Manager’s Attention Deficient Disorder
People do things they get rewarded for. Fact.
Rewards can take a multitude of forms. Some places use merchandise, travel, gift cards, and money. But a lesser used and as effective (if not more so) is “Attention.”
If you’ve ever had to watch over a bunch of little kids you know what I’m talking about. Kids love attention. Kids will do what gets you attention until it doesn’t. Then they look to see what is getting your attention. Many times it is the kid who’s not behaving. Click… light bulb goes off. “If I don’t do the good stuff I’ll get attention for doing the bad stuff.” Next thing you know every kid is misbehaving. You’ve just trained the entire group to misbehave without even knowing it.
Not to suggest employees are children but the concept is very similar in a work environment.
We all want to be recognized, validated and appreciated for the effort we bring to the office each day. Unfortunately, like the unsuspecting adult in the previous paragraph we too often reinforce the wrong behaviors.
It’s the Non-Performers Who Get Our Attention
As a manager you job is to get results through others. That means you rely on the performance of your team to get your job done. Your success or failure relies on their abilities. You pay attention to that. And your attention too often gravitates to those that aren’t doing their job effectively. It’s human nature. Those that are performing get less of your attention because you think – “they’re doing well. They don’t need me to interfere.”
Welcome to a viscous cycle of lower performance. Like the misbehaving children, your top performers will see that you’re spending less and less time with them. They’ll make the connection that you only spend time with non-performers and in an attempt to increase the amount of time you spend with them they will slowly decrease their performance until you notice and start paying attention. Either that, or they become so disengaged they start to look elsewhere for support – and that could mean another company or department.
Managers Need to Allocate Attention
Here’s a suggestion – as an experiment – take a week and chart the time you spend with each of your employees. Review if at the end of the week.
Are you spending more time with the people that really get work done and contribute to your success and the company’s? Or are you spending most of your time cleaning up after poor performers and counseling them on their performance? My guess is the bottom half of your team gets about twice as much attention as your top half.
Before you get into trouble and start losing your best performers make a conscious decision to spend more than half you time with your top performers. I’m not suggesting you ignore the poor performers – just amp up your efforts on recognizing and spending time communicating the value of the work your top performers are bringing to the organization.
As your poor performers see you spending time with the top performers they will either amp up their own performance – or go looking elsewhere for attention.
