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Ramesh

The Prime Goal for every organization should be "getting rid of bad managers"

This is my second post on “managers”, let me first explain why I prefer to write about managers. As someone who has been managing people and being managed by people I always think managers if not make but sure break organizations.  If you are reading this – Can I ask you to think about your previous employer? The moment you start to think, the immediate point of contact in your memories is you manager in that organization irrespective of whether you liked, hated him/her. Managers influence the lives of their team, they create thriving or stressful conditions, managers make their organization fail miserably or help them take a big leap in to the future. Fixing the manager issue means getting 70% of the things in your organization right. Productivity, employee turnover and innovation everything falls in place the moment you have right set of managers.

Imagine you are in a meeting and seriously discussing on how to reduce attrition, irrespective of the organization you are working in, the trademark solutions you will come up with are- improved facilities, growth opportunities, fun at work and other engagement activities. In few of the rare scenarios you will identify that one “bad manager” causing employees to leave. But in almost all cases you will be eclipsed from the fact that fixing not so good managers, enabling the right ones will improve the situation like a magic. Losing right talent is losing the war and you will never be able to rebound from that situation. Hence it becomes imperative for organizations to redefine metrics to evaluate managers. Team productivity, timely deliverables may not always an indicator to having a good manager in place. Create an environment where managers are on their toes more than the team itself. Have mechanism that has zero tolerance on mistreating team members.

“Having a bad manager is often a two punch, Employees feel miserable while at work, and that misery follows them home, compounding their stress and negatively affecting their overall well-being. But it’s not enough to simply label a manager as “bad” or “good.” Organizations need to understand what managers are doing in the workplace to create or destroy engagement” - Harvard Business Review

While we focus on what organizations should do to create great work environment, it is also important to see what managers can fix at their level. With the power/authority we enjoy as managers we sometimes go overboard to the extent one may think he/she knows too much and the team is wrong almost all the times. This equation makes relation with team members scarred and leads to stressful team environment. A self-aware person is more likely to succeed as a manager and create a wonderful environment for the team.

Manager, not a superior human being!

Organizations unconsciously create sections, there are unwritten rules about the privileges and they seem tilted towards managers. If not all the time most team members think being a manager is having a peaceful life at work without having to do much. It is the immunity managers enjoys make it look that way, managers feel it is not required to say “yes it is my fault” or “sorry I was wrong”. It could be a small or silly example  I am using to justify the point but think once, as managers how many times we say a “good morning” to our team member when walk in to office before they do? This mental hierarchy is ingrained into the culture of organization which clearly denotes fragmentation and creates unseen barriers.

 

While it may be true that you possess certain skills as manager that your team member may lack, it is highly probable that your team member knows few things much better than you do and he/she would have attempted solving complex problems than you ever imagined. It is also possible that your team member had seen more life than you did, travelled more or read well and carries a great amount of depth in one/many topics of human interest. The path to becoming a good manager starts when one starts seeing relations at equal human level while you may have various different tactics to deal with the regular work. You don’t have to be mean to your team member to be a result oriented manager, you can have a tough conversation at the same time go for a nice coffee together. Most managers carry forward the intensity they had in the meeting room to their regular interaction with respective team member which makes the situation worse.

You cultivate incompetence and risk Innovation

Organizations by investing on wrong people managers give an indirect signal to whole floor that you don’t have to be a great manager to succeed and grow, this is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. Just take any organization and look at the figures how frequently individuals termed as non-performers and management out VS how frequently managers get warnings/asked to leave on bad performance, there will be a striking difference. Which means organizations not showing enough courage to deal with managers in the name of not causing flux, not disturbing the morale of the team. By getting rid of a bad manager you will improve the morale of team, you make their life better.

People who cannot manage teams well will fail to inspire the culture of innovation, irrespective of how innovative he/she is personally. They lose trust of the team, it will merely become running a shop with a set of slaves, in this process the smartest guys on the team finds another opportunity and say good bye to the organization. It is not a newly discovered secret that the difference between great organizations and the ordinary ones is “brilliant people” and losing them means you are fading away as an organization.