Dealing With An Employee's Bad Ideas

Ahoy legend. Welcome to another episode of the Team Buffalo podcast. I'm your host, Travis Thomas. Today we are doing our one question a day series as we've just kicked that off, and it's a bit of a doozy. This one is on time wasting employees. And I think this is particularly interesting because there are a number of leaders, I've encountered a number of managers who struggle with this idea of well, I've got a proactive engaged employee, but what the heck do I do with their ideas? And how the he11 do I push past that? So the question here, we've captured from someone: as my employee wastes too much time on bad ideas, the headline on that, and the quick synopsis is, I'm a manager for a small but extremely busy office, I've got employees part time and comes in only a few afternoons a week, person wastes a lot of time thinking about little details and ideas, always open to suggestions, but when they make the suggestions, it's normally long winded. We've all been there. And I ended up explaining how we've tried this before and it hasn't worked. She's very quick to put other staff members down to me about making mistakes she finds, even though they have more complicated and busier workloads, and are all their full time. always recommend staff email me suggestions for the next team meetings, but she has emailed me more suggestions herself than everyone else put together. She has also started to text me on my day off, even though there are senior staff members to address queries to on that day. Any suggestions on how to handle this would be really appreciated. This is a really good one, I think it's a good test of leadership, right? Because you've got someone who's got ideas, and there's a few ways we need to split this and try to chip away at it. The first thing I'd be asking is, why do you think they send you all of these ideas? Some of them aren't ideas, right? So let's be clear on that. They did say that, you know, how do I deal with an employee that wastes too much time on bad ideas. But part of that wasn't just ideas. Part of it was critiques of their colleagues who are working full time, and they're not happy with the way they're doing things. So I think that's an interesting thing to consider is part of his ideas. Part of it is not. So I'd be asking firstly, the question is, why are they sending in these ideas? And that's potentially the first coaching question, you'll need more to bring into the session. And we'll cover that in a minute.

Hey, Joe, what? Why are you sending me all these suggestions? What's on your mind? You know, you've got a lot of ideas you send across what's prompting you to send that to me? And Joe might inkind respond well, you know, I just think there's better ways we can be doing this. So that's where we want to go next right is first understand? Why is this person asking me these questions, we always want to look for the motivation. And then second is they've given me now their version, air quotes of the motivation. But what are they actually doing it? Well, if I was sat looking at this person with very limited information, I'd probably be thinking, well, if they were just a pure, optimistic person who thought like, we could just have a great place to work and be doing more things, they would just be sending ideas, but they're also sending critiques. And that gives me a different slant, if they're sending critiques. Something else is going on here. And there's a couple of things I would then want to look at. And this is advice for you as leaders to start to consider is one. Do they think that they have a better way of running this? And why do they think that, too, is? If it's not that? So these are the series of things that could be? If it's not that then are they someone who actually maybe isn't particularly good at what they do, because this person doesn't talk about if they're good or not, says they have bad ideas, people who I found talk a lot about nonsense and don't achieve a lot of things tend to do so because it looks like they're busy. So if I'm always suggesting ideas, and I'm always talking to you about hey, this would be great, or hey, this, you get so overwhelmed by the volume of things I'm suggesting that you don't even focus on the fact that I'm achieving anything. So I'd be looking at, okay, well, what's this person's actual outputs? So first, we talk about what's their motivation? Okay, maybe they do want to help, maybe they don't. Second, we talk about what are they actually producing to give them merit to suggesting these things or not. And the third, as a leader is I'd be looking at what's the ring fence, I need to set up for this person. They have said what they think is important or what they think we should be doing? What's the actual span of things I want them to consider? Yes, maybe I want this particular person to focus on some things that can help us but maybe not. And we as leaders, we want to create a healthy balance between positive feedback/suggestions and things that are just a complete waste of time. So actually, in a coaching scenario several months ago, as always, I won't go into detail on who it was. But there was a particular person who was giving a lot of suggestions around things that should change and I'm coaching the manager and the

This person is always trying to change things around here. And so we talked about the person and said, what's their motivations? We went through the performance record, the person was actually a really good performer, which might be a little bit different than this scenario. But they were really, really high achieving. Okay, well, that's interesting. And so I said to the person, what mountain Have you given them to climb? That What are you talking about? I said, Well, do they have a mountain to climb, and he's like, I don't know. And I said, this person, by all accounts by every measure, intellectually, performance wise, conversation wise, is amazing, a really high achiever. And what they're doing, because they don't have the big enough goals to chase is they're picking apart everything around them trying to fix the world around them. Rather than having one big thing to focus on. It's kind of like, if you find someone who's really athletic, and you say to them, I don't want you to train for anything. What happens? They get really stir crazy, they might adopt some big bad habits instead. But what they actually need is an event or a big thing to work on. So if you took someone who's very athletic, and wants to be working on things, and you said, this is the next marathon, they trained for that they achieve it fine. This is the next marathon, they trained for that they achieve that, etc, etc. If you do not give high achievers the right thing to do, they'll become agitated with the conditions around them. And they'll focus in on nonsense. And this person was targeting things like the color of work attire in the office and like, Oh, my God, and he said, I just can't, I said, he gotta give them a mountain. And what did he do? He went off between that session, and the next session, he gave them the mountain to climb, but he didn't just do it on his own. He said, you know, hey, you know, we'll call her Sally, Sally, you're doing amazing work at this and that, like, where do you want to go. And so I was like, I want to do something in this category. And so I went cool, we're gonna work on that, together, I'll help find you those opportunities. And then he set her loose on that mountain. And she has since climbed it, and is now doing some really kick a$$ stuff. So I think that's part of it, right? It's what around that person is giving them the place to channel those. And maybe the ideas aren't bad, maybe the opportunities aren't bad, it's that they do not have a good enough distraction. So we'll look at first, as I said, just to summarize, and then I'll wrap up with kind of the key tips here. First, is to summarize and understand where the motivation is coming from, we have to understand the motivation, right? Second is, how are they actually performing in the example I just gave the persons performing particularly well. And then third is what's the boundaries I need to set for that person, if that person is high achieving, and there's an opportunity to stretch them beyond the normal boundaries of the team? Fine, let's work together on that, rather than trying to direct their attention somewhere else. If the person is poor performing, instead of going, you shouldn't be talking about these ideas you have, we can pull their attention back to their own performance. And we can say, You know what, thank you for these suggestions. There's some really good one in here. But before we do that, I think it'd be good if we focus in on these areas of yours that we've been speaking about in your coaching and your development sessions, to make sure that you've got your stuff all taken care of, because I love these ideas. And I love what you're suggesting. But if we don't have your stuff on track, I'm worried you'll get distracted, and then your performance might take a bit of a hit. How good is that? turning their attention back to their own issues. Before you know it's kind of the whole glass house analogy, before they start throwing stones that should make sure they don't live in a glass house. And for someone who's poor performing. There is this strategy that I've seen employed in several organizations where people who are not particularly good at what they do or don't care about what they do start throwing stones to just distract away from them in their own performance. So that's my summary. Just to quickly wrap that up again: one, get clear on their motivation to look at their performance and understand the opportunity with their performance, and then three, redefine expectations. If their high achiever point them towards a big mountain, they can climb. If they're a poor performer, get them clear on how they need to turn their attention back to their own performance. If you enjoyed today's episode, as we wrap up, I encourage you to check out our website and all of our great newsletter offerings at teambuffalo.co. We actually have a weekly, sometimes twice a week newsletter that offers great tips, tactics and insights, and go to teambuffalo.co/newsletter and join that one. And I'd welcome you to subscribe to the podcast as we keep the daily questions heading your way. Thanks again for tuning in. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Stay awesome.