Having been through a few mergers and acquisitions myself, I’ve learned some lessons about things to do and not to do when going through these changes.

• Introduce yourself to new colleagues. It’s proactive and people appreciate your initiative.
• Adopt a “we” way of talking. It’s really easy to say “us” and “you guys” (or down here in Texas, “y’all”) at the beginning, but it does wonders for integration if people can remember we’re all one company now.
• Don’t call anyone’s baby ugly. You might run across some things you don’t like from the other company, such as a process or product. Keep in mind how the people that worked on that product or own that process feel – it’s their baby. So be empathetic and diplomatic when trying to “improve” these areas.
• Don’t assume. You may hear things about certain people from the other company, or how they do things at the other company before the merger closes. Reserve judgment until you deal with these people and processes yourself. It’s all too easy to assume those rumors are right, but forming an impression before you are directly involved could show you’re completely wrong. Keep in mind you don’t know the whole story yet, and you may be surprised.
• Prioritize. If you are gaining new team members or new responsibilities, it’s likely you will be overwhelmed for a while trying to take these on while continuing your current duties. Recognize that you simply can’t do everything, and delegate or postpone some of your tasks. If you don’t know which are your more important tasks, work with your manager to figure it out.
• Learn as much as you can. Even if processes from the other company are changing, knowing why and how they do the things you do will help when both sides are trying to find a mutually beneficial process.
• Don’t be territorial. Hoarding knowledge and refusing to share information can be detrimental in a merger. It’s bad for you, and it’s bad for the company. It can take months or even years to merge two companies’ products, processes, and tools, so the more quickly the information about these things comes forward, the more quickly everyone can get on the same page.

Have you been through particularly good or particularly bad mergers and acquisitions? What are some of your tips?

Let the little things go and focus on what’s truly important.

We’re always hearing that we should not focus on little things. There’s even a book about it (probably more than one). As someone who fixates on and is easily irritated by little things, I get why people tell you to let them go. Criticizing others over things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of life is a waste of time and energy. It makes others not want to be around you, and it makes you miserable all the time because every little thing bugs you.

But sometimes the little things do matter. I was reminded of that this morning when I noticed we didn’t have any hot water. I started going back in my brain to see if I’d paid the gas bill, and I remembered then that though I paid all the other bills before the holiday, I didn’t remember paying the gas bill. Yes, there’s a lesson to be learned here about switching to paying all my bills online, but that’s another post for another day. Anyway, by the time it was all said and done, it took 3 phone calls, 2 cold showers, and an additional $70 to reconnect the service for a $30 bill. See, really, a $30 gas bill is a little thing. But not paying it turns it into a huge thing.

Along the same lines, there are things that might seem small at work that aren’t big deals in and of themselves. But if you leave them untended, they turn into big things that are a lot harder to deal with.

Checking on your team’s morale

If you are a manager, it is imperative that you check in with your team members on a regular basis to see how they’re doing. I don’t mean how they’re doing on their project. I mean how they’re doing in their heads. I’m assuming you want your team to want to work where they do, and enjoy their environment. That’s hard for them if they don’t feel like their manager is interested in their well-being. Some might think it’s not a big deal, or too “touchy-feely” to see how they actually feel about the team they’re working with or the work they’re doing. But here’s what could happen if you don’t ever check on your team’s morale: your working relationship is damaged because there’s not open communication, your team members’ confidence can be damaged, your team’s productivity takes a hit, you won’t make efforts to help your team members get a new project or work through a conflict with a team member because you’re not aware of it, your team members could leave your team or organization.

Tracking plans

Plans are easy to make. A lot of times we make plans, then go off and do the work and basically abandon the plan. Then you get a couple of months into it and realize you’re so far off the plan you’re not going to get to do part of the project you’d really hoped to fit in. Worse yet, you’re going to miss a deadline. It doesn’t take much to take a quick look at your plan on a daily or twice-a-week basis and see how close you are to it. Sure, you might slip off, but the earlier you catch it, the easier and quicker it is to course-correct and mitigate a risk.

Addressing issues

People don’t like conflict. They don’t like it if they need to address a bigger issue, like someone missing constant deadlines, and they don’t like it if they need to address what appears to be a smaller issue, like someone whose attitude annoys them. But sometimes you’ve got to address the issues that seem small but could fester and grow. Now I am not saying you should address everything that bothers you. If someone smells a little one day, let it go. If it’s a recurring thing that is affecting your ability to work with them because you’re distracted and feeling ill, that’s another thing. Generally I’m talking about attitude issues and the way people talk to each other here. Sometimes people will say things that rub you the wrong way. A good rule of thumb is to let it sit for a few hours or overnight. A lot of times, your annoyance will subside in that break period. If it doesn’t, I encourage you to go talk to the person who offended or upset you to get it out on the table. If you don’t, it will fester, and the next time they say something to annoy you, you’ll add it to the first incident and build a pile of resentment. It can get so bad that your entire attitude about that person changes and you have difficulty working with them. The 10-minute awkward yet frank conversation is much better than letting those little annoyances pile up until you can’t stand to hear that person’s name in your presence.

So carefully tend the little things in your life, and make sure they stay small enough to let go!

What’s a toxic employee? Someone who has no respect for the people he works with. He might ignore your emails, waste your time, or repeatedly not show up to meetings you invite him to. She might undermine your role on the team or overstep her bounds with regards to your work or your team. They hold grudges, act unprofessionally, and can be subordinate, rude, and condescending.

What do you do about these people? Most management experts tell you to work with these people, attempting to coach and mentor them toward being a better team player and respect their fellow employees. I agree that as a manager, you should do everything you can to guide those employees to be professional, valuable assets to the team, rather than liabilities. However, at some point, some people just don’t want to change. What do you do then?

It’s at this point that you must remove toxic employees from your organization.

Let me say that again.

You must remove the toxic employees from your organization.

It’s been my experience that the negative impact they have on the rest of your team for weeks and months far outweighs any technical skill or architectural brilliance they may have. Let’s take a look at what happens when you keep toxic employees in your environment:

• It absolutely kills the morale of your good employees. Working alongside someone who is unresponsive, rude, and disrespectful is exhausting. It takes a lot of additional time to get information from them. It requires multiple escalations to your manager and theirs in efforts to work together. When you’re already short-staffed, or constantly under the gun, adding extra pressure like this is a surefire way to get your good employees to burn out more quickly.

• It harms your credibility. If everyone around you can see what a problem this person is, and multiple people have talked to you about it, and you don’t do anything about the situation, or at least nothing visible, what do you think people are saying? They’re thinking you feel that one negative employee is worth more than the 5, 10, or 15 that are suffering due to the toxic employee’s behavior. Which puts you in the situation of low morale (see the point above). And that affects their belief in you as a leader and whether you’ll remove obstacles for them and help them work to their best advantage.

• It breeds gossip. If you’re going for an environment of transparency and openness, gossip is a huge detriment. People talking behind closed doors, or not being upfront with management, will turn your culture in a direction you don’t want it to go. Suspicion and information hoarding comes next, and no one wants to work like that.

• It affects your deliverables. If you’re shipping software, your release dates will be delayed due to the extra time needed for waiting on this employee to respond to emails or show up to meetings. If you’re writing documentation, the quality could be affected because you didn’t receive feedback during the documentation review from this employee.

• It does nothing for the toxic employee. If you truly care about developing your employees, you have to send the message that toxic behavior is not acceptable. It’s like raising children. If you never tell them no, they grow up expecting to get everything they want or ask for. If you never provide feedback that their toxic behavior is unacceptable, those employees never get the chance to improve.

How do you deal with toxic employees in your organization?

To start with, email is a flawed medium. The reader can’t see body language and can’t interpret tone. The sender often copies people that wouldn’t necessarily be there if you were having a face-to-face conversation. That being said, it’s a vital part of all of our lives and we might as well learn how to use it in the most effective way we can.

Here are some email tips I’ve learned that help reduce frustration and save time:

• If you’re requesting action, explain why. This explanation is key to the recipient trusting and respecting you. I’ve been in some situations recently where email senders sent an email to 10 people telling someone on the To list to do something with no explanation whatsoever. Not only does it reek of superiority, recipients immediately become defensive or suspicious because they don’t have the same context you do. It goes a long way toward teamwork to share knowledge and information.
• Be direct. Most people I know get a ton of email. And 98% of the time, they don’t want to read an 8-paragraph message. Keep it short and sweet and let them know whether you’re delivering information or requesting action.
• Use simple words and sentence structure. I’m a technical communicator, and this tip’s straight from that background. Don’t include long, run-on sentences that are impossible to decipher. Don’t use superfluous or hoity-toity words. If you’re trying to say you need something so you can do something else, say “We need X to do Y.” Don’t say “Essentially we must acquire the remainder of the aforementioned items for the purposes of executing on the previously committed plan for the desired outcome.”
• Limit the number of questions you ask in a single email. I prefer to ask multiple questions in one email, so I don’t have to do the back-and-forth thing for an hour. However, that approach doesn’t work with some people, so with certain colleagues, I must ask one question per email. It does require the back-and-forth thing, but I get the information I need with less frustration.
• If including multiple questions in one email, number the questions. Many people like answering questions inline in the body text of an email, but some don’t. If you number your questions, recipients can also number their answers to correspond to your questions and it’s easier to scan.
• Slow down, especially if you’re emotional. Emails with missing words are difficult to read. Emails with missing words and an obvious angry tone are even worse. If your brain is thinking faster than your fingers can type, it’s guaranteed your email won’t make any sense. Then you have to start the back and forth of what did you mean here, here’s what I meant, oh I didn’t get that’s what you meant, etc.
• Cut short long threads and get people in a room. Participating in an email thread for 3 hours is frustrating and wastes time. If people can’t get on the same page in an email thread in 30 minutes or less of continued conversation, walk away from the laptop and gather the people to hash it out. What takes 3 hours in email can take 5 minutes in person.
• Realize that email is not for difficult conversations. If you’re trying to address a performance problem or a source of tension, face to face is always best. Having a real-time conversation about difficult things is more appropriate. It offers the person receiving bad news an opportunity to ask questions as they arise, and offers you an opportunity to read the body language that could be in opposition to what the recipient is saying.

How do you communicate effectively in email?

A co-worker and I were discussing the ball-juggling we’ve all been doing lately and how it affects us and she made the comment that we’ve just got to “love each other through it.” The comment really stuck with me, because it made me realize that a lot of times, it’s love–for the job, the people, or both–that help us get through the stress. I’m more of a people person, and my favorite part of my job is the people I work with, so I’m going to focus on that. Going with the assumption that you love (or at least strongly like) the people you work with, here are some thoughts for how to “love someone through” the difficult times at your job.

• Realize that not everything is personal. When we are tired, stressed out, and lack sleep, our immune systems are down. Notice that “systems” is plural. I’m referring to both the physical and the emotional immune systems. Our emotions are raw, which makes us more vulnerable to what people say about or to us. Sometimes when someone is offering an opinion to us, or even a constructively critical comment, it’s easy to be defensive or take things personally. Keep in mind that generally people are offering that feedback to help you, and try to understand it’s not a personal attack.
• Watch your tone. It’s always important to have professional and positive communication, but even more so when everyone is stretched thin. Recognize that people are likely more sensitive than normal, and it pays in your working relationships to empathize with your co-workers and use a gentle tone to deliver a possibly confrontational message.
• Hold back a little more. You don’t have to say everything that enters your head. Put extra effort into thinking first and speaking second, and ask yourself if what you’re about to say really needs to be said, or it will only make you feel better to get it off your chest. Squelching less important criticisms or comments can go a long way toward keeping things civil during tough times.
• Look for the good in people. Something I’ve recently started doing is trying to pay compliments to the people I work with that are generally more disagreeable or difficult to work with. I do this for a couple of reasons. It helps smooth over past conflicts, and it helps me reduce my complaints and look for more positivity in the day. Everyone has something to contribute, else they wouldn’t work there, right? Find one or two things about those people that help you recognize their value.
• Have a little fun. If you eat lunch every day in the office, go out with the team occasionally, even if it’s to a fast-food joint. Or have everyone take their lunches out to the lawn to eat together. Spend some time talking about non-work things and enjoying the human side of your co-workers (versus the worker side).
• Laugh! So many studies have been done on the benefits of laughter, it’s impossible to ignore them. Share some funny stories or do a harmless practical joke. Lighten the mood however you can and laugh with the people you see every day.

How do you “love people through” stressful times?

My recent lack of motivation and the very busy couple of days I’ve had at work recently made me think about how my lack of motivation affects others. It’s a big part of my job to motivate others. I have lots of initiatives going that need a strong motivator behind them, and several people to motivate, including direct reports and peers. How can I do that, if I’m not motivated myself? And is it okay to have periods of low motivation, or do I need to always be “on”?

In general, I think it’s okay to have brief periods of low motivation, as long as you keep a few things in mind:

• The low-motivation periods should be brief. Two to three weeks, max. Any longer than that, and lack of motivation can turn into despair. If you continue beyond this timeframe with no motivation, something needs to change. Take on a new challenge at work. Read a new kind of book. Pick up a new hobby. Make a new friend. Do something to get out of your daily rut.
• While it’s okay to show your lack of motivation to those you motivate, do so carefully. It’s okay to show your team you’re human and let them know you’re not having the best day (or week). It’s not okay to yell at them when they ask for help, or whine incessantly about how miserable you are. Those behaviors kill their vision of your stability.
• There will be another hill after the valley. Everything ebbs and flows — at both work and in your personal life. Keep in mind your current lack of motivation doesn’t mean the world’s ending, and treat it for what it is, a bump along life’s pathway. Overreacting and turning yourself into a sob story is the quickest way to get others running away from you as quickly as possible.

Here’s how those periods can help you (and those you motivate):

• They let you relax a little. If you’re a Type A personality like me, you’ll likely find it really hard to deal with these periods and feel like you should be doing something that’s making a difference, or you’ll beat yourself up for not being on the top of your game. Allowing yourself some leeway in your emotional drive benefits you tremendously. Moving through the down period instead of fighting it is healthy and helps you deal with later disappointments and rough patches. Relax. Breathe. This, too, shall pass.
• They help you identify with those you motivate and open up communication. When your team members see you let down your hair a little and have a rough time here and there, they are more likely to confide in you when they are having a rough time. Most people can see right through a perpetually perky facade, and prefer more honest communication about how things are going.
• They inspire you to make a change. Often our motivation flags due to stress or boredom. With either catalyst, making a change is a positive step to regaining your motivation and plunging forward.
• They’re the precursors to an increase in motivation. There’s nowhere to go but up when dealing with periods of low motivation. Knowing these periods are temporary and will soon turn around help you get through them.

And some ideas for how to motivate others, even when you’re not feeling motivated yourself:

• Confide in someone that you need some help with motivation. Asking for help is never shameful; it’s a mark of a true leader. No one can handle life on his or her own. We have vast networks of friends, family, co-workers, online buddies, pets, and plants. Use them to their benefit! It’s amazing how good it feels to know someone has your back and will help you through the rough times.
• Find something to praise in someone, then praise them. Focusing on what someone else is doing well takes the spotlight off yourself and what you’re going through. Encourage your team members to share kudos stories and get the good stuff out in the open. People sit around and complain all the time. Be a catalyst for praise, positive thinking, and selflessness.
• Focus on an area that’s going well for you. Even when things are going wrong in multiple areas of your life, there’s always something good. Figure out what it is. Sit down and write a list of your blessings, if you need to. Finding the silver lining will help rejuvenate you and hopefully give you the oomph you need to start motivating your team again.

How do you deal with your low moments?

Why are small victories important?

Small victories are the positive stepping stones to larger goals. They make the goal seem less overwhelming, and provide a path to that desired result. And they keep you going with hope and the confidence that you can make it to the next part of the journey. It’s easy sometimes to get downtrodden when projects get delayed, team members get annoying, or you get a pay cut due to a lousy economy. Celebrating the smaller things can keep your motivation up and give you a little boost to move forward.

Rewarding the team for incremental successes also fosters teamwork, and helps team members feel supported and encouraged. You never know when a team member might be feeling down, or like they aren’t contributing, or having a low-productivity week. The little celebration could be just the ticket for getting them going again and feeling like a valuable part of a shared effort.

With whom should you celebrate small victories?

The most obvious answer is with your team. But who’s your team? If you’re a manager, that could be your direct reports. It could be your fellow managers (the management team). It could be your project team. With which of these groups is it appropriate to celebrate these victories? All of them! If your project team has a software release, that’s cause for celebration. If your direct reports achieved a goal you set for the team by deadline, that’s cause for celebration. And if your fellow managers finally standardized on that new process, that’s also cause for celebration.

I’d encourage you to think about how you can celebrate with others with whom you might not normally celebrate as well. For example, brag on your direct reports to the VP and let him be a part of the celebration. If you’re in Engineering, invite salespeople to a product team celebration so they can feed off your enthusiasm, and hopefully channel that enthusiasm into selling your product! Not only will these inclusions spread the word about how great your team is, thus building your team morale, it’ll improve future relationship building with people you don’t interact with on a daily basis.

How do you celebrate small victories?

The possibilities for how to celebrate small victories run the gamut in scale (see some examples below). A good general rule of thumb is to keep the celebration in proportion to the size of the victory. For example, if everyone updated a team web page by deadline, it’s probably more appropriate to have a candy prize than an afternoon out bowling. But if you just released a bear of a project, the bowling afternoon would be more reasonable.

Following are some ideas for how to celebrate small victories, based on things I’ve seen or done in the past:

• Send a recognition email to a larger group, recognizing your team members’ efforts.
• Bring in breakfast for the team.
• Buy the team lunch.
• Have a team potluck and play games onsite for a couple hours during the workday.
• Take the team bowling.
• Give candy prizes.
• Give team members a day or two of “comp time” if they’ve worked a ton of extra hours for a project.
• Let people go home early on a Friday afternoon.
• Give team members an inexpensive gift card to iTunes, Starbucks, or a bookstore.
• Make brownies for the team.

What are your ideas for celebrating small victories?

Some thoughts on how to be a good meeting attendee:

• Be on time. Common courtesy. Enough said.
• Be prepared. If there are things to read before the meeting, come to the meeting having read them and prepared to comment and have a discussion on them. The meeting will be pointless if half the attendees haven’t prepared in advance, because you can’t have an informed discussion when several people aren’t informed.
• Sit at the table. If there is an available seat at the table, take it. Don’t sit against the wall like you can’t be bothered to join the group. It’s alienating, and when you have a comment or someone asks you a question, it’s a (literal) pain for everyone at the table to crane their necks out of joint to see you give your response.
• Speak loudly and clearly into the microphone. There are very few meetings happening today that don’t have at least one person calling into them from home, another time zone, or from halfway around the world. If you’re mumbling, or not sitting at the table (see above), the people on the phone can’t hear you.
• Eliminate side conversations. These get out of hand really quickly. If you have a comment to make, make it to the group, or save it for an individual outside of the meeting. It’s difficult to hear one person talking if two others next to you are whispering to each other. And those on the phone can’t hear at all when multiple people are talking at once.
• Stay off the laptop. I’ve been plagued by the annoyance of seeing people on laptops in meetings for years. There are so many things wrong with this picture. The person on the laptop is usually not paying attention to the meeting. I can’t tell you how many times people have had to repeat comments or entire discussions because the person on the laptop didn’t hear it. This repetition is money and time down the drain. Not only is the person using the laptop distracted, the people around the laptop user are distracted by any of the following things: the web site the laptop user is perusing, the email the laptop user is answering, the really loud keyboard keys the laptop user is banging. Then there’s the issue of IM and email sounds pervading the meeting conversation because the laptop user failed to mute their laptop audio.
• Mute your phone if you’re not speaking when calling in. If you’re calling in from home, or Starbucks, or the McDonald’s drive-thru, make sure your phone is muted. I’ve heard babies cry, dogs bark, side conversations, fast food orders, and ambulances during conference calls. I don’t fault anyone for having kids or dogs (I have both), but when you’re on a work call, professionalism is important. Since you’re not in the room to show you are giving the meeting your full attention, you must do what you can on the phone to show that.
• If you’re eating, don’t talk with your mouth full. I’m sure it’s somewhat controversial whether it’s ever appropriate to eat in meetings, but I believe it’s not an issue in some meetings. Sure, if you’re meeting with customers or upper management, it’s probably not a good idea to be chowing down on your pizza and Snickers bar, but if it’s a lunchtime meeting with internal people only, I don’t have a problem with having lunch while you’re discussing things informally. The key points here are that if you are eating, keep your wrapping rustling to a minimum (especially if you’re next to a microphone for those on the phone), wait until you swallow your bite before making a comment, and chew with your mouth closed.

What other ideas do you have for helping meeting attendees to be courteous and productive?

For those of you who don’t watch, Design Star is a reality TV show on HGTV that holds a competition among interior designers from around the country for a spot to host their own TV show on HGTV. There are individual and group challenges throughout the season, and each week the contestants’ work is judged by 3 well-known designers and TV personalities (Vern Yip, Genevieve Gorder, and Candice Olson). I missed the first episode (my Tivo recorded the wrong channel), but there was a handy little “Previously on…” segment at the beginning of the second episode that let me know Nina won the first week’s challenge.

As the second episode opened, the designers were split into men’s and women’s teams. The first shot of the men’s team showed them talking about how no matter what, they were a team, and the team came first. The first shot of the women’s team showed Nina saying something to the effect of “I won last time, I’ll be the leader.” Immediately you could sense the tension among the group. As the episode continued, Nina ran all over the other group members, dictating how things were going to be in their designs and their purchases. Other group members tried to speak up, but Nina basically blew them off, saying “Trust me.” In the end, the women’s team lost, and Nina was one of the bottom two designers.

Nina provided several lessons for how not to be a leader.

• Force yourself on the team. The first words out of Nina’s mouth were that she was going to be the leader. It was a forceful, no-room-for-argument dictation, and just like that, no one else on the team had a chance to volunteer. Even Vern, during judging, emphasized that Nina took the lead. She didn’t just take it, she wrenched the opportunity from everyone else. From that point forward, Nina’s fellow team members were resistant to her “leadership.” When a project starts off on the wrong foot like that, it’s hard to turn it around.
• Cite your position as a reason you should be the leader. Nina saw it as an open and shut case that she should be the leader because she won the previous week’s challenge. But winning that challenge didn’t make her any better a leader than anyone else. Offering the opportunity to someone else to lead the team would have shown her to be a collaborative team member, and would have been a good way for her to lead by example. Anyone can be a leader. Claiming you’re a better leader because of your position or title is arrogant and short-sighted.
• Talk too much. Nina was so busy talking about her ideas, she completely shut out her team members’ ideas. Every time an opposing idea was offered, she immediately rejected it, talking endlessly about how her idea was going to be brilliant/beautiful/amazing/etc. Her reactions to her team members’ opinions seemed to indicate she was more interested in talking and acting on her talk than listening and collaborating.
• Be completely self-unaware. Nina was totally clueless about how other team members perceived her and her actions. They tried to reason with her, tried to make their ideas heard, and tried to offer alternative plans. She railroaded her own plans through the group to the point where they gave up. When they were waiting for the judging, the other team members talked with Nina about how they tried to make their voices heard, and to the end, she insisted she had been open to their ideas and listened. However, it was obvious to anyone watching that she did anything but that.

And in the end, the entire team lost. Nina wasn’t 100% responsible for the team’s loss, but her poor leadership was the major contributor to the lack of cohesiveness, lack of trust, and lack of teamwork present on the team.

What other ways might poor leadership contribute to a team’s downfall?

(Special thanks to Andrea Wenger for the idea for this post)

I’m planning to expand on each of my points in that post here on this blog in upcoming posts.