In Northern Ireland the authorities boast about the pool of well-educated and hard working people available to potential inward investors. Indeed, the general level of education in the Province is good, and probably as good if not better than the rest of the United Kingdom. Why then does the Province not match the rest of the UK in terms of economic performance, and further, why does the United Kingdom not match America and the best in Europe?
There is no simple answer to this question as many factors are involved, not least the large number of firms, particularly the smaller ones, in the UK that have failed to keep abreast of the latest, or any, developments in new management thinking. Also there is the traditional conservatism and reserve of the British and their strong inclination to resist change.
The main factor though, in my opinion, has to be the calibre of management in general and its ability, or lack of ability, to extract anything like the true potential from their employees.
Managing people ought to be relatively straightforward; yet seeing it done well remains a rarity in my experience. Despite the thousands of years that human beings have been trying to influence the actions of other human beings, very little progress seems to have been made in mastering or refining the art of managing. We still appear to have the greatest difficulty getting people to row in anything like the same direction, never mind being able to co-ordinate their combined talents in the achievement of really outstanding performance.
To quote Ray Immelman in his ground-breaking book, ‘Great Boss, Dead Boss’:-
“Managers desperately want to build and manage a superb organisation, but every day they face a cesspool of dissent, non-cooperation, hidden agendas, power play, concealed realities, back-stabbing and low-level warfare”.
He goes on to say that this behaviour is prevalent in virtually every type of organisation including government, academic institutions, military and even the church. Such behaviour is appallingly destructive and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve truly competitive levels of performance. In teaching management, I always maintained that it was not possible for an organisation to become ‘world class’ whilst a ‘them and us’ mentality prevailed within. Sadly, there are still far too many examples of this in the UK today.
What then is the problem, why aren’t organisations better managed? How are managers selected, how are they trained? Unfortunately some organisations still don’t seem to see the need to train managers, it is assumed that people know intuitively how to manage. Even those organisations that do train their managers fare little better. Again to quote Ray Immelman:-
“Companies send an endless stream of people on courses, seminars and training programmes but rarely get significant improvement in the performance of the business in return.”
All too often people find themselves in a management role as a reward for having performed well in their previous manual or technical role. Whilst I was working as a management consultant on an assignment for the Ormeau Bakery in Belfast, the Company promoted the best decorator of wedding cakes they had ever had. They then had no decorator of wedding cakes and an inexperienced manager, which didn’t strike me as a sensible swap, commercially or personally.
Unfortunately the attributes required of a good manager are not well known, never mind clearly understood, and as a result it is extremely difficult to identify those who would be competent in this role. This makes conventional recruitment and training of managers very much a ‘hit-and-miss’ affair.
However, new and important work has been carried out in the area of managing, and the solution, or ‘silver bullet’, that I am proposing in this paper is based on work undertaken by the Gallup Organisation. The results and background to this work are contained in the book: ‘First, Break all the Rules; what the world’s greatest managers do differently’, written by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman and published by Simon & Schuster in 2001. Other follow-up books have further expanded on the concept.
The major problem with managing people is that there is no way of measuring objectively those factors that affect an organisation’s ability to attract, retain and motivate good employees. In the absence of any definitive measurements, the Gallup Organisation interviewed thousands of successful managers and hundreds of thousands of employees, and painstakingly analysed the results. Their analysis showed that the best managers, whilst all being very different as people, did have certain characteristics and attributes in common. By and large they went against the perceived wisdom associated with traditional management practices. In fact they “broke all the rules”.
One of the key findings, probably the most important in relation to employees, was that the critical factor in building a strong and effective workplace is the employee’s relationship with their immediate manager. This one crucial factor determines how long an employee will stay, once recruited, and how productive they are while they are there. To quote the findings:-
“People leave a manager, they don’t leave a Company.”
The role of the individual manager cannot be overstated. It is the critical ingredient in ‘turning talent into performance’. One hears a lot of talk about ‘self-directed work teams’ and ‘self-motivation’, but it is the role and behaviour of their immediate manager that really makes the difference for employees.
However, in the absence of a quantitative “measuring stick”, how do you gauge the response of employees, whether they are willing to do their best, whether they will cooperate with corporate objectives, whether they will stay and how much you can rely on their continuing support in the future? Based on all of their interviews, the Gallup Organisation developed a list of twelve questions that accurately gauges, in the absence of being able to physically measure, the answers to the above questions. Any group of employees giving strong and positive responses to all the following twelve questions will indicate a motivating and constructive environment for promoting high performance:-
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Do I know what is expected of me at work?
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Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
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At work do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
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In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
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Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
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Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
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At work do my opinions seem to count?
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Does the mission/purpose of my organisation make me feel like my work is important?
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Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
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Do I have a best friend at work?
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In the last six months, have I talked with someone about my progress?
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At work, have I had opportunities to learn and grow?
For twelve seemingly innocuous questions, this test has proved surprisingly reliable at assessing the motivational state of any group of employees and how willing they are to have their talents converted into real performance by good managers. Whilst it is easy to score highly on some questions at the expense of others, you will only get an environment conducive to high performance where all twelve questions receive positive responses.
It is up to their immediate manager, however, to get the best out of each individual employee. Every employee is a unique blend of “knowledge, skills and talent”, each with their own “personal filters” on how they see and perceive the world within which they live and work. The crucial distinction between knowledge, skills and talent, from a managerial point of view, is that knowledge and skills can be taught, but talent cannot. In essence, talent is “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behaviour that can be productively applied”.
Everyone has talents and there are many different types. They can be divided broadly into three basic categories; “striving, thinking and relating talents”. You either have particular talents or you don’t!
According to the Gallup Organisation findings, the best managers can identify the talents that their employees possess and use them to their organisation’s advantage. In effect they exploit the strengths of each individual employee’s talents, and adapt to compensate for any weaknesses.
In most organisations you find managers busy trying to cure employees of their weaknesses, in a vain attempt to make each employee a complete and rounded individual. Most employees receive some form of periodic personal feedback in which their weaknesses are identified and highlighted, with recommendations as to how these might be overcome. In many cases this involves trying to teach talents, which you cannot. To quote again from Buckingham and Coffman’s book:-
“People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough!”
Having established that the relationship with an employee’s immediate manager is the cornerstone to achieving a productive environment, what actions help the best managers in the process of turning talent into performance? In their book, Buckingham and Coffman refer to “the ‘Four Keys’ of great managers”. These are:-
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Select for talent. In traditional recruitment and selection of employees, much attention is devoted to experience, intelligence and determination. How did the person perform in their last job? This is normally taken as a strong indicator of how the person will perform in a new and often very different environment. The intelligent manager, however, will identify the talents that they need from their employees and look for these in the interviewee. Most managers, or even recruitment specialists, wouldn’t know what talents are needed, never mind how to recognise them at an interview.
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Define the right outcomes. There is a strong urge among many managers to control their employees, rather than manage them. This leads to the desire to insist that employees slavishly follow prescribed methods or procedures in carrying out every task. “The hardest thing about being a manager is realising that your people will not do things the way that you would”. It is far better to define the outcome you want, and let the employees achieve this in their own way. Ok, they need to be properly briefed and know the parameters, culture and environment within which they are operating. In my experience trying to impose a ‘one best way’ is doomed to failure.
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Focus on strengths. Everyone is different, and the best managers will use this to advantage. The secret of turning ‘talent into performance’ is to make sure your employees are playing to their strengths, and not wasting time while you attempt to eradicate their weaknesses. Where an employee has a weakness, it may be necessary to compensate for this in order to capitalise on the strength of their particular talent. The vast majority of organisations spend too much time trying to fix employee’s weaknesses, and not nearly enough time exploiting their talents. The trick is to turn talent into performance by managing around weaknesses.
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Find the right fit. Two of the twelve questions, referred to earlier, ask; “Is there someone at work who encourages my development?” and “At work, have I had opportunities to learn and grow?” Obviously a crucial factor in creating the right environment for motivated employees is for them to have the opportunity to improve and better themselves. Unfortunately most organisations are structured in such a manner that the only way for employees to benefit financially and to advance their career is through promotion. As with the ‘decorator of wedding cakes’, this is not always the smart move. One rung on the promotion ladder doesn’t necessarily lead logically to the next and, having made a wrong promotional move, it can be difficult if not impossible to reverse. Having selected for talent and placed the employee in the position to exploit that talent, there has to be a better way of providing career advancement. It doesn’t take too much imagination to come up with more innovative ways of rewarding good performance, which was after all the objective of the exercise in the first place.
Human beings are capable of the most extraordinary feats of endurance and performance, given the right environment and managed or led in the appropriate way. As stated earlier; “managing people ought to be relatively straightforward”, and when done well can produce amazing results. Everyone has talents; although most managers still don’t know how to turn these into performance.
In this series of papers I have identified six ‘silver bullets’, based on what I feel are the best and most appropriate developments in new management thinking. These would transform most businesses and other organisations in the United Kingdom. For reasons that I can’t fathom, the top decision-makers in industry, government, academia and the professions appear reluctant to embrace new management thinking, preferring instead to measure and compare organisations with each other, based on outmoded and out-dated management techniques.
To quote Richard Zultner, an American consultant who has worked extensively in London for major clients, including the ‘Financial Times’:-
“The best focus is to focus on improvement, not on comparison to others, a standard, or some alleged ‘best practice’. Improve continuously and let the others worry about how they compare to you. Most organisations spend way too much time and effort on standards, benchmarking, maturity, best practice, this and that and far too little time actually improving.”
Throughout my career I became increasingly concerned and frustrated with the apparent obsession of managers, executives and directors to cling to old-fashioned and out-dated management methods. The United Kingdom must be among the most conservative countries in the world when it comes to encouraging new management thinking. How many times have I heard managers say; “we’ve tried that, but it doesn’t work”, based on experimenting with some half-baked notions? A few years ago I thought Northern Ireland was going to ‘buck’ the trend, when InvestNI offered clients the ‘TOC Business Improvement Programme’. But the old obsession with the status quo reasserted itself and the programme has been effectively sidelined
The 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, said:-
“New thoughts and new truths go through three stages. First they are ridiculed. Next they are violently opposed. Then finally they are accepted as self-evident.”
I will leave you with one final thought. How far has ‘New Management Thinking’ got along the road to being self-evident in the United Kingdom?
