OK, so there’s not enough money on the planet to get me to watch the Fox TV show “Glee.” Nope, that’s not my thing, although – surprise, surprise – my wife and daughter both love it. Well, at least I thought I didn’t like it, until I figured out who Sue Sylvester was. Suddenly that show is almost worth suffering through just to hear Ms. Sylvester’s proclamations (I said almost). Here’s one of my favorites:

“I’m all about empowerment. I empower my Cheerios to live in a state of constant fear by creating an environment of irrational, random terror.”

Cheerios? That would be the cheerleaders at the fictitious high school in the show. Sue, of course, coaches the cheerleaders, which, based on the quote above, must be quite an experience. Sure, it’s only television, but it’s funny because there is just enough truth in her attitudes to make you wince. Like me, I’m sure you have known several managers that share some of her….uh, less flattering traits. You know what I mean – belligerent, critical, condescending, insulting. Like that.

But, whether you classify Sue’s verbal jabs as insults or proverbs probably depends on your point-of-view. There are just enough of those kinds of managers in the workplace that achieve some definition of success that allows them to continue to exist, even flourish. Their bosses justify their behavior with statements like “Hey, he hits his numbers” or “You might not like her, but she gets results” or “We need someone to crack down on that department.” Apple CEO Steve Jobs, for example, is well known as a difficult guy to work for, but HOLY COW does he get results. Since he makes it work, it obviously must be OK to adopt his style of management.

Probably not. While fear, criticism, bullying, humiliation and other similar tactics may produce short-term results, the long-term results are also predictable: disengagement, high turnover, falling productivity, morale issues, and worse. Very few individuals have the absolute power and the unlimited budget to sustain such an environment, and they have to be willingly accept the inevitable results of their leadership style to sustain it. In Jobs case, it’s a style that more 8th century monarch than 21st century manager, as a recent HBR article attests:

Jobs, for all of his virtues, clings to the Great Man Theory of Leadership — a CEO-centric model of executive power that is outmoded, unsustainable, and, for most of us mere mortals, ineffective in a world of non-stop change. A Wired magazine cover story from last year made the point well. The article begins with a memorable anecdote — the CEO, in search of a space in the company’s crowded parking lot, regularly leaves his Mercedes in a handicapped space, sometimes taking up two spaces. The pattern became so noticeable that employees, according to the article, put notes on his windshield that read, Park Different.

“Jobs’ fabled attitude toward parking”, writer Leander Kahney says, “reflects his approach to business: For him, the regular rules do not apply.” That means shrouding his company in secrecy; treating his employees to tyrannical outbursts; and refusing basic accommodations that would make beautifully designed products more customer-friendly.

The High Cost of Abusive Managers

Unfortunately, the Sue Sylvester-style of leadership is quite commonplace. Recent studies indicate that over one-third of employees have been bullied at work by their managers with management behaviors ranging from from gossip or slander to verbal and emotional abuse to physical intimidation. While not every manager guilty of abusive behavior is a bad person, even well-meaning managers can be guilty of repeated harsh criticism, ostracism, and even public humiliation. The cost to the organization is more than significant, as described in this article:

Workplace bullying directly impacts the bottom line by affecting productivity, wellness (with subsequent rise in employer benefit costs), attrition, attraction and retention. One study by John Medina showed that “adults with chronically high stress levels performed 50% worse on certain cognitive tests than adults with low stress.” Other studies estimate the financial costs of this lost productivity (at work) at more than $200 billion a year — and that’s a conservative estimate.

While most critics believe that the injection of more rules and regulations – that is, state and federal legislation – is the answer to abusive management styles, I think the solution is far more simple. With clear and compelling evidence that this management style costs companies enormous amounts of money, companies should be more than enthusiastic about making the following changes:

1. Evaluate management hires/promotions as much on leadership capacity as much as technical skill.

2. Rigorously train managers and supervisors in critical leadership skills – creating trust, effective communication, conflict resolution, delegation, empowerment, and coaching.

3. Regularly survey employees to determine engagement level and to determine if abusive management practices are present in the workplace.

A company simply cannot afford to continue to assert that training has no tangible ROI. The business case for management leadership training is well-established. The challenge is to have a greater sense of the impact of that training than the current quarterly financial results. Behavioral change takes time, but the long-term results are more than worth the investment.

Of course, you could simply let your managers continue to lead like the incomparable Sue Sylvester:

“I’m gonna make it a habit to not stop and talk to students because this has been a colossal waste of my time.”

“Good luck!”

Who doesn’t love to hear those words? Typically, these are words of encouragement. Joyful, even enthusiastic; designed to leave someone with pleasant feelings about the future. They are not, however, designed to be the two words that describe the sum total of a company’s training program.

Really.

Back in the late 80s when I started as a sales representative for a west coast medical company, I went out to corporate headquarters for…uh, training. Or so I thought. My first day on the job, I went on a couple of sales calls with a sales manager. We said hello, picked up a couple of small orders (literally, we picked them up, they were written on a piece of paper and left for us), and headed back to the office. After lunch, someone spent some time showing me some of the company’s products and where to find them in a catalog (just showing…not explaining or doing anything, you know, instructional). Then we had a three-day national sales meeting and I headed back home. “Good luck,” the boss said.

I’m gonna need it, I thought to myself. Training? You can’t be serious. It wasn’t training, it was a disaster. Disorganized. Disjointed. Dis-aster. One week in and I’m thinking the decision I made to join the company was just that – a disaster.

What Does Your Training Look Like?

I never cease to be amazed at companies that provide little or no training opportunities for employee or managers, and can’t understand why employee commitment and performance are lacking. The fact is, when a company fails to comprehensively train employees – and provide ongoing training and development – a couple of things happen, neither of which is good for the company.

First, employees that aren’t well-trained rarely perform up to their potential. Why would they? Even elite athletes, singers, and stage performers train and train and train. They are constantly learning and developing their skills. But why? Aren’t they already good enough? One thing is for sure: there is a world of difference between twenty years of experience and one year of experience twenty times. If a company wants increases in productivity and improvements in workplace performance, training has to be a part of the culture.

Secondly, when a company doesn’t train its people, it might as well hang a sign on the wall that says, “We Don’t Care About You (At All).”  A little harsh? I don’t think so, and neither do your employees. They make the direct connection – you don’t want to invest in my training and development, but you do want me to continually improve performance…how does that work exactly? It doesn’t. Worse for employers, recently released research indicates that companies who ignore the development of line employees do so to their own detriment. In a recent report entitled, Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder: A Summary Report on the Experiences of Companies That Improve Conditions at the Base, researchers discovered that when companies take care of people, those people take care of the company (Yeah, I know…shocker!):

A new McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy study published by the Harvard Business Review rolls up conclusive findings that, no matter the size of your business, the way you treat employees at the bottom rung of the company ladder has an impact on your bottom line. (from Portfolio.com article).

One of the findings in this report was the positive impact that training has on companies. Turns out, it sorta makes a difference. Those companies that invested in more training, “and offered more advance opportunities for those on the lowest rungs of the ladder…were rewarded with lower turnover, easier recruitment, and increased efficiency.”

But We DO Train our Employees

Maybe you do; maybe you don’t. Most employee on-boarding processes are random, disorganized, or incomplete. But those companies still claim they train their people. Few companies truly train for core skills and then test to ensure competency. Most often, companies hand employees the H.R. Manual or the Policy & Procedure Handbook, cover the highlights in just a few minutes, and then leave the employee to figure out the rest. And they say exactly the same thing, “We train our people.”

Sure you do.  All I have to say is, “Good luck!”

Hopefully, as a manager, you have become aware of the importance of employee engagement. Hint: As it turns out, engaged employees do better work! Yes, I know, absolutely shocking. But, it’s true – those employees that feel genuinely connected to the company, feel valued by the boss, and derive satisfaction from their work, significantly outperform their disengaged counterparts.

Now, engagement is being more closely scrutinized in light of the current challenges in the economy. Is engagement as important when the economy is sluggish, companies are cutting payrolls, and the future is uncertain? If your intuition is that engagement is even more important now than ever before, you would be right. The American Management Association (AMA) recently published an article entitled, “Emerging from the Rubble: Reengaging Employees in a Post-Recession Workplace.” Turns out, engagement numbers are not faring so well in the economic downturn:

According to Watson Wyatt’s 2009–2010 U.S. Strategic Rewards Report, levels of engagement are down 9 percent among all employees, but down 23% among high-performing employees. This research found more bad news when workers were asked about the line of sight between their efforts and company performance. The number of high-performing workers who said that their performance goals are linked to their company’s strategy and goals was down 20% from 2008 to 2009. The number who said that their supervisors tie rewards to organizational performance was down 37% and the number who said that their performance objectives are motivating was down 24 %.

According to Gallup, about one-in-three employees considers themselves to be fully engaged, which is significant when you consider that employee engagement is directly linked to key business metrics like productivity, profitability, safety, and customer advocacy. Now, the Watson Wyatt research mentioned above indicates that number is declining further – and dramatically so among “high-performance” employees.

The Squeeze on Top Performers

This is where it gets tricky in the workplace. Engagement is critical to creating top performance, but with lay-offs, downsizing, and shrinking budgets, a company’s top performers are being asked to do more and more – and the result could easily hasten a company’s downward spiral.

Consider the following, from a May 2010 Harvard Business Review article entitled The Acceleration Trap:

Faced with intense market pressures, corporations often take on more than they can handle: They increase the number and speed of their activities, raise performance goals, shorten innovation cycles, and introduce new management technologies or organizational systems…

We call this phenomenon the acceleration trap. It harms the company on many levels – over-accelerated firms fare worse than their peers on performance, efficiency, employee productivity, and retention, among other measures our research shows.

If companies increase the “number and speed of their activities,” why would productivity decline? Why would retention suffer? Is there a connection between the “acceleration trap” and employee engagement? It seems likely, although there is no specifically targeted research to prove the point. Clearly, the increased stress and pressure of additional activities and rising performance goals – in the absence of strong leadership and a strong culture – will adversely affect engagement.

All of this means that top performers can, in fact, be getting squeezed from both sides. Downsizing may create more workload for the remaining employees, and, at the same time, the company may now be adding projects and activities that further add to the workload, when they are, as yet, unwilling to rehire employees.

The Challenge for Managers

The challenge for companies is to create strong leaders, particularly in the mid-management sector. Average managers don’t typically look at high-performance employees and see trouble on the horizon, they see people who like challenges and handle them well. More work? Sure, they can handle it. Stellar performance; never complain….right up until the day they leave.

That is one of the key differences between an average manager and a strong management leader; the strong leader will pick up on the warning signs of a high-performance employee that is beginning to unwind. And, because they understand the value of building relationships and developing strong communication skills, they will have diagnosed the issues and created a solution for the employee that keeps them on board – and engaged.

“An inability to build relationships is the biggest reason why promising leaders derail. Also high on the list: poor communication and team-building skills.”   Five Rules for Making Smart Hires (Wall Street Journal)

In addition, the quote from the AMA article above identifies some key failures that managers have to rectify immediately: creating a strong line of sight between the employee’s efforts and company performance, and, creating compelling performance goals. Compelling to the employee, that is.

When a high-performance employee is not overworked and/or overstressed, the key is to let them see how their work drives the company forward (personal value), and provide them with the performance goals that motivate them (personal satisfaction). These are critical to driving engagement numbers forward.

Competition is fierce in consumer packaged goods (CPG), the industry sector that includes food and beverages, footwear and apparel, tobacco, and cleaning products (things that get used by consumers and replaced rather frequently). Product innovation is constant, space on store shelves is limited, and brand awareness is paramount. Even in a good economy, business in CPG can be tough sledding, and 2008 wasn’t one of the good years – a struggling economy and depressed consumer spending led to a decrease in median shareholder returns of 25% for consumer packaged goods companies.

In the midst of this carnage, Campbell’s (makers of several household brands, notably Campbell’s Soup) turned in a surprising 7% increase in net earnings per share in FY 2008. In fact, beginning the second year after Douglas Conant became CEO of Campbell’s in 2001, the company has marched steadily ahead – from $6.13 billion in revenue in 2002 to $8 billion in 2008.

In a February 2010 interview with Gallup Management Journal, Conant discussed the steps he took to get the company moving – a process that took about eighteen months and included the replacement of 300 (of 350) top managers.

I strongly believe that you can’t win in the marketplace unless you win first in the workplace. If you don’t have a winning culture inside, it’s hard to compete in the very tough world outside… You can’t ask employees to achieve extraordinary results if they’re not fully engaged. That’s why we focus a great deal on getting the workplace right so that people are engaged and proactive – so that people are moving forward arm in arm and competing with a spring in their step. As they become more engaged, they find ways to win in the marketplace that are sustainable.

Conant has seized on a crucial and profound principle in business: employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are directly linked. In fact, it is fair to say that your customer’s satisfaction in the marketplace will rise and fall with your employee’s satisfaction in the workplace. Sure, I know this seems somewhat obvious (or completely obvious), but it is still the rare company that invests in leadership training for those managers who are responsible for employee job satisfaction.

Workplace Development

Training for managers? Why not training for the disgruntled employee? Actually, that is the first thought at most companies. So, perhaps knowing where the problem lies is the real challenge. When employees become disenchanted in the workplace, according to Leigh Branham, most of the time the issue is an ineffective manager. In his book The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, Branham dissected the responses of 19,700 employees who left their jobs and discovered that 70 percent left their positions for reasons directly attributable to their immediate supervisor or manager.

However, disgruntled employees rarely leads to management training. Instead, companies install casual dress Fridays, monthly birthday parties, and any number of other feel-good ideas. Don’t misunderstand, there is nothing wrong with any of those things per se; they just won’t make the problem of poor leadership go away. That’s the real challenge.

Employee engagement (employee job satisfaction) is a measure of how much an employee feels connected to the company. Are they bought in? Do they enjoy work? Do they trust the boss? Are they passionate about doing their best work? Research clearly shows that all of these things – and many more – are directly impacted by an employee’s direct manager or supervisor. Unfortunately, that manager or supervisor is rarely trained to function as a leader – to develop people, to communicate effectively, to inspire and engage. Instead, bright and capable employees are promoted to management simply because they are…well, bright and capable. They get things done. They take responsibility. They make things happen.

As managers (or supervisors), however, they come face-to-face with the brutal fact that the toughest part of their new job is dealing with the employees. Without any preparation or training for the position, they are left to figure things out for themselves, which creates frustration for both managers and employees.

Here’s an example: Ask any manager if they have ever been trained to create trust with their employees. It is likely that they have not, but look at Conant’s observation about the importance of creating trust with employees:

“…once you earn people’s trust, you have permission to do some amazing things. Trust gives you the permission to give people direction, get everyone aligned, and give them the energy to go get the job done. Trust enables you to execute with excellence and produce extraordinary results. As you execute with excellence and deliver on your commitments, trust becomes easier to inspire, creating a flywheel of performance.”

Conant observes that trust is a critical part of workplace performance. As a manager, then, it is critical to understand that marketplace performance ultimately is a function of trust. Trust leads to workplace engagement and engaged employees create satisfied customers. Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz made this point years ago when he said, “You can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management.”

To win in the marketplace, it is essential to win first in the workplace.

“I would love to see the boss do my job!”

Some employees are getting that chance. Undercover Boss, which debuts on February 7 after the Super Bowl, is the newest television show to join the onslaught of reality show programming. The idea is simple enough – take a corporate CEO and put him in one of the front line jobs in the company.  The objective is to provide the CEO with a glimpse of the everyday challenges associated with the jobs that drive the company forward. No, not administrative or sales positions, but the primary jobs that define the company’s work.

A good idea, though not necessarily a new one, as pointed out in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post:

More than forty years ago, Robert Townsend, the former head of Avis Rent-a-Car described how he had his executives spend time every month working behind a rental counter, and similar versions of this activity were documented many years ago in HBR and elsewhere. They serve as valuable, first-hand reminders for managers of how difficult certain jobs are, how hard their people work, and how silly or unfair some of their company’s rules can be. And that is where the opportunity lies.

No doubt, it is a great idea to have managers – especially executives – spend time doing the jobs they are responsible for managing. At the very least, a close observation of those jobs would reveal policies, procedures, rules, or methods that should be addressed.

Trading Places (in reverse)

Interestingly enough, an article crossed my desk recently that discussed a completely opposite approach – having an employee go undercover as the CEO. Well, sort of. Here is the idea as suggested by Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga:

I’d turn people into C.E.O.’s. One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, “By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re C.E.O. of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.” And that way, everyone knows who’s C.E.O. of what, and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.

This is an interesting idea, and works on a number of levels. First, people like to have some control over their own destiny; to have some say-so about something of consequence on the job. It is one of the reasons why certain employees can be guilty of hoarding information or resources, or carving out an area of responsibility and protecting it like an endangered species. In pursuing some meaning or purpose in their work, or, in some cases, just attempting to provide a level of job security for themselves, those employees try to create a layer of control and authority that may not exist.

Making an employee the “CEO” over something specific is one way to provide the purpose that employee is seeking. Certainly, she should be adequately trained to perform the role. She should understand the expectations for the role. She should comprehend the impact of her role on other people and departments. Ultimately, however, by passing the authority and responsibility (within defined limits) for a particular item or area of responsibility to the employee, and designating her as the “CEO” of that area, is an excellent way to create value for her as a person and an employee.

Second, people develop confidence in themselves and create satisfaction in their work when they have the ability to achieve something noteworthy. At the same time, employees vary in the level of talent they bring to a job, so in assuming the title of “CEO” over something that fits their skill-set and talent level, they have the opportunity to create personal success and directly observe their own contribution to the success of the team.

A word of caution: It is a good idea, but like so many ideas, proper execution is critical. An effective leader will prepare the employee to assume the role of “CEO” rather than simply apply the title. Promotion without preparation is the key to disaster.

“A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.”   …Milton Berle

Somewhere, there is an unwritten rule that says all managers are required to conduct limitless meetings. It’s in the Manager Handbook or something. You get promoted to management, you are required by law to conduct lots and lots of meetings. Maybe there’s a quota – like a Merit Badge or something.

The challenge is that no one teaches people how to conduct effective meetings. Yes, you know it’s true – you sit in these train wrecks on a regular basis. You are either the victim or the culprit (or both), but you are spending way too much time in meetings. If, however, on the wildly off-chance you don’t have to participate in a lot of bad meetings, you will never know the pain…

Don’t get me wrong – some meetings are necessary. Occasionally, one is actually productive! Most meetings, however, are only marginally beneficial, and many are a complete waste of time. They start late. They are poorly led. They are long on ideas and short on execution. There is no follow-up or accountability. Good ideas are labeled “risky” while bad ideas are pondered for hours on end. Then everyone retreats back to their offices and races to catch up on their work before the next meeting is called. And the cycle starts all over again.

The Scourge That is PowerPoint

And, of course, there is the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation. There should be an addendum to the aforementioned handbook that provides for excessive punishment for anyone that misuses PowerPoint presentation software. This one product might be the single most abused business tool ever introduced into the workplace. (OK, I’ll grant you that text messaging and Blackberrys would get a lot of votes.)

SunGard, one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies, works with just about every financial services company in the world. In a recent New York Times interview, Cristóbal Conde, President & CEO of SunGard, commented on the use of PowerPoint in the workplace:

I actively despise how people use PowerPoint as a crutch. I think PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. I would much rather have somebody write something longhand, send it in ahead of the meeting and then assume everybody’s read it, and then you start talking, and let them defend it.

Conde’s comments suggest there are actually two major potential problems with PowerPoint presentations. First, presenters are apt to use business jargon, 12-color charts, transition effects, and text-laden slides to disguise the fact that they don’t have a firm grasp on a problem or an issue, or to hide the fact that they are uncomfortable with detailed discussion about the problem or issue. Second, presenters dramatically overuse/misuse PowerPoint to create a presentation that participants would sacrifice parts of their anatomy to avoid.

As Conde notes, “The question from the beginning of the meeting to the end of the meeting is, ‘Have we added value: yes or no?’ And I would say that if the meeting is mostly the presentation of a deck of PowerPoint slides, you conveyed information, but you didn’t actually add value.”

An Effective Meeting

Unfortunately, some people just love to have meetings. In some instances, it is a great replacement for actually getting some real work done. In most cases, however, a manager simply hasn’t learned how to lead a productive meeting. So, let’s review the basics.

There are three parts of a meeting that must be done well for it to yield positive results: First, there is what happens before the meeting (the Agenda), then there is what happens during the meeting (the Leader), and finally, there is what happens after the meeting (the Follow-up). In fact, it is the follow-up process that ensures that all the heavy lifting done before and during the actual meeting results in good decisions and accountability.

Here are eight steps to follow that will help any manager produce shorter, more effective meetings:

1. Create an objective for the meeting (Before)
2. Create a specific agenda for the meeting (Before)
3. Ensure that any contributor to the meeting is fully aware of his/her individual role in the meeting (Before)
4. Establish a firm time frame for the meeting (Before)
5. Assign a note-taker for the meeting (Before)
6. Record all decisions, action items, and critical information (During)
7. Assign process owners to all action items (During)
8. Distribute notes immediately following the meeting (After)

As you can see, the success or failure of any meeting is largely determined before the meeting even starts. The first five steps are all about planning for an effective meeting (a novel idea, to be sure).  The balance of the steps are simply about good execution.

While a meeting is only as good as its agenda and follow-up process, the leader will ultimately determine the overall effectiveness of the meeting. Frankly, setting an agenda and distributing the notes after the meeting is not terribly difficult, but, if the agenda is poorly conceived or the notes outline a series of bad decisions or faulty action items, the meeting will ultimately be considered a failure.

And, if the meeting includes one or more of those PowerPoint monstrosities, you can bet your last dollar that meeting length is going up and meeting effectiveness is going down.

Annual reviews are designed as a part of an overall performance management process. During the typical annual review, managers are usually assessed in a number of mission-critical competencies. Unfortunately, though well-intentioned, the typical review contains a number of flaws.

First, adequate training in assessment areas is not always forthcoming. In fact, specific competencies are not always adequately identified for managers prior to the review.

Second, in many cases, clear objectives and expectations have not been established for each competency, so the review takes on a highly subjective tone. For example, in the presence of a single instance in which a manager has seeming failed to demonstrate “initiative” (over a 12-month period), a manager may receive only an average score on this required competency – a 3 on a scale of 1 to 5.

Third, at some companies, managers may be assessed (allegedly) on literally dozens of competencies. In one case, I consulted with a company that assessed managers on over thirty management or leadership competencies in which they were expected to do well. However, the review process often devolved into identifying the two or three areas that needed improvement, while little attention was given to areas of strength or excellence. Managers perceived the whole process to be about about finding what was wrong with them rather than truly managing and improving performance.

All of this caused me to think about which competencies are really important in management leadership, i.e., which competencies should a company focus on to improve management performance? The Center for Creative Leadership – a well-respected leadership think tank – recently surveyed 2,200 leaders and asked what they considered to be the most important skills that leaders must develop to be successful in the current business climate. Here are the top 5 competencies they identified:

1. Leading people: directing and motivating people.
2. Strategic planning: translating vision into realistic business strategies, including long-term objectives.
3. Managing change: using effective strategies to facilitate organizational change.
4. Inspiring commitment: recognizing and rewarding employees’ achievements.
5. Resourcefulness: working effectively with top management.

(Hmmm.  It seems that, to be successful in the current business climate, leaders must first and foremost be good at leading people. But, isn’t that what leading is? What else would they lead – the facilities?)

Notwithstanding my sarcastic comment about No. 1 (I’m sure what they have in mind is for leaders to be more effective with people), I think they have it right – with one glaring omission. The single most important skill that any leader must possess is the ability to communicate effectively. Of course, those surveyed would likely say that communication is intrinsically present in each of these competencies, but in my view that is exactly the problem. While organizations consistently claim communication is critically important to success, it is rarely identified as its own competency – as demonstrated in this survey [Note: In many reviews, "verbal communication" and "written communication" are listed as necessary skills, but these generally refer to presentation skills (verbal) and general business correspondence (written)].

The important take-away here, I believe, is that current leaders do believe that working with people is the single biggest competency needed to be successful. If that is an accurate assessment, then managers would be well served to access any training or education available to improve those skills.

Some cliffs are worse than others...

It is not uncommon for managers to struggle with priorities; to consider what the most important thing is that they should be doing. Is the most important thing to keep a close watch on employee productivity, ensuring the company receives a good return on its payroll investment? Is the most important thing to manage to the budget, controlling expenses and improving efficiency? Is the most important thing to allocate resources, ensuring that all projects are on schedule? Is the most important thing to be a good leader, creating a workplace environment that engages employees? Yes, all of these things are important – but, in the course of a typical day or week, which one is the most important?

Perhaps the answer lies inherently in the question. What I mean is that, for managers, perhaps the process of determining the most important thing IS the most important thing they do. Someone has to guide the direction and priorities of the team (or company or department).

The most important thing is to make sure the most
important thing IS the most important thing.

Which is to say that THE most important thing for a manager to do is to make sure that the priorities chosen are the right ones. Clearly, one of the critical skills in management is to consistently choose the most important things that can/should be done at any given time.

Unfortunately, this whole idea can also cause a team to drive off a cliff (some cliffs are worse than others, of course, as the pictures demonstrate). If a manager has been led to believe that he, and he alone, is capable of determining the team’s priorities; that only he is capable of creating the best results for the team; that he must make every decision and solve every problem – then, ultimately, the most important thing in that manager’s mind is not the team’s execution of those priorities, but his execution of those priorities. Upon closer inspection, it is often clear that the team is not really a “team” after all.

The World According to Micro-Managers

According to the dictionary, a micro-manager is one who manages “with great or excessive control or attention to details.” The key word here is “excessive.” Although there are times when a significant amount of control might need to be exercised (new hires, for example), it is extraordinarily rare to find high-performance employees who want or need “excessive control.”

However, many micro-managers I have observed do not see themselves as being bad for the team – or being bad in any kind of way. In fact, many micro-managers believe that their excessive control and attention-to-detail is exactly what the team needs, and what makes them good at their jobs. They have not come to the conclusion that “the most important thing” in the workplace is to develop the full performance potential of each employee; instead, they believe “the most important thing” is the final result produced by the (so-called) team – the measurable performance result – i.e., that the ends justify the means.

These are two different philosophies of management. While both styles care about results, the first philosophy places the burden of performance on team members, while the second places the burden on the leader (after all, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself).

Are you a micro-manager? The following statements about micro-managers, excerpted from “What Is Micromanagement? And What You Can Do To Avoid It,” a Global Knowledge White Paper by Steve Lemex, may provide you with some answers:

• They believe that being a manager means that they have more knowledge and/or skill than their employees.
• They believe they can perform most of the tasks of their staff, probably better.
• They believe that they care about things (quality, deadlines, etc.) more than their staff.
• They feel it is more efficient to do the job themselves than give the job to a staff member.
• They are overly critical of their staff. When they review the work of staff members, they tend to find at least one thing wrong each time.
• They don’t allow their staff to learn from their mistakes
• They get irritated if staff make decisions without consulting them
• They spend an inordinate amount of time overseeing single projects
• They pride themselves on being “on top of” their staff’s projects.
• They are overworked, and their staff is not.
• They come into the office earlier than any staff member and leave later. If they are away from the office, they call in at least twice a day, including when they are sick or on vacation.
• They seldom praise staff members.
• Their staff appear frustrated, depressed, and/or unmotivated.
• Their staff do not take initiative – they have to check with the manager before doing anything
• They have been referred to as controlling, dictatorial, judgmental, critical, bureaucratic, suspicious, or snooping by staff

If this sounds a whole lot like you, I’ve got good news for you – you can be successful as a micro-manager! No doubt about it, micro-managers often produce good, even great, results. However, you have to realize that the “team” (such as it is) will never succeed without you.

If you insist on doing everything, that is exactly what will happen, so quit whining about your employees’ lack of initiative. The team will likely suffer high turnover; employees will tell you they got a better offer, but they really just want to work for someone that will give them a chance to grow and develop. The team will not be innovative, because the “really good” ideas always come from you. When you drive off the cliff, it will be a long way down…

On the other hand, if you want to create a high-performance team – and be able to take a vacation without being tethered to your Blackberry – “the most important thing” is to make sure that developing your employees IS the most important thing you do. Then, all of the day-to-day priorities you establish can be accomplished by the people you actually hired to do them.

News flash: In terms of workplace performance, employees aren’t all the same.  Yup…bet you had no idea.

Of course, it would be nice if they were all the same – preferably awesome. Unfortunately, we have all seen the employee who has been with the company for ten years but really doesn’t have ten years experience, he just has one year of experience ten times.

Sure, it’s an old joke, but the reason it’s been around so long is it contains a lot of truth.

Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started. (From Talent is Overrated, by Geoffrey Colvin, Portfolio – Penguin Group, 2008)

“Performance management” is one of the buzz words associated with management (although it originates as an HR function), but ask managers what it is and you will get a variety of (sometimes quite interesting) answers. Here’s a look at what Wikipedia has to offer on the subject:

Performance Management (PM) as described here refers to a term coined by Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels in the late 1970s to describe a technology (i.e., science imbedded in applications methods) for managing both behavior and results, the two critical elements of what is known as performance. Performance is the sum of behavior and results, and cannot be viewed as independent of either component. It is an outcome of effective management.

In the context of Human Resources, performance management refers to the ongoing process of setting goals, self-assessment, manager assessment, peer-assessment (also called 360 assessment), coaching, development planning, and evaluation. Research has shown that this process, which is widely used in business (but often called performance appraisal), has two forms: competitive assessment (where employees are rigorously compared against each other), and coaching & development (where employees are evaluated against their own goals and capabilities).

Managing behavior and results. This probably calls for a definition of behavior as well (we’re not talking about managing all behavior, are we?), but I suspect this explanation of performance management means that effective managers train employees in certain behaviors (workplace tasks) that inevitably lead to a predictable set of results.

The second part of the Wikipedia definition reveals more detail. Here, performance management includes things like goal-setting, assessments, coaching, development planning, and evaluation. The interesting thing about all of this is that, while managers are generally required to “manage performance” – by some definition -  that definition is rarely crystal clear to the manager. Further, the manager is almost never provided with the necessary training to be competent in “performance management,” at least in terms of using all of those tools effectively. Quite often, it is simply assumed that, once promoted to management, a manager somehow just knows how to manage performance.

Evidently, the assumption that managers just know how to manage performance isn’t working out that well – at least from anecdotal evidence. Talking to managers from a number of industries and different company sizes, it is interesting to hear their ideas (definitions) about performance management: they range from telling employees what to do, to completing an annual performance evaluation, to correcting mistakes and/or failures, to documenting inappropriate behavior, to providing job skills training, to letting HR do it. Oddly enough, the concept of “coaching and development” almost never arises…

At the same time, the vast majority of those managers feel they are poorly prepared and inadequately trained to effectively manage their employees performance.  How about you? How effective are you at managing performance?

Who makes a better manager – a man or a woman?

I suspect that in some quarters just asking that question is potentially career threatening! Can you imagine someone actually suggesting – in today’s culture and political environment – that a man might make a better manager because of his gender?

In a recent NY Times article (Adam Bryant. No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers. July 25, 2009.), Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, said the following:

In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers. Men love to hear themselves talk. I’m so generalizing. I know I am. But in a couple of places I’ve worked, I would often say, “Call me 15 minutes after the meeting starts and then I’ll come,” because I will have missed all the football. I will have missed all the “what I did on the golf course.” I will miss the four jokes, and I can get into the meeting when it’s starting.

Men also, they’re definitely better on the “whatever” side. Things tend to roll off their back. We women take things very personally. We’re constantly playing things over in our head — “What did that mean when they said that?” — when they mean nothing. And I’m certainly not immune to this. So there’s a downside to women.

WOW! Imagine the furor that would be raised if a male Senior VP suggested that men make better managers, better mentors and rational thinkers, and that women love to gossip and spend too much time talking about their new shoes and who got kicked off So You Think You Can Dance!

Which, they do, by the way.

Yeow!! Sorry, that was my wife throwing a plate at me. Not all women do, of course. Just like all men don’t talk about golf and football…. Uh oh. I guess that argument just fell apart, huh? But you get my point.

Is It Gender or Personality Driven?

Actually, I think Ms. Politically Incorrect’s observations have much more to do with behavioral styles than gender. She is a dominant, driver personality – she likes to cut to the chase, avoid the small talk, and get down to business. In the article, she says:

I don’t waste time. If you want to chat, if you want to gossip, I’ll gossip with anyone, I’ll hang out. But when I’m working, I’m working. When you sit here in my office, we work. Men don’t do that as well as women do, either. All of sudden they’re on football. All of a sudden they’re showing videos of their son’s soccer game. Then they’re telling a couple of jokes. I’m not good at jokes during meetings. I’m very focused. I’m very singularly directed.

Again….WOW! Men don’t work as well as women?

But I digress. To my point, is Ms. Generalization’s unwillingness to waste time a gender-specific trait? I don’t think so. Is she focused and “singularly directed” (?) because she’s a woman? Doubtful.  No, more likely, these items are the cornerstone of her personality style, and has little to do with gender. And her generalizations about men are just that, sometimes true and sometimes not so true. Her experience has brought her into contact with – what? – a couple of hundred male managers in her career? And, from that HUGE sampling she has concluded that all male managers waste time talking about football, while their female counterparts are “nose to the grindstone?”

Uh huh.

But, Ms. You-Can’t-Touch-This, by her own frequent admission, does like to “generalize,” doesn’t she? By the way, isn’t that a HUGE no-no in our society? Here she goes again:

I have been in this career for many years and I have seen, and this is a generalization, that women are better list-makers. They will do their to-do list. They will prioritize their to-do list. They will get through their to-do list. Maybe it’s because we do shopping lists. And if we have a problem — again, as a generalization — we will confront the problem and deal with it head-on.

Somebody stop me! This paragraph sends me into painful shock waves of laughter. I had to go back and read this article three times to make sure it wasn’t a parody of some sort! If a man said something like this, he would be drawn and quartered, and then summarily dismissed – in that order.

Of course she never mentions anything at all about actual job performance. Does she actually care if a male manager talks about sports, or, conversely, if a female manager talks about soap operas, if they do their jobs well? No, the point is, she just doesn’t care to chit-chat (despite her weak claim that she loves “to hang out”) – and that has much more to do with her behavioral style than her gender.

Oh, well…it does makes for great water cooler conversation. Who do you think makes a better manager – a man or a woman?