Tag Archives: management

Finding Leaders instead of Promoting Managers

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How does your company decide who is going to be promoted to a ‘Management’ role?  Do they pick the people that are really good at ‘doing the work’ and then send them on a Management Training course?  Does that work?  Isn’t this what was described in “The Peter Principle”, back in 1969 by  Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull?  That was meant to be humorous, not advice on how to run your business!

So, what can you do instead?  I’d start by identifying the natural leaders in your business.  Observe the people that work for you; who are the networkers, who do people go to when they have a problem to solve?  Those individuals might be a starting point for identifying the potential leaders.

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you recall, I explicitly separate leadership and management.  Your business still needs managers, to manage processes, projects, budgets etc., but you need leaders to lead the people.  If you put ‘managers’ in positions of leadership, then they may well treat your people as if they were simply entities such as projects or products.

Once you have identified the natural leaders, talk to them, coach them, identify their strengths and weaknesses and put them into positions where they can use their strengths.  Did you think that I was going to suggest that you work on improving their areas of weakness?  That might be something that you would consider, but think carefully:  if the weakness is likely to result in them not being good leaders, then they’re probably not the right person.

I’d recommend one of my favourite books on this subject: “First break all the rules”, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.  What this book explains, is why we should look to use the strengths of each person in our companies to best effect.  It is important that both the individuals and their managers to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and to be honest enough to own up to their weaknesses.

If you’re looking to improve the engagement of your employees, talk to them about their strengths and weaknesses.  What will you achieve by doing this?  By using each individual and their strengths, you can expect to see more engagement resulting from each person being allowed to do what they’re good at, and enjoy doing.  Is there a downside?  Yes, but only if you have a key objective to meet which isn’t a strength of any one individual in your team.  But that aside, you’ve already increased engagement by focussing on their strengths!

What are my weaknesses?  I suppose that I could share one with you:  I get easily distracted when I’m trying to do something that doesn’t really interest me.  I’m writing this blog right now, rather than doing what I really should be doing!

Confusing management with leadership

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I am not someone who is motivated by grand job titles, so it confused me somewhat when a part of a company that I worked for changed the job title of some of its supervisors from “Team Leader” to “Team Manager”.  I suspected that the decision was made by someone who thought that being a “Manager” sounded more important than being a “Leader”.  I can already find myself disagreeing with this point-of-view.  At that point in my career, I don’t think I understood the difference as I do now, but one of the Senior Leaders in the part of the business that I worked in didn’t follow the trend.

What is a Manager?

There are numerous ways in which you can describe the role of a manager.  Managers carry out things like

  • performance management
  • work allocation
  • reward decision-making
  • hiring and firing
  • delivery of the corporate messages

Although this is not a comprehensive list of duties, what you will see is a list of activities that impact their staff.  The manager in such a situation is expected to be the vehicle through which the company interacts with its staff.

What is a Leader?

This might be a more difficult question to answer, but here’s a few ideas about what leaders might do:

  • coach others to achieve their best performance
  • be an expert, can lead from the workplace
  • can share workload, ensuring that everyone plays to their strengths
  • can interpret corporate messages, delivering meaning

You might think that I’m suggesting that managers can’t be leaders, by choosing different styles of words for the two categories, and maybe I am!

The real differences between leaders and managers

What really separates leaders from managers is simple:

Managers have to push their staff into delivering whereas people will follow leaders and deliver more!

A simple statement may start you thinking about how you are working today.  Are you a leader or a manager?  I’m sure there are merits in both camps, but I have worked for people managers as well as leaders, and I have a strong preference for leaders.  If I think back over my career, I see only a few leaders who got the best out of me; these people created space and opportunities for me to grow as a person, as well as to be able to deliver value to the business.

If you’re an aspiring leader, feel free to comment on this post!

Does your performance management system deliver?

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Does your business use annual performance management reviews?

I’m assuming that, because you’re reading on, you answered yes to that question.  I’ve been the subject of and have delivered many performance reviews, and have always struggled to understand the value of these annual rituals.

Why do we do this?

Is the purpose of the annual review to help individuals identify how to perform better in the future?  Is it designed to set their annual bonus and pay award?  It may well be both of these, in which case, can you really expect your team to be honest and open in their own assessment of their performance?  If they know they had a challenging year, from which they’ve already learned by their mistakes, are they going to remind you about this, or will they tell you about all of the good things that happened?  I know what I’d do!

I’m an employee, a manger and a human being!

As an employee, I’ve always sought and acted on feedback from others around me, so why do I need to be reminded of the mistakes that I made 11 months ago, or the successful completion of a project last week?  The answer is usually that my salary is related to my sustained performance, and that the company bonus scheme pays out a princely sum, based on my performance last year.  Will my manager play up the positives or remember the negatives?  I’m nervous now!

As a manager, I try to coach my team throughout the year, leading them through the difficult times and celebrating their successes with them.  I have to assess their performance over the year on a 3 or 5 point rating scale, and remind them of their highs and lows over the year.  This is something that I struggle to with, as a manger; performance across a 12-month period has a natural variation, yet I’m expected to summarise this variation with a single rating.  I feel sorry for my team members who had learned from their mistakes, yet will receive a lower rating than they feel they deserve, despite having shown improved performance since that error of judgement earlier in the year.

As a human being, I suffer from bias.  I am programmed to remember bad things; I remember bad or dangerous events for self-preservation.  As a human being, I like some people more than I like others; I can’t help it!  The impact of this as me as a manager is that I going to fail to give an objective view of my team members’ performance.  I can’t help it, it’s just the way I was made.

What’s the result of all this?

My experience of such systems is that we rarely feel that my performance was assessed objectively.  Personally, I’ve had reviews that rated my performance below what I thought it was and, perhaps more surprisingly, above my expectation.  It was the latter experience that made me wonder whether there was any real value in performance reviews.  Does the fact that my annual bonus is related to my personal performance over the last year make me deliver higher performance? No, of course not!  What it does to me, and many others around me, is to demotivate us when it is not as good as we had hoped!  I’ll discuss this problem another time!

The good news!

There is a solution, however.  Throw away the annual performance review and coach your teams throughout the year.  If you must pay a bonus to your staff, link it to business performance.  I have been part of an organisation that paid its staff a fixed annual bonus based on the company’s performance. Every member of staff got the same bonus; that seemed to be much fairer than more complex system, based partly on individual performance.

I’m sure that you may think that there are serious risks with taking such a bold step, but ask yourself, what would you gain by not having an annual performance management cycle?

First steps in turning managers into leaders

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I hope to convince you, as you read this blog, that there is a better world out there, if only we can move our businesses away from control by managers, towards an era where leadership not management is king.

I’ll start you thinking with a simple thought:

The majority of people that go to work in your business just want to be able to do a good job!

If this is true, then I wonder how much you spend on complicated reward and performance management systems in your business?