Learning to Lead

arry H. Ray was more than a little cynical when he went to his first interpersonal-skills workshop after his Veterans Affairs medical facility was ranked below average in a customer service survey. Customers said that the quality of caregiving was equal to if not better than the care received in private enterprise but that the employees were rude and insensitive. At the workshop, Ray was told, a trainer would show him how to listen, give feedback and generally act like a mensch, and then Ray would be asked to try to imitate the trainer's behavior.

At first, Ray thought the monkey-see, monkey-do thing was a joke.

"I thought, 'You've got to be kidding,' " says the employee development specialist, who marched into the training session along with his colleagues as if he were being sent to detention rather than charm school. "Learn to listen? It seemed so simple that it didn't seem of value. But everybody recognized we needed to improve, because we obviously weren't as good as we thought we were, based on the horrendous survey findings."

Much to his surprise, Ray, who works for the VA Health Care Network in Buffalo, N.Y., found at the workshop that he had a lot to learn about dealing with people.

Listening, for instance, proved much more complicated than he imagined. It involves making eye-to-eye contact, considering other people's perspectives and reading between the lines of what they are saying-in other words, a lot more than just staring at the person who is talking while thinking about what to say next.

"People pooh-pooh this type of training because they think it's soft and whiny stuff," says Ray, who still, on occasion, pulls a card from his wallet to remind himself of the steps he should take to deal with various difficult emotional encounters. "But the truth is that we deal with people every day, and we need to learn to get along with them better. This stuff really works."

Managers Who Can't Relate

Developing better interpersonal skills is a survival tool in government today.

Being smart, having impeccable credentials and excelling in your field isn't enough to make you an effective leader. Studies show that most managers fail to be good leaders because they don't know how to relate to other people, solve conflicts and motivate employees despite the extensive management training most of them have received.

"The initial reason someone gets promoted into a supervisory position is their technical expertise, not their interpersonal skills," says Kerry M. Joels, an internal organizational development consultant with the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Secretary. "But we are finding in quality-of-life surveys that many supervisors don't do a good job in interpersonal skills. They don't listen or give feedback."

Why do so many government executives lack people skills? "Many people in management," says Joels, "tend to be the analytical type. . . . They aren't necessarily that much in touch with emotions. They balk at dealing with conflict and hope that when [emotional] problems arise people would be 'professional' and 'work things out themselves.' "

But, of course, problems don't go away by themselves. Left unaddressed, they just get worse. And the more managers snap at employees, lash out with orders, fire off instructions and ignore people's emotional needs-behaviors managers often display without even knowing it-the more demoralized and less productive their staffs will be.

Some federal agencies are launching programs for supervisors and employees to develop their people skills as they try to meet the requirements of the reinventing government movement and the Government Performance and Results Act. "Everyone is under the gun to make government work better," says Marilynne Black, an account executive with Tampa, Fla.-based AchieveGlobal, a consulting company offering training, executive coaching and other services.

"Many managers in government are trying to improve behavior not from the standpoint of [people] being nicer to each other but from the standpoint of how they can be more effective as an organization, now that they are being measured by their performance," Black says. "They are interested in aligning the behavior of the organization to be more strategic and effective in serving the customer. The work we do with government executives involves not just helping them develop interpersonal behavior but also helping them become part of a team and support the strategic goals of the agency."

HHS, for instance, instituted a Quality of Work Life initiative in 1996 to improve employee satisfaction, strengthen workplace learning and better manage change and transition. The initiative requires managers to interact more personally with their employees to find out what kind of work they want to do, how their goals tie in with the agency's mission and what training they need to do a better job. It was launched after nearly half of HHS employees surveyed described management as generally ineffective and said they had negative feelings about their organizations.

HHS Secretary Donna Shalala asked the heads of the department's operating divisions to develop their own strategies to improve quality of work life. One of Shalala's major goals was improving communications with employees. Over the past several years, many supervisors have completed 16 hours of training in communication styles, and HHS has tripled its investment in workplace learning, spending about $1,500 per employee in 1998.

Practice Makes Perfect

Training in interpersonal skills, now offered at every level of management, is based on a universal technique called "behavior modeling." Through this method, trainers perform a basic communication skill like listening or giving feedback by following a series of steps, and the trainees try to copy it. Participants then get feedback on how well they learned and continue to practice the skill using real-life situations that come up at work until they feel they've mastered it.

Managers are also given wallet-size cards that outline the steps involved in using particular interpersonal skills. For instance, Ray's wallet card lists six "key actions confronting issues with your manager and peers":

1. Explain the problem as you see it.

2. Describe the impact the problem is having on performance.

3. Ask for the other person's views.

4. Agree on the problem that needs to be solved.

5. Explore and discuss potential solutions.

6. Agree on what each person will do to resolve the problem and set a follow-up date.

The behavioral model is different from training models that emphasize changing employees' attitudes through teamwork exercises and sensitivity training, and enlightening staffers through lectures on issues like stress management or cultural diversity. Many managers have complained that the insight they gained through these programs didn't apply to their work.

In short, managers didn't know how to change their behavior. As a result, they'd get back to the office and slip into old habits.

Phil Sturm was one of many participants at a "group effectiveness training" program in Denver. He was sent to the program as a reward for doing good work at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He enjoyed the workshop, especially the part where a group of people had to figure out how to use ropes to move a coffee can filled with beans without touching the can or spilling the beans.

"It was a challenge," the BLS economist says. "It really did require us to work in concert as a group. But I'm not sure there is a whole lot transferable, other than the feeling of camaraderie."

The first challenge for someone in Sturm's position is how to change the way you act around people you've worked with for years, who may roll their eyes at your enthusiasm upon your return from spiritual awakening. After all, while Sturm was in Denver being enlightened and experiencing his own version of a "Rocky Mountain high," his colleagues were in a dark, cavernous building in downtown Washington crunching numbers and imparting gloomy forecasts. "The big joke when I came back to work in a good mood was, 'It must be the altitude,' " he says.

It's also hard to figure out how to apply the knowledge you gain through lectures to solving real problems at work. One government executive faced with a racial conflict can describe in great detail what she learned at a lecture on cultural diversity. "The classes were great," she says. "The focus was understanding the changing workforce, how the demographics were changing and how we need to stop making assumptions about people who come from different backgrounds."

But she says she still has no idea how to deal with the racial conflict within her division. She dreads confronting the parties involved because the topic is so emotionally charged; secretly, she hopes the problem will just go away. Managers facing such conflicts might be better able to deal them if they can be taught to follow a series of steps leading to resolution of problems.

Step by Step

This is where behavior modeling comes in.

VITAL Learning, an Omaha, Neb., consulting firm offering supervisory and executive training, teaches government managers what to say and do when conducting performance assessments, coaching employees for improved service, dealing with conflict and handling any other situation that involves interpersonal interaction.

Say, for instance, two employees disagree over an issue.

VITAL Learning suggests managers take the following steps to resolve the problem:

• Ask each employee to state the problem.

• Ask each employee to state the other person's view of the problem.

• Ask each to confirm the accuracy of the other's restatement.

• Focus on objective facts, areas of mutual need, or mutual goals.

• Ask each to suggest a solution.

• Bring both employees to agreement on specific steps to resolve the conflict.

• Set a review date with both employees.

If you are dreading telling your staff about the reorganization plan that will change nearly everything in your unit, don't go into the conference room to give a lecture and then walk out, VITAL Learning warns. Instead, prepare your staff for the change by following these steps:

• Detail the coming change and explain reasons for it.

• Let employees ask questions and express opinions or concerns.

• Respond to question and concerns.

• Get commitment from the staff about being open to making the changes and set a time to meet again to review the changes.

Following a prescribed set of steps when different problems come up made a huge difference in Harry Ray's management style and has even led to policy changes that enhanced the culture of the organization and placed his division in the forefront of change when it comes to family-friendly issues.

One employee, for instance, had a tough time getting back to work after returning from maternity leave, and Ray was told she couldn't take any more time off. "Under the old school of management," he said, "I could have easily done the old-boy negative thing and told her, 'You've used up your time, so go AWOL.' But she was just hired. I didn't know her, so I thought, 'I'll listen to her.' "

Ray first asked her to describe her situation, and then he restated her concern. He asked her if she could suggest any solutions. "She said she wanted a work-at-home situation, a flexiplace kind of thing. We never did that in this facility, but I told her I'd check it out and get back to her."

Ray thought this was a good idea, so he pitched it to his superiors. They liked it, and the woman became the first person in the facility to get flexiplace, opening up the door for other employees seeking alternative workplace and scheduling arrangements. "She is an outstanding employee," he said, adding that she even came to work during a blizzard when everyone else stayed home. "It sounds corny, but I'm convinced one of the reasons she is so good to us is that we were good to her."

Often, though, managers don't have time to refer to their cards to figure out what to do. In those cases, Black tells her clients to refer to the five basic principles that lay the foundation for productive interaction. If a disgruntled employee storms into your office screaming because he was RIF'd or passed over for a promotion, for instance, Black advises that you keep your cool and think about the following principles:

• Focus on the situation, issue or behavior, not on the person.

• Maintain the self-confidence and self-esteem of others.

• Maintain constructive relationships.

• Take initiative to make things better.

• Lead by example.

The process, she says, gives supervisors a chance to buy some time until they are ready to review what steps they should take to deal with the conflict. When a nurse came into his office after being laid off, for instance, Ray wasn't sure what to do, so he printed out a list of jobs from a network database to show her there were plenty of other jobs around; that made her feel more confident. "I wanted to maintain her self-esteem," he said. Once the nurse felt better about her prospects, Ray scheduled a time when they could meet to talk about the psychological effects of getting laid off and to see what she could do to make herself more employable.

Trickle-Down Behavior Change

Learning better interpersonal skills to communicate more effectively with colleagues, work productively in teams, motivate employees and tackle other challenges is only worthwhile if top management really wants to make changes to improve productivity. But some employees say that managers who need to become more approachable, empathetic and helpful don't even try to change their behavior. They go by the rule of "do what I say, not what I do."

One government employee who went through team-development training says his supervisors talked about wanting to improve communications and empower employees. But when it came right down to it, the supervisors "don't want to give up the decision-making power. When I was going into team training," the employee says, "we learned that if the team makes a decision, that's it. But here [at work], what the team says may or may not hold weight."

Some consultants believe it's not worth training managers or lower-level employees to develop interpersonal skills if the top executives don't agree to change their leadership styles.

"I've refused training projects when I find myself in that type of organizational culture," says Roberta Jannsen, director of executive education at Loyola University in Chicago. "If people come in with their arms folded across their chest and they resent being there, the training won't work. You can have good leaders, but if they can't implement what they learned, they'll revert back to old behavior and get cynical."

Realizing that the behavior changes must come from the top, many agencies are beginning to focus on training their senior leaders. After undergoing extensive training, 12 executives from the U.S. Marshals Service, for instance, signed a "Senior Managers Contract for Real Change" in May 1996. The document spelled out a set of guiding principles and ground rules for carrying out the reorganization plan for the agency.

"We pledge to practice the absolutes beyond the reorganization and make them the standard for how we conduct business in the future," the contract says. It adds that the executive team is committed to "creating an organizational environment based upon honesty, trust, respect, communications and cooperation" and lists some "implementation absolutes. These include:

• following the guidelines, structure and principles of the reorganization plan to make it work; and

• keeping employees fully advised.

The action plan states that these absolutes will be implemented by doing the following:

• establishing a plan to ensure the new organization is in place by October 1996;

• delivering a proposal to the executive team within two weeks on a new allocation system.

Before employees go out on a limb to change their behavior, says Black, they want to see that leaders are practicing what they preach. "The U.S. Marshals Service," says Black, "wanted to let people know that they were serious about improving operations and that the leadership will demonstrate teamwork. These top leaders were asking lower-level teams to help serve customers better. These interpersonal skills are needed at all levels when you are dealing with this kind of organizational change."

Being a leader means pursuing goals and objectives through other people, harnessing their energies and talents for the success of the organization as a whole. The so-called "soft skills" that behavior modeling teaches can help you do just that.

Marcela Kogan is a Washington freelance journalist.