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Rethinking The Manager’s Role: Here’s How to Get Better Results

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Sponsored by The Culture Platform

At some point in the last 20 years, companies started to believe employee engagement should define a manager’s role. And looking back, this conclusion made some sense. After all, managers are the organizational layer between leaders and people on teams. So why not embrace this as a framework for managerial effectiveness?

How The Engagement Expectation Began

The shift to engagement as the center of a manager’s role coincided with the arrival of tech-savvy millennials and the promise of HR software to power the so-called engagement revolution. It sounded good in theory. But it has largely been a failure.

Frankly, there is no evidence that investing in “managing” employee engagement actually works. Instead, research consistently points in the opposite direction. So let’s dig deeper for answers.

Throughout most of the industrial economy, managers weren’t very good at managing people. In fact, job turnover surveys typically found the #1 reason employees quit was “my manager.”

No wonder organizations decided to invest in technology to help. But what has that accomplished?

If you add up the revenue of engagement software and HR tech firms over the past 20 years, you’ll see customers spent perhaps $25 billion on these tools. Even so, the level of U.S. employee engagement remained mostly unchanged throughout this timeframe. It has consistently hovered around 32%, according to Gallup. Abysmal.

Why do we need to change what's wrong with a manager's role? 20-year U.S. employee engagement trends from Gallup

Rethinking the Manager’s Role

I believe this idea of managing engagement was flawed from the beginning. Flawed because managers actually manage people and their expectations about success. If every employee could perform at a top 10% level, get promoted, and work from home, engaging them in their work would be a breeze. But that’s not reality.

Today, when people leave a job, they usually don’t say their boss is the primary driver. Instead, they point to a desire for professional growth or career advancement. With this in mind, I would say managers have the most important role in any organization. So this is why I believe it’s time to rethink the manager’s role.

What if organizations actually embraced what employees want? And what if they empowered managers to help their people plan for professional growth and advancement?

Currently, most organizations don’t think this way. They culturally believe career planning is an individual employee’s responsibility.

I vehemently disagree with this conventional thinking. It’s really just an artifact from an era when employees could comfortably expect to spend their entire career at one or two companies.

For most managers, empowering employee career-building will require new attitudes and actions. Changing cultural norms and setting clear expectations isn’t an easy or intuitive process. This means managers will need a new framework or model for managing people that is different from today’s engagement-centric approach.

A New View of the Manager’s Role

I propose a new concept built for the modern manager-employee relationship. 

I call it goals with purpose.

Goals with purpose align an employee’s current job role with future career aspirations. This alignment is the key to creating an emotional connection between an individual and the work they’re performing as part of the team.

For managers, this is no doubt much more challenging than seeking engagement through a simple pulse survey or weekly poll. Those engagement tools are easy to use and they appeal to the mass market by design. However, they don’t address what matters most to employees.

The Power of Goals With Purpose

What does it mean to set goals with purpose? Through the research I’ve conducted at The Culture Platform and the listening I did at Cisco with hundreds of companies, I’ve processed this input and determined what constitutes a goal with purpose.

At its highest level, this kind of goal is the way an individual contributor on a team clearly sees how today’s job role aligns with future-minded growth opportunities.

Specifically, a goal with purpose has five attributes:

1. It is tangible
It aligns a job role in a measurable way with goals that matter to the organization’s success. An individual contributor should be able to “hold” this goal in their “hands.”

2. It shapes personal growth
It reflects the strengths of the person in that role. Experienced leaders know a job role should never play to someone’s weaknesses.

3. It demonstrates a pathway
It aligns a current role with a future role. The future role may even be outside the organization or team.

4. It helps people navigate the organization
It clarifies the position an individual plays on the team. This helps dispel politics and endless positioning.

5. It empowers a reputation
It enables people to communicate with facts about their accomplishments. Ideally, it provides a “signature” project to build an individual contributor’s credibility.

Managerial Success: A Call to Action for Leaders

A manager’s role has never been more important to organizational success. It has also never been harder to be a manager, given the pandemic, work-from-home disruption, the current era of business “efficiency,” and the unrelenting pace of change.

If managers have an organization’s most important job, leaders need to realize an employee’s emotional connection to the company is earned. They also need to recognize it is worth the effort.

Tapping into an individual’s intrinsic motivations is the key to inspiring discretionary effort — that magical relationship between an employee, their manager, and their company. It’s the sweet spot where going above-and-beyond is the way things work.

During Cisco’s heyday, we called these magical moments the “Cisco Save.” In other words, when we needed to accomplish something important, a group of people would step up and do whatever it took to get the job done.

As leaders and managers, we can make work more magical for our people. But engagement doesn’t make someone want to do “whatever it takes.” We finally know that now, after 20 years of trying. It’s time to try a better way. We need to make goals with purpose every manager’s priority and make career empowerment the new managerial normal.

What do goals with purpose mean to you? How could this approach help your organization move in the right direction? I look forward to seeing your comments and ideas.

Gary Hamel on Workplace Bureaucracy

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The opening keynote speaker at UNLEASH America was Gary Hamel, one of the world’s most influential business thinkers. He is a professor at the London Business School, director of the Management Innovation eXchange and the author of several best-selling books, including “The Future of Management” and “What Matters Now.” Hamel is also the most reprinted author in the history of the Harvard Business Review. He spoke about the stifling effects of top-down management and how we need less — not more — workplace bureaucracy. Here are highlights from Hamel’s Q&A session with the media.

Understanding the Effects of Bureaucracy

“Bureaucracy shackles people with rules that prevent them from doing the best thing for the organization, the best thing for customers,” Hamel says.

He doubts that most organizations have tried to measure the costs of bureaucracy — which include insularity (too much time spent on internal issues, politicking, too much energy spent trying to gain power) and friction (too much busy work that slows down the decision-making process). Other costs include bloating (too many management layers), risk aversion (too many barriers against taking risks) and inertia (too hard to proactively change).

“Without having a benchmark there and any cost data around that, you have no idea what it’s actually costing your organization,” Hamel says.

Ten or 15 years ago, not many companies were concerned about the environmental cost of business. But now, that’s a major issue, and companies have environmental reports. Hamel recommends doing the same with bureaucracy. “If I’m an investor and I understand that this top-heavy, rule-driven culture is going to cause the organization to miss opportunities, miss how to allocate resources and misuse their talent, that is something I want solved.” While CEOs vaguely understand these costs, he says, they haven’t actually calculated the costs and decided this is a problem that needs to be solved.

Embracing Change

It’s possible to run a billion-dollar business with virtually no management layers, though Hamel believes the average person can’t conceive of this idea because they’ve never seen it before. “For example, at GE Aviation, they have 400 employees at the plant and one plant supervisor,” he says. He recommends getting out to see these companies and how they operate to understand how they are able to maintain control, discipline and alignment without a superstructure of supervisors.

“And then you have to be able to find a migration path between the present and the future,” Hamel says. Many post-bureaucratic organizations were formed that way, so they didn’t have to “uninstall” bureaucracy and tear down all of their rules and regulations.

This can be more complicated for more traditional companies because bureaucracy does serve a function. “Even though it has a lot of downsides, bureaucracy is the way we get control and coordination and consistency in large organizations.” If you try to destroy that and start all
over, Hamel warns, that will lead to chaos. “That’s why you need to approach it as migration path as you think about such principles as openness, meritocracy, experimentation and other next-generation management principles.”

He recommends challenging long-held organizational assumptions. “You just assume that power trickles down, you assume that you need managers to manage — but none of these things are eternal truths, they’re not principles of physics.”

Using Technology to Reduce Workplace Bureaucracy

Hamel believes that technology can dramatically change how organizations are run: how to find and hire people, how to make capital and strategic decisions. But right now, technology is primarily being used for white collar productivity (sharing documents, sharing schedules, etc.) or to aggregate information and exert more control. “Managers today have an enormous amount of real-time, microscopic information about performance, and the temptation is to have time cards on steroids.” Managers are paid to control, he says, and he thinks they may use technology to disempower rather than empower workers.

Technology has offered much more choice in our lives as consumers, but where is the equivalent empowerment in the workplace? “Why don’t we design our own jobs? Why don’t we pick our own colleagues? Why don’t we choose our own bosses? Why don’t we approve our own expenses?” That might sound crazy, but Hamel says organizations are doing it.

Hiring strategies are moving toward a consensus model, he says. “Historically at Whole Foods … if you wanted to work there, you would work for a couple of weeks with one of their in-store teams, and it took a 70% vote of the in-store team to hire you.”

Even project development is becoming more democratic. Hamel says that at Chinese manufacturer Haier, every new product starts as an online project with customers. “For example, when they want to develop new air conditioners, they go to social media and ask, ‘What do you want in an air conditioner?’ The first time they did this, they received 700,000 comments and had hundreds of thousands of fans following the project.” The company even uses social media to find technical partners. In one instance, they posted a technical challenge and asked who could solve it. The outcome? Dow Chemical responded, “We can build a membrane for that.”

5 Successful Leaders Share Powerful Lessons For First-Time Managers

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Good leadership is an essential for any successful company, but it’s not always easy for junior or first-time managers to adapt to their role. Many times, leaders look back on their career and have a whole host of new insights and knowledge they wish they’d known all along.

When we started impraise 3 years ago, the focus was on the product. As the company grew and we brought more people on board, we faced the challenges of also becoming first time leaders. Managing people for the first time, whilst challenging, was also rewarding, but it was always helpful hearing from people with more experience, and understanding what helped them progress and become the best leaders possible.

With recent failures at Uber showing many young leaders were neither trained or equipped for their roles, we wanted to find out just what people wish they’d known when they began on their leadership path. We talked to five top leaders to find out what they wish they’d known when they started their management careers, and collected their most valuable insights…

Harry West, Frog design

“In an organization that’s fast moving,with lots of young people…we need to be proactive. We shouldn’t expect people to know how to manage without any training.”

CEO Harry West shares with us the things he’s learnt whilst managing the rapidly growing design company.

Historically, he shares, during the company’s earlier days, when potential future leaders were trained, there was a lack of knowledge and structure in place concerning the skills required and how they should be developed. The company now have in place a management training program to ensure these things are addressed before young leaders are put in charge of teams. Reflecting on earlier practices, he muses that this less than thought out approach to systematic training was not good enough for such a fast moving, young tech company. West soon learned that this wasn’t working, and began reshaping their training process to be more systematic, now ensuring young leaders go into their positions equipped and confident.

Martin Jellema, Werkspot

“One of the most important elements is the people themselves”

Martin Jellema, Werkspot & Instapro’s Chief Commercial Officer, responsible for a 70+ team, shares the top three lessons he’s learnt since he began managing.

Jellema maintains that, after all his years of managing people, one of the most important elements is the people themselves. Finding and recruiting candidates that fit the company and can handle every aspect of the role remains one of the most important aspects of managing.

Besides this, he maintains, asking for help where needed remains the second most important thing. He now values collaboration over feeling the pressure to perform flawlessly and prove yourself as manager, saying it’s more useful to discuss issues, allowing people to help you come up with solutions you wouldn’t necessarily think of. In Jellema’s experience, both your boss and your team will see you reaching out for help as a strength not a weakness: understanding that something needs to be done or changed and using the resources you have to make that positive change won’t be frowned upon. You have a great team around you for a reason: use their knowledge and skills! He also outlines the importance of keeping focus on ‘high leverage’ activities: rather than taking time on minor activities, delegate, and dedicate the time to things like team training which ups productivity.

Bob Kastner, Meeting tomorrow

“If you have great team members, and you get them energized by a great scoreboard, then you’ll be unstoppable.”

Bob Kastner, director of marketing at Meeting Tomorrow shares the one thing he wishes he knew as a junior manager: how useful scoreboards are when it comes to keeping the team engaged, energized and on track.

Kaster says things should be easy to read at a glance. People should be able to tell what’s going on by looking at a few, important metrics: only use the ones that are essential to productivity. Kaster’s next must-do for these metrics is keeping things constant: update the board as often as possible; keep information relevant and updated in real-time, and have it on display, keeping things in the forefronts of people’s minds, and discussing them regularly in team meetings or daily stand-ups.

You can decide whether to create a competitive friendly vibe, seeing who tops the scoreboard, or create a collective vibe: how close is the team to hitting goals? Kaster has learnt to put this focus on striving for more motivating ‘best’ results rather than encouraging people to beat averages, always ensuring most importantly, to celebrate these successes as a team when they occur!

Brett Remington, Wisconsin Centre for Performance Excellence

“Trust holds everything together. It takes huge amounts of time to accumulate… As a manager, your success depends on the preservation and enhancement of trust.”

We spoke to Brett Remington, of the Wisconsin Centre for Performance Excellence, and he outlined the things he’s learnt: his experience based ‘truths of management’.

Remington’s first learning was the importance of trust and fostering good relationships with those around you. He shares he’s also learnt to see managers as administrative functions, believing that “if you’re going into management because you want to change the face of what’s possible in your organization, you are applying for the wrong job.” The second, he says, is it’s essential to have a curiosity about the processes your team use: you could have a great team, but, if the processes being followed are ineffective, they’re going to be disengaged and unsuccessful.

He also sets a lot of store by keeping metrics simple and useful, and learnt to focus on 3-5 key performance metrics. He says attempting to stay on top of more than 5 performance measures at once makes for accomplishing less, whilst having focus on fewer than 3 at any time means you’ll likely miss opportunities for continuous improvement and innovation.

His next learning? Humility and the need to embrace change.

“You are only about 2/3rds as good at your job as you think. The 1/3rd you don’t know about, don’t believe, or don’t pay attention to is going to determine how long you’ve got left in this job. Find ways of eliminating blind spots and practice humility. Eventually, you may find that your role as manager is vastly different than when you started. People, processes, policies, and potential change. Know when the accumulated changes no longer fit with your skills, aspirations, or interests. When that time comes, be ready to change out of your manager role and reflect on what you have accomplished as you pursue a better future for yourself.”

Barry Curry, Systeme

“Most importantly learning how to react and behave when you are out of your comfort zone will better prepare you for being out of it.”

Barry Curry, Technical Director at Systeme, also brings back the key point of positive feedback, recognition, and acknowledging your team for their accomplishments: it’s always key to ensure people know they’re valued.

He shared his biggest learnings with us, beginning with the importance of keeping sight of the big picture. It can be easy to get drawn into the small details: stay focused on key details, and don’t take things personally. If things become heated during stressful projects or periods, it’s okay to let people vent. Acknowledge people’s perspectives, never make responses personal and keep things respectful, with co-workers and clients alike.

He also suggests using goals to ensure what you’re doing has direction. This ensures that problem-solving for others doesn’t totally overtake your other responsibilities. Another learning is resist the temptation to always check your emails first thing: first complete one of the daily tasks you’ve set yourself, without distraction or prioritising other’s needs.

He also says that although sometimes sharing problems is difficult, having thought about solutions before sharing the problem will show you’ve thought things through and instill confidence in you. Similarly, having a process in place for when unplanned or unexpected things arise is key: have a consistent process in place to help you deal with things more efficiently.

For more information and expert advice on becoming a great leader, check out our free eBook and white paper.

An original version of this article appeared on Impraise’s Blog

Engage Your Workforce, No Coddling Required

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“Doesn’t everybody love their job?”

During the heat of a #TChat event last week, our partners at TalentCulture challenged the Twitter community with that tongue-in-cheek question. And now I suggest an appropriately tongue-in-cheek response: The answer is no.

So, how do we fix it? And should we fix it?

Employee engagement moves business forward, and should be a priority for any human resources professional. But as the prevailing sentiment among #TChat participants indicated, coddling disengaged employees is not an HR function. Nonetheless, if your employees feel that they aren’t respected or their work doesn’t matter, you need to deal with larger issues than engagement scores.

It’s important to recognize employees for their contributions — in part to increase engagement, but mostly because it’s a vital factor in business success. Several years ago, Gallup estimated that disengaged employees cost the U.S. economy $370 billion annually. High employee disengagement leads to high employee turnover — which, in turn, means increased recruiting and training expenses.

So, if your company is looking to increase overall engagement in a sustainable way, it’s essential to help your workforce understand the meaning and importance of their contributions.

3 Sources of Positive, Tangible Engagement

1) Executive Sponsorship  If your C-suite dismisses the importance of engagement, that will ultimately be reflected in the attitude of managers and employees. Engagement needs to be a priority at the highest levels. Executives who live company values are leading by example. Prove to all levels of the workforce that workplace culture is purposeful — not accidental — and everyone becomes invested in making it the best it can be.

2) Clear Communication  Get the team on the same page by articulating company goals and clarifying how individual goals relate to the bigger picture. True engagement — the result of a satisfying job and not office perks — can only be achieved when employees see how their individual contributions fit into the organization’s mission, values and objectives.

3) Individual Relationships  A great first step in helping employees feel respected is actually demonstrating respect on a personal level. Employees who feel anonymous are at risk of becoming disengaged, and dragging down others’ productivity and engagement. In large companies, it can be challenging for leaders to build relationships across their span of control, however this is essential. Different people respond differently to different motivators. The key to motivating employees is to understand each person well enough to recognize the factors that will help them develop and perform at their best.

For more information on building a culture of engagement, download our 2013 Guide to Recognition.

Image Credit: Pixabay