Why Do Our Employees Not Do What We Want Them to? Part 2
Hello and thank you for reviewing this article, this is the second part of a series of articles with the same title. I hope you find really good help in it.
There are a wide variety of reasons why an employee fails to accomplish any task assigned. In the first part of this series, we pointed out that a lot of times your employee don’t know why they should do what you are asking them to do.
This in the sense that you need to make your self clear since the very beginning, at the moment you are assigning the task. You need to be able to communicate and explain what is your objective, the benefits for the organization, the benefits for him or her and the other side too, the lost that it would mean to the organization and for him or her among failure.
Now, there is another big answer to the question been the topic of this article, and it is that They think that your methods wont bring the results and that by doing things their way will in fact have the right result.
This is a strong argumentation and the most of the time you -the leader- won’t be aware of its existence.
Picture this, you sitting with your employee, explaining the objective and how to get to it. You assign the task that will give you-your organization or the company the results you are pursuing, your are explaining the way to implement a winning strategy the right way. But, wile you are doing so the mind of your collaborator is telling him or her: “this won’t be useful…I won’t do as he or she is saying…I will do it my way and show how things should be done…later they will be thankful to me because my idea was better.” As hard as it sounds, this happens more often than what we would like to believe.
Here is an example, say you are talking to a sales representative of your organization telling that you want him or her to always show the product catalog to all clients no matter how old the vendor-client relation is. You are pointing to the fact that clients won’t always remember what you have available, also you are making new introductions from time to time, so you need your representatives to make the habit of having your product catalog his or her hands. At the other side of the conversation, your representative is thinking that if he or she do so the client will think he or she have poor knowledge of the company they are working for and that would make him or her look less professional.
Now, when this happens don’t feel that your employee want to challenge or embarrass you, usually this happens when you are implementing new procedures, a new technique or when the employee is new to the job or on the other hand, when the employee have been doing things the same way “for ever”.
Here are some ideas to prevent this problem:
Nowadays managing a team is about (among a lot of other things) preventing failure when a task is set. By having conversations instead of giving orders to your collaborators, you will be able to prevent failure.
By been clear in your instructions and getting feedback from your employees you will be able to know their mind and be realistically in control of the results and the way to achieve them.
Have great sales!
