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Great Managers Reject the Idea that Trust Must Be Earned

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They reject that idea because trust is at the foundation of an effective workplace. And if you require your people to “earn” your trust first, that means they are starting with an assumption of distrust. You’ve just killed 80% of what makes a vibrant workplace and engaged employee right from the start.

Marcus Buckingham has some good things to say on this in his book First, Break All the 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.”  “Great managers reject the idea that trust must be earned.”

A Framework for Understanding Organizational Management

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I recently received a helpful question from a reader who was looking for a framework to help him think through his business in a comprehensive way. I thought it might be good to make this more broadly available as well, so here’s the main part of what I shared (less the actual links and, of course, the book images!).

Great question regarding frameworks. I agree that discovering the framework behind anything helps you understand it much better. For business and management, I follow the framework Tom Peters gives in one of the first three chapters or so of his book In Search of Excellence, which I find to be super helpful and without holes:

  • Guiding concepts (mission, values, standards; should be unchanging)
  • Strategy (how to get from here to there; changes with environment but must be consistent with guiding concepts)
  • Structure (how everyone is organized to get from here to there; so must align with the strategy and, again, must reflect the guiding concepts)
  • Systems (mechanisms that make things work and keep them running that are woven throughout the structure–things like hiring practices, firing practices, performance management, the systems for executing the specific work of the organization, and so forth)
  • Skills and style (people’s abilities and strengths harnessed in the service of the organization’s purpose)
  • People (the actual people)

I would also recommend Patrick Lencioni‘s book The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, which also presents a helpful framework, though it is a bit less comprehensive than Peters’.

 

 

Why You Don't Want Your Organization to be a Miserable Place to Work

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The most important reason is that letting your organization be a miserable place to work is just plain wrong. Employee satisfaction and engagement is an intrinsic good that everyone ought to care about — especially Christian ministries — because it is the right thing to do.

For those still not convinced (though if doing the right thing isn’t important to you, maybe you shouldn’t be in the workforce…), here’s a great combination of the ethical case and the business case in one paragraph (from the article I linked to yesterday, Entrepreneurs Must Save America):

People say that America will beat China because the U.S. is full of innovators and China isn’t. What do you think?

Clifton: For one thing, that’s not true. China can innovate. But they don’t have a culture that understands the power of engaged workers. Right now, they just out-low-cost-manufacture the world. But that won’t last forever. Their wages will keep going up, and jobs will go to other places — to Southeast Asia, to India, probably some to Africa, maybe some to parts of the Middle East.

But for now, it’s safe to say they’re winning the jobs war?

Clifton: Definitely. Yes, they’ve got the momentum right now.

Then why does it matter if China has engaged workers?

Clifton: Because engagement is a precondition for the state of mind that creates entrepreneurs. Miserable workgroups chase customers away. Miserable workforces don’t create any economic energy, so those companies are always cutting jobs. America will not come back and win the world unless we have the most spirited workforce. Spirited workforces create new customers. New customers create new jobs.

 

You Probably Need to Hire More People Than You Think

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My wife and I were talking about gardening the other day. We had driven by some nice flowers that the city we were in had planted and was watering, and my wife commented on how planting those flowers (and others throughout the city) meant they also had to have people to take care of them. Someone needed to water them, obviously, but also do many other things–plant them initially, keep them weeded (an ongoing thing, apparently), fertilize them if desired, and so forth.

I thought that was interesting, because I’ve always taken those nice flower displays for granted. Turns out my wife had a job in college taking care of the flowers on our campus, so she knows all about it.

Which leads to the most interesting thing for me: It took a team of 7 people to keep the flowers planted, watered, weeded, fertilized, and in order on our campus. The university we went to had about 15,000 people, so the campus wasn’t super small, but it wasn’t incredibly large, either.

The reason this is interesting to me is because I’m just the type of person who would have been crazy enough to put “water flowers” in my repeating task list every other day and “fertilize flowers” every 6 weeks and think he could take care of the flowers all by himself. But in reality, it took a team of seven people.

I know that the standard notion is that most organizations have too many people. Or, that seems to be the standard notion at least among some consultants and executives. My thinking is the opposite of this, especially when it comes to ministries.

Caring for the flowers on a college campus, or for a city, is super important. If it takes seven people simply to do that, how much more should ministries make sure they have enough people devoted to their all-important task of teaching and spreading biblical truth?

Seven people for an internet team, for example, probably sounds like a lot for most ministries. But if my college that served 15,000 students had seven people taking care of its flowers, how much more important do you think it is for a ministry that serves 3 million people a month (or many more) to have a team of 7 expert, knowledgable people tend to its website and make it the best it can possibly be?

And so forth with every other area of ministry.

Enough with overworking people, or skimping on having the necessary people for the work of the ministry. If this is the most important work in the world, let’s act like it.

“But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more cloth you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:30).

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37-38).

The Job of Top Management is Not to Sit in Judgment on New Ideas

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I’ve seen this happen, and it’s not pretty. It’s a waste and it’s a tragedy. Peter Drucker:

“Professional” management today sees itself often in the role of a judge who says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to ideas as they come up…A top management that believes its job is to sit in judgment will inevitably veto the new idea. It is always “impractical.”

 

Don't Waste Your Employee Training: Build on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

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The latest Gallup Management Journal has a good article on Why Strengths Matter in Training.

Here’s the summary:

Too many training and development efforts fall short because they don’t factor in employees’ talents.

And is some important data, for any who somehow think organizations can ignore the importance of focusing on their employee’s strengths:

Gallup research shows that people who know and use their strengths — and the companies they work for — tend to be better performers. In a study of 65,672 employees, Gallup found that workers who received strengths feedback had turnover rates that were 14.9% lower than for employees who received no feedback (controlling for job type and tenure).

Moreover, a study of 530 work units with productivity data found that teams with managers who received strengths feedback showed 12.5% greater productivity post-intervention than teams with managers who received no feedback. And a Gallup study of 469 business units ranging from retail stores to large manufacturing facilities found that units with managers who received strengths feedback showed 8.9% greater profitability post-intervention relative to units in which the manager received no feedback.

Companies that want to boost productivity and innovation must help employees apply their natural abilities to the day-to-day requirements of their role. Implementing a strengths-based approach often demands a fresh mindset; the old ways won’t do. The questions below can help employees figure out how they can best apply their talents in their role — and can help managers and leaders learn how to use a strengths-based approach to boost company performance.

Your Organization Does Better When You Care about Keeping Your Employees Happy

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A good post by Dave Ramsey. Here’s the first part:

What makes a customer satisfied with your business or organization? The answer may surprise you. It’s not always about offering the lowest prices or the newest gadgets. According to research from the University of Missouri, employee satisfaction plays a major role.

The study shows that CEOs who pay attention to employees’ job satisfaction are able to bothboost customer satisfaction and increase repeat business from those buyers two-fold. Simply put, when your team is happy, everyone is happy—including your bottom line.

He then gives 5 ways to keep your team engaged and satisfied. Read the whole thing.

6 Characteristics of Knowledge Work

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Here are 6 great points I recently came across, summarizing Peter Drucker on what makes knowledge work different from (and more challenging than) manual work:

  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 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.”

Here’s the key point, and the key challenge: Knowledge workers must manage themselves. The manager can only be a source of help, not a boss.

This creates an incredible opportunity and challenge for us as knowledge workers. The challenge is that it means that we need to know how to manage ourselves now more than ever, which does not necessarily come naturally (which is one reason I wrote my book). But the opportunity is that knowledge work by definition presents a great opportunity to unleash your creativity and innovation and unique interests.

This also presents a challenge for organizations, however. Many organizations that consist of knowledge workers still manage their people as if they are doing manual work. This is why you still see tightly controlled leadership and management practices.

The news flash is that these approaches kill knowledge work. Organizations cannot take their management cues from how management was done in the industrial era (I’m not saying even manual work should have been managed in that way, but it’s even worse with knowledge work). Every organization needs to be built on the recognition that their people, especially their knowledge workers (which is most of the workforce today), must be given ownership in their tasks and be allowed to manage themselves.

(By the way, if you are reading this blog, you are a knowledge worker; also, even if your “paid” job consists in manual work, we are all knowledge workers in our personal and home lives.)

Give People Big Jobs

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Peter Drucker gets this right:

“The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle-age soured, cynical, unproductive.

Executives everywhere complain that many young men with fire in their bellies turn so soon into burned-out sticks. They have only themselves to blame: they quenched the fire by making the young man’s job too small.”

In other words, you burn people out mainly by giving them too little, not mainly by giving them too much.

If you treat your employees simply as tools — that is, simply as interchangeable parts who are there to do what you tell them rather than to take initiative and ownership of their job — you are are not just being an ineffective manager. You are harming your employees (as all bad management ultimately does).