for them to do on day one
• Give them challenging work that matters
• Give them face time with leaders
• Involve them in decision making

Although these are obviously good tips for any generation, Ian David Moss explains why these are particularly important for GenY. Read Ian's other six tips and the much meatier post here!

What do you think?

An online discussion: “How do you deal with the “problem” Board member?”

A phone call from a favorite former staff person: “I’ve got a new supervisor and she’s crazy! All she does is micro-manage and stick her nose in my business. How do I get her to stop?”

A question from a coaching client: “How can I get a dominating and defensive team member to let others contribute, too?”

In just the past several days, I’ve given advice in each of these situations. While I’d like to blame it on a full moon and hope that it too shall pass, instead I think that it’s a likely symptom of people within nonprofits and NGOs who are responding to growing stressors of increased demand for services and reduced human and financial resources.

My answer in each of these situations was the same: Stop trying to change them and instead change your own behavior. Here are a few simple steps:

1. RESET: Press the re-set button on your own perception of these people. Instead of labeling them as “problem-crazy-dominant-defensive,” just give that all up. Turn the focus away from you and how they “make” you feel. Getting your own emotions under control and looking at the situation objectively is your first goal.
2. REFRAME: What is the Board member actually doing? What triggers the micro-management? How can you tell that there is an unequal team relationship? Look at what is actually happening. Focus on data and specifics. Gather examples.
3. REWARD: Even if you’re not sure what it is, assume that there is a positive purpose for what they are doing and thank them for it. Acknowledge their commitment to the organization, their wisdom, and their feedback. Let them know that they are important and valuable resources and that you’ve noticed some behavior changes recently that you want to know more about. Use specific examples from Step 2 as the foundation for finding out what’s going on.
4. RESEARCH: Once you’ve acknowledged their value, find out more about what’s behind the behavior. Perhaps the Board member is impatient to get things done, or conversely worried about things moving too fast. Perhaps the new supervisor doesn’t feel like she has a grasp on what’s happening within the team and needs more information. And perhaps the team member is concerned about quality or doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. Until you know more about the motivations of the people, addressing behavior change will be difficult.
5. REGROUP: Now that you know what’s going on, you can create a strategy for addressing it. Regularly engage the Board member, instead of avoiding him or her as you likely wanted to do when you perceived him as a problem. Offer to schedule a weekly status update meeting with your supervisor or just sit down and talk about how best to work together moving forward so that you are building a great working relationship. Work with the entire team to shape the team dynamic.

If you stop focusing on “problem people” and instead start focusing on what you can personally do to change your own way of interacting, you’ll soon find that the “problems” will disappear.

Praise is powerful. It increases our productivity, keeps us engaged, and helps us stay focused and committed. Here are a few tips for using praise in nonprofits and NGOs:

1. Following a Board meeting, when you (or your Board Secretary) send out your Board minutes, tack on a personal p.s. for those who were most actively participating that thanks them for their engagement during the meeting (even if they were acting as skeptic or naysayer).
2. Ask whoever coordinates volunteers to keep you or your organization's top leader up-to-date on outstanding contributions. Send a personal note from the CEO or Board Chair. Also thank them or spotlight them publicly in your next newsletter.
3. Start staff meetings with something great that you noticed the team did recently and give special thanks to any stand-out individual accomplishments. After you do, say "Anyone else have some good stuff to share?" You'll be amazed at how it keeps the whole meeting positive.
4. When giving out new work assignments, remind your team members about how well they handled an earlier challenge.
5. Use praise as part of a "feedback sandwich". Praise before and after difficult discussions can change the whole tone from criticism and defensiveness to constructively setting goals for improvement.
6. Incorporate praise into your programs and services. If your organization provides direct services to people, ensure that the staff that works most closely with them have an understanding of the power of praise.
7. No matter when and where you use praise, make sure that praise is genuine, personal, and specific.

 A Few Additional Resources on Praise:

The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work by Jeffrey Zaslow for the Wall St. Journal

5 Ways to Give Praise by Joan Henshaw at Ladder Consulting.

The Feedback Sandwich by Mike Morrison at community.businessballs.com

Even in very small nonprofit organizations, I’ve seen “Silo Disease” develop. It creeps in stealthily, infects the staff, and insidiously leads to poorer outcomes and a reduced ability to create real mission-based change.

Some Warning Signs & Symptoms

• Worry about Position: New hires are worried about what job title they will be given, and long-timers want a different one.
• Avoidance: People don’t grab coffee or eat lunch together or gather for informal discussions, either at work or after work. In fact, people may not even look each other directly in the eye.
• Clock-Watching: Non-hourly/exempt team members watch the clock and others watch them watching it.
• Overly-Layered Org Chart: The organization’s structure is highly departmentalized, with lots of middle managers, who don’t meet regularly as a leadership team and who “do their own thing” with their teams. The right hand and the left hand rarely know what the other is doing.
• Task-Focused: People regularly use the phrases “job description,” “tasks and duties,” and “policies and procedures, ” instead of “vision and mission,” “outcomes and objectives,” and “benchmarks and accomplishments.”
• White Knights: Personal heroics are rewarded frequently and more strongly prized than team accomplishments.
• Turf Battles: People guard or hoard information. There’s obstinance or even outright refusal to disclose and share unless “approved” by supervisors.
• Weaseling: People regularly try to avoid meetings because their “plates are too full” or “they are a waste of time.”
• Finger-Pointing: When deadlines are missed, no one takes responsibility and it’s all about “who wouldn’t do this” or “share that” in order to meet the goal.
• Speaking “At” not “With”: When meetings are held, they are a series of non-helpful updates, instead of creative brainstorming and action planning.
• Special Rules: People complain that some staffers are treated like “golden children.” People are more affiliated with departments than the organization as a whole.
• Indispensability: When someone goes on vacation, no one else can fill in, and that person must stay available and on-call the entire time.
• Ducking and Hiding: Although there’s an open door policy, the doors are never open.
• Somberness: Laughter, celebration, and genuine emotion are rarities.
• Command, Control & Fear: Middle managers micro-manage and get upset when “standard operating procedure” isn’t followed up and down the “chain of command.” They are afraid when “the boss” wants to interact directly with the people they manage.

Does it feel like your organization has “Silo Disease”? Or do you want to inoculate before you get it? Here are some pro-active steps to take.

Preventing and Curing Silo Disease

• Codify Your Values: Include information-sharing, collaboration, and team-based work styles as part of your organizational values. Add these values to your Code of Ethics and formalize them as part of your modus operandi.
• Hire for Culture Match: When you hire a new employee, don’t give them a task-based job description during an interview. Instead create a description of the “ideal match” for the person who would fill this position and craft behavioral interview questions asked by a cross-functional team to assess whether this would be a good hire. Include sense of humor, passion, and other emotional strengths as priorities.
• Ditch the Titles: Unless essential or requested on formal paperwork, de-emphasize job titles in regular communications like email signatures, and routine correspondence. Consider taking job title completely off of business cards the next time you order. People can be “go-to point-people” without having a title listed after their names.
• Make Meetings Engaging: Start every staff meeting by talking about some great things that have happened for the organization as a whole or some challenges that everyone shares. Focus discussions around vision, mission, goals, objectives, and benchmarks. Make the meetings “planning” meetings instead of “reporting” meetings so that people stay engaged and action-focused. Use email for “informational updates” and make sure that everyone who is “need- to-know” is regularly cc’d as a matter of course. Other tips about keeping your mission front and center.
• Set Organization-Wide Goals: In larger organizations, look for opportunities to create matrixed teams that share organization-wide goals instead of crafting and rewarding departmental goals. When those goals are met, inspire the team with praise. More on praise.
• Eat, Share, Laugh: Bring your lunch to work, and instead of eating it at your desk, find a spot in the kitchen or conference room where you can join others and they can join you. Make a point to check on people’s family, pets, and car troubles. Contrary to popular opinion, eliminating water cooler conversations actually may decrease productivity, especially with small teams. Actively look for opportunities to laugh together, and you'll build "trust" (also known as "silo anti-venom"). More on trust.
• Train, and Train Some More: Make sure that everyone is trained to answer phones, do routine data entry, and respond to concerns or requests for basic information. These functions should be comfortable and familiar to everyone in the organization, regardless of their position or title. Encourage cross-training for other mission-critical functions, so that no one is indispensable.
• Use Your Brains: Foster innovation and creativity from everyone on the team. Both are needed to generate strong outcomes. Build regular brainstorming into your culture, and reward it. More on innovation and creativity.
• Value Line Staff: Make sure that “point people” come from all levels of the organization and have input into important mission-based decisions to diffuse command-and-control leadership. Make “skip-level“ communications a routine part of doing business. Regular contact from leadership with line staff should be the norm, not the exception.
• Unlock the Secrets: Keep doors open. If something is truly so confidential that it must take place “behind closed doors,” get in the habit of taking a walk or meeting offsite to discuss it. Even in non-siloed organizations, frequently closed doors may increase anxiety levels. Make sure that Board-level commitments to transparency are valued and acted upon by staff as well. More on transparency.

What else would you add to this list? Just log in and share your thoughts here!