Your Management Style: Easy or Effortless

We’ve all had enough jobs with enough managers to see more than our fair share of bad managers. I recently had a group discussion wherein we discussed frustration with managers. One of the people gave some key feedback from her experiences as an employee with bad managers.

“It’s in my nature to speak loud and clear about what I do like and what I don’t like. Still with respect, and always with suggestions for solutions, I love new ideas.

But in my experience, a lot of managers don’t like that. It puts pressure on them and their workload to be challenged with new ideas. A good manager loves it, but I don’t feel like I’ve had a lot of really good managers. I’ve loved the good ones I’ve had because they seem full of life.

Poor managers seem worn down and disinterested in general, they don’t want the noise of change because it’s easier to leave things the way they are, regardless of reason.

Anonymous

I wanted to take a minute and share some of my personal experiences with management, for better or worse

Being a good boss is easy.
Being a bad boss is effortless..

Kevin Steele – Linkedin

Caring, Clarity, Adventurous

These are the three critical traits that are necessary to generate a long lasting and positive management experience. In the end, your role as both leader and employee depending on you ability to find balance in these traits.

Caring – Doing the Hard Job

Here are just a few of the sentences I have heard managers say in my career. These show a lack of empathy of our employees, additionally, they show a lack of imagination6

“We could do it as I said, or I could fire you.”
—– When you default to threatening people’s livelihood if they don’t fall in line, or if they offer counter proposals to your plans, you are hands down, a bad manager. If you are a manager, and this is your go to sentence, strongly consider changing this, or changing roles.

“4 (cases completed) a day or walk away!”
—– Don’t dictate the worth of an employee, to your self or their teammates, based on a KPI. Even worse is when you boil it down to a trite saying and remind people of that on a daily basis. When you hire someone, do your best to make sure they are right for the job (and the culture). If they aren’t use it as an opportunity to see if you have a job that is right for them. People are the sum of their parts. If you choose to judge them solely on one thing, then you will always find people lacking, which is your problem to solve, not theirs

“Just do your damn job.”
—– Strong, curt, and not entirely dishonest. Yet these words are thievery. These words were said in a meeting with the entire Support team, and one person decided to question the process, and offer another possibility. The work on the other option would include involving another department, as well as mental, political, and time investment to implement.

Remember how I said this phrase is thievery? It robbed the team of a better solution. This response also robbed the employee of their dignity via shame. It robbed us of the opportunity to hear each other, and in the end it was one of a number of things that robbed us of that employee.

I was not the employee. I was the manager. While I am still friends with this wonderful person, they left us for better opportunities. I made this mistake early on in my management career, and that employee and their teammates never forgot it. It is now a joke in the team that I can participate in. I’m grateful for the lesson as I feel that that joke reminds me to be more considerate of my employees.

Emotional labor is not just a part of the job, it is key to being a good leader.

Clarity – More than Criticism

Clarity (the noun) has two meanings, as described by dictionary.com

1. the quality of being coherent and intelligible.
2. the quality of transparency or purity.

The best gift you can give people is clarity. We need transparency from our managers to know how we are doing, what we are doing well, and what we can improve on.

Timely feedback is also critical. If left too long it loses it’s impact to make good changes. Delayed correction may leave you answer the question – “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

For your feedback, guidance and instruction to have meaning and provide sufficient direction, the employees need to know that you care about them (See above). We cannot expect people to follow us, if for too long they see us wander, or rush headlong into dangerous, grueling territory.

Adventurous – Improve or Manage?

There is an old business saying by Jim Rohn:

“What Gets Measured, Gets Improved.“
Jim Rohn

The employee’s version of this quote sounds slightly more jaded.

“What Gets Measured, Gets Managed.“
NOT Jim Rohn

This change in such a famous business quote should lead most leaders to question what improvement should look like. Are the things we are measuring about improving the systems, culture, and processes; or are they about managing a status quo?

Measuring KPI’s to maintain a good CSAT, NPS, MTTR, etc… is all well and good. You need to measure certain data on a consistent basis to address problems. It doesn’t take much brain work to realize that “addressing problems” is more about maintaining a positive status quo.

So where is the best place to find improvements in the system?

Get it from your employee’s experiences with customers, and your customers experiences with your systems. Note the similar directions of these relationships.

Employees and Customer Experience

If you create a safe environment for your employees, and encourage empathy toward customers and the customer story, you will receive all sorts of feedback on how to make improvements. They see the inside of a machine and understand customers problems from a point of views that even customers won’t see.

Customers and Your Systems

Getting feedback from customers is a critical way of addressing their experience having to deal with the minor and major flaws of your product. Include their experiences with employees, but remember to focus on system improvements, not on a single employee behavior. This may include identifying employee onboarding and training as potential areas of improvement.

Hic Sunt Dracones:
Here there be Dragons

New ideas, and new ventures require energy and patience. As you lead your team, make sure to speak clearly, kindly and keep an open mind for the feedback that will foster self improvement. Forge bonds with your employees and teams. Stay keen on improvement, on communication, and empathy, and you will find your team amply prepared to try new things, make great and successful changes, and deliver amazing results; even in the scariest of times

-Doc