Better Managers Begin With Better People
Leanne Hogland-Smith explains how your personality can effect your career as a manager, and how people with better personalities make better managers.
by 
by Better managers
Until an organization transforms into a Holacratic one such as what Zappos recently announced, there will be managers. And the old expression still holds true,
People leave managers, not organizations
Some managers possess questionable characters
Recently, our older son changed jobs because the incoming manager was a seasoned veteran, but a person of questionable character. He was publicly arrested at the place of business for a failure to appear warrant. He had been involved in driving under the influence. Yet because of his tenure, not his character, he was promoted to manager.
Then another executive coaching client from a Global Fortune 500 firm attended a regional sales meeting. Her sales manager publicly berated her for not achieving any sales success. Of course, what he failed to mention is she was not allowed to leverage already existing relationships through another product line. She was not given any sales leads for this new vertical she was supposed to establish. Marketing was some glossy brochures without any strategic alignment to the organization or ideal customers. She learned after she had been on the job for six months the best way to contact her sales manager was through email invitations/scheduling. Her sales manager came in at 10 am and left at 2 pm with at least a 90-minute lunch.
Tackling managerial ineffectiveness
There are three basic reasons for managerial ineffectiveness:
- Poor executive leadership as you know what rolls downhill
- “Superworker” promoted into the “supervisor” or manager
- Bad hiring practices
With many firms having at least three if not four or five different generations in the workplace, managers more than ever before require ongoing development to be able to secure the desired results. This development may begin by replacing the old competency model still used within the hiring and promotion practice and instead embrace a results model for overall leadership development.
A results-based management model
A results model looks to the results first and then identifies what talents are needed to secure those results or as Steven Covey is so often quoted “Begin with the end in mind.” This model helps to explain why when asking 100 different people to name the top leader from their perspectives you will receive a plethora of responses.
Successful execution is achieved because of those in managerial roles
follow a predetermined set of processes that LEAD to those outcomes
Additionally, a results-based leadership model streamlines the execution to achieve the predetermined results and reduces missed execution because everyone is now rowing in the same direction, toward the same target.
Sometimes we fail to recognize the individual has unique talents. Understanding the talents and then valuing those talents is what separates good talent management from less than effective talent management.
Good managers are all about securing the desired results through the efforts of others. Yet when the executive leadership is poor, when the manager is the super worker and when bad hiring practices exist, then Peter Drucker’s words still ring true:
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work
Discovering & guiding people to be the best for themselves and their organizations is what ignites my passion. With over 30 plus years in corporate sales and having my own 16 years young executive coaching & talent management consulting practice, I truly believe if we stop setting people up to fail we could go even farther and faster than we have to date. This passion extends to helping young people through the Career & College Success Bootcamp. Calls are always appreciated at 219.759.5601 Chicago, USA Central time.
