Better Managers Begin With Better People

Better managers

Until an organization transforms into a Holacratic one, such as Zappos recently announced, managers, will be. And the old expression still holds,

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. The incoming manager was publicly arrested at his place of business for a failure to appear warrant. This incident raised valid questions about his character, yet he was still promoted.

Then another executive coaching client from a Global Fortune 500 firm attended a regional sales meeting. Her sales manager publicly criticized her for not achieving any sales success. She had received no new sales leads for the vertical she was supposed to establish. Marketing was some glossy brochures without any strategic alignment to the organization or ideal customers. After being on the job for six months, she learned 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 primary reasons for managerial ineffectiveness:

1. Poor executive leadership, as you know what rolls downhill
2. “Superworker” promoted into the “supervisor” or manager
3. 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

Successful execution is because of those in managerial roles

follow a predetermined set of processes that LEAD to predetermined outcomes

Additionally, a results-based leadership model streamlines the implementation to achieve the predetermined results and reduces missed performance 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 skills and valuing those talents 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 lousy 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