What does all this tell us?


Looking at what a cross-section of managers from all types of industries and experiences have said, it is pretty clear that there are consistent concerns about top management's approach. They seem to revolve around five key points:

  • not keeping promises/saying one thing and doing another

  • honest, open communication

  • a lack of courage by top managers to tell it like it is

  • not walking the talk

  • rewarding /promoting the wrong people.

And those ˜if I were CEO for the day' wishes, brought out three key points:

  • TALK to the people

  • LISTEN to the people

  • Ask them ˜what should I STOP doing?'

All of these are basic management responsibilities. If they are not being delivered on then there is something wrong with the people who are managing your business. As I have said earlier, I do think (and so do many others) that we are currently reaping the harvest of our inability to give those we erroneously call managers the right skills to manage people. This, on the evidence offered here, needs to be urgently addressed. What my research clearly shows is a major concern that basic management skills are missing from many so called managers. These people are doing daily damage to our organisational structures and they are demotivating our people.

Both big business and SMEs suffer from this. The solution is to reintroduce people management skills into our organisations and reward people for their abilities in this area. Several companies - predominantly medium- sized - told me that they make overall employee satisfaction and individual team satisfaction components of the annual bonus of their managers. This is a trend that is set to increase.

Not keeping promises/saying one thing and doing another

I hear this from employees every single day of my life. It culminates in employee alienation, because they don't know what is going on, or what tomorrow will bring. It reminds me of the (true) employee assessment process where a manager writes of one of his subordinates , ˜His people would follow him anywhere , but only out of curiosity to see what happens next !' The worst scenario is where this happens at the top of an organisation, so there is no clear vision, the horizon is hazy and no one is quite sure which direction the corporate ship is sailing in for very long.

However, it must be on the ˜to do' list of every manager from the CEO down to make certain that employees know what is going on. Unless they do, you can never engage them.

Honest, open communication

I keep hearing the excuse , ˜We can't tell everyone everything because it's confidential.' Rubbish! If you know then so do others. We work with bright, intelligent and curious people (we all say that's the type of employee we want) so don't be ambiguous. Tell the truth, even when it is bad news, because it all comes out sooner or later. You know it does, so why not get in with the first blow, before the rumours take over? But (as we will discuss in a more detail in Chapter 9) take care with your communications. Don't give it to some spotty kid or some external PR firm. Show you're serious and give it to a director or a vice-president.

Create a champion for open, honest communication and make them accountable for the truth. This is particularly important in SMEs where, often, there is no separate communications role. Make sure a partner or a board member takes an active responsibility for it.

A lack of courage by top managers to tell it like it is

Glossing over bad news, putting a spin on things, isn't good. My view is that plain, straight communication works every time. If your PR firm can't write plain English, fire them and get someone who can. If your internal communications people don't get the idea, fire them too. Personally, I get heartily sick and tired of gobbledegook PR speak. Who do they think they are talking to? Certainly not to the ˜very best people', that you as an employer profess make up your workforce, or so you proclaim on your website. By the way when did you last go on your own website. Do it. You'll find it very revealing . I send employees on to their websites all the time, and they come back dazed and confused . ˜This place is nothing like that,' is the usual feedback.

There is no doubt that some managers think that they still can - in the twenty-first century no less - pull the wool, or most probably its synthetic equivalent, over the eyes and ears of the employees. Please believe me - and go out and tell them - it doesn't work! Never has, never will. But people keep trying. Somehow, it would seem, we have decided in our little corporate corridors that dressing things up in a new way takes the sting out of unwelcome news. While there are many examples of corporations deliberately being, in their often peculiar way, economical with the truth, none beats this from the Dutch office furniture company Samas. Announcing the redundancy of 200 of its 3,800 staff, it didn't say it was firing them. In a burst of utter creative genius (albeit seriously misplaced) it was quoted as saying it was ˜to lose 200 of its 3,800 staff through' (wait for it!) ˜stimulated natural turnover .' Be honest, be open, say what you mean - you're firing them, but you're trying to dress it up and failing miserably.

Not walking the talk

This is possibly the big one. Managers who tell you to do something, watch you do it and then go off and do something else themselves . I see it everywhere. One of my good friends is the HR director for a large Swiss global business. Life was bad. There had been job cuts, cost cuts, you name it they had done it. As part of getting into the new spirit of austerity she gave back her car (and its attendant chauffeur). But most of the others did not. While cost cuts had got to the level of no free biscuits and coffee anymore, directors were still arriving at the front door of headquarters in their black, chauffeur-driven limos. There's a tram route right outside that building. Imagine how morale and productivity would have lifted if those directors had been seen alighting from a tram, having paid for their own coffee and newspaper on the way? Is that an extreme case? No, it happens every day. And often cuts are blindly made in a doomed attempt to show that everything is being taken very seriously indeed. At one firm I worked with, when the recession hit most of the managers were pretty good about cascading the bad news and answering employees' concerns. In fact they were so good that after the initial announcement, they managed to fire the entire internal communications staff! From being good at something they became non-communicative to a ludicrous degree. Only rapidly rising dissent amongst middle managers restored the internal communications function. They followed that up with the cancellation of the six-monthly get-togethers of senior management. A nice move you might think. Not so. Despite the firm's woes they were still recruiting to fill new business opportunities and the six-monthly meets were the most cost- effective way for new and old employees to meet and begin to get an understanding of the business.

The lesson to learn from all this is that, yes, you should walk the talk, do it like you expect others to do it. But don't go overboard and cut where it will do you damage. Another example is travel. When the going gets rough everyone flies economy. My view is that this is a crazy policy on long trips. You want people who will be ready to go and you want people who will be able to work while they are en route to a far off destination. I don't see automatic downgrades to economy class being a smart saving. I know engineers who regularly flew to places like China and India (up to twice a month in some cases) who, when the travel cheaper directive came in, first used their own air miles to secure upgrades. After that they quit.

Walking the talk sends the message that the leaders of a business are prepared to sacrifice too. It doesn't mean that you have to shut down everything or cannot make intelligent exceptions that help to get work done. We operate our businesses in complex, complicated and often- chaotic times, so we need flexibility in our decision-making. My suggestion is that you consider carefully what to cut and why. What is the longer- term impact on the business? What message does it send to different groups of people?

One final point on this subject: during research on a study [1] I made some interesting discoveries. Where people failed, or simply just chose not to walk the talk and join in with any plan, was in one of three distinct areas of any organisation:

  • at the top of the organisation ( hubris and arrogance of the ˜I'm too important/senior for this stuff' variety)

  • at the bottom of the organisation (nothing to lose, ˜so what are they going to do, fire me?')

  • with employees who have a great deal of contact externally, eg sales- people, on-site engineers, who know that they can virtually walk out at any time. Reason? They are always aware of new opportunities in rival firms and customer's operations. They are always the first to leave in any upturn.

Rewarding/promoting the wrong people

In 99 per cent of the business books I have read (and there have been a great many of them) there is one strange phenomenon at work: none of them mentions office politics. They espouse theories about how to manage. They even talk about clear goals and open and honest communication. But they don't talk about the politics of business. I can't imagine why. Because, like it or not, office politics are the very lifeblood of any organisation.

Personally, I have never seen a company that doesn't have office politics. It is a natural as breathing . Therefore, it is sad but true, people who don't deserve it will get promoted and rewarded. It is, as they say, in the nature of things. The boss likes Bill and he doesn't really like you. And even if you are the better man, you are not going to get that promotion. It is frustrating, but office politics won't go away just because we think it is a bad thing. All we can decently do is admit it exists and try to work towards a more honest solution, where the good guys do get the raise.

I am a frequent user of the train line from Bournemouth in southern England to London. One morning I was sitting in my compartment when two be-suited executives got in. Between 40 and 50, well dressed. They were also furious in a vicious kind of way. For over an hour they dished the dirt on every person they worked with - subordinates and superiors alike. No one was spared. These two executives were poorly led and felt that they had a right to do things their own way, rather than the way the company expected them to. I listened to them from behind my newspaper. And I got to thinking, ˜These two people are surviving, yet they live for screwing up the lives of others. They are clearly out of control and they are in fact a major liability to their own firm (I never did find out who the firm was, much to my chagrin). What they needed was to be terminated . But who was going to do that? Was there anyone with the courage to stand up to them and say, ˜Hey guys, it's all over?' Most probably not.

Then I recalled another conversation I had had some weeks earlier with a work colleague who said that the further you went up the organisation the safer - not the more vulnerable - you became. ˜Senior executives don't get fired - it's too embarrassing. OK, you might put them somewhere safe where they can't do too much damage but they don't get fired .'

And you know, he was right. Senior people, unless they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, don't get fired. They get cared for and looked after just like the two on the train.

So it isn't just a case of the wrong people getting rewarded or promoted. It is also a case of the wrong people being in the company at all. I guarantee you know only too well who they are in your business. So who has the courage to cut out the poison , or do you just put up with it as business as usual?

[1] (2001) Social Capital: Securing Competitive Advantage in the New Economy . Financial Times Executive Briefings.




The New Rules of Engagement(c) Life-Work Balance and Employee Commitment
Performance Tuning for Linux(R) Servers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 131

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