Peter Drucker: “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work.”
A while back I had a post around “1 Jerk = $160K.” We’ve all experienced managers who are either idiots or just complete jerks. The fact of the matter is that these types of managers are often not just making life difficult for your employees, but they are actually impeding productivity and profits from flowing into your organization.
Some managers are hated because there’s just a mismatch of style. A productive and capable employee may not want or need to be micro-managed and this conflict of style will simply lead to resentment. Getting leaders and managers to understand how to deal with these differences in style and be flexible is critical to employee engagement, and in this example, is critical to the engagement of what could be a great producer.
On the other hand, some managers are just universally hated. It’s hard sometimes to identify the course of action for these managers. I worked for one once that was so reviled that I’d never seen morale lower in any organization. The problem was that his organization was producing well above the goals set for him, so senior management never saw to terminate the relationship. The real story behind the scenes was that his group was composed of very self motivated salespeople in a good market. This simply meant that they were going to produce anyway. The long term damage was certainly in lost productivity (on top of already exceptional productivity), morale, turnover, and in performing tasks that were dictated to us, but completely unnecessary.
Identifying these managers and removing them from management is a critical task in the talent process for management and succession. When we get into critical management positions, leadership becomes increasingly important. While overall production, sales, and productivity are important indicators, your employee engagement surveys are equally if not more critical in today’s talent economy.
5 responses to “Management as a Productivity Barrier”
You make an excellent point about the cost impact a bad manager can have on an organization. Unfortunately, I think many people assume that bad managers will somehow be obviously visible wherever they are in the company. This is simply not true. Often, they are adept at managing upward and therefore are only seen as incompetent by the people below them in the organization. If a company’s talent management processes are not designed to uncover this failure mode, then the effects of low morale and disengagement are sure to follow. Organizations that do not measure employee engagement or do not take action at the correct level, are at a higher risk of not identifying these poor managers.
Barney: Great point, based on experience, these poor managers are almost always great at managing upward. They communicate with their own management well, and seem to be able to spin data to their advantage. Unfortunately, even when engagement surveys show their poor performance, the organization is unwilling to take corrective action because their own experience was so different. This simply underscores the need to have a good governance and process established prior to these measurement events such as engagement surveys.
I wonder if Drucker was thinking of jerks or was he thinking of the exercises that managers go through in large bureaucratic organizations which appear to be useful but which employees feel are huge and frustrating time wasters.
We actually measured the impact that a leader has on engagement. We used our own leadership tool, the Apter Leadership Profiling System (ALPS), which basically asks direct reports “what’s it like to work for your boss” (i.e. climate). Engagement was measured by the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli). The results were pretty astounding. Climate accounted for almost one half of variation in engagement.
Now, if you have a jerk at the top of the organisation, their team is likely to be less engagement. What’s the impact on their team? And the next level down….. …and the next?
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