Team Building in the Philippines: A Culture of Candor and Assertiveness in the Filipino Workplace

Note: Not all Filipinos are passive or have the tendency to avoid conflicts or confrontations but most are. In this blog, I'm talking about most Filipinos, not all.

There's not enough of it in most Filipino work places. We Filipinos are not big on saying it as it is.We are non confrontational. We are specially timid around bosses. Geert Hofstede's research on power distance index puts us at top 4. That means that we are among those who have the most tendency to avoid contradicting or challenging a boss' opinion. This go both ways. I've seen managers go ballistic at small hints of challenge. We don't expect to be corrected by subordinates. We see it as an upfront, an uncomfortable, ego busting upfront.

The world is changing. The amount of education and information being absorbed by team members and their talents and intelligence would easily go to waste if they are not given the chance to speak up and speak their minds as freely and whenever possible.
I propose, that we change the way communicate in the workplace. Let us encourage candor and assertiveness. There are so much benefit for doing so. It will help managers make more informed decisions. It can save us from making expensive mistakes. Most importantly, it can increase engagement and teamwork.

Here's the difficult question, how do we go about it? How do we turn around ages of programming? How do we make unassertive people, assertive? How do we change a workplace that subscribe to hierarchical relationship?

This is what I tell my employees.

"I can't possibly be right all the time, hence I appreciate being corrected. Whenever you feel that I am making a bad decision, try to stop me. But don't expect me to just change my mind just because you tried. I'll put up a fight and I expect you to do the same. If I see you taking the coward's way out, I will call your attention until you realize that it pays to have a healthy exchange of ideas with me."

Let me tell you however, that saying those things is not enough. You cannot have that litany and then expect things to change right away. Leaders need to put their money where their mouth is by putting people to task about being open with their ideas, feelings and opinions.

That too however is not enough. Two interventions are necessary to establish a culture of candor and assertiveness. One requires establishing team cohesiveness by building trust, open communication, commitment, accountability and focus on result. The other one requires building the team's including the managers' assertiveness. They should be able to shift from passive or agressive to assertive style of communication.

There are dozens of available interventions out there on team building and assertiveness training. They will help you build a highly interactive and high performing team. If you need my assistance, call me at (63918)939-9294.

My Recommendations for Building a Strong Filipino Team

Aside from the fact that I am a Filipino working in a Filipino setting, I observed that Filipinos are different in many ways from people in the west and even from neighboring countries. This is of course not to say that we are totally different. It is the concoction of similarities and differences that we need to take good look at and build on as we establish a completely engaged team. Here are my recommendations:

Equip Managers to Lead Teams
Many Filipino Managers are young, lacking in proper leadership training and inexperienced in leadership. Many of the new managers I've encountered are mostly task managers concerned mostly with getting things done. They have a very vague concept of teamwork, much less the dynamics that go with it. Many companies go to team building workshops without addressing a key ingredient to making teams work-- Leadership.

A Team Leadership workshop should address important team leadership issues as understanding the difference between management and leadership, the role they play in team development, what can get in the way of teamwork and what they can do about it. It should also offer coaching tools in large servings.

Train Your Employees To be Assertive

Filipinos are some of the least assertive people in the world. A research made on Power Distance Index place us one of the countries with the highest tendency to defer to authority. What does this mean? It means that most Filipinos are unlikely to challenge a wrong decision coming from a boss. Let me go further by saying that we are mostly non confrontational. We will hesitate to call the attention of a fellow worker whose doing a poor job for fear of ruining the personal relationship. we can do this to the point of damaging the performance of the whole operation. When this happen, we tend to be less engaged because we don't like the fact that the boss is not seeing or not addressing the performance issues.

An assertiveness training will help team members assert themselves when they need to speak up to the boss or to their team mates. This will allow the team to have more available information, quality decision making, and more engaged team members. Training them however is one thing, encouraging them is another. I have always find it a challenge to get team members to speak up to me about issues and I'm trying. What more those who discourage it?

Build Norms around trust, communication, goals, behaviors and results.

This one is universal.I think all teams in all over the world need this. I'm coming from a book written by Patrick Lencioni on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. If you've been reading me from sometime, you'd know how I feel about this thing. My teambuilding workshops uses a lot of Patrick Lencioni's proposal on how to build cohesive teams. Let me know if you want to hear more from me about this.

Establish Opportunities for Teamwork

Give your employees a venue to practice teamwork. Equip them with tools. Things that come to mind are quality circles, six sigma teams, business process improvement exercises, etc. You can give them training on problem solving and decision making and other process improvement based tools that go with the programs I mentioned. Institutionalize process improvement. I've seen a lot of process improvement training that went for naught because of lack of a program to sustain it.

You probably know that I am very passionate about this I have created a complete team culture building solution that focuses on the things I've mentioned here. If you are serious with building a team culture for your company and I do think you should, please call me at (639)18-939-9294 or email me at ecebreo@exeQserve.com

Addendum I recently put together a new holistic team building program inspired by the proposal I wrote here. If you want to see it, just click this link:

The Power of Empowerment in the Workplace

I don't get it. Why would a manager not empower their employees? I didn't think I even have to talk about the benefits of empowerment. In fact it took me long to write about this subject matter because I thought it was too elementary.

What changed my mind? I've been encountering too many situations lately where lack of empowerment is causing some companies to slowdown, make wrong decisions or lose good people. Let me cite some instances.

In one company, a Country Manager micro manages everything including work performed by very junior managers. As a result, bills are not paid on time, some decisions that can be made at certain levels are refered to him causing delay and frustrations. It causes managers to leave the company, sometimes soon after they accepted the job.

In another, American bosses situated on the other side of the earth make decisions for their Philippine operation while very senior managers who have better understanding of the culture on this side of the planet are accountable for results but do not have enough authority to make things happen.

I could go on and on about some companies' lack of nimbleness that can be attributed to absence of empowerment but that's not the purpose of this blog. My purpose is for managers like me to recognize the power of empowerment and utilize them in the workplace as much as they can.

What is empowerment? If you Google it, you'll come out with so many answers so let me share the description that I know and the one I am referring to in this topic.

Empowerment is the delegation of responsibility, accountability and authority necessary to succeed in one's work. Now, a lot goes into making that happen. That is because just delegating per se won't cut it. The person giving the empowerment may cause the one being given power to fail if that person is not ready for empowerment. Factors like ability, readiness and willingness are critical to success of delegating responsibilities, accountability and authority. It starts therefore in hiring the right person, ensuring that, that person has the tools to make things happen and providing that person all the necessary support to gain confidence in what she is doing. This includes allowing the person to make mistakes and learn from them. This is tricky because we all know how expensive some mistakes can get.Sometimes we just can't allow them to make those mistakes so we become more controlling. The only way however, for the people we are leading to not make mistakes is for us managers to make the mistakes ourselves. If we are leading a lot of people, that would be a lot of mistakes on our part. This is why a lot of failures can be traced back to the inability of top leaders to make right decisions or their failure to make right decisions on time. I've seen it in my recruitment business. We've lost quite a number of great candidates because the top manager had to decide on the employment of people several rungs below him when the prospective immediate superior could have made that decision. By the time the top manager becomes available to interview a candidate, he has already accepted a job offer elsewhere.

I have seen the power of empowerment in my own team. I am able to do what I'm able to do because I've spread problem solving and decision making among my team members. It has a lot of benefits. People understand their responsibilities, are accountable for them and know that they can do whatever is necessary within the bounds of the company resources to make things happen. It frees me to focus on strategizing and more development works. It also frees me to coach. If you are doing a lot the decision making in the company, I assure you, it will very difficult to coach.

I enjoin you to look at how much empowerment you are giving your employees and resolve to ready them for empowerment. It makes their job more meaningful and yours less cumbersome.

Team Building Lessons That Blew Me Away

As a team building facilitator, I am blessed with so much life learning each time I go out there and facilitate. There are a number of precious moments when participants would share important realizations or insights that would blow me away. There are also moments when I learn more than I expect to and I am sharing those moments with you today.

Argue and then Commit.

A couple of years ago, I was facilitating this learning game called spiderweb where participants would be asked to go through a web without any parts of their body touching the web. It's quite a physical game that cannot be completed on time without collaboration and commitment among team members. At that time, I have already facilitated this game a number of times and I already have a canned idea of what should be learned in this activity. This one was going to be more powerful than the previous experiences. The size of the group was too big so I decided to split them into two. Accidentally, all the formal leaders went to one group. I worried about the group with no leader because I was concerned that they won't be able to finish on time but I was wrong. The group without formal leaders finished very early while the group with leaders failed to complete the task after several attempts. What happened? In the group with all the leaders, the most senior called all the shots. Assigned tasks to everyone and took command of the group from step one. Unfortunately, his strategy was wrong and I supposed a lot of the members know this. They however kept mum and just followed the instructions. Each time somebody makes a mistake, the leader would scold that member and come up with a new instruction. They ran out of time before they could finish. The scene was totally different with the other group. They started by arguing about the best way to solve a problem. Somebody played the role of a leader but only to facilitate the implementation of the idea. When someone in the team thinks that one strategy is going wrong, she would speak out loud and the rest would listen and maybe argue. Each time they would execute however, even the ones who initially do not agree with the strategy would do her best to pitch in.

When we sat down to share the experience, the two groups recognized the stark difference between their approaches and then revised their ideas of how to assimilate a leadership role. They realized that leadership is not about taking control, planning and giving instructions. It's realizing the team's full potential by optimizing team talents. The group without formal leaders finished the game first because they had real leadership that allowed members to passionately share their ideas, argue and then commit. The leader of the team swore to me after the session.
about changing his style.

Let's Learn from Our Mistakes

In another spider web activity where the CEO of the company participated, the team was getting stuck with analysis paralysis. They were spending too much time planning every step to the point of wasting it. The CEO who intimated to me that he planned to lay back and allow the other members of the team to take charge ran out of patience and stepped in. He said, we need to stop overanalyzing things and start testing our ideas and if we are to make a mistake, let's learn from them and move on, and this they did. The CEO started asking the members which idea they think they should start testing. The group picked one and then they tested it. The first idea bombed. They talked about it a bit and came up with a better strategy and this one worked. They completed the task in no time. During the debrief, the participants realized two important things. One, it helps to have a leader that allows people to try out their ideas and then learn from mistakes when they make them. Second, that fear of mistake can paralyze a team. If the first one does not exist, the team can only have the second one.

Great Results follow Great Relationship

After a two-day management teambuilding, one of the senior managers of a multinational company spoke as a reaction to the workshop. He said "Every year we focus on setting our financial goals straight. We've talked about KRAs and KPIs but we never really covered relationship. It has always been too soft a topic for us. We fail to realize that the only way we can achieve all those goals, those key result areas and key performance indicators is if we work effectively together. And we can only work well together if we have a good working relationship strengthened by trust and open communication." They realize that good working relationship is followed by result. In that workshop they resolved to work on building a more cohesive relationship. They asked me to see to it that they followed through and we did follow through. They hit their targets that year and improved overall employee satisfaction.

Each of these experiences build on my appreciation of teamwork and guided me in leading my own team and improving my program. The amount of learning I receive from participants humbles me and make me look forward to learning more. I know they make me a better leader and a better team building facilitator.

To Coach Like Freddie Roach

I've always been a boxing fan. And as a fan, I am fascinated with the current pound for pound best boxer today, Manny Pacquiao. There is one boxing personality however that interest me more than Pacquiao. That is his coach, Freddie Roach.

I want to coach like Roach.

While I believe in Manny's talent, he couldn't have achieved his full potential without Roach. It is Manny's Attitude and Roach's coaching that allow the champ to get better every time. Let me point out some of the things that Roach do that make him worth emulating by anyone who is responsible for growth and success of another.

Presence.

Roach showed that one cannot coach in absentia. One has to be there in person to observe, give timely feedback, cheer the player on, or in some instances throw in the towel if necessary. In order to do all those, a coach like Roach has to be in the thick of the action. During practice and in the fight night. As a manager I need to be there for my team. I also need to be in the thick of the action. I should be ready with my feedback. I should be ready to cheer them on and make my call whenever necessary. I need to be there.

A Step Ahead

Everytime Pacquiao faces a challenge, Roach knows what to do. He looks ahead. He scouts the opponent by watching his previous fights, looking for chinks in the opponents armor. He looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent and identify opportunities that his ward can capitalize on. He works on his game plan and then work with Paquiao on execution, way ahead of the fight. As a result, success is almost always assured.

I regret that I'm not always a step ahead as much as I want to be. As a manager and as a coach responsible for the success of my employees, I need to do more of stepping ahead, scouting for possibilities and laying the ground work for my team members to succeed.

Clarity of Purpose

Roach's purpose as a coach is clear. To help Manny succeed. The boxer's success is his success. In order for Pacquiao to succeed, he needs to become a better fighter. In order for that to happen, he needs to understand Pacquiao's strengths and weaknesses so that he can capitalize on the boxer's strengths and work on his weaknesses. Knowing his ward's strength help him pick the right fights for him. Not all coaches are as clear about their purpose as Roach. In fact some have it the other way. They need to succeed and the players are stepping stones towards that success. This method produce at least one loser and atmost, two losers - the player and the coach. I understand from Roach that the way to succeed is to help others succeed. That is the way to go.

Preventing AWOL and Same Day Resignation

This question sat in my inbox for a while. I apologize to the sender for the late reply. But as they say, better late than... later.

I'd like to ask your idea on how we can eliminate if not reduce occurrence of same day resignation & AWOL.

We have a resignation policy of 30-days notice. They'll be liable to training expenses deductible from their last pay if they fail to inform in advance.

This policy is given during orientation and is indicated in our employee handbook and in their employment contract.

These however do not seem to matter to them. What I notice is they go AWOL or resign effective immediately after the payroll cut-off. So they've already received their salary except for the 13th month.

Can the company waive the release of their clearance and last pay?

Here's my answer.

Since I am not a lawyer, you cannot take my opinion as a legal one. In fact the first thing I'd do is to consult a lawyer about the legality of decisions I will make especially if it concerns withholding a person's pay. I received a sage advice from a lawyer friend in the past. She said that before I make any decision that might end up in the court of law, I need to consult the lawyer whom I will tap to defend my cause. This made a lot of sense to me and used it as a rule of thumb whenever I feel a legal advice is necessary.

There are a couple of things that I'd work on with my lawyer if I find myself in your position. Here they are:

First, I'd ask my lawyer to work with me on giving more teeth to my 30-day notice. When employees go AWOL or resign effictive immediately, the company may incur damages and the company may seek remuneration for the damages caused by it. I think you need to establish the cost of violating your company's 30-day notice rule and make it a matter of policy to seek legal action against empoyees who violate this policy. The more rampant the violation is, the more necessary it is for you take action to show that you are serious about this rule.

Second, I think you can choose not to clear employees who do not comply with the 30-day notice policy of the company, hence you can choose to widthold their last pay untill they clear themselves by rendering 30-day notice. Here's where it becomes complicated and I myself would like to ask a lawyer how to properly do it. If you require an employee to serve 30-day notice and the person won't and you decide to terminate that person's employment, does the person become entitled to last pay because he was already fired? Right now, I don't know the answer to that.

These I think are some of the possible legal remedies to your problem. There is a bigger problem to contend with however, in preventing employees who want to leave right away and are being prevented from doing so. Level of commitment, quality of work and possibility of sabotage in case of disgruntled employees are just some of the concerns that come with this.

Frequent employee turnover is a costly problem. When employees frequently go AWOL or leave immediately, its an even bigger problem. You have to find the cause of this problem and nip it in the bud. There could be several reasons why employees behave without consideration or respect for existing company policies. They could be very unhappy and you need to find the cause of the unhappiness and address it. Happy employees don't leave and even if they do, they take care not to ruin the relationship, hence they follow the rules. Here is where your employee relations skills gets sharpened. Listen to what your employees are saying and consider making some organizational changes if you want to keep good employees in.

Leading from the Middle

Leading from the top is difficult. In my opinion, leading from the middle is just as much if not more difficult.

When you are in the middle, you serve as a channel of communication between the top of the organization and the bottom. The people at the top expect you to align others with organization directions, while the people below expect you to look after their welfare and take care of them as they take care of you. there will be times when what one party wants does not sit well with the other party. I imagine a lot of challenges just by being in this position like:

There are some leadership decisions that you either do not understand or agree with that you have to pass on to your staff. How do you get people's buy-in on something that you do not buy into yourself?

How do you contribute your ideas to shaping the organization when there is no forum or venue available for you to do so?   How do you effectively manage your team when you are not provided with sufficient training or tools for leadership and management?

These are real concerns that I myself confronted during the course of my being in the middle of the organizational hierarchy. Let me share some of my thoughts on these.

I think that there are no perfect organizations and very few come close to being one. Have I been to any of them? no. None of them come even close. Something always gives. Not enough leadership, not enough resources, not enough creativity, not enough smart people, not enough commitment from people. Because organizations are almost always wanting of resources both material and or esoteric, the leader's challenge whether at the top or in the middle is cut out for him/her. As I focus on the role of the leaders from the middle, I'd like to share my thoughts on the challenges I mentioned above.

I believe that it is the top leaders' job to communicate clearly how the organization should move and at which direction. They should provide clarity and secure buy-in on strategies and actions. If the middle managers feel however, that the communication is lacking, they summon their own leadership instinct to inform the people from the top that some issues are not well understood and needing of more explanation. If they don't agree with some policies or strategies, they summon their own leadership initiative to make their disagreement and its reasons known. Good leaders know that challenging top management decision is not an act of disrespect. On the contrary, it is an act of respect. In my previous job, I often disagree with what my boss wants to do. My boss was many years my senior and has been in business long enough to know what he is talking about but whenever it happens that I disagree, I ask for a permission to speak my mind and he always grants it. I would express my opinion or concerns and he would listen. At times he would realize that I'm right and change his decision, at time I would realize that he's right so I buy in to what he wants to do. Before the buying in from either side happens, there are a series of exchanges of ideas and scenarios being played out. Because there is mutual respect, the exchanges have always been honest but polite. I've built enough good relationship with my bosses for them to allow such honest and respectful communication around issues and strategies.

There were times when I can't agree with my boss' decision but have to communicate the same with my staff. When I was a younger leader,I found my way out by saying, this is management decision, it is not mine. I was just ordered to implement it, so implement it we must. I realized later however that this is not the right way to do it. A solid organization is lead by solid leadership team. By that I mean from top managers to middle managers and supervisors. leaders must accept that they answer to the leadership team first and foremost. They go to their respective departments or sections as representatives of that team and not the other way around. This means that when the leader of the leadership team makes a decision after the exhanges of ideas and opinions were exchanged, everyone in the team must achieve clarity and buy in even if they don't agree with it in the beginning. There should be no excuses or no washing of hands on the issues or decisions made.

On the question of contributing one's ideas for the betterment of the organization when there is no forum or venue available for the contribution of ideas, I believe that a leader must learn how to open that forum or venue. I like it when the organizational leaders say that their door is always open and that you can walk in to bring your concern or ideas. It makes it easy for me to sell my ideas to them. Even if they don't say those things however, I never let it stop me from selling my ideas to them. There are a couple of tricks I learned when selling my ideas to top management, chief of them is learning how to sell. I realize now that a previous article proposing that HR Managers should learn how to sell apply equally to other middle managers. Read about it here.

Now, how do you effectively manage your team when management does not provide for training or effective tools you can use? The answer is be resourceful. While it is top management's responsibility to provide the tools and that their  failure to do so will be to their own undoing, remember that everyone in the organization is a stake holder to the company's well being. If and when management lack the resources or imagination to equip its employees, a mindful leader from the middle uses his innate resources to strengthen her team so that they are equipped and motivated to contribute to the organization's success. While it looks like it's a lot of hard work on something that a leader might not be aptly compensated to do, the experience teaches the leader to become better and more prepared to take on bigger responsibilities in the higher rungs of the organizational career ladder.

I found the book of John Maxwell entitled 360 Degrees Leader as a substantial and inspiring read on leading from the middle or lower. If you find your self dealing with the dilemmas of middle management. I strongly recommend this book.