By Business Behaviorist Miles Rumphley….
Bosses are always on the lookout for trouble. A poor boss will run and hide the minute she sees trouble coming. A mediocre boss will wait until one of her employees comes into her office and says, “Boss, we have trouble.”
But a good boss will get ahead of the problem, usually by setting traps to find out about trouble before it blows up in her face.
One of the classic traps is the phony day off. A boss will sometimes turn on the “out of office’ reply and skip out the door— then just “happen’” to stop back to pick something up. This technique is especially popular during the holiday season, when employees tend to get a little careless. Chad Brisbee of Techmo Ltd. pulled this on his staff last year, only to find his Office Manager drinking punch, wearing a party hat and leading the team in an X-rated version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Since then, Brisbee has kept his staff guessing by using subtle variations of this trick. For example, he recently pretended to leave early one Thursday, then hid out in a heating duct and listened to the gossip.
Another popular tactic is to bury some important detail deep inside a long and boring email, just to see if the staff is paying attention. When Justine Greenblum of Just Rite LLC sent a four-page email to her staff last month, she hid the quarterly bonus details in the middle of Paragraph 20. When the sales staff claimed they didn’t know about the goals, Justine had them dead to rights. Not only did she find out who was ignoring her messages, but the money she saved helped her make her own bonus!
If your boss is a trap-setter, it pays to be vigilant. For example, posting a look-out would have given Brisbee’s office manager enough time to take off the party hat and pour out the punch. And alert employees in Greenblum’s office could have run a simple word search for “bonus”on all emails. Traps are effective only if employees are not paying attention.
If you are a boss, on the other hand, you should guard against becoming too predictable in setting your traps. Empty traps always make you look ridiculous, and you can assume that everyone is snickering behind your back. But how will you know? The next time you drop in by surprise and everybody is hard at work, you can be sure your staff is one step ahead of you!
