By: Shadé Akande
Many of us are fortunate enough to have had a manager who had a positive impact on our professional development and day-to-day work environment. Sadly, many of us are also able to quickly recall the manager who we had less than pleasant experiences with. They were the ones who made our jobs arduous, our lives difficult and who should not have been responsible for managing other humans.
A bad manager is one of the top reasons continuously cited as why employees leave companies. Why is it that today with all of the data, business intelligence, and personal experiences, so many organizations are still disregarding the impact that poor people management has on employees (and the bottom line)? Here are three of the major causes of this issue.
The first one is very common. Let's say an organization has a superstar, high-performing employee who’s exceeding expectations and has become a subject matter expert. What does the organization do next? They give the employee a person or more to manage and label it a “promotion” because if s/he is good at researching physical phenomena while devising hypotheses to conduct experiments and draw conclusions from experimental data (or whatever the job is), then obviously s/he would also be fantastic at managing people, right? Wrong. So wrong.
One of the issues with this approach is that these "promotions" often don’t include assessing people's management abilities — effective communication, strong interpersonal skills, and coaching, developing, disciplining, encouraging & engaging individuals. So, not only does this employee have to continue exceeding expectations in their newly defined role, but they also have to ensure that their new direct reports have the resources needed to at least meet expectations in their own roles whilst managing any challenges that naturally arise from change.
[Related: Why Being Likable as a Leader Matters]
Another issue is that bad managers often go unchecked for too long. This can be extremely frustrating to employees, especially if they’ve voiced concerns to no avail or don’t believe that they have a safe outlet to share their concerns. So when employees feel that they can’t speak with their managers, they don’t trust leadership enough to report manager misconduct; or if leadership assumes that managers are doing a good job without occasionally checking (or they’re turning a blind eye to bad behavior), then employees leave companies. And often it’s the good employees who leave (mediocre and poor employees stick around much longer). Trying to entice an employee to stay at that point is futile.
Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, said, “No amount of pay and benefits will solve the problems created by a manager who has no talent for the task at hand.” I remember joining a company where during my first month I had coffee with an employee who had just resigned and he told me that five other colleagues of his had resigned in the past year — all reporting to the same manager. That manager was then immediately investigated and her entire team ended up being redistributed. But six employees shouldn’t have had to exit the company before action was taken. Not only did that situation unintentionally communicate to employees that they weren’t a priority, but it also revealed that the leadership team had some serious blind spots, there was an unhealthy culture brewing, employees were dispensable, and power was unevenly distributed.
The third and most important issue is that some organizations still don’t sincerely view their employees as the most valuable part of their company. I can’t overstate this one enough. Mission statements, placards and company meeting speeches are laced with declarations about employees being number one but employees often experience something very different. When organizations get this one piece right, the impact on everything else can be golden.
So what are some solutions to these manager challenges?
1. Organizations shouldn’t automatically make people management the next step for a high performer, or even perceive managing others as a promotion. Managing should be viewed as a privilege and a calling for the chosen, trained and interested bunch. Organizations should also train/do a better job of training individuals to be effective people managers before giving them the responsibility. And organizations need to recognize that the naturally great people managers are uncommon, so appropriate training is required to get those who aren’t great to that level. Organizations (and employees) should also openly acknowledge that it’s very honorable to be an individual contributor who doesn’t have direct reports. Having manager, director and VP equivalent positions and career tracks that are valued and equally challenging (without having to manage people) is a great first step.
2. The leadership team should create or recreate a culture of inclusiveness, transparency and integrity. Leaders should be present and walk the halls for spontaneous conversations with everyone. They should be humble and eager to serve the needs of all employees. This can build the trust and atmosphere that fosters feedback and great ideas from employees. Leaders shouldn’t assume that everything is okay but should instead be intentional about regularly checking the pulse of the organization. They need to realize that there is a real quantifiable financial impact attached to every unhappy employee—and every project, product and colleague that the unhappy employees come in contact with. Leaders should treat a challenging culture or poor employee experience with more vigor than they’d treat a failing product. If your employees aren’t happy, nothing else matters more than correcting that situation. Even if there are a handful of satisfied high performing employees at your company, they won’t want to stick around for long in an environment where the majority of their colleagues aren’t content.
3. Organizations need to view employees as too valuable to put into the hands of a manager who isn’t vetted. Seriously, it's more valuable than the product, service and revenue. It’s a mind shift for many. When you truly believe that your employees are the foundation of your business, you’ll think twice about who you allow the privilege of managing them. And you’ll think twice about not requiring training for people management before you impose a new manager on your treasured employees. Once an employee has been with your organization for a certain amount of time, they acquire institutional knowledge specific to your business that their potential replacement, regardless of how impressive s/he appears to be, will need some time to acquire. How much is that worth? How much will that cost your company? Say… the price of people management training? Actually, more. The inevitable fact is that it’s going to cost you. Isn’t it better to pay on the front-end in the form of training, retention and engagement than on the backend in the form of recruiting costs, lost productivity, and the negative impact to remaining employee morale? Managers are the one constant that most impact how satisfied, engaged and committed an employee is at work. Everything can be on the line if you miss this one.
Here are some additional actions you can take to improve the management experience for employees at your organization:
- Hire very capable people who require very little supervision—and then trust them
- Implement cross-collaborative management so that managers are impacting more employees (breadth), employees are experiencing different managers (depth) and then knowledge and exposure are increasing
- Flatten your organization (remove a layer or two), which then requires fewer managers
- Streamline the performance review process and create an environment of continuous feedback so that managers aren’t responsible for a ten-page performance document for each direct report; make the focus development and mentorship not administrative tasks
My final two cents: When your human resources team reports to Finance or Operations, instead of reporting to the Chief or VP of HR/People Ops, your organization is probably not going to get the employee experience thing right. There is a balance sheet mentality that accompanies the former approach, which may cause you to view employees as disposable commodities with a fixed cost attached, not taking into account all of their many qualitative attributes that directly and indirectly make the organization great. Numbers-people rarely get that as well as People-people do. This topic in and of itself is an entirely separate article, but if your products/services teams don’t report to your CFO, then your HR team probably shouldn’t either.
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Shadé Akande is the Founder and CEO of Squad Square, and employee experience (HR) improvement partner and career strategy provider for thriving organizations and individuals. Prior to this, Shadé led Talent Acquisition and People functions for companies such as Verizon Wireless, Google, Sanofi, and Asics).
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