Tanya had recently emigrated from Russia shortly after the collapse of the old Soviet Union. She had obtained an excellent technical education, which qualified her for the job with her uncle's company. In addition to her Russian engineering degree she also began work on an MBA in the States. In these studies she was exposed to modernized business and especially management practices, something her uncle and his business partner had not had. In this training-combined with her natural-born sensitivity-she learned about good communication, appropriate reinforcement, goal setting, and involving the employee in management decisions. In short she learned about a "people first" approach to management.

Having been initially hired at a low management level, she started using some of the techniques she learned in business school and her department's productivity improved and stood out among the others in seven months. The business had been characterized by high turnover requiring significant re-training of new recruits at great expense. The owners felt they had to settle with the poor level of employees that were hired, who then became easily disgruntled because they felt little support. Many were never very productive. Needless to say, a great deal of time and money was wasted on training employees in high-precision, technical production, only to have them leave after a few months. Tanya was able to employ some of her new techniques in her small department, where she brought employees to a high level of performance and productivity. More about how she did this later. 

As a result of her success the company and her uncle moved her over to marketing and sales. There she flourished and most importantly learned about the front-line struggles of the sales force, the needs of the customer and how to best represent the company in the media. Perhaps most importantly she directly learned about the customers and what the company could do to help them. 

What became clear was that a precise understanding of the customers' needs for the precision-made products was essential to a successful outcome: a sale to an increasingly loyal customer. She instituted sales training so that the sales staff would have enough technical knowledge to translate and in turn transmit the information to production. This worked very well and sales increased. Then another problem was highlighted-production could not keep up with demand.

 At a company meeting the owners (Tanya's uncle and his partner) complained that the employees were poorly trained and perhaps if they hired older, more mature workers with a better work ethic they would do better than with this force of young and immature people. Having had some success with her department, Tanya thought it might be better to try to work with the current employed workers who had some training and experience, than begin with a fresh crew that would have to start at the base of the learning curve. Tanya Focuses on Emotional Intelligence and Little

Tanya Focuses on Emotional Intelligence and Little Steps

With reluctance and a casual challenge her uncle told her to try. He was obviously cynical and did not think that much would come from her efforts, despite her earlier successes. The company owners were not going to make any effort themselves and they would stand by and watch while this was going on. 

So what did Tanya do that helped improve productivity to the point that her department stood out and ultimately became the best producer in the company? And most importantly what was this young woman going to do to change the entire company while the cynical owners stood by with their arms crossed, waiting to point out the foolishness of her efforts? 

In a way the owners standing by worked in Tanya's favor because they "let her do it" and did not interfere, at first. Going back to her beginnings with the company, what Tanya did in her first effort with her small department was to simply "listen." This small step is often huge in its impact. Listening is a mostly internal skill, although it results in important feedback to the speaker. The internal operation of listening is characterized by an active response to the person, reflecting back what he or she has said, in your own words, and then following up with questions. It is captured in our sixth Flow-Of-Work Factor, "Emotional Intelligence," or a capacity to appreciate another person's emotions and makeup. Of all the skills this one is that most lends itself to natural-born talent and is the hardest to train, although it is not impossible to do so and is well worth the investment in employee retention and productivity. In her new capacity as Director of Operations, Tanya first listened to the managers and then the employees. Using this input, she looked at the highly technical demands of the job and identified a number of things:

1. Insufficient time was spent on learning new skills.
2. As employees did begin to learn they were given way too much work and did not have enough time for mastery. In other words, they were just not given the time to fully learn something and this learning was undermined at a critical point.
3. For those employees that were not attaining mastery, negative reinforcement became the rule of the day, resulting-more often than not-in disgruntled employees quitting or ultimately being fired.
4. As employees did attain mastery they had little or no idea how things "fit together" in the bigger picture of the company and its several departments.

As she became aware of these problems, Tanya instituted several measures to address them. She convinced her skeptical bosses and owners that the company was large enough to have a training department that could start preparing materials for new employees, to ease their adjustment. This is a good example of Factor 7: "Bite-Size Pieces."

The training director with Tanya's assistance started developing materials to help teach and adjust new employees. It is important to note that she trained her managers to spend much time with new employees, cueing and praising them (Factors 2 and 3). Indeed she spent much time with managers as these programs were phased in, modeling (Factor 1) for them how she expected them to be with employees. She did not simply hand them a training manual. She spent a lot of time and became an active part of the training program.

At least half of each day was spent either with managers and/or on the production floor (Factor 11: "Positive Presence"). The presence of top management on the floor was very encouraging to managers and employees alike, some of whom had little or no contact with the company owners in this positive way. Tanya had increasing success and in two years brought the company to the $200 million level. This was where a new set of problems began. We might say Tanya was an irresistible force encountering an immovable object.

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