Losing and Gaining Employee Trust - Say Yes When Possible

Rank and file employees' trust in the good intentions of their bosses is a very fragile. It is slow to be earned, and accumulates through micro-choices, but can be lost in an instant when efficiency or bottom-line thinking supersede the human factors inherent in managing staff.

These pivotal moments are easy to identify in retrospect, but can be difficult to avoid as they spring into existence. Two easy examples, one from several years ago and one from today:

• Staff had been arriving back from their days off sporadically tardy, and it was becoming a drag on both the administrative end of things (scheduling them for an activity or responsibility is tough when you can't be sure they'll be back on time), and for the individual counselors who were being screwed over by their peers. As an administrative team, we had a productive and appropriate brainstorming session as part of our weekly long staff meeting on Sunday afternoons, and we came up with an adaptation to the days off scheduling (starting/ending at 9:15am instead of 9:30am). The change was shared later that evening at the weekly all-staff meeting. While staff followed the new rule, I learned in the end of summer feedback forms that this was a particularly discussed and maligned decision. Staff felt like we'd had one way of doing things, and we were screwing them over by changing the rules to their time off mid-summer. While we fixed the short-term, non-vital problem, the damage we did to their trust in the administrative staff proved irreparable. To be honest, this is just one example, as is to be expected in a long and exhausting season, there were many other micro-choices in that summer that also contributed to the overall distrust (more of an 'us versus them' than a 'we're a happy family' - we're not talking like huge trust issues here, just the subtleties of maximizing intrinsic motivation). 
• This evening was the last night of the first session, and traditionally we have had counselors stay on duty for an extra half hour in order to get a little extra time in with their campers on the last night. Instead of being off-duty at 9:30, they are free starting at 10:00pm. Right as all of camp was heading back to their cabins around 8:30pm, a bunch of the administrators gathered and it was realized that none of us remembered letting counselors know that Friday nights are a little different. Right as we were about to decide what to do (expediency was required), a first-year counselor piped up from the edge of the conversation group and said "I think most people were split on this, we were talking about it a couple days ago and staff was about half and half" - I replied "Well I'm glad you guys were thinking about it, that's the kind of question someone should ask Ad Staff, since we hadn't remembered and it would have been great...." Here I hope/think we made the right quick choice and I sent around the most easy-going and chill member of administrative staff to let people know that they would be covering until 10:00pm. Because a counselor had given us the information (or in the first case had we asked the counselors what they thought) we were able to make a choice that we wanted for camp and do it in a way that would assuage any potential backlash. 

I guess the moral of this post is one effective way of maintaining employee trust (and thus intrinsic motivation to perform at their highest level) is to find room for their preferences and desires to be expressed and met when possible. Or - Say yes when possible

How do you reward/appreciate planning?

Today the PD did a really great job planning things out. It was her day off starting at 9:30am this morning, so she had to appoint someone to be PD. The counselor she picked was a fantastic choice; full of ideas and energy, a third year counselor, and was very honored to get to be PD.

The PD also wrote her schedule to be mainly rain-adaptable since it was supposed to thunderstorm all day, though we somehow just managed to be be "dry" but sticky all day instead. Her schedule featured things like dining hall bowling, makeovers, board and card games, puppet-making, and a slew of other activities that were tailor-made for indoor weather.

I'm just not sure how to properly appreciate her for a job well thought out. Maybe I'll give my Reinforcement Award at staff meeting to the counselor, and mention her being PD on that (which she did a great job at, so duh), and then make sure to tell the PD how much I thought her planning led to the counselor having a good day and that she was an excellent choice. That way I get to thank/appreciate them both in different ways with the same Award - and since it's another of my administrator's award system I've adapted, all of the awards also stand as a testament to his good idea.

Tower Building

Tower Building Write Up


Did this activity today and it was incredibly well received. Had the counselors add their blocks one by one, and then break up into groups to help each other come up with six items to put on the second block. Then they added them while sharing their favorite, then broke into groups again to do the third block.

In the end, the debrief included everything I could have possibly wanted about how the tower metaphor applied to each person individually (and uniquely) and also that we as a staff build a tower together each day of camp. People really responded well to the metaphor wrapped in a literal tower!

My favorite response someone gave was Jake saying "Guys you realize that all of these 72 blocks say things that each of us is capable of doing on a day to day basis? This means we can all be amazing counselors, we just have to try" (Paraphrased...)

Building Ethic Instead of Details

I remember reading a leadership article a while back that talked a lot about KITA (Kick in the ass) managing - it provides stimulus, but doesn't persist after the kick has faded into the background.

This week has been an amazing example of managing by building ethics instead of building detailed information based lessons that are underpinned by KITA. For example: we have not mentioned tardiness or attendance since the first day, when people were shown and told clearly that we show respect for each other by being where we are supposed to be when we are supposed to be there.

By setting the standard of you are being disrespectful to others and the institution when you are late, it has (so far) made people want to be on time in order to show that they care and that they want to be here. Instead of it being me or another administrator getting angry and acting childish (and that anger being a KITA), which would mean that staff would only care about being on time when they thought a manager was watching or would notice.

Feminism

Debated for about an hour tonight about some of the facets of shucking off the patriarchy, and there were a lot of ideas bandied about. The best metaphor of the evening compared the patriarchy to an old house. Yeah you could slap anew paint job on it or throw aluminum siding around it to preserve it for a generation, but if you really wanted to build your dream house, you'd gut it and save all the materials you could and redesign it from the bottom up.

Culture is passed down over time

Vocabulary is a strange thing. When we add words to our lexicon, it helps us agree on what a concept or cultural phenomenon is.

The last few days (which have been the first few days of staff training) I have heard four or five of my "rules of camp" mentioned in the exact context they deserve to be in by counselors I know weren't on staff when I introduced those rules in 2014.

Besides the pride that swells in my heart by knowing those have been added ot how people think, I also really like seeing the process of cultural change through vocabulary.

"Camp is for the camper"
"Say yes when possible"
"Assume best intentions"

Those three all made it onto our social contract this summer, without me mentioning them explicitly.


We also added the phrase "pumpkinface" to describe someone who shows up late to breakfast because they stayed up too late and turned into a pumpkin - minor shaming, silly, in good fun, but gets the point across to anyone late for things that it is not okay to be late. (a little woried of this turning sour by being a hazing thing, but I'l make sure to head it off if it goes in that direction)