Excerpt from a LACT workshop + Youtube video with questions from participants
LACT : We have chosen the case of a company in which we have intervened and which will echo some of the cases that you have mentioned to us. It is a consulting company, in a fairly competitive market, where the commercial activity is very important, with salespeople obviously in direct contact with the customers and concerned that certain procedures - on which their remuneration depends - are carried out in the temperature. This French company depends on an international parent company to which it must submit important monthly reports. There is therefore great pressure on this reporting which constrains and stresses the administrative and financial management, to which are added the constraints that come from the field. It is a society that needs to restructure.
So we have a head of accounting who has a problem with his collaborator who manages administrative teams that implement these famous procedures.
From his point of view, this collaborator is competent and reliable, he is also experiencing a very difficult personal situation, a very conflictual divorce situation (with very heavy accusations against him). This accounting manager has a difficult daily relationship with this employee, made difficult because this employee no longer has authority over his administrative teams and complains every day to his boss about the malevolence of these teams that he has not not chosen (he was hired recently). So, to assess the situation and identify the attempts at solutions, we were interested in identifying what we are trying to do in relation to this situation which is not going well. The manager who complains, says of his collaborators that they are "incompetent, malicious, moreover, it was already the case before me, the predecessor left because of that" and says "I'm fed up, I can't do everything, I'm with broken arms, not only are they malicious but I recover all the problems”. So he ends up asking for help, saying above all: "you have to help me to get them stuck, it's not going at all". So, faced with this, what does his line manager do? As he finds that his collaborator has too gloomy a perception of hostility, he tends to play it down, to minimize it by saying: “it's not that serious, don't worry”. He tries to reassure him by encouraging him, telling him “we'll find a solution for you (the DGA will intervene)”. The head of accounting ends up being the authority in place of this manager by directly managing the teams in question. What do you think at this stage of the situation and the interactions between the line manager and this manager? If you were the line manager, what would you do at this stage? Participant: I will ask the manager the question to find out what he proposes to do to solve his problem...
LACT: There he proposes "that we really have to pin them down and set up procedures to prove by A + B that they don't do what they should do, that they refuse to apply the processes that I have put in place, even when I try to train them, that they show themselves to be quite dilettantes".
That's why he ends up saying that we have to corner them and get rid of them, that we absolutely have to find a solution, but the hierarchical superior thinks that all that is very exaggerated. Participant: It's easy for me to make comments, because anyway I don't know what I would do in this situation, but in this case, wouldn't it be better to manage to make him aware that in the end he may also have a difficulty in management, that management cannot necessarily be learned in books and to offer him coaching?
LACT: Yes, but he will answer “oh no me, it's the first time I've been in such a situation.
There really is this history. They leave for lunch at noon, they come back at 2:30 p.m., they stare at me, they taunt me, but what can I do. So there is only one thing really, and that is to severely punish these people”. Participant: There might be a way to bring them together?
Participant2: It might be complicated….
LACT: So he tried to bring them together, to show authority and in these cases they don't say anything and then it starts all over again.
Participant: But the ideal would be to bring together the manager and the teams concerned, for an interview.
A fairly intelligent intervention by the manager above (N+2) who would say: “listen, we are testing a meal, something, we will try to bring you all together and try to explain what is bothering you and talk about it all together”. LACT: So we're going to try to talk about it, right?…
Participant: I don't know, but I have the impression that at this moment, we're in total stalemate.
LACT: But do you think that might make them reasonable?
Participant: Not necessarily reasonable, but maybe they can't talk to each other anymore. And so contact might be easier with people above where the teams don't necessarily dare to express themselves like they do it with their direct manager, there may be a way to be more constructive...
LACT: In fact, to give a little more information, indeed he inquired but they too say that their manager anyway tries to corner them all the time, treats them unfairly, there is really a deadlock situation at this level.
Participant: And the risk, the difficulty, is that the N+2 in this type of context will try to choose who is wrong and who is right, he will be put in a situation to choose between the good and the bad...
LACT : Exactly, that's what we naturally try to do, but in this specific situation, it's tricky because everyone blames each other.
Effectively the chief perceives all the same that this manager manages in a way too authoritarian, too rigid and that of nothing, or of a point of detail, it makes an affair of State. And so the head of this manager ends up having doubts: maybe he is not up to his job, maybe he should lay off the female collaborators... We have to find solutions. Here, what is important is to come back to a central notion for us: the attempt at a solution. You see here, on the one hand, someone who complains, who points out the culprits, who complains about the situation "I can't do everything", who, on the other hand, asks for help, but help particular, sanctioning, very conditioned, and on the other hand, faced with this person, we tend to play down, reassure and do things in their place... In fact, they are caught in this loop: "when he complains , he complains too much, so I try to tell him calm down and instead of calming him down, it has the opposite effect, it revives”. We use this very important notion of attempted solutions which are the solutions implemented either by the person having a problem – here it is the sanctions and it does not work – and/or the people who are involved by the system to solve the problem. problem - here the hierarchical superior involved who is looking for solutions because the consequences of the situation are very tangible: lack of performance of the administrative teams, reactions of the sales people who complain more and more, because the customers are getting impatient and their commissions are not taken into account... So we call an attempt at a solution, what we think is a solution which turns out not to be one, which does not work, which is dysfunctional in the situation and which in fact will maintain, exacerbate , make the problem worse.
This notion is very important for us because it is a real complexity reducer. We are obsessed with trying to find solutions to help you regain control. I will have the opportunity, during the individual telephone interview that you will benefit from within the framework of this workshop, to give you very precise prescriptions which will be adapted to the situation you have described and which will allow you to stop contributing. in spite of you to aggravate the situation, because often with “the best attentions one can produce the worst effects” said Oscar Wilde.
And this allows you to immediately regain control over a problem that seems to escape us. If we go back to the case, the people involved in the situation are: the head of accounting, the administrative manager and the HRD who ends up intervening because he hears about the difficulties in this department from the company's employees who discuss it between them.
Thus, the HRD goes to meet the head of accounting to ask him what is going on, with the logic of acting quickly, because the HRD also sees and hears salespeople complaining, pressure from general management, etc. It goes up on all sides. The HRD is considering radical solutions - making transfers, dismissing the teams - then ends up wondering if this manager is up to it, is considering his transfer, bad luck since there has already been a precedent... We realizes that at this level, the head of accounting initially seeks to protect his administrative manager. He will first mention to the HRD that he is in difficulty on behalf of this history and that he has to deal with a team that was already not performing at all when he arrived. Then, as there are also difficulties in terms of invoicing too, we even imagine a culprit and causes that still serve to protect the person in charge, taking time to find a solution that spares him. Faced with this situation, the HRD assesses that there is still a risk, that it is starting to be troubled and worrying, that it is his responsibility to put in place a system to ensure that things do not explode. . The HRD finds himself involved to act, and says to himself: “another problem with DGA (on which the accounting depends)”. Thus, from her point of view, the situation appears even more complicated, she goes up a notch, believing that the DGA has something to do with it - "just look at his services, there are relational tensions everywhere at the manager level and there it is descending and contaminating the lower ranks”. He says to himself: “there is an RPS risk, it is absolutely necessary to act! ". But to act, there are not really any tangible facts and as the DGA manages to deliver monthly reports to the parent company on time, the latter finds him quite competent. The general management will therefore not be very inclined to support a questioning of the DGA, even with facts. The HRD is quite stuck in this situation, but is beginning to think that it could explode. Participant: But at this point in the scenario, I have the impression that everyone agrees that the girls have absolutely nothing to do with it.
LACT: It's ambivalent.
That's the difficult personality. We consider this manager to be competent, we still want to keep him, we consider that the employees of the administrative services exaggerate all the same and we also agree on the history of their behavior. When we share the causes and the history, it is difficult to find a clearer position. We don't really know… LACT2: Ambivalence is part of the PSR problem in general, you say it very well: the boss asks for something, you do it differently, there is always ambivalence at the source, always tensions.
The collaborators think that everything is unfair and at the same time they do not work as they should. There is always this ambivalence which at some point stretches and breaks. LACT: So the HRD still needs to act, he is very worried because if it explodes, the responsibility will still fall on him.
He therefore sets up training, that is how he contacts us and he wants training that will focus on the administrative services where he perceives the problems. During this training, we will actually see that this administrative manager is in a very worrying situation, in burnout. He has a very strong rigidity in his managerial mode, as well as a rigidity to question himself, therefore little inclined to a training course. In addition, he has a paranoid side and perceives his environment as hostile. He is on the verge of a deep depression. His problem could be summed up as follows: “my personal life is cholera and my professional life has become the plague. So between the plague and cholera, what way out? And there, you have to be careful because there he finds himself beyond exhaustion, he can go towards the risk of suicide, because suddenly, this person is completely stuck. We observe at the beginning of coaching with him that his expectations were very high to get involved, to regain a footing from the angle of his professional life, since his personal life was so complicated (involving in particular justice). And the disappointments and failures they encountered took on even greater emotional proportions, which made the situation even more difficult. During the training, this person almost collapsed in the face of the difficulties which suddenly appeared, so we were in a position to raise an alert and we told the HRD that if they wanted to help this person , we could absolutely offer him coaching. He's actually a combative person, who considers these teams to be against him, he fights them but that way of fighting them doesn't work, and in fact he can be very interested if we offer him to acquire the right weapon and give it a shot. That's how, from this angle, we managed to make him consider coaching and finally this person ended up accepting a particular intervention concerning him. LACT2: We can perhaps also specify that he accepted the coaching because he had taken part himself in this collective prevention intervention and that he had developed a certain confidence with the speaker.
Earlier when you mentioned advising him of coaching to improve his management style, he would probably not have accepted in this form. In this case, he was able to work over two full days with our methodology, as we are doing here with you in this workshop. During this intervention, something happened that made him accept it, when it was difficult to imagine at the start. Participant: So you found yourself in B-to-B with him...
LACT: Yes, but it wasn't easy, because even if he was on the edge of the abyss when we met him in this particular context, he was far from wanting to lay down his arms, or even considering it...he was like that knight from an old Monty Ponthy movie "Sacred Grail", if you remember, who, during a duel, after having lost a first arm, then the second, continues to want to do battle with his enemy and who, without his arms, continues to defy him by saying, "go ahead, fight, if you think you scare me , I'm going to annihilate you…”, except that this person was in a really delicate situation.
It was therefore necessary to carry out a very specific intervention at that time – we have a very specific operating diagnosis for this type of case – so that he could lay down his arms. We also took a strategic action in terms of communication because he was in a very dangerous situation, he couldn't take it anymore, he was thinking about suicide very clearly. We had to make him think about it, telling him that by doing this (suicide), in a certain way he was going to be perceived as even weaker, "is that really what you would like there to be YOU ? You see how far we've come... All of a sudden, we mobilized him...
