PART 1: IT’S OKAY TO BE THE BOSS—BE A GREAT ONE!
ONE. The Undermanagement Epidemic
- Too many leaders, managers, and supervisors are failing to lead, manage, and supervise.
- Undermanagement is costly.
- Most problems could be avoided altogether or solved quickly by a highly engaged hands-on manager.
- Why are so many managers so hands off? It’s always been hard to manage people. Nowadays, it’s a whole lot harder.
- For too long now, the pendulum of management thinking, books, and training has swung so far in exactly the wrong direction, toward hands-off management.
- Responsibility without sufficient direction and support is not empowerment. It is downright negligent.
TWO. The Top Seven Management Myths
#1. The Myth of Empowerment: The way to empower people is to leave them alone and let them manage themselves. What is the reality? Almost everybody performs better with more guidance, direction, and support from a more experienced person.
#2. The Myth of Fairness: The way to be fair is to treat everybody the same. The reality is that we are not all winners and what’s truly fair is doing more for some people and less for others, based on what they deserve—based on their performance.
#3. The Myth of the Nice Guy: The only way to be strong is to act like a jerk, but I want to be a “nice guy.” The reality is that lots of managers act like jerks. That doesn’t mean they are strong. Real “nice guy” managers do what it takes to help employees succeed so those employees can deliver great service for customers and earn more rewards for themselves.
#4. The Myth of the Difficult Conversation: Being hands-off is the way to avoid confrontations with employees. The reality is being a weak manager makes these confrontations inevitable, whereas being a strong manager means these confrontations rarely occur, and when they do happen they are not so painful after all.
#5. The Myth of Red Tape: Managers are prevented from being strong because there are many factors beyond their control—red tape, corporate culture, senior management, limited resources. What is the reality? Focus intensely on what you can control and then follow the rules, cut through the red tape, and do all the things you can to be a strong manager that don’t require anyone’s permission.
#6. The Myth of the Natural Leader: I am not “good at” managing. What is the reality? The best managers are people—natural or not—who learn proven techniques, practice those techniques diligently until they become skills, and continue practicing them until they become habits.
#7. The Myth of Time: There’s isn’t enough time to manage people. What is the reality? Since your time is so limited, you definitely don’t have time to not manage people.
THREE. The Hard Realities of Managing People
- I know that for most people, being really hands-on requires a fundamental rethinking of the manager’s role and the management relationship. Being strong is about being steady, consistent, patient, and engaged whether things are going right, wrong or average.
- Managing people in the real world is very, very difficult, and there are no easy solutions.
- The best training you can get is help copying what the most effective managers are actually doing every day. These are the real world in the mundane techniques of strong, highly engaged, hands-on management.
FOUR. It’s Okay to Be the Boss!---Start Learning to Be a Great One!
Be the boss who follows these eight back to basics techniques:
1) Get in the habit of managing people every day.
2) Learn to talk like a performance coach.
3) Take it one person at a time.
4) Make accountability a real process.
5) Make expectations clear every step of the way.
6) Track performance in writing.
7) Solve small problems before they turn into big problems.
8) Do more for some people and less for others (based on what they deserve).
The Undermanagement Epidemic
Managing is a sacred responsibility. If you are the boss, it is your responsibility to make sure everything goes well. You have to make sure all the work is getting done very well very fast all day long. If you are the boss, employees look to you first when they need something, or when they want something, or when something is going wrong. If there’s a problem, you are the solution. If you are the boss, you are the one everyone is counting on.
But too many leaders, managers, and supervisors are failing to lead, manage, and supervise. They simply do not take charge on a day-to-day basis. They fail to spell out expectations every step of the way, track performance constantly, correct failure, and reward success. They are afraid to, or they don’t want to, or they just don’t know how to. All across the workplace, at all levels of organizations in every industry, there is a shocking and profound lack of daily guidance, direction, feedback, and support for employees. This is what I call “undermanagement”—the opposite of micromanagement.
Undermanagement is costing organizations a fortune every day. It robs so many employees of the chance to have positive experiences in the workplace, reach greater success, and earn more of what they need and want. It causes managers to struggle and suffer and deliver suboptimal results. It sours dealings with vendors and customers. And it costs society in so many ways. Undermanagement is not a household word like micro- management, but it should be because its impact makes micro-management look like a molehill.
THE UNDERMANAGEMENT EPIDEMIC: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Since the mid-1990s, I’ve had a front-row seat from which to study workplace dynamics. I’ve spent most of my time training managers at all levels; tens of thousands of managers, from CEOs to frontline supervisors, in just about every industry—retail, health care, research, finance, aerospace, software, manufacturing, the public sector, even nonprofits, you name it. Managers’ successes thrill me. Their failures break my heart. Their challenges are my challenges.
I’ve spent so much time behind the scenes in so many organizations that I can tell you this: most problems could be avoided altogether or solved quickly by a highly engaged hands-on manager, by a boss who accepts her authority and the responsibility that goes along with it. This is the boss who says, “Great news, I’m the boss! And I’m going to try really hard to be a great one!” Unfortunately, highly engaged managers are rare. Frankly, most bosses are not so great. Many struggle to be better. Some don’t even bother to struggle. Most bosses are so hands-off they mostly don’t manage unless they absolutely must.
Why is that?
It’s always been hard to manage people. Managers have always been stuck in the middle between the employer and the employee, trying to negotiate their competing needs and expectations. Most managers, like most human beings, have probably always gone out of their way to avoid those conflicts. One of the legacies of the old-fashioned workplace (that of the postwar myth about dues paying and ladder climbing for job security) is hands-off leadership based on sink-or-swim followership. In the old long-term hierarchical model (the pyramid organization chart), followers took for granted their managers’ authority and the authority of the employer. As a result, followers were more likely to figure out what to do and do it, making lots of mistakes along the way, no doubt. But there was more room back then for waste and inefficiency. Not anymore.
Nowadays, it’s a whole lot harder to manage people. Today, the world is highly interconnected, fiercely competitive, knowledge driven, and global. Markets are chaotic, resource needs are unpredictable, and employers are geared for constant change. As a result, employers must be lean and flexible in order to survive, and individuals must be increasingly aggressive in order to take care of themselves and their families. Employees are less likely to trust the “system” or the organization to take care of them over time and thus less likely to make immediate sacrifices in exchange for promises of long-term rewards. They are more likely to disagree openly with employers’ missions, policies, and decisions and challenge employment conditions and established reward systems. As a result of all of these changes, most employees are much less obedient to employers’ rules and supervisors’ instructions.
Traditional sources of authority are also being steadily supplanted by new sources. Seniority, age, rank, and established practice are diminishing. Organization charts are flatter; layers of management have been removed. Reporting relationships are more temporary; more employees are being managed by short-term project leaders, instead of “organization-chart” managers. On the rise as sources of authority are more transactional forms such as control of resources, control of rewards, and control of work conditions. Employees look to their immediate supervisors to meet their basic needs and expectations and freely make demands of their managers. Managers who cannot meet these needs have less and less authority in the eyes of employees.
Meanwhile, most managers, like everybody else, have more tasks and responsibilities of their own, along with more administrative duties. Even so, managerial spans of control—the number of employees officially reporting to each supervisor— have increased. More managers are managing employees working in locations remote from the manager. Plus the breadth and complexity of the work being done by the employees reporting to each manager has also expanded in most cases.
For too long now, the pendulum of management thinking, books, and training has swung so far in exactly the wrong direction, toward hands-off management.
The recent widespread use of the term “engagement” is just another way of invoking the vastly misunderstood concept of “empowerment.” Empowerment has been widely misunderstood ever since Douglas McGregor gave us Theory X and Theory Y: Theory X says that workers are best motivated by external sources such as fear, coercion, and tangible rewards. Theory Y says that workers are best motivated by sources internal to themselves such as desire, belief, and the quest for self-actualization. Nearly all the relevant research indicates that people are actually motivated by both internal and external factors. Nonetheless, Theory Y has been the main ingredient in the “empowerment” literature for several decades, to the nearly total exclusion of Theory X. The result is that “false empowerment” has become the prevailing approach in management thinking, books, and training. In the “false empowerment” approach, managers should not keep close track of employees and they definitely should not zero in on employee failures. Employees should be made to feel they “own” their work and should be set free to make their own decisions. Managers are merely facilitators, there to align the natural talents and desires of employees with fitting roles in the workplace. Managers should not tell people how to do their jobs, but rather let employees come up with their own methods. The idea is, make employees feel good inside and results will take care of themselves.
This false empowerment approach dovetails with broader social/cultural/workplace trends away from hierarchy. We “question authority” at work, in the family, and everywhere else. The wishful thinking that “nobody needs to be in charge” is underwritten by this larger discourse.
But face it. Somebody is in charge and employees will “be held accountable.” Employees do not have the “power” to do things their own way in the workplace. They are not free to ignore tasks they don’t like. They are not free to do as they please. Rather, employees are free to only make their own decisions within defined guidelines and parameters that are determined by others according to the strict logic of the enterprise at hand. Responsibility without sufficient direction and support is not empowerment. It is downright negligent.
Here’s the punchline: there is no end run around the management part of leadership. Those in leadership positions simply must take charge of their people: give orders, track performance, correct failure, and reward success, every step of the way. These are just the basics of managing people, and anything less is undermanagement.
Why Managers Don’t Manage
Unfortunately, most managers have bought the false-empowerment philosophy that is constantly peddled in and out of the workplace. Most don’t take a stronger hand when it comes to managing—they don’t even perform the basic tasks of managing. Most managers undermanage. Why?
I ask managers every single day why they don’t take a stronger hand when it comes to managing. They almost always give me the same reasons—I call them the top-seven management myths in today’s workplace.
#1. The Myth of Empowerment: The way to empower people is to leave them alone and let them manage themselves.
This is false empowerment, the number one myth in the workplace.
What is the reality? Almost everybody performs better with more guidance, direction, and support from a more experienced person.
So why do managers often second-guess their own instincts to take a stronger hand? Precisely because they have been ingrained with the mantras of false empowerment. When managers do take charge, employees often recite these same mantras, complaining, “Don’t micromanage me!”
The funny thing is that most cases mistaken for micromanagement turn out to be undermanagement in disguise. Let me show you.
Case number one. The employee must check with his manager every step of the way in order to make very basic decisions or take very simple actions. Is this really a case of micromanagement? No. If an employee is unable to make very basic decisions or take very simple actions on his own, that’s almost always because the manager has not prepared the employee in advance to do so. Someone has to tell him, “If A happens, do B. If C happens, do D. If E happens, do F.” That’s how you equip an employee to make decisions and take action. Someone has to tell the employee exactly what to do and how to do it. Someone has to make sure he understands how to accomplish his tasks and carry out his responsibilities. Someone has to equip the employee with the tools and techniques of the job. That someone is the manager.
Case number two. The employee makes decisions and takes actions without ever checking in with her manager. When the manager finds out about those decisions and actions, the employee gets in big trouble. Burned for taking initiative? Yes. Micromanagement? No. If an employee does not know where her discretion begins and ends, that’s because the manager has not spelled out guidelines and parameters for the employee up front. Someone has to painstakingly clarify for her what is within her authority and what is not. Someone has to repeatedly spell out what she cannot and may not do. That someone is the manager.
Case number three. The manager remains tangled up with the employee’s tasks or the employee gets tangled up with the manager’s tasks—in the end, you just can’t tell which tasks belong to the manager and which ones belong to the employee. Isn’t that micromanagement? No. This is failure to delegate. Some work is hard to delegate, but if the work cannot be delegated properly, it is the manager’s job to figure that out and act accordingly. Someone has to spell out exactly which tasks belong to the employee and which ones belong to the manager. Someone has to tell the employee up front in advance exactly what is to be done, where, when, and how. That someone is the manager.
All of these cases often misconstrued as “micromanagement” turn out to be cases of undermanagement. That’s why I often say that micromanagement is a giant red herring. Is there even such a thing as “micromanagement” at all? Of course, some managers overdo it sometimes, but the vast majority underdo it. Real micromanagement, if it exists at all, is quite rare. Look at the basics of management: Delegate properly so each employee knows which tasks belong to him and him alone. Spell out exactly what is within his authority and what is not. Equip him with the tools and techniques of the job. That’s not micromanagement, that’s just plain management. Anything less is undermanagement.
What does real empowerment look like? If you want to truly empower people, then you simply must define the terrain on which they have power. That terrain consists of effectively delegated goals, with clear guidelines and concrete deadlines. Consistently articulating with every direct report the appropriate standards and expectations—what to do and how to do it—is the hard work of leading, managing, and supervising. Within clearly articulated parameters, a direct report has power. Limited power? Yes. But it also has the great virtue of being real power.
#2. The Myth of Fairness: The way to be fair is to treat everybody the same.
Where does this myth come from? First, the Human Resources/ EEO/Legal Department aversion to any kind of litigation risk has led to a blanket default presumption in the working world that differential treatment of employees is “against the rules.” Second is the closely related political correctness that causes so many people to self-censor any mention of differences between and among individuals—even observable merit-based differences. Third is the popular misunderstanding of humanistic psychology and human development theory, which holds in essence that “we are all winners.” The underlying theory is that because every person has innate value, we should treat everybody the same. That’s only fair if you are running a commune.
The reality is that we are not all winners, as any one of your employees could tell you. Treating everybody the same, regardless of their behavior, is totally unfair.
Since the early 1990s, the self-improvement movement has made an odd shift away from “improving” one’s self, toward feeling good about one’s self, improved or not. The irony is that real human development comes precisely from helping people assess their performance honestly and helping them to improve, so they can earn the rewards they need and want. All the feel-good pretend-sameness becomes yet another excuse for managers to avoid monitoring and measuring performance, much less telling employees when they’ve failed and helping them improve. When managers do point out failures to employees, they are often met with resistance or strong emotions: “It’s not my fault. Stop picking on me.” That’s when a lot of managers second-guess themselves and withdraw again.
Even worse, hiding behind false fairness means that most managers are unable or unwilling to provide employees with extra rewards when they do go the extra mile. I know a lot of managers who actually say to employees, “I really appreciate your extra effort, but I can’t do something special for you. If I did that for you, I’d have to do that for everybody.” Of course, you can’t do everything for everybody, so most managers take the easy way out, which is rewarding nobody specially. The result: Low and mediocre performers enjoy roughly the same rewards as the high performers. Limited resources for rewards are further watered down by trying to spread them around equally. High performers grow frustrated and angry. The upshot: Managers fail to give the best employees the flexibility they need to continue working so hard and so smart, and they deprive themselves of a key tool for motivating employees.
What’s truly fair? Do more for some people and less for others, based on what they deserve—based on their performance.
#3. The Myth of the Nice Guy: The only way to be strong is to act like a jerk, but I want to be a “nice guy.”
Lots of managers act like jerks. That doesn’t mean they are strong. It just means they are acting like jerks.
What is the reality? Real “nice guy” managers do what it takes to help employees succeed so those employees can deliver great service for customers and earn more rewards for themselves.
Sometimes when managers hear me say, “It’s OK to be the boss,” they picture bosses they’ve known in the past whom they remember as being particularly, well, “bossy”—arbitrary, out of line, loud, mean, and even abusive. Let me be very clear: When I say, “It’s OK to be the boss,” that is not what I’m talking about.
Why do bosses sometimes act like jerks? Some people revel in being at the top of the heap—it is an ego trip for them. It makes them feel important. It gives them a chance to lord it over other people. For them, it’s the workplace version of schoolyard bullying. It is also irresponsible and damaging.
Some bosses are jerks out of pure negligence: they don’t really know what’s going on, but make important decisions anyway. These are the jerks who do not give employees feedback on their performance until they fail terribly, and then impose very serious consequences. These are the jerks who use their authority as the boss, but in all the wrong ways at all the wrong times, without ever doing the hard work of managing people.
Then there is the surprisingly widespread phenomenon of “false nice guy complex.” The “false nice guy” managers refuse to make decisions, give orders, and hold people accountable. They tell themselves that they are doing so because they don’t want to be a “jerk,” or they want to be “nice.” They convince themselves that it is somehow not OK to be the boss. The wielding of authority by one person over another seems wrong to them. This is another misunderstanding that flows out of an egalitarian impulse: All people are equal in the cosmos, and therefore one person should not claim superiority or call for the obedience of another in any relationship. That’s beautiful.
Really? Then why do you go into a restaurant and start giving orders to the waiter? Because you are paying the restaurant for service and food. The waiter, on the other hand, is being paid. No hard feelings. It’s a transactional relationship. In the same way, your authority as the boss at work does not require some claim of superiority in the cosmos. Employment is a transactional relationship, just like a customer relationship. Those whom you manage are being paid to do the job. That is the ultimate source of your authority, plain and simple. No hard feelings.
The irony is that false nice guys tend to soft-pedal their authority so much that things are bound to go wrong. Then they get frustrated and angry and tend to act like jerks: arbitrary, out of line, loud, mean, and even abusive. The difference is that false nice guys tend to feel terribly guilty after behaving this way. So what do they do? They go back to soft-pedaling their authority, without ever realizing that they are caught in a vicious cycle.
Are they really being “nice guy” managers by failing to provide the direction, support, and coaching that employees need in order to succeed?
In truth, they are simply letting themselves off the hook, to avoid the uncomfortable tension that comes with being stuck between the boardroom and the front lines—the one who has to negotiate the competing needs and desires of the employer and the employee. They are refusing to take responsibility for their authority, which has real consequences that are anything but nice: Problems occur, sometimes big ones. When problems are not dealt with, sometimes they turn into disasters. Sometimes career-damaging or career-ending disasters. Not so nice. The best way to avoid being a jerk is to accept your legitimate authority and be comfortable using that authority legitimately.
#4. The Myth of the Difficult Conversation: Being hands-off is the way to avoid confrontations with employees.
Most managers find that the most painful and damaging aspect of managing is when they must have very difficult conversations, even confrontations, with employees about some problem or another. They believe that being a strong manager requires or even causes these confrontations, whereas being a weak manager allows them to avoid these confrontations.
What is the reality? Being a weak manager makes these confrontations inevitable, whereas being a strong manager means these confrontations rarely occur, and when they do happen they are not so painful after all.
One of my main goals when I’m training managers is to help them get over their fear of confronting employees. Our research shows that the primary reason why so many management conversations are so very difficult is precisely because they are so rare. When management conversations happen only on special occasions, they tend to be very difficult. Why?
- Neither the manager nor the employee is experienced at having management conversations, so neither is very good at it.
- The manager has not been making expectations clear; so much of the conversation comes as a big unpleasant surprise to the employee.
- These conversations usually happen when a problem absolutely must be dealt with, so the conversations are more likely to become heated. Plus, solving a problem after the fact is a whole lot more difficult than preventing it in advance.
- Because the manager is out of the loop, he usually doesn’t have all the facts and thus has less confidence in his point of view and fewer resources with which to make his points and respond to employee push-backs.
This approach is a lot like losing your temper. You finally decide to “put your foot down” about one or more issues and problems that you’ve let slide. You call a team meeting and pronounce: “People have to start coming in on time and taking shorter breaks, and this time I’m serious. And by the way, all the chitchat in the office has to stop. I want people focused on their work!” Maybe then you might ask that one problem employee who has been driving you crazy to follow you into your office and tell him that he’d better shape up, or, better yet, that he’s fired. That day you might go home thinking, “I just did some managing!” Then the next day you come back to work and go right back to your hands-off status quo.
If your version of taking charge is turning from “nice guy” into “tough guy” on a dime, then there is a good chance you will seem like a jerk. Not only that, but people are not likely to take you seriously. They might think that you can’t or won’t enforce your new pronouncements . . . or will ultimately cool off and forget about the whole thing. Maybe you won’t be any good at these confrontations and they won’t go well; maybe people will push back and you’ll crumble. Maybe people will be angry, or they’ll snicker and scoff, or they won’t like you anymore. The whole thing will be awkward and uncomfortable and painful—and then, after all that, maybe your efforts to take charge won’t work anyway.
Taking charge in any meaningful and lasting way is a lot like getting in shape physically. It is a long tedious process. It requires fundamental changes in your behavior, changes that become new habits. There are no shortcuts. It takes time to see results. You’ll still have some difficult conversations and even some extraordinary confrontations. It takes guts to take charge and be a strong manager, but probably not for the reasons you think. Don’t be afraid of a few difficult confrontations. Be afraid of a long, slow, tedious transition that will radically change your habits, your role, and your relationships at work from now on and forever more. If you can’t muster that courage, then maybe you shouldn’t be the boss.
#5. The Myth of Red Tape: Managers are prevented from being strong because there are many factors beyond their control—red tape, corporate culture, senior management, limited resources.
Managers tell me every day that despite their best efforts, they are held back by rules and red tape and contracts. By the way, some managers hide behind this challenge as an excuse to not manage. And almost always, right beside them, in the very same organization with the very same rules and red tape and contracts, there are lots of managers who find ways to work within and around the rules and red tape and contracts. It’s difficult, but they do it anyway because that is their job.
How do you work within and around the rules, red tape, and contracts? I am a lawyer technically. So let me tell you what lawyers do when confronted with rules and red tape and contracts. They learn the rules and red tape and contracts backward and forward. And then they work them. What else is there to do? Learn the rules and work them.
Are you worried about being sued? There are many impermissible reasons for distinguishing between and among employees. Performance is not one of them. As long as you can demonstrate that any rewards or detriments to employees are based solely on their work performance, there is no basis for a claim of unlawful discrimination. Find an ally who can help you learn the rules and work the rules: Someone in HR. Someone in legal. Someone in EEO. Someone in the union. Your boss.
Remember this: Of course, there will be things you can’t do. Don’t do them. If you do, you’ll get in trouble. But often you can do things you didn’t realize you could do, once you learn how do them. There are so many things you can do. You cannot remove every obstacle. But there are so many partial solutions that make such a big difference.
The myth is believing that the factors beyond your control are what make you feel powerless.
What is the reality? Focusing on what you can’t control makes the most powerful person weak, whereas focusing intensely on what you can control—to the exclusion of what you cannot control—will always make you stronger.
The fact is, there are so many things in your control: you, your guts, your skill, your habits, and your time. You don’t need anyone’s permission to be strong. You don’t need anyone’s permission to talk to your employees more often—one-on-one— about the work each is doing. You don’t need permission to set people up for success, to spell out expectations clearly every step of the way, to clarify goals and guidelines and deadlines. You don’t need permission to monitor and measure and document performance every step of the way. You don’t need permission to zero in on small problems immediately and solve them before they grow into larger problems. You don’t need permission to try your best to steer more rewards to people who go the extra mile.
#6. The Myth of the Natural Leader: I am not “good at” managing.
The underlying theory here is that some people are natural leaders and therefore the best managers, whereas others are not natural leaders and are destined to be not-so-great managers.
What is the reality? Lots of natural leaders are not such great managers. The best managers are people—natural or not—who learn proven techniques, practice those techniques diligently until they become skills, and continue practicing them until they become habits.
Is there such a thing as natural leadership ability? Of course. Some people are visionary, charismatic, articulate, filled with ideas, and unusually energetic. They are motivators. They inspire. People want to follow them. But that doesn’t necessarily make them good managers. More often, these great leaders succeed precisely when they are smart enough to hire great managers and let them do the crucial management part of leadership. Indeed, one of the most common stories I hear from managers in this scenario is how the natural leader often whirls into the workplace, distracting employees, exhilarating them, patting people on the back, making random decisions, building personal loyalty among the employees, spreading ideas and thoughts that create hopes and fears . . . and then disappears, leaving the manager to clean up the mess.
I use the term “management” precisely to focus on the more mundane, but absolutely crucial, aspects of leadership: providing direction and guidance, holding people accountable, dealing with failure, and rewarding success. These are the basic elements of management that are way too often missing from leadership today. And these are the elements that are by far the most important when it comes to getting more work and better work out of employees and helping them earn more of what they need. I’ve learned from training tens of thousands of individuals that almost anyone can become a much better manager. How? Learn proven techniques. Then practice, practice, practice those techniques until they become skills (and then habits).
#7. The Myth of Time: There’s isn’t enough time to manage people.
This myth comes from the fact that there are only 168 hours in a week and you have zillions of demands on your time—you have your own tasks and responsibilities and projects besides your management obligations.
What is the reality? Since your time is so limited, you definitely don’t have time to not manage people. Managers who try desperately to avoid spending time managing people always spend lots of time managing people anyway. That’s because when a manager avoids spending time up front in advance making sure things go right, things always go wrong. Small problems pile up. Often, small problems fester unattended until they become so big that they cannot be ignored. By that point, the manager has no choice but to chase down the problems and solve them. In crisis, the manager is virtually guaranteed to be less efficient, a further waste of time. So these managers run around solving problems that never had to happen, getting big problems under control that should have been solved easily, recouping squandered resources, dealing with long-standing performance problems, feeling even more pressed for time. That means in all likelihood they will go right back to avoiding managing people, and the next time they’ll make time for management is the next time there is another big problem to chase down and solve.
Remember that the time you spend managing is “high leverage time.” By managing, you engage the productive capacity of the people you manage. For every, say, fifteen- minute management conversation you have with an employee, you should be engaging hours or maybe days of that employee’s productive capacity. If that fifteen-minute conversation is effective, that fifteen minutes of management should substantially improve the quality and output of the employee’s work for hours or days. That’s a good return on investment—that’s why I call it “high leverage time.”
If you put your management time where it belongs and attend to the basics every step of the way, the time you do spend managing will be so much more effective. You’ll start to see results right away. Very quickly, things will improve, and you’ll start to get a lot of that time back on the other end.
The Hard Realities of Managing People
I know that for most people, being really hands-on requires a fundamental rethinking of the manager’s role and the management relationship. Indeed, many participants in my seminars tell me, “Nobody has ever said this to me. I feel like you are giving me permission to manage, permission to be the boss. What a breath of fresh air.” Of course, lots of participants tell me, “This is common sense. It is so basic. Managers have to manage, plain and simple. What were we thinking?” Indeed, much of what I am saying is basic common sense. Managers need to manage.
The funny thing is that about half of the participants in my seminars say just the opposite (at the beginning, anyway): “You must be crazy. This contradicts most everything I’ve ever read in management books and been taught in other management training classes.” And they are right. Very few people out there are saying what I am saying.
Managing people in the real world is very, very difficult, and there are no easy solutions. I know that most managers are under a tremendous amount of pressure. Most managers move into positions of supervisory responsibility because they are very good at something, but not usually for the reason that they are especially good at managing people. Once promoted, most new managers receive very little in the way of effective management training. And the management books and training that they do receive are dominated by the false empowerment approach. They rarely address the “hard” realities of managing:
- You cannot always hire superstars. You have to hire the best person available, and often that person is in the middle of the talent spectrum, not at the top.
- When you do hire superstars, they can be even harder to manage than the mediocre people.
- Even if you set expectations clearly, sometimes employees don’t achieve those expectations.
- Not everybody is a winner. Dealing with failure is a big part of managing.
- Employees can’t always work in their areas of strength because there is lots of work to be done, and employees are hired to do what needs to be done.
- Employees don’t always earn praise. And those who do earn praise usually want tangible rewards, not just praise.
In our training seminars, when I start talking about these hard realities, managers start nodding their heads and listening carefully. When I tell them that I don’t have any easy answers because easy answers work only in fantasyland, more people start nodding. Then I promise them that I do have lots of very hard solutions that will take lots of guts, skill, time, and discipline to implement. That’s when they know that I really have something to offer them. All I do in my seminars is teach frustrated managers to copy what the most effective managers are actually doing every day. I’ve trained tens of thousands of managers in the real world in the mundane techniques of strong, highly engaged, hands-on management. I hear back from managers that I’ve trained just about every day. And the word from the front line is: They are getting more out of employees and doing more for employees, one person at a time, one day at a time.
It’s Okay to Be the Boss; Be a Great One
It’s okay to be the boss. In fact, it’s critical. The boss—at every level—is the most important person in the workplace today. Everybody is under more pressure. Employees are expected to work longer, harder, smarter, faster, and better. And employees are not about to wait around for long-term rewards. They rely on their immediate boss more than any other individual for meeting their basic needs and expectations at work, and for dealing with just about any issue that arises at work. They want to know, “What’s the deal around here? What do you want from me? And what do I get for my hard work today?” The boss is the point of contact—but much more than that, on a daily basis, the boss defines the work experience. On this there is widespread consensus: In study after study, the number one factor in productivity, morale, and retention is the relationship between employees and their immediate boss.
What kind of boss are you going to be?
Be the boss who says, “Great news, I’m the boss! I consider that a sacred responsibility. I’m going to make sure that everything goes well around here. I’m going to help you get a bunch of work done very well, very fast, all day long. I’m going to set you up for success every step of the way. I’m going to spell out expectations for you every step of the way. I’m going to help you plan. I’m going to work with you to clarify goals, guidelines, and specifications. I’m going to help you break big deadlines into smaller time frames with concrete performance benchmarks. I’m going to go over standard operating procedures. I’m going to offer reminders. I’m going to provide checklists and other tools. I’m going to help you keep track of what you are doing and how you are doing it every step of the way. I’m going to help you monitor and measure and document your success every step of the way. I’m going to help you solve problems as soon as they occur, so they don’t fester and grow into bigger problems. I’m going to help you find the shortcuts, avoid the pitfalls, and follow the best practices. Count on me. When you need something, I’m going to help you find it. When you want something, I’m going to help you earn it.”
The rest of this program is meant to help you get past the myths and tackle the very real challenges that make it so hard to be a manager today. Yes, it’s hard. Step up to the challenge.
It’s okay to be the boss. Be a great one!