What Kind of a Boss Are You Anyway?

The title of today’s post came from a reader who sent me an email after my blog about employee commitment. There’s a lot of pent up frustration out there about us mangers, People, and it’s bound, as my reader suggested, to chase away your best and brightest.

As someone who likes to research a topic in order to develop it properly, I’ve done my due diligence and here is how some of the issues stack up. Do you recognize even one that applies to you? If so, there are things you can change IF you have the heart and mind to do it.

Don’t Believe All the Stuff You Read in Reviews: only Paris Hilton does that. Put your own boss’s comments in context. Is she bad about having productive performance conversations and the annual review (if you even get one) is rushed and bland? Maybe you should ask your team how you’re doing and really listen for feedback.

Are Your Bad Habits Rubbing Off on Your Staff? Are you continuously late to team meetings or do you regularly ask employees to work extra hours because you couldn’t get your act together? As Stephen Covey said, being in the thick of thin things means that the important things never get done – until they reach a crisis. Putting out fires is not the measure of a good manager or leader no matter how good that adrenaline rush feels.

Do You Show Genuine Respect for Other People? I confess: I absolutely hate people responding to email and texting during meals and meetings or continuing to work while I sit there for a scheduled meeting; and the only functioning brain in the room is mine because the other person erroneously believes in the myth of multitasking. It’s been proven that multitasking is less productive than attending to one thing at a time and following through on it. If you don’t respect my time or the purpose of the meeting, don’t call one -- or me.

You Went on the Leadership Courses; Now What? I’m not one of those people who believe that leaders are born not made although the potential needs to be there. Winston Churchill was a terrible peacetime leader but he understood what it took to lead in the darkest of times. I don’t think he went on a course to develop that skill set. The point is, leadership training can be generic and disconnected from either your job or your organization’s culture; making it very difficult to apply the content in everyday work. The best recipe is training that is a direct result of a good performance review (not filling up a predetermined number of annual training hours) coupled with mentoring and coaching. Being curious and unafraid to ask questions are also vital development tools.

As managers, too often we don’t take stock of our own performance and how it affects the people who have to make things work on the team. Are we lazy or in over our heads? Are we modeling the behaviors inflicted on us by our own bosses? When you find one day that your best people are leaving, you may need to own up to the fact that people rarely leave their jobs; they leave their bosses.

We’ve all had great bosses. Who were yours and what made them great?

To Prune or Not to Prune? It's Not Only For Gardens

I’m a wanna-be gardener; so I listen avidly almost every Saturday to a popular local radio talk show about gardening. Last week, a caller offered three reasons for pruning and he suggested that these reasons apply to every day living, too.

So, we prune in a garden:

• To protect health

• To encourage a different direction

• To promote growth

I used to be afraid of pruning; scared I’d forever damage the shape and dimensions of trees that were planted long before I arrived. I’ve learned, though, to step back and look at my subject from its totality and to see limbs that didn’t survive a winter storm or that were growing against others and would eventually cause disease. With fewer boughs and branches, more light reaches the interior and making the cut at the right place encourages growth in the right direction. The future shape of the tree is determined by my own eye, hand and perspective.

Not to belabor this metaphor too long, but the gardener had the right idea, about trees -- and people and businesses, too. Here are my thoughts on the business side:

To Protect Health:

• Have the right tools to do the job and get advice and input when you need it.
• Use your wisdom developed through experience and maintain the courage of your convictions. Then, make an informed decision.
• Look at the shape of your organization: is it hindering the way things need to be done today?

To Encourage a Different Direction:

• Take a step back and view the totality of your business or operation. Don’t wait until there is a crisis or an economic meltdown to act. You get no points for that.
• Set a course with your strategy, have a back-up plan and review often. Things happen too fast to set anything in stone.

To Promote Growth:

• Shine a light on your internal processes, management practices, customer relationships and organizational culture. What is holding you back?
• To know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve been and where you are. It’s going to take a lot of good data to provide insight that leads to great business decisions. This is the time to bring Business Intelligence from the IT department to the entire operation.

What kind of business gardener are you? Are you promoting health; steering a new direction and encouraging growth? It's a great time of year to start pruning.

Has Management Become Just a J-O-B? Five Enduring Lessons

A couple of weeks ago, I asked whether ‘management’ is obsolete. As a discipline, it’s less than 100 years old and emerged in response to the large and complex organizations that grew after World War I. Management doesn’t have an exam like the law or licensure like medicine to demonstrate proficiency. Nevertheless, management is a difficult practice that many have come to with poor training and confusing expectations. And yet, while some practices must change, there are some enduring lessons about management I’ve learned during my career:

Embrace Your Outliers: I had a manager in London who was gender blind and that was a real asset to me, who wanted to be one of the first women to present insurance risks at Lloyd’s of London. It was about competence and potential, not whether we used the same bathroom.

Get a Mentor; Be a Mentor: One of my favorite managers made it his job to take on new recruits in a structured way to develop our skills and show us the ropes even if we were not in his department. He insisted that we give back by becoming a mentor and I found that teaching was the best way to learn.

The Better You Are, The Better I Look: This was the philosophy of a dynamic manager who made a point of surrounding himself with the best people he could recruit. The team couldn’t have been more different and while that caused friction, it also made for amazing innovations, growth and surprising agility. I learned from him that diversity of thought is a competitive advantage and that as change is the only constant in business, it was advantageous to get out in front of it or get out of the way.

Make a Decision: I once asked a manager for feedback on areas to improve after a performance review. He thought for a minute and then said, “Don’t take forever to make a decision. Gather information, hear opinions and then make a decision. You can always modify it but people hate dithering.” Good advice.

You Are the Culture: If you are a manager, even if you aren’t the uber-manager, you set the tone for your department. People learn the way things are done from you, good or bad. Employees don’t leave their jobs; they leave their managers. A hard lesson I learned as a manager was when I took over from someone who had very different ideas about what it meant to manage. If I had to do it over, I’d spend a lot more time changing the culture before thinking I could change anything else.

I agree with Gary Hamel that management processes have to be redesigned to take account of new organizational structures, different workforce dynamics and technological advances. His Management Innovation Exchange is an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management. It doesn’t mean throwing out every good thing we learned as managers; it’s just about kicking out what no longer works, like celebrity managers.

Waging the War on Bureaucracy: Is Management Obsolete?

Sorry if you choked on your doughnut while reading the title but, really, there has been so much written about CEO’s and their lack of ethics but their abundance of perks; about how leaders are failing every stakeholder they answer to and about how, like the dodo, management as a practice is becoming extinct.

How did things get this bad? Like Wile E. Coyote, didn’t we see Roadrunner aiming that anvil right at our heads?

Here’s my theory: we brought it on ourselves; we asked for the anvil. Why?

• We continue to hobnob with people who look like us and think just the way we do.

• We ignore social media as a passing fad or something IT needs to eliminate from employees’ Internet permissions.

• We haven't picked up on the fact that people are organizing online in communities that criss-cross time zones, date lines and borders to innovate, collaborate and create their own products and services. What's irrelevant are buildings and organization charts and titles.

• We talk engagement but secretly believe “they” are lucky to have a job.

• Change is for everyone else.

• We've been drinking the Kool-Aid of “shareholder value” as the only means to an end.

• And follow it up with a chaser of re-engineering as a synonym for de-layering, downsizing and off shoring (but, oh, that short term lift to the bottom line!).

• We are rock stars, aren't we?

I held management positions for twenty years; I know what it’s like to slog away and then be rewarded for my efforts with a fancy title and a fancy car. The problem is, the Roadrunner is on our tails, with a stick of dynamite.

I am really raving about this issue because there is so much more that managers can do not only save ourselves but also to make a difference in our companies and to the employees who report to us. For a less heated rant, I recommend an article titled, The End of Management by Alan Murray, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 21st.

In my next blog, I may rant less and offer a few solutions to an issue I didn’t know meant this much to me – until now.