We pull real conversations with real women figuring out How to CEO everyday.
This week…
Challenge: How do I create the environment I want while balancing the need to manage to the exception when people ask things like whether they can work from home?
Coach Response: A few years ago, Melissa Mayer took over Yahoo! After she was there for six months, she decided that the company was performing so badly that she wanted all remote workers to come back. She skipped a step and didn’t teach her managers how to hold people accountable. The reason performance sucked so bad wasn’t because people were at home, it was because there was no accountability for results. In your case, I think you could easily solve this problem. What if your answer was just, “Listen, I don’t care where you work as long as you get this done. So if you don’t get this done, guess what? You don’t work from home. That is a privilege that is earned and I would love it if you get to keep that. But if you don’t achieve results? Then no.”
I think you could have a policy that says performance earns you opportunities to work at home and extra days off. But all those decisions won’t be based upon your emotions. When they are, that’s why you feel terrible.
Questions to ask yourself:
What is the role?
What is the Key Result for one of the roles?
What are the Key Objectives?
Try to get out of the transactions and into the primary objectives of a role that don’t change over time, even if the projects within them do.
For example, we have an SEO team. The Primary Result of that team is bringing in new leads. Every month we change what is done and there is a lot of noise in there, but I know whether or not it’s successful based on whether or not I have new leads each month.
You’re setting up the systems and the framework so whoever you bring in can do this the way you want it done. That’s the marriage we are trying to find here. With this person you are working with, keep holding the space that you can bring her up. Get clear on the five things you want to talk to her about and those are the only things that you need to talk to her about.
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