It is wrong to think that great management is important for front-line employees, but that managers themselves can have bad managers and get along just fine.

Maybe this is an overstatement, but I think it would be better to have no manager at all than a bad manager. Actually, that’s probably true.

Regardless, great managers perform better when their manager is also a great manager, providing just a bit of outside perspective to help them make sure that they are doing what they do best every day, that the expectations of their role are clear, and that they are on track to being as effective as they can be.

Here’s how Rodd Wagner and James Harter put it in the book 12: The Elements of Great Managing:

We are often asked what makes great managers perform so well.

Some of it is pure talent — a natural ability to discern an employee’s mindset, a persistent optimism, or a strategic acumen difficult to duplicate. Some of it is a deeply held personal mission to change the world for the better.

Much of it also requires that a front-line supervisor have the same experience with the 12 Elements as those he directs. One of the most fundamental needs of a great manager is . . . a great manager.

As obvious as that statement may be, there is an undercurrent running through many organizations that assumes recognition and praise, a mentor, clear expectations, and the rest of the 12 are required only for the front lines. The best managers, so this line of thinking goes, are more self-aware and self-contained, impervious to such forces, and able to maintain a steady course without much regard for the circumstances.

The evidence is just the opposite. The engagement of managers ebbs and flows just as much as it does for anyone else. Moreover, the engagement level of a manager correlates strongly with the attitudes of her team. No one is an island.

. . . The anecdotes and, more important, analyses of manager performance point out that one of the best things a senior executive can do to motivate the entire population in a company is to first look out for the enterprise’s supervisors. Before a person can deliver what he should as a manager, he must first receive what he needs as an employee.

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• Why Companies Should be Generous in Their Pay

They make the point — rightly, I believe — that “most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture.” For this reason, companies that pay with a generosity of spirit are likely to perform better financially than those that don’t. The reason is that when employees feel that they are being treated well with their pay (rather than the minimum the company could get by with paying them), they tend to match the gesture with more effort. It also tends to result in higher engagement (because of the thought behind their pay — not because of being driven by money), which also results in greater performance for the organization.

Here is what they have to say in their own words:

Most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture

One truth reemerges in various permutations throughout this book. It is that human behavior usually doesn’t conform to the logical or mathematical assumptions behind many personnel strategies. This certainly holds true of the tug-of-war over an employee’s salary.

The traditional view assumes that a company should pay as little as possible to secure someone’s services, whether that amount is just a little more than a competitor would pay or the lowest amount for which the worker will settle in his salary negotiations.

The often-overlooked flip-side of that strategy holds that the employee will do the minimum required to make his salary and his bonus. The company wants maximum work for minimum pay, while the employee wants just the reverse. Between these competing forces, the wage is settled, giving both sides a tolerable, antagonistic compromise.

But a funny thing happens in experiments where one person offers a wage and another person decides what level of effort to give in return. If the “employer” offers an above-market wage, the “employee” usually matches it with more effort, even when the worker can get away with doing less. “This suggests that on average people are willing to put forward extra effort above what is implied by purely pecuniary considerations,” wrote researchers Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter. With conscientious, engaged employees, generosity of pay begets generosity of effort.

While money itself does not buy engagement, it appears an employee’s perception that the company is aggressively looking out for his financial interest leads to productive reciprocation. More than just the money, the thought counts.

The research points to a choice that executives must make. Do they want a workforce that thinks, “I have to fight for every extra dollar they begrudgingly pay me,” or one that feels, “If I look out for my company, they will look out for me”?

Simple questions reveal where a company stands. If a talented employee does something extraordinary or repeatedly distinguishes herself, will it be her manager or the employee herself who initiates discussion of a raise? Does the company spend more to attract outside stars than to cultivate internal ones? Does the company realize its talent is underpaid only after a competitor woos them away?

In matters of pay, as with the 12 Elements, what employees enthusiastically do for the company depends heavily on what the company eagerly does for them.

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I have always thought it was a shame that more people don’t go into “giving” professions. In fact, I have occasionally felt pangs of guilt that I didn’t choose a career that was completely focused on serving others. I have deep admiration for dedicated and hard-working clergy, social workers, or missionaries, and I wonder why I haven’t abandoned my career and moved into one of those kinds of jobs.

While I have not completely abandoned the idea of one day doing that, I have come to the realization that all managers can–and really should–view their work as a ministry. A service to others.

By helping people find fulfillment in their work, and helping them succeed in whatever they’re doing, a manager can have a profound impact on the emotional, financial, physical, and spiritual health of workers and their families. They can also create an environment where employees do the same for their peers, giving them a sort of ministry all their own. All of which is nothing short of a gift from God.

(From The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.)

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I’m sure there is more to the rationale, but is this a good idea? No. This is called the strictness error and it is demotivating. Managers can hold to the same error when it comes to performance reviews. Hence, the problems of the strictness error for both contexts is well explained by these comments in the book Management Skills:

The strictness error is the flip side of leniency. You rate everyone very strictly. While it is acceptable to maintain high standards, performance appraisals should be an accurate reflection of performance. Appraisals that are too strict will de-motivate employees and frustrate them. They will begin to think that no matter what they do, it will never enable them to achieve the rewards that they value. [I would restate the last part of the sentence, because it sounds too extrinsically motivated, but you get the point.]

The strictness error, as mentioned, is the opposite of the leniency error. You don’t want to error on that side, either, whether in education or management. The lenience error

provides employees with high performance appraisal ratings for mediocre or marginal performance. This marginal performer is then ‘rewarded’ in organizational terms. This will increase the likelihood that his or her marginal performance will continue–because they have no incentive to improve.

Of course, the one other issue raised here for the arena of management is whether the traditional concept of a performance appraisal is a good idea at all. It is, and should, seem a bit odd that I am able to make a comparison between how we treat elementary students and how we treat adults on the job.

It is critical that people receive feedback on results and are held accountable for meeting the defined outcomes they are responsible to produce, and that this be done through a regular routine of meetings and conversations. But whether this should include or be wrapped in with a detailed performance appraisal that effectively ranks or grades people is an open question, in my view.

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“Some managers are hamstrung by their fundamental mistrust of people. A mistrustful manager’s only recourse is to impose rules. For a mistrustful person, the managerial role is very stressful.

The rules rarely succeed in anything but creating a culture of compliance that slowly strangles the organization of flexibility, responsiveness, and perhaps more important, good will.”

That is a key point: multiplying rules strangles good will. And if you strangle good will, you eliminate the motivation for people to do very much beyond mere compliance. In other words, you will have ripped the heart out of the organization.

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We avoid words like “beauty” — and the concept of beauty — between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (Especially if we work in the likes of HR or IS or Logistics.) But as part of the urgent process of re-imagining organizations, we must embrace both the word and the concept — and make beauty the primary attribute not only of product design but also of process design.

In short, we must create an enterprise environment in which enterprise systems are no less than … Beautiful Systems.

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You’re racing down the hall. An employee stops you and says, “We’ve got a problem.” You assume you should get involved but can’t make an on-the-spot decision. You say, “Let me think about it.”

You’ve just allowed a “monkey” to leap from your subordinate’s back to yours. You’re now working for your subordinate. Take on enough monkeys, and you won’t have time to handle your real job: fulfilling your own boss’s mandates and helping peers generate business results.

How to avoid accumulating monkeys? Develop your subordinates’ initiative, say Oncken and Wass. For example, when an employee tries to hand you a problem, clarify whether he should: recommend and implement a solution, take action then brief you immediately, or act and report the outcome at a regular update.

When you encourage employees to handle their own monkeys, they acquire new skills—and you liberate time to do your own job.

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1. Resistance is futile
2. Don’t assume people won’t find other ways to waste time
3. Social networks can actually make workers more productive
4. You’ll miss great ideas
5. Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think

Point five is absolutely critical  — employees can be trusted. And trusting employees leads to higher performance. She adds: “If you can’t trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.”

Also, I think that point five overcomes point two — if you hire good people, they won’t waste time. Or, perhaps better, they will only waste time when doing so will lead to greater productivity overall.

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The reason that conferences are not unnecessary expenses is because it is actually revenue generating to attend. But this is often overlooked because only the cost is tied to the conference in an organization’s budget, but the productive outcomes from the conference are not.

First, here’s how Ferrazzi decides whether to attend a conference:

“Conferences are good for mainly one thing. They provide a forum to meet the kind of like-minded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals. Before deciding to attend a conference, I sometimes informally go so far as using a simple return-on-investment thought process. Is the likely return I’ll get from the relationships I establish and build equal to or greater than the price of the conference and the time I spend there? If so, I attend. If not, I don’t.”

Second, here is Ferrazzi’s very good case on why cutting out conferences is a bad way to cut costs:

“Right after we sold YaYa, the new owners instituted a set of cost-cutting policies relative to travel and conferences. I thought the policies were fundamentally off the mark. The owners saw conferences as boondoggles–pleasant affairs for indulgent executives rather than as revenue generators. To our new parent company, the costs of sending people to a few events each year seemed like an unnecessary expense on the start-up company’s balance sheet.

“I strongly disagreed and promised to convince them otherwise. I set about recording the actual number of revenue-generating projects that came directly from people I had met at conferences. The owners were stunned when I presented a spreadsheet showing successive deals and how a significant chunk of revenue could be traced back to one conference or another.”

Third, here’s a good summary from Fast Company on the value of conferences and conventions: They enable you to (1) make contacts and (2) share ideas.

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“Talent of every sort is in short supply, but the greatest shortage of all is skilled, effective managers. Even [in China], where you can hire factory workers by the million, companies can’t find enough managers….Labor is abundant, but managers are scarce.”

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“…truly great organizations think of themselves in a fundamentally different way than mediocre enterprises. They have a guiding philosophy or a spirit about them, a reason for being that goes far beyond the mundane or the mercenary.” — Built to Last

It is eye-opening to realize the critical role that beliefs play in organizations. For we typically think of beliefs mostly at the individual level. But it is the shared beliefs and values in an organization that play the biggest role in making the organization effective and meaningful, and a place where people want to contribute.

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“The basic philosophy of an organization has far more to do with its achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.” — Thomas Watson, Jr.

Who was Thomas Watson, Jr.? From Wikipedia: “Thomas John Watson, Jr. (January 14, 1914 – December 31, 1993) was the president of IBM from 1952 to 1971 and the eldest son of Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s first president. He was listed as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century.”

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I have also blogged on this in my series Managing in a Downturn.

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1. Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?”
2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
   
3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of the knowledge workers.
4. Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not — at least not primarily — a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
6. Finally, knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.

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Scientific management called for standardized, specialized, and machine-paced jobs in the name of efficiency and low labor costs. People were expected to add little value beyond their manual labor. Two carrots were used: financial incentives and the threat of being fired. A key assumption was that in return for having a job, people should be willing to act like machines for eight hours a day.

Scientific management has been shown to be highly flawed. Its use in large organizations for decades caused low intrinsic motivation on the part of employees and high rates of turnover and absenteeism, and a strong inclination to solve workplace problems through unionization. Sometimes employees would engage in counterproductive behaviors and even sabotage. Ultimately all of this opened the door to foreign competitors [note what happened to the American automobile manufacturers, beginning back in the 1970s].

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