Norm Howe's blog

What do you do when you can’t get your department functioning at the level you need?  What do you do when little problems pop up randomly every day?  Could they have the same root cause that seems to manifest itself in a different way every time?  You don’t know.

If this sounds familiar, you’ll know how I felt a few years ago.  My department just wasn’t getting the job done; nothing dramatic, but it felt like the death of a thousand cuts. I tried every fashionable cure that the management gurus were spewing out.  Nothing worked.

When FDA inspected a Heparin supplier, Shanghai No. 1 Biochemical & Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., they thought they were seeing the real plant.  It turned out that it was only a show facility.  The real plant was a shadow plant located somewhere else. 

The US-FDA Warning Letter later stated, “The inspection revealed that the facility was not manufacturing, and did not appear to have ever manufactured, Heparin Sodium USP (or heparin sodium) for the U.S. market."

In this final installment (Part 1) I'll cover a surprising element of investigations that you don't hear much about.  Yet this is the element that produces most of the facts that you need to get at the truth.

3. Drive out fear.  W. Edwards Deming, the famous quality guru, insisted that managers must drive out fear.  But in training seminars many managers would ask, "Why should employees fear me?  I'm a nice guy, and besides, I'm just doing my job."  Deming would respond that fear arises from the structure of the employee – manager relationship.

You can use your newfound expertise in personality types to better understand how to deal with other aspects of employee behavior.  Need to get a decision out of that quiet lady by the copiers?  If you’ve done your homework on personality types, you will recognize that that her reluctance does not come from obstructionism. 

Rather, she is an analyzer.  She has to absorb and analyze every piece of information before she makes a decision.  She needs time and a lot of information before she comes to a conclusion.  If she requests more data right when you think that the cluster should have reached a decision, it’s not because she’s trying to thwart your plan. 

Continued from Part 1.

Before we get into the specifics of how to motivate your team members, let’s talk about the subject of motivation itself.  Here is an opportunity for you to use your analytical skills to apply general research to your specific situation.

Frederick Herzberg was a professor in the School of Business at the University of Utah who developed the Dual Structure theory of motivation.  Herzberg defined motivation in a special way.  His research demonstrated that a true motivator is a factor that comes from an internal motor within the employee.  That motor runs under its own power.  The proverbial Kick-In-The-Pants (KITP) can influence employee behavior but it is not a motivator because it requires an external influence and its effect is short term.