Reduce Interventions: Mess Less With Your Team
03. Dec, 2009 
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When intervening your team, you are changing their behavior. By asking them over and over again how they are doing against the plan, you are changing their responses.
Even some well intended interventions can make things worse:
“Seagull coaching (dive in, dump on people and dash off), the most common form of coaching, just makes things worse because it undermines self-trust and confidence and pushes people deeper into their ambivalence (increasing dissatisfaction). Positive feedback (and praise) has the same effect as negative feedback, albeit to a lesser degree.”
The more you are messing with your human system (the team), the more chaotic (unpredictable) their behavior will become.
And you really want predictable behavior:
“Employees live in complex organizations, complexity imposes unpredictability of the future and only a turbid picture of the future may be sensed. The direct control of the employees will stress them and the employees will act and not behave normally. If a manager wants to see the real behavior he has to do it indirectly and from a distance.”
Dr Ali Anani wrote recently a great presentation about this in the context of employee performance. In 2008 we wrote together a series of postings on this blog about “The Fish Pond“-metaphor. Its purpose is to make some sense of complexity, humans, projects and globalization.
In this new presentation “Quality Control on The Uncontrollables” he suggests setting upper and lower limits to performance measurements similar to its use in quality control. Only when boundaries are challenged, the manager is considering an intervention.
Grasping the impact of the information is a mental exercise. But well worth your cognitive time. 
Dear Bas,
I read your article comprehensively. It is great. This is not only I get excellent review from you; more importantly is the depth of your article and the supportive evidences you provide (the seagull and the mess up part). Truly, you should include this article in any book you publish. It is so convincing that I got myself more convinced with what I wrote!
Excellent article and I congratulate you.
Regards,
Thanks Ali! Will do. You connected some dots for me.. as usual