Generosity is good.

Generally.

Sometimes you can be generous in ways that, ultimately, aren’t really helpful or desired.

And you can be generous in ways that, unwittingly, handicap the person you’re trying to help.

Generosity CAN sometimes hurt more than it helps.

“Helicopter” parents do this when they oversee or manage their children’s lives too tightly, leaving them little room to learn how to make good decisions, to be resilient, and learn from mistakes, to test and discover who they really are and who they want to become.

Similarly, micromanagers can have the same long-term effect on employees whom they over-supervise and can, ultimately, stifle.

Such managers may think they’re helping employees when they:
- Oversee employees’ work closely
- “Correct” work that’s not done exactly how the manager would do the work him/herself, even if it is within customers’ guidelines and quality standards
- Guess or assume what customers want, rather than to verify or correct

Real generosity – that with a long-term view – can show up in actions such as:
- Clarifying who your customers are and what they want
- Using customers’ priorities to guide decision-making
- Defining and refining work processes
- Communicating clearly
- Following up to ensure that actions being taken will meet customers objectives and company promises to them…or will manage the gap in performance to goals until it can be closed
- Teaching employees how to do all these things, themselves

Perhaps the reason that “helicopter” parents and microscopically managing managers aren’t generous from the perspective of others’ long-term development is that:
- They fear not being needed
- They miss doing the work themselves
- They feel more comfortable when work is done the way they want it done, despite what customers want
- They want accolades and approval (and their bonuses, yes) gained by producing immediate results more than they want accolades and approval for long-term team development and employee growth…and the increased results that come with it

If you recognize yourself as (like it or not) a micro manager, here are ways you can learn to be more generous in ways that develop employees for long-term improvement and results, along with meeting short-range goals, too.

1. Be clear about your objectives, as a manager and “people developer.”

2. Be clear about your objectives for employees. Talk with employees so standards and goals are clearly known.

3. Teach employees how to monitor and correct their own performance, using measures and performance-to-standard or performance-to-goal feedback mechanisms.

4. Follow good follow-up practices.

5. Notice when you’re most likely to dive into the tight oversight mode, or to start to swoop and redo work that’s perfectly fine from a customers’ perspective. Catch yourself and your behavior before the pattern goes too far.

6. Pre-plan actions you can take to divert yourself from your normal swoop-and-redo mode.

7. Understand when employees are just doing something differently than you might choose to do, but are meeting customers’ requirements.

In these cases, you’re often far better off letting them learn from the experience of making decisions, giving their approach or idea a try, and learning from the results.

8. Recognize your own progress and development as you learn to let go – and often, in the process, get better overall results from the people in your company or group.

Consider, also, the many ways you can be generous.

These are ways you can help the people you’re guiding to learn more and grow in confidence, technical and people skills, and produce increasingly improved results.

Consider this list of possibilities. How can you be more generous with:

- Time?
- Attention?
- Money?
- Teaching or mentoring?
- High quality listening?
- Praise?
- Advice?
- Demonstrating use of your own talents?
- Enthusiasm?
- Honesty?
- Being present, and sometimes silently, as an employee learns to assess his or her own work and customer satisfaction results accurately?

Learn to be generous in all the ways that really count…now, and for the long-range, too.

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In contrast to the Saints’ great 2010 Super Bowl story, how did Toyota get it so wrong?

Here are five key ways they’ve created their current situation:

1. They believed their own press.

Observant, in-control Toyota.

Invincible, untouchable, always high-quality Toyota.

Or so we were led to believe.

Their cars have been, in so many ways, customer-pleasing (they have been for our family, too – we own two Toyotas).

As a result, Toyota and Lexus owners thought their cars were as safe as the company wanted us to believe.

Until we heard the terrified 911 call from the off-duty California Highway Patrol officer who died with three other members of his family in a Lexus he couldn’t stop.

2. They ignored the facts.

Perhaps Toyota saw what was going on with various product quality problems.

And perhaps they didn’t even look, or they couldn’t see.

Whatever the case, seeing the facts and responding appropriately to those facts could have helped them prevent the mess they’re in now. And to do that means they’d have to be able to see facts – whatever they are – as a good thing, ultimately.

3. They counted on past performance as an indicator of current performance.

Toyota has learned, hopefully, that you can’t just rest on your laurels, and your past performance.

A reputation for quality based on past performance does not guarantee quality in current performance.

You still have to check what the quality is on the production line, and coming off the line and going out to customers.

And you have to correct errors, whenever they are found, whatever is causing them.

4. No news was better than bad news inside the company.

The more we learn about the culture and dynamics at Toyota, the more it appears that when the waters were troubled, they didn’t go below the surface to see what they could see.

Bad news wasn’t wanted, or allowed.

Customer frustration and safety were, it seems, lower priorities than keeping internal peace, and supporting decisions that had been made by consensus.

Cage rattlers were not encouraged, even if customers’ safety was at risk.

5. They didn’t create a system that could support their growth goals.

The more we learn, the more it is apparent that Toyota’s success in the past had a lot to do with their system of careful apprenticeship, with new employees’ learning from others who had prior experience.

In recent years, the growth they sought did not allow them to maintain that careful system of learning, appropriate and attentive oversight and skill mastery.

They’re paying the price for trying to grow beyond their readiness to perform consistently and safely at desired volumes.

There are other problems in play in the mess that Toyota has made.

Hopefully, they’ll be able to resurrect their once-legendary quality, and rise above the now low expectations they’ve created.

The steps ahead for Toyota will surely focus on creating a system and processes to once again ensure that product design, testing, production, quality control and customer-responsive service and support are worthy of the customer loyalty that they took so much  for granted.

They will have to work very hard to earn customers’ business and referrals again.

It’s an important lesson, and a cautionary tale, for many companies and industries.

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Close to the finish line on a problem-solving process?

If so, make sure you don’t forget one easy-to-miss step that many problem-solving teams skip.

That’s when you create measures and other ways of knowing if the solution works, and continues to.

Consider this:

If you’d had better measures in place before this problem happened, could you have avoided all this clean-up work now?

Maybe not…but it’s worth a moment’s thought.

As you create the right measures, imagine you’re an archer, shooting your arrows of action at the bullseye of a target.

Create ways that enable you to know that you’ll hit the bullseye - instead of being off-center or possibly missing the target, at all.

Take the following steps to create strong measures and other management guideposts:

1. Select
2. Collect
3. Check
4. Refine or carry on

Here’s more detail about each phase:

1. Select

Having good measures means they’re well-aligned to what’s important to customers of the improvement you’re making.

You may have several types of customers for your problem-solving work. Each group probably has their own needs.

Take all these different – and perhaps competing needs – into account and prioritize them.

Here are a few thoughts about where to start:

Do customers of the improvement care about timeliness? Then establish measures of product or service delivery cycle time or delivery timeliness.

Is profit important? Create measures that focus on income and cost management.

If ease of use is significant, try customer satisfaction indicators, such as a customer survey or interviews.

2. Collect

Figure out the easiest way to gather the information you need, and to do so, consistently.

Then find the easiest way to present the information to those who will use it.

Information must be easy to get and easy to use if it is to work effectively as a significant management tool.

3. Check

Periodically evaluate the system of information you’re collecting to see if it works as well as you hoped.

Understand if you have the right early warning system in place to tell you what you need to know about whether the solution to the problem is working well – or working at all.

4. Refine or carry on

If the data and information guideposts you create show you that you need to change again, or continue to problem-solve, do so.

If you don’t, you’ll lose the goodwill and engagement of your team.

No matter what else is going on, you need the power of a unified and fully-invested team behind you.

Cap off the hard work of problem-solving.

Put good measurements in place to help you manage the problem-solving outcome to strong and positive final results.

I’m always on the search for new and good ideas, positive thought provocation and business inspiration.

Here are a few recent articles that are worth a quick read, for different reasons:

Harvard Business Review:
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

Business Week:
Companies That Are Taking Risks in the Recession

Inc.:
Measuring Your Workforce to Build a Winning Team

New York Times:
On Will Wright’s Team, Would You Be the Solvent or the Glue?

Problem-solving is, well, it’s often a problem, itself.

Remember a time when something happened that wasn’t planned.

And it wasn’t good.

You didn’t have extra time to clean up the mess the problem created for you, or for the customers you work so hard to get, and keep.

And yet, what choice did you have?

Much better than getting to that point, of course, is keeping problem-solving skills fresh, and solving problems while they’re still small.

That requires paying attention to the signs that there is a problem - seeking signs of trouble, if you will.

And it means taking a little time now instead of a lot of time later, when the problem and its impact on you and your customers may have grown out of control.

If your problem-solving skills need a tune-up, try these eight steps:

1. Know what it’s about

Generally, what’s the problem?

Who seems to be involved?

Who needs to be involved in designing a solution and implementing it?

What’s the impact of the problem on you and your customers?

2. Know who the solution is really for, and what they want

In the midst of the noise, uncertainty and fear that often surrounds problem-solving – especially if the problem is a big one – you need to find a clear target.

Who is the solution for?

What would they consider success to be, when you’ve solved this problem?

Are there other customers or stakeholders whose needs you need to consider as you create the best solution?

3. Get the facts

You need facts to fully understand the problem you face, and the magnitude of its impact.

What information do you have, or can you get, to help you understand the problem completely?

4. Figure out what’s really causing it

If you miss the real cause of the problem, you may, in fact, create more problems with the solution you plan to put in place.

Using the “five whys” to discover the root cause of the problem.

Ask yourself or your team why something is happening.

Now ask yourselves why that is happening…and why that is happening.

Do this until you discover the real cause of the problem.

It may be that some group or individual needs training to do a job consistently, and up to the customers’ expectations.

Maybe a process is now too complicated, or technology is out of date.

Or perhaps communication isn’t good between different parts of your company, and it’s showing up in problems that get out to the customer.

Whatever it is, the root cause of the problem is what you need to reduce or eliminate.

Until then, you’re largely wasting your time and money, going through the motions of problem-solving, rather than getting the job done.

5. Find the easiest way to make the cause go away

Envision the easiest way to make the cause of the problem go away.

Can you implement that solution, just as you envision it? If not, what’s in the way?

Take those constraints into account and create the solution that works best for your overall situation and resources.

Figure out, too, who needs to be involved in implementing the solution.

Bring them into the problem solution process early enough that they have high ownership of the solution they need to help create.

6. Know how you’ll know if the solution is working

How will you know if your solution is working while you try it out, and before you take the time and bear the expense to implement it fully?

What can you measure or observe that will let you know if the problem is actually going away with this improvement effort?

7. Give your idea a try

The only way you’ll know if your solution works is to try it out.

Pay close attention to signs of success or failure of the test, and get others to pay close attention, too, to what they see.

Evaluate the results that you find, collectively.

8. Celebrate…or try again

If the test worked, capture the process improvement or other changes you’ve made.

Then fully implement the solution throughout your company or organization.

And celebrate, if appropriate, in a valued way.

On the other hand, if the fix didn’t work, go through the process again.

It’s a safe bet that if you don’t, the problem won’t just go away. And it’s likely to grow, faster than you might imagine, affecting things in ways you might not guess.

Your best best:

Solve today’s problem today.

Resilience can grow. If you’d like to increase your own, here are a few places to start:

1. Get good information and use it well

Good information, well-designed and well-used, is a vital management tool in the best of times.

It’s vital for anticipating and preventing problems. Good information can provide an early warning system about change in its earliest stages.

If you’re in circumstances that require resilience, you also need good information to stay focused as you learn, adapt and create a better situation for yourself and your team.

2. Create an open, honest, collaborative, creative environment

Resilience requires honesty and creativity, at least as much as it requires persistence, and a refusal to be defeated by circumstances.

In such an environment, you and your team are better able to gather yourselves to face and accept current conditions.

Then, in a creative and collaborative frame of mind, you and your team can see alternatives you might have missed had fear and disappointment filled your mind, imagination and sights.

3. Learn from decisions you made previously

If resilience is called for, new decisions are inevitable.

Decisions may not have been easy to make in the first place. Now, under pressure, the process may be doubly difficult.

You have the benefit of additional information this time around. Like an inventor who was not successful in his or her first attempt at creating a new product, you know something that did not work. Hopefully, you also know why, and can use that information to your benefit.

As you prepare for decision-making, consider what’s different now. Have changes occurred in these or any other areas?

- Customers’ needs and priorities
- Company or team priorities
- Goals
- Resources
- Your abilities, or those of your team
- Timeline

Also, what is an optimal outcome now, compared to what it was when you started this project?

4. Strengthen your focus on  your ultimate purpose and goal

Let the long-term view and perspective help drive or pull you through uncertain times.

Where you arrive, and how, may not work out exactly as planned – as you know (it has already changed, or you wouldn’t be thinking about the need for resilience and focused, effective flexibility).

What’s essential is envisioning yourself successfully making your way – however you ultimately do – through the uncertainty ahead. And then delivering on that expectation.

5. Create a stable base of operations…ideally, before the need for resilience arises

Create, streamline, simplify your daily operations so you can count on them for solid, predictable outcomes, every time.

What if you don’t?

You could be very distracted, and miss both day-to-day and long-term goals, if you have to siphon off precious time, attention and creative energy to get things done that should, by now, be easy, efficient, effective, predictable.