September 5, 2022

What to do when your team resists change, the best managers don’t fix, they coach & Overemployed – remote work’s nightmare

Brad Giles Accountability, Leadership, Newsletter, People leading change, Coaching

4 September 2022 Newsletter

“Motivation is lighting a fire under someone, Inspiration is lighting a fire within someone” Dr. Lance Secretan

Hope you’re Thriving!

It’s been a productive week with three quarterly planning workshops and several meetings. Let’s jump into it.

Overemployed – remote work’s nightmare

I’ve spoken about the new trend of working from home several times here, here and here. Of course, many leaders are concerned about workers not doing the right thing from home. Perhaps they’re measuring activity, not results, and don’t measure staff through KPIs or other means.

This week, I came across a community of people aiming to hold multiple full-time jobs. Years ago, a concept called moonlighting was frowned upon. That was where a person would have a full-time job during the day and another job they would work at night.

The overemployed theory takes moonlighting to a whole new, fraudulent level. The goal of these people is to hold 5, 6, 8 or more jobs, each with full-time salaries. These people do not hold various casual jobs; they have multiple full-time jobs and tell each employer that they only work one job.

There is an entire community of 80,000 members on Reddit dedicated to tips and tricks to manage the fraud and help members graduate what they call your J1 (Job 1) through to J2 (Job 2) and so forth.

What did I pick up reviewing the chat forum? Many things that we advocate and teach teams to do are precisely what the Overemployed are trying to avoid.

These are things like:

Reference checks, speak with every manager for several years of history
In-depth interviews
Detailed 90-day onboarding
Meetings – regular meetings and random, last-minute meetings that would throw out the structured schedule across multiple companies
Regular one-on-one meetings with managers
The video camera is on during meetings with remote work-from-home people. This way, they had to focus on the job for the meeting
Employment contracts that specifically outlaw multiple jobs and have confidentiality clauses

You can also read this article: The rise of WFH staff secretly working for more than one firm

The best managers don’t fix, they coach

This week I came across an interesting article about the manager as a coach concept.
From the article:

“Think about your typical week as a manager. How many times did you help your direct reports by trying to solve their problem?

The answer is probably as many times as you met with them. While that’s common among managers, it’s not always optimal.

Too often, managers feel the best way to add value is by fixing someone’s problem. “I know the answer, and I need to tell them,” we say to ourselves. But over-relying on fixing constrains our ability to lead and robs our team members of growth opportunities.

As a result, many managers get overwhelmed with responsibilities and burn out. They create a team culture in which they’re expected to have the answers.
And their direct reports — instead of utilising their talents and stretching their problem-solving skills — become dependent on their managers to do their jobs.

Managers are not solution vending machines. They’re not paid to give answers.

Great managers know they need to invest in the long game: building a team that is constantly growing, feels empowered to drive results, and reaches higher levels of performance.”

The article discusses four coaching tools for managers, as shown in the image below.

Read the article here: The Best Managers Don’t Fix, They Coach — Four Tools to Add to Your Toolkit

This week on The Growth Whisperers podcast