Missed Opportunities

Paul Richardson 2011

If you spend any time at all talking to people about their work environment
you will always hear stories of management problems. It doesn’t matter
what industry they work in or what their level in the organization is, the
stories have consistent themes. The conclusion to be drawn is that
supervisors and managers are missing out on epic opportunities to lead
their organizations to massively better performance. Instead they create
work environments that frustrate and anger their staff while hobbling
organizational performance. The obvious question is, why?

The common thread is lack of management training in and understanding

of human resource management. Many managers have a strong, if often
outdated, understanding of the technical aspect of their organizational
functions, but very few have been trained in the most important aspect of
management, the human dimension. Much has been said about the lack
of training for managers, especially the “clinical experience” necessary to
learn to manage well. Henry Mintzberg in his Harvard Business Review
article The Manager’s Job: folklore and fact, describes the problem well.

Finally, a word about the training of managers.  Our

management schools have done an admirable job of
training the organization’s specialists—management
scientists, marketing researchers, accountants, and
organizational development specialists.  But for the most
part they have not trained managers.
 
Management schools will begin the serious training of
managers when skill training takes a serious place next to
cognitive learning.  Cognitive learning is detached and
informational, like reading a book or listening to a lecture.
No doubt much important cognitive material must be
assimilated by the manager-to-be.  But cognitive learning
no more makes a manager than it does a swimmer.  The
latter will drown the first time he jumps into the water if his
coach never takes him out of the lecture hall, gets him wet,
and gives him feedback on his performance.
 
In other words, we are taught a skill through practice plus
feedback, whether in a real or simulated situation.  Our
management schools need to identify the skills managers
use, select students who show potential in these skills, put
the students into situations where these skills can be
practiced, and then give them systematic feedback on their
performance. 
 

My description of managerial work suggests a number of

important managerial skills-developing peer relationships,
carrying out negotiations, motivating subordinates,
resolving conflicts, establishing information networks and
subsequently disseminating information, making
decisions in conditions of extreme ambiguity, and
allocating resources.  Above all, the manager needs to be
introspective about his work so that he may continue to
learn on the job.

NO JOB IS MORE VITAL TO OUR SOCIETY THAN THAT

OF THE MANAGER.
 
Yet, in spite of Mintzberg and others identifying the problem and the
ubiquitous complaints of workers, organizations continue to hire MBAs and
other “management” graduates with the assumption that they are fully
qualified to manage well. As Mintzberg points out, MBAs do know how to
crunch the numbers and manage them, but they have little cognitive
training on human psychology relating to motivation, or need satisfaction
and no practice with a coach in the utilization of that knowledge. The
concept below based on Robert Katz’ HBR article Skills of an Effective
Administrator, argues that the human skill component of the total
management skill set is the most important at all levels. Yet, it is the area
where current managers tend to be weakest.

Note that the “technical” component declines as management level

increases. And it certainly does. I hear complaints from people continually
that while the top management persons they work for usually have some
technical experience it is most often badly out of date and hence of
negative value in their job performance because it wastes time answering
questions from the past that are no longer pertinent.
Managers learn to do the whole job best in organizations that provide
training in the needed management skills with emphasis on the human
dimension plus working in an environment with positive role models who
can demonstrate every day through their actions the benefit of using the
techniques learned in the training. Organizations that provide both aspects
of this “excellence equation” are very rare indeed. Yes, it does cost money
to provide the proper training and coaching. However, I would argue based
on long experience that the payback on such an investment is many times
the cost. Consider the motivation improvement that William James of
Harvard found when studying the human skill variable.

Employee

% 80 to 90%

A
B Area affected by
I motivation
L
I 20 to 30%
T
Y

Potential Motivation Impact

Thus, a manager who can do the proper things to create win-win motivation
of their staff can increase the work result by large multiples. Yet, this
potential return on investment is not known or acted upon by most
organizations. It seems that even when presented with the opportunity to
facilitate people working at 80 to 90% of their ability most managers are not
willing to go to the learning and work to make it happen.

The best definition of a manager’s responsibility is “Leadership is

responsible to provide a work climate in which everyone has a chance
to grow and mature as individuals, as members of a group by
satisfying their own needs, while working for the success of the
organization.”

To gain the synergy available for improving performance the manager must
have a robust tool kit of skills that are well used with skill. Involving the
work team in problem solving in a focused way can provide team buy in
and amazingly positive results. The manager must not “throw a problem
over the wall” and expect a team to solve it with no involvement from
management. Participative management is a very powerful process but
only if done correctly. Often it has turned into “going through the motions”
affairs which further turn off the work teams.

Participative Management

Quotes from The Change Masters, Rosabeth Kanter (1983), Chapter Nine

True “freedom” is not the absence of structure—letting the employees go

off and do whatever they want—but rather a clear structure which enables
people to work within established boundaries in an autonomous and
creative way. It is important to establish for people, from the beginning, the
ground rules and boundary conditions under which they are working: what
can they decide, what can’t they decide? Without structure, groups often
flounder unproductively, and the members then conclude they are merely
wasting their time. The fewer the constraints given a team, the more time
will be spent defining its structure rather than carrying out its task.

But the limits can be vague, unclear, contradictory, hidden and subject to
guesswork. So the group might make a large number of false starts before
it finally learns what is permissible and what is not. It might spend most of
its time discussing how to decide rather than deciding. Too many choices,
too much up for grabs can be frustrating. Anchors are necessary,
something to bounce off of, some constraints or criteria or goals.

It is significant in this respect that participation works better where the

parties involved in it are strong, and there is clear leadership in the
organization.
But structure means giving people full information about the ground rules; it
does not imply the imposition of mindless formulas for action—giving
people a set of rote motions to go through that have worked somewhere
else or have been specified in minute detail. This is the problem with many
packaged programs that have been sold to U.S. companies under the
“participation-and- label.” (The “and-“ generally refers to productivity
improvement or quality improvement or morale improvement.) Many
American companies are fond of using what Barry Stein has called the
“appliance model of organizational change”: buy a complete program, like
a “quality-circle package,” from a dealer, plug it in, and hope that it runs by
itself. The opposite extreme from no-structure is overstructuring
participative activities with no thought to the appropriateness of the
structure for the place where it is being used, and with the elimination of
one of the values of participation to employees: the chance to exert more
control over work situations.

Quality circles are especially prone to being introduced by overly specific

structuring of actions rather than by education in the principles and skills to
make this kind of involvement work. The most effective set of work teams
handling quality issues at a Hewlett-Packard facility were a natural
outgrowth of existing practices, and they were called “Quality Teams”
rather than quality circles. The initial structure consisted of forty hours of
training for supervisors, who then devised their own methods. In six
months, efficiency was improved by 50% by the leading teams, and space
was cut by 25%. A manufacturing head [Paul Richardson] concluded, “It
was not a rote process.” In contrast, a neighboring plant that adopted the
formula method, complete with one-two-three do-this/do-that structuring,
ran into problems with its quality circles. Treated by employees as “a
typical fad, a typical campaign,” this program was “running out of gas.”

Delegation ≠ abdication. “Thus, related to the structure issue is a key

lesson for managers” - delegating responsibility to other people does not
mean abdicating managerial responsibilities for monitoring and supporting
the process. Some managers assume an either/or world where either they
are in complete control or they have given up all control. But delegation—
whether by a management team to a set of employee teams or by a single
manager to his or her subordinates—means that the manager not only sets
the basic conditions but also stays involved, available, to support
employees, reviewing results, redirecting or reorienting the team as
necessary. Leaders can also help to coordinate activities, centralize record
keeping, and serve as points of contact with other departments. Of course,
sometimes a manager who simply wants to prove that participation does
not work will throw a task at an unprepared team and abdicate all
responsibility—thereby setting up the whole thing for failure.

“Who cares?”- reporting and accountability. One of the reasons for

managers to stay involved, even when delegating responsibility in a
participative fashion, is that—ironic through it may seem—the personal
concern of the manager for results is the sign to employees of caring. If a
manger or the initiator of a team simply walks away from the process once
having launched it and never asks for reports, or monitors and measures
output, then employees begin to wonder whether this is indeed a high-
priority use of their time. They wonder whether anybody really cares about
this. Was it simply an empty activity to give them the illusion of
participation? But clear accountabilities and reporting relationships are a
way of indicating to employees exactly who does care and exactly what the
value of their activities is.

The twenty-five-hour-day problem. The last issue in launching participation

is to find and manage time. Participation in teams and involvement in
decisions are time-consuming, or they take time in addition to core jobs,
and time is a finite resource. So where will the time come from? Will
participation be on company time, or employee time.” If it is on company
time, is it off the budget of the particular manager, of is it compensated in
another way? Members or workers may not always feel that the extra time
they must invest in meetings and in informing themselves is justified,
particularly where they feel inadequately paid for it. Worker apathy can be
a problem; teams can shirk responsibility because they do not feel like
putting in the time. So corporations must legitimize participative activities
and entitle participants to take time for them as long as they can still do
their core jobs effectively.
The following list is based on experience as a manager fortunate enough to
have worked in an environment where role models were plentiful and
pertinent training was continuously ongoing. This is not intended to be an
exhaustive list but represents an important core of vital skills for effective
management. This is especially true if you wish to get to an effective
implementation of participative management at more than a “going through
the motions” level.
 Skill/Knowledge Requirements for Change Leaders

Skills/Knowledge

Foundational Management and Motivation Theory and Research

 Organizational problems are people based
 Change: 4 levels; Knowledge, Attitudes, Individual Behavior, Group
Behavior
 Leadership definition
 Leadership Process: Plan, Organize, Lead, Control
 Three types of leadership skill: Technical skill, Human Skill,
Conceptual skill, GRID
 Effective Human Skills---Understanding past behavior, predicting
future behavior, directing, changing and controlling behavior
 Motivation and Behavior---behavior is goal oriented, motivation is the
“will to do”; motive strength. Strongest motive leads to activity
 Need satisfaction, blocking, cognitive dissonance, frustration
(imaginary and real barriers; rational coping (alternate goal setting),
irrational behavior (aggression/hostility, rationalization, regression,
fixation, and resignation). Motives recur (hunger).
 Expectation levels—Subordinates will perform to their manager’s
expectations: High expectations result in high performance, Low
expectations result in low performance.
 Achievement-motivated people; high need for achievement and seek
situations in which they get concrete feedback on how well they are
doing. More concerned with personal achievement than rewards.
Rewards aren’t rejected. For example money is valued as a gauge of
their performance.
 Theory X and theory Y—McGregor
 Immaturity-maturity continuum
 Leadership responsible to provide a work climate in which everyone
has a chance to grow and mature as individuals, as members of a
group by satisfying their own needs, while working for the success of
the organization.
 Herzberg—motivation and hygiene factors
 Job enrichment
Situational Leadership—Hersey and Blanchard
 Leadership Style Grid
 Machiavelli—Personal Power and Position Power
 Coach Example
 Situational Leadership Model
 Maturity
 Change Process

Implementation of Performance Standards

 Performance needs a yardstick to measure merit.

 A pass/fail or point (goal only) system doesn’t encourage people to
subscribe to “reaching goals.”
 Goals are the other end of the yardstick. Thus merit is measured as
the progress made toward reaching the goal above and beyond the
performance specified in the performance standard and merit is
positive if progress is made even if the goal isn’t met.
 Performance standards are not set on attributes but on measurable
results of the person for whom the standards are written. For
example, “Performance is acceptable when: the organizational
performance is at or above the standard set. A performance
standard is not, for example, “PAW: 80% of the staff working in the
organization are happy with the manager.”
 Performance standards should include all areas the supervisor might
want to criticize and all of the areas the employee might want credit
for doing (more education, community involvement, etc.)
 Supervisors must not criticize performance for which no standard
exists until a new standard negotiated with the employee is in place.
And this only allows supervisor to criticize performance in the new
area in the future. This is equivalent to the “no ex post facto” law
requirement in the U.S. constitution.
 The employee is responsible to track performance to standards on a
real time basis. Periodic meetings between supervisor and
employee are set to track performance through the evaluation
period. It is in the interest of both parties to take corrective action as
soon as an “adverse trend” is recognized.
  Because performance to the standards is tracked all through the
year, the performance review has no surprises and can concentrate
on what are the next steps for the following review period after
documenting the current past period.

Managing Management Time

 Conflict between leadership and vocational activities

 Tendency to retreat to the familiar
 When the amateur is confronted with additional responsibility he
reacts by working longer and harder at what he does best and loves
to do most; the pro responds by moving his managerial fulcrum over.
 Leadership is either—getting things done through others, or one
damn thing after another
 Three types of managerial time; boss imposed, system imposed and
self imposed.
 Molecule of Leadership
 Three molecule roles: Leadership (them), Teamwork (peers),
Followership (boss)
 The amateur believes that the organization owes him the active
support of his superior, peers and subordinates; the pro takes
nothing for granted, so works tirelessly at getting and holding their
active support and failing that, makes a career decision.
 The Pareto Principle—80/20 Rule
 Rules of the road—between your and boss’ plan, boss has right of
way
 The boss may not always be right but is always the judge
 The priority of the boss’ satisfaction (sell to the boss).
 Managing Time—Getting control of the timing and content of what
you do.
 Degrees of leadership freedom (insurance for boss): Act on own with
routine reporting, Act but advise at once, recommend and then take
action resulting from boss dialogue, ask what to do, wait until told.
 Leverage: employee time, supervisory time, executive time.
 Managing monkeys
Effective Communications

 Psychological Games
 Social styles
 Backup styles
 Opposing strengths and weaknesses
 Versatility
 Diagnosing problem interfaces

Data Gathering and Analysis

 Lifeblood of Closed Loop Management, the only way to improve

 Pareto Analysis (vital for continuous improvement efforts)
 Pair wise Comparison Techniques
 Effective data analysis, What do the data tell us?
 Statistical testing for significance
 Reflection . . . the intellectual exercise through which managers
and leaders focus upon events in order to ascertain how one’s
beliefs and assumptions as well as one’s background and
experiences impact organizational functioning.

Sergiovanni