“Do As I Say, Not as I Do”

Hello and welcome. Our topic today is ‘its okay for me to make a mistake, but not you’. Sadly, that is the attitude that so many managers have with their people. They hold their employees, their team members, to a standard that oftentimes is different than the one that they hold themselves to.

And so they continue to put pressure on people to do things that they themselves are not committed to doing and are not following.  This is a bad, bad way to get your team to be on the same page with you and to be motivated.  Let me give you some examples of where we demand different standards for others so that we can put a little context around this.

The first thing that I’ve seen done quite often is that companies will have an arrive-on-time policy.   They expect employees to show up on time, get to work on time and then to work the entire period they’re committed to during the day.  Unfortunately, I have seen managers berate their people.  ‘You are always late.  You’ve got to be here on time!’  Then, when I looked at their own performance, I noted how often that manager was either late for work or they demonstrated a policy, if you will, or pattern of lateness in their own actions.

Let me explain what I’m talking about. So many managers will say, ‘We’re going to have a meeting at 9:00 today’ and 9:00 comes and manager is nowhere in sight.   They are five minutes late, maybe ten minutes late, and they come running in and say ‘Let’s go everybody.  Let’s get together.  We’re supposed to be meeting right now.  What kind of example is that setting for the team?  It’s setting an example that being late is acceptable. It just depends on when you’re late.

In the employee’s mind, what’s the difference between being five minutes late for arrival at work and the manager being five or ten minutes late for a meeting? The answer to that is absolutely nothing.  They’re still wasting time.

If your employees are sitting in the conference room waiting for you to show up and you’re five or ten minutes late, all you’re doing is wasting their time.  They’re losing productivity.  And yet, we think that we’re entitled to yell at them whenever they’re five minutes late for work.

Now, there may be times where someone has a chronic problem and it has to be addressed.  I’m not talking about those situations.  I’m talking about the occasional occurrence.  It’s almost as though the manager was looking for the opportunity to tell the employee ‘Gotcha!’  All the while the employee can’t say ‘Well, we had a one-on-one scheduled for Friday at 3:00, and you’ve adjusted that and moved my one-on-one three times.   Today you’re twenty minutes late for my scheduled one-on-one that you moved three times’.

Gee, talk about holding yourself to a different standard than your employee.  I promise you, if you had set that meeting at 3:00 and the employee didn’t show up, you would be ready to fire them because they weren’t there on time.

You see, it’s common courtesy to be on time.  If you’re not, you’re not doing what should be done by a leader.

Let me give you another example.  Being late to meetings is bad enough, but let me show you something that’s happening all over America and all over the world in business meetings and in companies.  This has to do with cell phones.

Everyone today has a cell phone.   We all have them, and we’re tied to them.  We get work done because we do have them.  They are great devices, so I’m not saying anything negative about cell phones.  But there are a lot of companies that have policies that you can’t use a cell phone on company premises and employees will see managers using their cell phone in spite of the policy.   Of course, employees are saying to themselves (and maybe their co-workers) ‘Do you just have to be a manager to get an exception to this rule?’  Is there a different set of rules for managers than for me?  They can talk on their cell phone but I can’t?

To put it plainly and simply, that’s having a different standard for managers than employees.  If you’re all part of the same team, this duality of rules just doesn’t make sense to the human brain.   They may understand it from a policy standpoint. You might even convince them ‘It’s because I’ve got a higher title than you,’ and that may fly for a little while.

They may accept it, but the human brain is wired in such a way that they know that is not logical.  They may not be able to express it, but they just feel uneasy about it.   Here’s what I’m talking about so you’ll understand by this example.

How Demanding Are You?

What I mean by people knowing instinctively but not being able to put their finger on why this is wrong.   That actually goes all the way back to when we were children.  One of the classic statements that parents will make when they get frustrated is tell their children ‘Do what I say, not what I do’. Well, that doesn’t seem like the smartest statement, does it?  But I’ll bet most of us who have children have at one point or another lost our patience with our child and we said something like that.

What we’re really trying to communicate is ‘I’m an adult and I’m entitled to different privileges than you are as a child.’    Isn’t it remarkable that children understand instinctively that this doesn’t make sense? Mom and Dad just said something that doesn’t make sense.  They do this and it’s okay, but if I do it, it’s not okay.   They understand very quickly.  It’s embedded in those forming brains.   ‘Gee, adults sometimes do things, and they get to do things that other people don’t get to do.  They can do the wrong thing and it’s okay.  But if I do the wrong thing, I get punished. And I get penalized.’   Doubt creeps in.

We all know that’s bad parenting, and we’ve all fallen prey to it at one point or another.  I’ll bet you’ve observed it recently.   That child grows up to become an adult. And I’m talking to you as a manager and a leader today.  The fact is, you have subconscious thoughts that say ‘That didn’t sound right.’    You instinctively know it’s not right, but you can’t put your finger on it.

We live so fast in business today that oftentimes we don’t analyze what’s going on.  And so let me ask you, what are the dangers when we’re holding and demanding people to adhere to standards that we ourselves don’t follow.  That is an incredibly dangerous place for us to be because we are actually encouraging dishonesty of our team members and employees.

Whenever we say ‘Okay I’ve got a different standard,’ what the employee will say is, ‘I’m dealing with an illogical person.  I know that they can’t hold me to a standard that they don’t hold themselves to but I don’t want the hassle of a confrontation.  So what I’ll do is sneak around and do stuff that hopefully my manager doesn’t catch me doing.   If my manager catches me and they try to make a big deal out of it then I’ve got something to lean on.  If he or she tries to fire or punish me, I can remind them that they do this all the time, so I don’t think you can hold me to that standard.  I know that you say this is what we should do, but you’re not practicing it yourself.   So if I’m in trouble, you’re in trouble.  Don’t we both want to let this go away?’

Do you see how you are encouraging dishonesty?  You’re also encouraging or actually setting up a situation where you could be, in effect, blackmailed by an employee who says ‘You’re demanding things differently of me than you demand of yourself.’

The net result is that you have eroded the trust of your team member in you as a manager and in you as a leader.  They don’t trust you to do what’s best for the team.   They don’t trust you because you don’t hold the standards that they expect you to demonstrate, and therefore they don’t feel comfortable with your leadership.

Employees Deserve Better

This is a huge problem for managers across the world because managers must have the trust of their team in order for that team to do its best.  And the statistics bear out exactly what I’m talking about.

The Gallup Organization reports that 87% of employees around the world are disengaged from the workplace.  What that means is that they don’t believe in their manager.  If there was real leadership being exhibited, if there was fairness, if there was accountability for both parties, accountability for a manager, accountability for a team member, it made sense and it was consistent, then in reality engagement goes up.

People want to know that they’re pulling together.  They hate being totally on their own.   So many managers are only about the business about criticizing what they perceive are weaknesses in people, and they never point out any of the strengths in their people.  They don’t understand that this duality of demanding standards from your team that are different from yourself is at the root of the conflict.

What I would like you to think about  – instead of demanding different standards of people than you hold yourself to — is that you take a few actions.  The first thing that I’d like for you to do, and I highly recommend this, is to carefully evaluate what you believe.  Then you also have to evaluate what you do.  I recommend that you write them both down.  Do you get to work on time?  All the time?  Some of the time?  Most of the time?  Make notes. Hold yourself accountable.

You want to know what you really believe.  How important is it to you?  If you really believe something, you’re going to find a way to get it done.  If you don’t, you’re not going to be committed to the result.  Carefully evaluate what you believe and then evaluate that against what you actually do.

In the second step, ask yourself if the columns match.  If they don’t match, then step three is that you need to commit to a plan to be what you believe.  You see, most of us don’t really know what we believe.  We’ve never taken the time to think about it and then to list out what we believe.

Same Standards = Fairness

Personally, I believe in fairness.   I believe in people being on time.   I believe in people doing their best.  I believe in encouraging people for good work.   Those are some of the things that I believe.  I believe in commitment.  I believe in doing my best.  And you see, if we don’t know what we believe, we can’t understand what we’re holding other people accountable to.

This is a critical exercise for you as a manager and a leader to do. It will help you to understand those situations where you might be guilty of demanding a standard for somebody that is different than you do for yourself.   You may have a blind spot, and trust me, we all have blind spots.  We do things that we don’t know we’re doing.  I often like to say “You don’t know what you don’t know.”  And often we don’t know what we don’t know because we haven’t stopped long enough to evaluate what we believe, what we know and what we want to do.

Once that evaluation occurs, we begin to have clarity.   That clarity allows us to make decisions faster. It allows us to motivate our team.  It allows us to move forward quickly because now we’re on a same page.   We are in tune with ourselves and it’s much easier to be in tune with your team members if you go through this exercise and are honest with yourself.

This is not something for you to evaluate and compare as a team, to go talk to your boss or any of those things.  This is self-development and what I want you to do is be brutally honest with yourself.  Really understand what you believe, what you want to do and what your level of commitment is to your beliefs.

If you do that I promise, in a very short time you will be the leader that others want to follow. And, you won’t be one of those managers who demand different standards from your employees!