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Letter from the Editor
There’s a Dilbert cartoon that shows the pointy-haired manager pointing to a projected chart titled, Most Valuable Asset. He proclaims to his team that recent research indicates that employees are, in fact, no longer the company’s most valuable resource. They’re number eight on the list. Right behind carbon paper.
The cartoon would be hysterical if it didn’t feel like it was too true too often at too many companies. While it’s easy to make fun of the lack of attention that managers give employees, there’s a real cost associated with that inattention.
According to David Sirota, co-author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing), companies who create environments where employee morale is high – such as Intuit and Barron's – tend to outperform their competitors. (The authors' research is based on the results of 2.5 million employee surveys taken since 1994.) For example, the share price of companies who were identified to have high morale increased an average of 16% in 2004, compared to “low morale” companies whose increase was a mere 3% and to the industry average or 6%.
How do you foster high morale? Sirota explains that employees want three things:
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Equity. Employees want to be treated fairly. They want to know that their efforts will result in fair pay. They want to be treated as adults with skills, experience, and potential.
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Sense of Achievement. Employees want to be proud of what they do and for the organization they work for.
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Camaraderie. Employees want friends. They want to be part of a team.
Sirota further states, “Recognition is also important. Employees do not have to be told that you love them, but you want to be appreciative of good work. It sounds very corny, but people are corny. People need this kind of feedback.”
So, if employee development begins with “catching people doing something right and telling them,” why don’t we as managers do more of this? Why don’t we spend a minute giving employees what they want? Why don’t we spend a minute giving feedback on a job well done and another minute discussing ways to do it even better/faster next time?
What do YOU think?
Terry
Please share with me your thoughts and specific examples and read what others have to say at
http://coachingforperformance.blogspot.com/. (If you prefer, you can also email your ideas to me at
ttraut@unlockit.com.) Stimulate. Be stimulated! Invite your colleagues and bosses to join the discussion by pasting the following into an email:
We’re talking about coaching – something that I know you have a passion about. Share it with the rest of us on BlogSpot at
http://coachingforperformance.blogspot.com/.
Entelechy Speaks to Henry Mintzberg about Coaching
Prologue
 Recently, a colleague of mine (Judy Brophy at Daniel Webster College, Nashua NH) asked me, “Why don’t MBA programs teach their students how to manage the performance of their people? They teach them finance, business, marketing, organizational systems; but they don’t teach them how to work with and through people.” I decided to ask two of my favorite thinkers on such topics, Warren Bennis and Henry Mintzberg.
Dr. Bennis, arguably the “father of leadership” having been the first to clearly differentiate management from leadership, believes that “so little of [the MBA curriculum] is grounded in actual business practices, the focus of graduate business education has become increasingly circumscribed – and less and less relevant to practitioners.” In his Harvard Business Review article,
How Business Schools Lost Their Way, Dr. Bennis describes how business schools, once trade-schools for management apprentices have evolved into centers of research, which, while valuable for theory and science, are devoid of “the stuff of management.”
In his article, Dr. Bennis makes reference to “one outspoken critic, McGill University professor Henry Mintzberg.” Having talked with Dr. Mintzberg previously (see my article
Entelechy Speaks to Henry Mintzberg about “MBA=Leader” and Other
Half-Truths), I thought this would be a good time to reconnect with a question that builds off of Judy’s and asks:
Why don’t managers coach and develop their people? Even if B-school students learned how to develop and manage the performance of their people, would they? They and their incumbent colleagues certainly don’t seem to now!
I called Dr. Mintzberg for his thoughts, knowing that he would shoot straight from the hip.
The Interview
TT: Why aren’t managers and supervisors taking the time with employees to coach and develop them, knowing that employees are the ones who do the work?
 HM:
I suspect that there are two broad reasons. The first is the pressure and the pace, particularly in the United States, has gone up enormously and I don’t think that it’s just competition. I think there’s a kind of freneticism. For example, e-mail makes managers much more frenetic. You’re constantly being interrupted and you feel you need to react instantly. The pace and pressure to respond and react takes away from any time you may have planned to meet with employees or even to walk down the hall to see how employees are doing.
Additionally, the emphasis on shareholder value has made companies much more mercenary. For example, the whole emphasis on leadership has driven a wedge between managers and other people. Everyone struts around pretending to be a leader, and I believe that doesn’t help communication, it just hinders.
There are still many managers who simply don’t have people skills – many of whom have done MBA programs and use that as a way of launching into management positions. They would have never gotten into managerial positions naturally. (TT: See Henry’s book,
Managers Not MBAs.)
Another reason that managers don’t spend a lot of time with employees is because of the high turnover/movement of high potential managers. Some companies have policies of turning their managers over every couple of years, which I think is sheer madness. What this does is it forces the manager to think, “I’m not going to waste my time since I’ll be gone soon.” (TT: And the same reaction can be said for the employee.)
TT: Let’s look at the pressure and the pace for a moment. It seems that the pace and pressure are getting worse. With PDAs like Palm Pilot, Treo, and Blackberry, and constant 24/7 connectivity to everyone everywhere, there’s increasingly less chance that managers will find the time to meet with employees for coaching or developmental discussions. Would you agree?
HM: Yes. I’m rewriting my first book, The Nature of Managerial
Work, and my publisher said, “Henry, you need to write more about this freneticism. It’s important stuff.”
TT: So what’s a manager to do?
HM: Slow down. Take a deep breath. Pause. Reflect. Coach ourselves; I think coaching ourselves is an interesting example of pausing and reflecting. (TT: See
www.coachingourselves.com
for more information and discussion about Henry’s involvement in a program where managers coach themselves on a variety of topics of interest to them.) Here you get together with a bunch of other managers for lunch to just talk about the things that are important to us as managers.
TT: What are the advantages of coaching ourselves as opposed to attending a training event?
HM: The advantages include knowing that we’ve done it ourselves, we’ve thought it through ourselves, and we own it. It’s our territory. Don’t get me wrong; training can provide skills that managers can’t get on their own. But unless they apply those skills – and pause to reflect on how they’re doing with those skills – the training is inconsequential.
TT: Different topic. Are some types of managers better at – more open to – coaching than others?
HM: Look, the whole subject of management styles has been researched ad nauseum. Managing isn’t about a style. My research and experience shows that managing happens on three planes. It happens on an information plane; managers have and share information. It happens on a people plane; managers deal with and through people. And it happens on an action plane; managers do things. All three are important. While coaching may be about the people plane, coaching and developing people is not about being a people-oriented manager, it’s about being a well-rounded manager.
One of my major criticisms of most management and leadership gurus is that they focus on one element of managerial or leadership effectiveness and promote it to the exclusion of everything else. For Michael Porter it’s thinking. For Tom Peters it’s acting. For another, it’s something else. In reality, managing is about all those things. These gurus are all wrong because they’re all right – you need to look at management from all managerial activities. I understand their focus on a singular aspect of management or leadership; that’s how you get to be a guru. But it does a disservice to managers who then see management as only thinking, or only acting, or only leading. Leading is a good example: nobody wants to be a manager any more; everyone wants to be a leader!
Reflections
Henry Mintzberg doesn’t hold back. He faults the frenetic pace that companies have inculcated into their culture as a primary contributor to the lack of employee development and coaching. Additionally, “talent management” – the latest buzzword within human resources these days – may actually contribute to the problem; developing high potential candidates for managerial and leadership positions means that these managers are typically reassigned after a couple of years. There’s no time – and no incentive – to slow down and develop people!
Frenetic managers tend to have frenetic employees. When managers spend time with their employees to discuss specifically how each employee is contributing to the company, employees become less frenetic and more productive and more enthusiastic and….
I also think that our learning and development community shares some of the culpability. Our search for faster and more accessible training via WBT and podcasts and the like have given managers a sense of release from the responsibility of coaching and developing their people. Need customer service skills? Take two WBT courses and see me in the morning. Actually, you DON’T need to see me in the morning; the Learning Management System (LMS) will tell me how you did. All better. Next!
Suggestions
 Of course, employees share responsibility for their own development. But why managers don’t actively guide and shape that development for the good of the organization – and their own success – is beyond me. The answer is simple, but maybe not easy:
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Managers need to be told to develop their people. Until company leaders make people development a priority, only renegade managers (or smart managers) will see the potential that lies within each employee and tap into it.
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Managers need to be smart, well-rounded managers. They need to see people development as a key responsibility, as important as sharing information or making decisions or planning budgets.
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Managers need to pause and reflect and discuss what’s working and what’s not working with their peers.
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Employees need to press their managers for guidance and face-to-face time. Make it easy on your manager; identify one thing you want to develop (that would be good for the department) and have a couple of suggestions for how you’re going to develop those skills.
Dr. Warren Bennis is the University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and the founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles. Dr. Henry Mintzberg is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal and author of
Managers Not MBAs as well as many other books on management.
There’s Something in a Saying
 If you’re like me, you have a fondness towards quotations. I LOVE clever witticisms and truths that are worded so craftily. I like brevity and depth, where few words speak volumes. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts. – Winston Churchill
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. – John Wooden
Sayings inspire. Put them in the signature of your emails; place them at the bottom of the participant guides you create.
If you would like a collection of 799 such sayings, please email me at
ttraut@unlockit.com AND include one of your favorites.
‘Tis the (Budget) Season – Entelechy has a Gift for You
Autumn means many things, but to the cost center manager it means one thing: annual budgeting time. Whether you’re VP of Sales or Director of Learning and Development, you’re looking to maximize your current training budget and plan for next year’s budget.
An investment in Entelechy’s customized training will ensure a prosperous new year – and with our proven customization process, we are able to help you before 2007 draws to a close. If you’re not sure that customized training is what you need, please check out
http://unlockit.com/Why_Customize/index.htm
and you’ll better understand the significant benefits customization offers.
Whether you’re looking for a full-blown customer service curriculum to take your 5,000 customer service reps to a new level of customer focus or a management development program to add to your corporate university, Entelechy can customize a training solution – YOUR training solution – that is measurably more effective than off-the-shelf training and surprisingly affordable.
For more information (and no pressure), contact Terry at ttraut@unlockit.com.
And Now, Something Completely Different
Ever think a computer application is out to get you? Maybe it IS!!! Sit back and enjoy a piece of IT creative brilliance.
http://fc01.deviantart.com/....swf
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Terence Traut, President of Entelechy "unlocking potential"
ttraut@unlockit.com
phone: 603-424-1237
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http://www.unlockit.com
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