Category Archives: Leadership

A Manager’s Guide to Employee Engagement

A Manager's Guide to Employee Engagement

GUEST POST from David Burkus

We need to talk about employee engagement surveys. It’s great news that organizations are paying attention to engagement and its impact on performance. The bad news is that senior leaders seem to want a clear metric to judge how satisfied and motivated their people are. Management requires metrics, after all. Decisions require data.

Employee engagement surveys are the tool of choice to measure a company’s employee experience, motivation, and overall culture. Gallup research suggests that employee engagement is linked to many other important organization metrics like productivity, employee retention, and profitability. Unfortunately, Gallup has also found engagement is on the decline across the United States, particularly among remote, hybrid, and younger workers.

Ultimately, the reasons for the recent employee engagement decline and the inability to turn it around stem from a few problems with how most leaders treat engagement as a concept and engagement surveys as a tool. In this article, we’re going to review the top three problems with employee engagement surveys and offer a solution for each one that will not only boost engagement scores…but will engage your people.

Employee Engagement Problem #1: People don’t take the surveys seriously

Employee engagement surveys are only as important as leadership says they are, and the reliability can be a little flawed. No, don’t throw out surveys completely because the data might be flawed, but it’s important to know the context of how this engagement data is collected.

Your employee gets an email. It typically goes something like this:

“Dear Valued Employees, Our company has brought in “GloboEngage360”, to survey different aspects of the company according to the point of view of its employees. This survey is not mandatory, but your feedback is greatly appreciated and will remain anonymous.” Sincerely, Management

Put yourself in an employee’s shoes. They have meetings all day. They have tasks to do and people to coordinate with. If it isn’t mandatory, something like this is going right to the bottom of the list of things to do, or just put into the trash immediately.

And most employee’s gut reaction to a message from leadership or outside consultants saying this is anonymous is, “This is definitely not anonymous.” So, will employees take this survey seriously at all? Hard to say. Is there some value to be had from collecting the data this way? A little, but it’s best used as a starting point into your own investigation into engagement.

But we also must consider leadership’s point of view. Survey goes out. The survey consultancy collects the data, makes a nice packet of insights, and boils down your people’s performance, happiness, and productivity all into nice little percentages. But the data is only as serious as the seriousness of the people who filled out the survey, and their seriousness is determined by how seriously they think leaders care about the survey.

Seriously.

Employee Engagement Solution #1: Share the results

This should be an easy thing to do. And it’s the easiest way to communicate that you’re serious about employee feedback and improving the employee experience. It’s a mystery why companies don’t typically share the results with those who took the survey. By not sharing, people can only speculate, and they’re probably going to go to draw the worst-case scenarios like “The company is going to restructure” or “My job is in jeopardy.”

So, share the results. You may not have gotten an accurate and serious picture of engagement in the results you’re sharing, but when employees see that you considered their responses and you’re making changes as a result, they’ll give these questions more consideration next time a survey is sent around.

To articulate that these surveys matter to your team, you don’t need to send them the entire data file or even the summary report the consulting firm created for you. It can be way simpler than that. Just take the time to share:

What positive results you’re proud of.
Why you’re so proud of those results.
What unexpected results you received.
And what you’ll be changing as a result.

That’s it. Just a simple email, memo, or quick video on what senior leadership learned from the survey and what they’ll be building upon or changing completely because of the survey.

Employee Engagement Problem #2: Leaders Interpret Data Wrong

After a survey is taken, the team from human resources or the consulting firm administering the survey will compile everything and prepare a summary report. And this is where things can go really wrong. Often the report is broken down by the different questions asked, and the lower scoring the question the more attention it gets. If one item is particularly low, then we start a company-wide initiative to improve on that one item. Because when leaders only look at the company-wide data, they tend to make decisions that impact everyone… company-wide.

But if your company has issues, there’s a chance it’s not in every single department or every single team. Most people’s experience of work isn’t reflective of the entire company. It’s a commentary on the parts of the company they work with. Company culture is the average of the culture on each individual team.

You know what happens next. Now your top performing teams are subject to mandatory programs that will slow them down, confuse them, and ultimately make them feel punished. Those top performing teams need to be protected!

Employee Engagement Solution #2: Look team-by-team, not company-wide

When you look at the data, don’t just take the overall metrics and run with them. If you have direct contact with the agency you used, ask them, or ask your HR or culture team, to get the metrics broken down to the team level, or as much functional or regional separation as you can get.

And then use those metrics to isolate the teams that are under-performing in whatever areas you measured and cater a solution to that team. Talk to that manager. Talk to the people on that team. See what’s going on.

The solution for that individual team is not going to be solved by a company-wide solution. Big initiatives that touch every team in a company with the intent to weed out a problem often are too broad and diluted to fix the issue.

So, break those numbers down to the team level. Then, help the team leaders that are dragging the overall numbers down-and reward the team leaders who are serving their people well. Building a company culture is about building strong team cultures. It takes time, effort, and more than just the numbers and one big solution.

Employee Engagement Problem #3: Surveys are too infrequent

Employee engagement surveys are typically done once a year. Maybe twice. Remember, people don’t want to be inundated with surveys all year, and leadership and HR teams know that. So, companies will concentrate on that one survey ask a year. And companies will rely on HR and culture teams to implement a workplace environment that is inclusive, sparking innovation, and motivates and engages people.

It makes sense not to administer formal surveys too frequently throughout the year. HR should be very judicial when sending out surveys. But just because you’re not surveying people regularly, doesn’t mean you can’t be monitoring employee engagement regularly.

Employee Engagement Solution #3: Keep the conversation going on the team level

Managers can do their own anecdotal surveys, better known as a “conversation” with their team.

You, as a leader of your team, are ultimately responsible for your employees’ engagement and for fostering a purposeful culture. A company’s culture is the aggregate of all the teams’ cultures. This work really falls to you. Have ongoing conversations with your team and in your individual check-ins. Ask them what projects are going well. Ask them what they’re energy levels are like. Ask them how they’re interacting with their teams. And most importantly, ask them if there’s anything you can help with.

If you keep an open dialogue with your team about how things are going, the metrics from a yearly survey will not surprise or shock you. If you’re good, you’ll know before the survey.

Conclusion

Remember, a company’s culture is the sum of its team cultures. Invest in your teams, have open communication, and the engagement numbers will take care of themselves.

There’s a tendency to treat employee engagement like the score of a game, and so we shouldn’t be surprised when people try to game the system and improve the score. But the point of collecting all that data isn’t to learn how to improve a number. It’s to know where we need to pay more attention to our people and how we can help them feel more connected to their work and to the team they work with.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on May 16, 2024.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Subtle Leadership

Leave a reply

Subtle Leadership

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

You could be a subtle leader if…

You create the causes and conditions for others to shine. And when they shine, you give them the credit they’re due.

You don’t have the title, but when the high-profile project hits a rough patch, you get called in to create the go-forward plan.

One of your best direct reports gets promoted out from under you, but she still wants to meet with you weekly.

When you see someone take initiative, you tell them you like their behavior.

You get to choose the things you work on.

You can ask most anyone for a favor and they’ll do it, just because it’s you. But, because you don’t like to put people out, you rarely ask.

When someone does a good job, you send their boss a nice email and cc: them.

When it’s time to make a big decision, even though it’s outside your formal jurisdiction, you have a seat at the table.

When people don’t want to hear the truth, they don’t invite you to the meeting.

You are given the time to think things through, even when it takes you a long time.

Your young boss trusts you enough to ask for advice, even when she knows she should know.

In a group discussion, you wait for everyone else to have input before weighing in. And, if there’s no need to weigh in, you don’t.

When you see someone make a mistake, you ignore it if you can. And if you can’t, you talk to them in private.

Subtle leaders show themselves in subtle ways but their ways are powerful. Often, you see only the results of their behaviors and those career-boosting results are mapped to someone else. But if you’ve been the recipient of subtle leadership, you know what I’m talking about. You didn’t know you needed help, but you were helped just the same. And you were helped in a way that was invisible to others. And though you didn’t know to ask for advice, you were given the right suggestion at the right time. And you didn’t realize it was the perfect piece of advice until three weeks later.

Subtle leaders are difficult to spot. But once you know how they go about their business and how the company treats them, you can see them for what they are. And once you recognize a subtle leader, figure out a way to spend time with them. Your career will be better for it.

Image credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Leaders’ Responsibility is Their Response

Leave a reply

Leaders' Responsibility is Their Response

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you’re asked to do more work that you and your team can handle, don’t pass it onto your team. Instead, take the heat from above but limit the team’s work to a reasonable level.

When the number of projects is larger than the budget needed to get them done, limit the projects based on the budget.

When the team knows you’re wrong, tell them they’re right. And apologize.

When everyone knows there’s a big problem and you’re the only one that can fix it, fix the big problem.

When the team’s opinion is different than yours, respect the team’s opinion.

When you make a mistake, own it.

When you’re told to do turn-the-crank work and only turn-the-crank work, sneak in a little sizzle to keep your team excited and engaged.

When it’s suggested that your team must do another project while they are fully engaged in an active project, create a big problem with the active project to delay the other project.

When the project is going poorly, be forthcoming with the team.

When you fail to do what you say, apologize. Then, do what you said you’d do.

When you make a mistake in judgement which creates a big problem, explain your mistake to the team and ask them for help.

If you’ve got to clean up a mess, tell your team you need their help to clean up the mess.

When there’s a difficult message to deliver, deliver it face-to-face and in private.

When your team challenges your thinking, thank them.

When your team tells you the project will take longer than you want, believe them.

When the team asks for guidance, give them what you can and when you don’t know, tell them.

As leaders, we don’t always get things right. And that’s okay because mistakes are a normal part of our work. And projects don’t always go as planned, but that’s okay because that’s what projects do. And we don’t always have the answers, but that’s okay because we’re not supposed to. But we are responsible for our response to these situations.

When mistakes happen, good leaders own them. When there’s too much work and too little time, good leaders tell it like it is and put together a realistic plan. And when the answers aren’t known, a good leader admits they don’t know and leads the effort to figure it out.

None of us get it right 100% of the time. But what we must get right is our response to difficult situations. As leaders, our responses should be based on honesty, integrity, respect for the reality of the situation and respect for people doing the work.

Image credit: 1 of 900+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Building Psychological Safety

Leave a reply

Team Dynamics Explained

Building Psychological Safety

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Psychological safety is the foundation of strong team dynamics. In this post, we will explore why creating a safe environment for team members to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes is essential for collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Your thoughts and feedback are always welcome.

What is the Challenge?

Many teams struggle to foster open communication and risk-taking because of a lack of psychological safety. When team members fear judgment or backlash, they’re less likely to share ideas, admit mistakes, or take initiative. This leads to limited collaboration and stifles innovation.

Why Does This Matter?

Psychological safety is crucial for high-performing teams. It allows members to trust one another, be honest about challenges, and share unique perspectives without fear. Teams that prioritize psychological safety are more resilient, adaptable, and effective at problem-solving. Without it, teams often fall into groupthink or miss out on diverse ideas.

How to Overcome It

The key enabler of psychological safety is creating a culture of trust, respect and openness. Here are steps to build psychological safety within your team:

Model Vulnerability as a Leader: Leaders should openly share their own challenges and uncertainties. By showing vulnerability, leaders signal to the team that it’s okay to speak up and be honest.
Encourage Open Dialogue: Create regular opportunities for team members to share their thoughts and experiences. Make it clear that all voices are valued, and avoid interrupting or dismissing ideas.
Enhance Learning from Mistakes: Reinforce that mistakes are part of the growth process by focusing on lessons learned rather than blame. This shift helps build a learning-oriented culture.
Promote Empathy and Respect: Encourage team members to listen actively and respect each other’s viewpoints. Empathy fosters understanding and helps create a safe space for honest exchanges.
Recognize Contributions: Acknowledge and celebrate the unique contributions each team member brings, whether it’s a fresh perspective or constructive feedback. This reinforces their value within the team.

What This Means for Your Teams / Organization

Building psychological safety transforms teams into collaborative, innovative, and resilient units. With a strong sense of safety, team members are more willing to share bold ideas, take risks, and support each other. Over time, this results in a high-performing team that adapts well to change and challenges.

More Inspiration – Thought Leaders, Case-Study

Thought Leader: Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization
Case Study: Google’s Project Aristotle, which identified psychological safety as the top factor in successful teams.

This post is part of my Corporate Innovation Explained series. You can also follow my Leadership Growth Explained and Team Dynamics Explained series if you like this kind of inspiration.

Team Dynamics Explained

Image Credit: Pexels

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Escaping the Fear Trap

Leave a reply

What We Can Learn from Wildfire Fighters About Leading Through Uncertainty

Escaping the Fear Trap

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

What does a lightning strike in a Spanish forest have to do with your next leadership meeting? More than you think.

On June 14, 2014, lightning struck a forest on Spain’s northeast coast, only 60 miles from Barcelona. Within hours, flames 16 to 33 feet high raced out of control toward populated areas, threatening 27,000 acres of forest, an area larger than the city of Boston.

Everything – data, instincts, decades of firefighting doctrine – prioritized saving the entire forest and protecting the coastal towns.

Instead, the fire commanders chose to deliberately let 2,057 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, burn.

The result? They saved the other 25,000 acres (an area the size of San Francisco), protected the coastal communities, and created a natural firebreak that would protect the region for decades. By accepting some losses, they prevented catastrophic ones.

The Fear Trap That’s Strangling Your Business

The Tivissa fire’s triumph happened because firefighters found the courage to escape what researchers call the “fear trap” – the tendency to focus exclusively on defending against known, measurable risks.

Despite research proving that defending against predictable, measurable risks through defensive strategies consistently fails in uncertain and dynamic scenarios, firefighter “best practices” continue to advocate this approach.

Sound familiar? It should. Most executives today are trapped in exactly this pattern.

We’re in the fire right now. Financial markets are yo-yoing, AI threatens to disrupt everything, and consumer behaviors are shifting.

Most executives are falling into the Fear Trap by doubling down on protecting their existing business and pouring resources into defending against predictable risks. Yet the real threats, the ones you can’t measure or model, continue to pound the business.

While you’re protecting last quarter’s wins, tomorrow’s disruption is spreading unchecked.

Four Principles for Creative Decision-Making Under Fire

The decision to cede certain areas wasn’t hasty but based on four principles enabling leaders in any situation to successfully navigate uncertainty.

1. A Predictable Situation is a Safe Situation.

Stop trying to control the uncontrollable. Standard procedures work in predictable situations but fail in unprecedented challenges.

Put it in Practice: Instead of creating endless contingency plans, build flexibility and agility into operations and decision-making.

2. Build Credibility Through Realistic Expectations.

Reducing uncertainty requires realism about what can be achieved. Fire commanders mapped out precisely which areas around Tivissa would burn and which would be saved, then communicated these hard truths and the considered trade-offs to officials and communities before implementing their strategy, building trust and preventing panic as the selected areas burned.

Put it in practice: Stop promising to protect everything and set realistic expectations about what you can control. Then communicate priorities, expectations, and trade-offs frequently, transparently, and clearly with all key stakeholders.

3. Include the future in your definition of success

Traditional firefighting protects immediate assets at risk. The Tivissa firefighters expanded this to include future resilience, recognizing that saving everything today could jeopardize the region tomorrow.

Put it in practice: Be transparent about how you define the Common Good in your organization, then reinforce it by making hard choices about where to compete and where to retreat. The goal isn’t to avoid all losses – it’s to maximize overall organizational health.

4. Use uncertainty to build for tomorrow.

Firefighters didn’t just accept that 2,057 acres would burn – they strategically chose which acres to let burn to create maximum future advantage, protecting the region for generations.

Put it in practice: Evaluate every response to uncertainty on whether it better positions you for future challenges. Leverage the disruption to build capabilities, market positions, and organizational structures that strengthen you for future uncertainty.

Your Next Move

When the wind shifted and the fire exploded, firefighters had to choose between defending everything (and likely losing it all) or accepting strategic losses to ensure overall wins.

You’re facing the same choice right now.

Like the firefighters, your breakthrough might come not from fighting harder against uncertainty, but from learning to work with it strategically.

What are you willing to let burn to save what matters most?

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

3 Reasons Why Bad Business Thinking Exists

1 Reply

3 Reasons Why Bad Business Thinking Exists

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

“The single most important message in this book is very simple,” reads the first line in John Kotter’s highly regarded The Heart of Change. “People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.

Really? That’s the important message? That emotive arguments are more powerful than factual arguments? What about other reasons why people change their behavior, such as social proof, conformity, incentives or coercion? By setting up a binary and artificial choice between two communication alternatives, he eliminates important strategic and tactical options.

It’s not just Kotter either, who is a well respected professor at Harvard Business School. The truth is that a lot of management thinking is surprisingly shoddy, with arbitrary notions and cognitive biases dressed up as scholarly work. We need to be more skeptical about “research” that comes out of business schools and consultancies. Here are three things to look for:

1. WYSIATI And Confirmation Bias

Kotter’s point about emotive vs. analytic arguments is, of course, completely valid. The fundamental error he makes is that he focuses on that particular aspect to the exclusion of everything else. Daniel Kahneman calls this WYSIATI, or “what you see is all there is.” Once you get tunnel vision on a particular fact or idea, it’s hard to see anything else.

Consider this thought experiment: You go to a conference featuring a powerful, emotive presentation on the need to combat climate change. You see glaciers melting, polar bears losing their habitat and young children starving from drought. Then you go back to the office, fired up and ready to do something about it, but everyone else has a strong argument against acting on climate change.

What is likely to happen next? You convince you co-workers—including your bosses— about the urgency of the crisis? Or, surrounded by skeptics, your conviction begins to wane? When all we see is the poor polar bears and starving in an echo chamber of likeminded people, we forget about other considerations, but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is.

An issue related to WYSIATI is confirmation bias. Kotter proudly points out that he worked with Deloitte to conduct extensive research for his book. Amazingly, after analyzing over 200 interviews, he ended up with the same 8-step process he cited in his earlier work. So what was the purpose of the research, to gain actual insights or to confirm what he thought he already knew?

Perhaps not surprisingly, after decades of organizations applying Kotter’s ideas about change McKinsey still finds that more than two-thirds of transformational efforts fail. Maybe there is actually more to change than communication strategy.

2. Halo Effects And Confounding Variables

One of the most popular modes of analysis that business thinkers use is to examine successful companies and see what they do differently. A number of bestselling management books, such as In Search of Excellence, have used this method. Unfortunately, when doing so they often fall prey to a cognitive bias known as the halo effect.

For example, in 2000, before the dotcom crash, Cisco was flying high. A profile in Fortune reported it to have an unparalleled culture with highly motivated employees. But just one year later, when the market tanked, the very same publication described it as “cocksure” and “naive.” Did the “culture,” under the very same leadership, really change that much in a year? Or did the perceptions of its performance change?

Cisco had a highly motivated and, some would say, aggressive sales force. When the company was doing well, analysts assumed it was their aggressiveness that produced good results and when its fortunes changed, that same aggressive behavior was blamed for its failures. This is what’s known as a confounding error, the fact that an aggressive sales force correlated with specific results doesn’t mean that the aggressive sales force caused the results.

Every organization has things which it does differently, that are idiosyncratic to its management and culture. In some market contexts those traits will be advantageous, in other environments they may not be. It takes work—and some humility—to separate what’s truly a success factor, what’s merely fit for a narrow purpose and what’s not really relevant.

3. Survivorship Bias

Business school professors and consultants gain fame—not to mention large fees—when they are able to define a novel concept or success factor. If you are able to isolate one thing that organizations should do differently, you have a powerful product to sell. A single powerful insight can make an entire career, which is probably why so many cut corners.

For example, in their study of 108 companies, distinguished INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne found that “blue ocean” products, those in new categories without competition, far outperform those in the more competitive “red ocean” markets. Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, was an immediate hit, selling over 3.5 million copies.

Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen’ book, Profit from the Core, boasted even more extensive research encompassing 200 case studies, a database of 1,854 companies, 100 interviews of senior executives and an “extensive review” of existing literature. They found that firms that focused on their ”core” far outperformed those who strayed.

It doesn’t take too much thinking to start seeing problems. How can you both “focus on your core” and seek out “blue oceans”? It betrays logic that both strategies could outperform one another. Also, how do you define “core?” Core markets? Core capabilities? Core customers? While it’s true that “blue ocean” markets lack competitors, they don’t have any customers either. Who do you sell to?

Yet there is an even bigger, more insidious problem called survivorship bias. Notice how “research” doesn’t include firms that went out of business because there were no customers in those “blue oceans” or because they failed to diversify outside of their “core.” The data only pertains to those that survived.

It’s hard to think of any other field where researchers could get away with such obviously careless work. Can you imagine medical research that didn’t include patients that died, or airplane research that didn’t include the flights that crashed? Suffice it to say that since the two books were published two decades ago, they’ve shown no capacity to predict whether a business will succeed or fail.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

When I’m finishing up a book, I send out sections to be fact-checked by experts and those who have first-person knowledge of events. I’m always amazed at how much I get wrong. In some cases, I make truly egregious errors about facts I should have known (or did know, but failed to take into account). It can be an incredibly humbling process.

That’s why it’s so important to not to believe everything you think, there are simply too many ways to get things wrong. As Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” I would also add a second principle that just because you’ve managed to fool others, doesn’t mean you’ve gotten it right.

Unfortunately, so many of the popular management ideas today come from people who never actually operated a business, such as business school professors and consultants. These are often people who’ve never failed. They’ve been told that they’re smart all their lives and expect others to be impressed by their ideas, not to examine them thoroughly.

The problem with so much business thinking today is that there is an appalling lack of rigor. That’s the only way that obviously flawed ideas such as “blue oceans,” “profiting from the core” and John Kotter’s ideas about change management are able to gain traction. It’s hard to imagine any other field with such a complete lack of quality control.

That’s why I send out fact checks, because I know how likely I am to think foolish and inaccurate things. I’ve also noticed that I tend to be most wrong when I think I’ve come up with something brilliant. Much as Tolstoy wrote about families, there are infinitely more ways to get things wrong than to get things right.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Do We Really Need Managers?

Leave a reply

Do We Really Need Managers?

GUEST POST from David Burkus

There have been SO many articles and books about this idea of flat organizations. No managers, no bosses, just passionate people solving problems and collaborating at ease.

Sounds great, right? Well, not if you’re a manager, obviously. But the concept sounds great, right? Less oversight, more trust, more autonomy, we all want that!

What these articles get wrong is this: the idea of managers, especially middle managers, being senseless buffoons or mere pawns with all the authority of a mall cop has gone too far. And the role of a middle manager needs a refresh, not an elimination. Middle managers are the unsung heroes of organizations. But these managers need to be leaders, not just human project management tools.

Where do we stand with managers, today?

The workplace changed a lot during the pandemic. We all came together, huddled from home, turned our kitchen table into a workstation, then our guest room or a corner in our living room to our home office, and overall, stayed productive. In the end, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a person hovering over our shoulder to keep us on track and working. So, logically, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a manager, and a lot of senior leaders felt maybe we could cut out some middle managers.

A survey by GoodHire in 2022, of workers in a variety of fields including education, finance, health care, marketing, and even science- found that 83% of American workers said they could do their own job without their managers. But paradoxically, GoodHire also found that 70% of American workers strongly enjoy or somewhat enjoy working for their manager. This finding is backed up by Pew Research which just released data in late 2023 finding that “a majority of workers give their boss high ratings.”

So, people like their bosses, but could do without them. What’s really going on here?

Why do we hate managers? (or think we do)

The brainless middle manager trope. It’s an old one. They’re in our shows, our movies, our social media posts. And, yeah, in our lives too. They show up late, leave early. They scrutinize everything you do. Track your tasks. Track your productivity. Track your success. Track your failures.

Middle managers today are basically glorified task managers, and that really must change. But…why are they glorified task managers in the first place?

Gallup just published the results of a massive study on managers. A key finding was that, right now, managers have more work to do, on a tighter budget with new teams. Managers are more likely to be burnt out, disengaged, and looking for a new job.

More work: Remember the remote and hybrid culture you probably had to facilitate from scratch with no experience with video software like Zoom and Webex? That was a huge undertaking. Managing people’s well-being wasn’t in the managerial job description before. Adding it may be long overdue, but it was still a task that managers feel ill-equipped to take on officially.

Less budget: The economy was a roller coaster for all industries over the last 4 years. And in response a lot of budgets froze or got tightened. Your company was probably hit in negative ways that affected resources that make your role easier.

New teams: There was a lot of quitting, layoffs, hiring, and job hopping that happened. Now, teams are shaken up, gone, or brand new.

When all these things compound, it makes sense middle managers are feeling squeezed, as Gallup put it.

And when you’re burnt out, disengaged, and looking for the next place to work, you’re going to become the bare minimum “glorified task manager” just making sure the wheels are spinning.

A manager should be a leader. Plain and simple. This isn’t just semantics. A leader is an inspirational figure that facilitates great work. Tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, they can keep track of tasks and you can check them from time to time. But it shouldn’t be the first thing a manager does: check the management software. Instead, check on the people!

What About Manager-less Companies?

It’s worth stating here that, none of this is new. The discussion about whether managers make a difference has been going on for a while, with both sides citing examples to suit their opinion.

On the manager-less company side, Washington-based Valve Software gets cited often. If you’ve ever played some of their most critically acclaimed video games like Half-Life and Portal, you’ve probably heard of them. They also created the Steam platform, which, again if you’re a gamer, you know well. Valve was started by two former Microsoft employees in the early 1990s and began, from the start, as a flat company. No managers, beyond the executive c-suite level. People decided what to work on, what to prioritize, and the company became a huge success. By a lot of metrics, it’s been a success. A little late on deadlines for game releases, but because they are so good, they’re often forgiven.

But here’s where it fell short. Priority is only given to what the majority of the organization prioritizes. At Valve, it was the product, the critically acclaimed games and the Steam platform. What wasn’t prioritized? Diversity. Even for a tech company, even for a gaming company, the demographics are predominantly white and male. This discrepancy came to a boiling point in 2020 when the executive leaders were blindsided by rising social issues and criticized for their silence both internally and externally.

Other companies like Medium and Zappos rolled back their manager-less structures. At Medium, they said the structure-less structure impacted the ability to scale and the time-consuming nature of it all. It also negatively affected recruiting. It all seemed cool, but risky. Zappos said it took the attention away from the customer, and customer service was what they were known for.

These aren’t the only organizations to have ever tried manager-less organizational designs. There’s a whole organization that catalogs them. In total, about 250 companies use a manager-less structure. But most of them have under 50 employees. And nearly all of them started as a manager-less company-they didn’t just wake up and decide their thousands of employees could suddenly manage themselves.

I should be clear: I’m rooting for those places and others to work. I’m in favor of any organization that helps people do their best work. I just personally believe it’s better to bet on talented people and great teams than on a seemingly perfect organizational design.

Managers have a great impact, good and bad

When you think about who your mentors are or people who have impacted you the most in life, outside of your family, I bet you’re thinking of a teacher that really inspired you early in your life, maybe your first basketball coach, or some other authority figure that took the time to understand you and teach you some valuable skills. In other words, you think of a manager.

In organizations, managers make up about 70% of the variance in team engagement. They have a tremendous impact on whether companies succeed or fail. 82% of American workers said they would potentially quit their job because of a bad manager. The impact and stakes are REAL.

Like it or not, the work we do in our lives defines a big chunk of who we are. And managers really hold the power in making our work fulfilling, or a mindless grind. Right now, things are bleak. The more work, less budget, brand new teams, the burn out. The ripple effects that come from the manager level go so far and so wide. But there is a way to help them.

Employees need more training and paths upward

People who are promoted to managers often are promoted because they are really good at their individual contributor skillset, and the only way to climb the corporate ladder is to get promoted and manage people. Hard truth here: not everyone is cut out to be a manager; not everyone even wants to be a manager.

Gallup found that only 48% of managers strongly agree that they currently have the skills needed to be exceptional at their job. And only three in 10 hybrid managers have received any formal training on leading hybrid teams.

Authors and McKinsey consultants Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Fieldhave an interesting thought about this in their newest book. Instead of promoting someone who is really good at their craft to a management role, there should be master tracks for technical areas. And putting your best technical person in a management role might drain them of that fire that made them so good in the first place.

Moving up in your company should not be tied exclusively to managing people. And if you promote people to those roles, you need a plan to train them. In fact, before promoting them it’s worth creating a trial project they can manage or put them in charge of interns for a summer. As Bill Schaninger said, “The first time someone does something shouldn’t be after they’ve already gotten the job.”

As a manager, it’s also part of your job (I know, another task, but it’s important) to develop members of your team. Maybe they’ll be managers one day, maybe they’ll even be your manager one day if you train them well enough. Your team is on a path in their career. Their jobs will fluctuate, people will move on, move up, change course, and so coaching them is crucial. Remember, the impact of a manager on someone’s life can be huge. There’s a lot of influence here.

Managers are not task managers, they are leaders.

Focus on the team, not the individual

Now, if you are a manager, it’s imperative that you resist the tendency to micromanage-the feeling of every little task being tracked is likely what created the motivation to fire managers in the first place. So, focus on the team as a whole, not the individual. Great leadership is about letting the team hold itself accountable.

You need to do your one-on-one meetings to check-in with your people and make sure there’s not any glaring individual performance issues. But great leaders are about teaching the team to hold itself accountable. Great leaders often come off more as facilitators who are there to guide and support the team as they divvy up tasks and co-create the best strategy.

Even when you’re doing your individual check-ins, I recommend a 10–10–10 format. If you have 30 minutes to check in with each person every other week, then spend only 10 minutes of that time focused on their actual performance as an individual. Spend the next 10 minutes focused on the team, how the team is supporting them, and how they are contributing to the team. Then spend the final 10 minutes on how you’re doing as their manager. Ask where you could improve and what support they need from you.

No one wants a 30-minute discussion around their performance flaws, but most people respond positively when the bulk of the time is spent focused on how their team and their boss can help them.

Final Thoughts

So, do we really need managers? Yes, but in a capacity that reflects the evolving needs of modern workplaces. As we look ahead, let’s champion a new breed of leaders-managers who not only oversee projects but also empower people, shape culture, and turn challenges into opportunities for growth.

Image credit: Pexels, Pew Research

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on April 16, 2024.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Strategizing Market Power

1 Reply

Target Market Initiatives

Strategizing Market Power - Target Market Initiatives

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Market power derives from addressing an urgent mission-critical use case in a particular vertical industry requiring a specialized solution that the incumbent vendors either cannot or will not provide. Power aggregates around a single vendor who is the first to provide an end-to-end solution (what Ted Levitt taught us to call the whole product), typically with the support of partners whom the vendor has recruited to the task. Once success has been verified, prospective customers rally around the new solution, making it the de facto standard for that market segment, effectively excluding all other competition. This dramatically lowers the cost of acquisition and maximizes the lifetime value of the addressable market.

The mechanism for obtaining market power is called a target market initiative. It begins with the selection of a target market segment. Here the criteria for selection are three:

Big enough to matter. The goal is to win well over 50% of the total segment within a three-year horizon, with the resulting revenue providing a material portion of the organization’s total revenue, and an even more meaningful portion of its profit contribution.
Small enough to lead. Again, if your organization is going to win over 50% of the segment within a three-year period, the segment must be small enough to make this feasible given your current size and funding.
Good fit with your crown jewels. To address an intractable problem requires breakthrough capability that others do not have, or what we like to call your “crown jewels.” These accelerate your path to success and provide a barrier to entry to protect your market segment leadership position once it is attained.

The playbook for running a target market initiative is described at length in Crossing the Chasm. It is organized around the following set of factors:

Target Customer. The bullseye target is the business process owner for the broken mission-critical process. They will provide the subject matter expertise. A secondary target is their executive sponsor. They will create budget to fund the effort.
Compelling Reason to Buy. The use case has to be both mission-critical and urgent, in order to overcome a pragmatist’s normal inertial resistance to embracing anything categorically new. Here pain, not gain, is the source of the trapped value that moves the customer to lean in and collaborate, and all your sales and marketing should be focused on the relevant pain points and their remedies.
Whole Product. This is the bill of materials for the complete solution, everything the customer needs to take the problem off the table, with nothing extra added. It is designed backward from the customer’s problem, not forward from your supply chain or your financial goals and objectives.
Partners and Allies. Whatever is on the whole product’s bill of materials that is not provided by your company must come from a partner. One of the functions of a target market initiative is to orchestrate the coming together of such partners to ensure timely delivery of the whole product. The focus is on completing the solution, not adding sales coverage.
Distribution. Target market initiatives require a direct sales channel to execute a consultative sales process, organized around a diagnostic/prescriptive approach, supported by marketing that speaks directly to the business process owner and their executive sponsor. This must not be outsourced, as it is through these direct interactions that you establish your company as the market segment leader.
Pricing. Pricing is value-based, calibrated by the consequences of the current as-yet-to-be-fixed broken mission-critical business process. Discounting is never appropriate as the customer is far more concerned about addressing their urgent needs than saving on the purchase price.
Competition. There are two classes of competitors in play. The first is the incumbent vendor who is not solving the problem satisfactorily at present but who could throw people at it in an attempt to get to “good enough.” The other is a vendor with breakthrough capabilities similar to yours who has not made the commitment to deliver the whole product but who has a partner that might try to do so.
Positioning. You are the breakthrough vendor who has made the whole product commitment, meaning you have demonstrated a deep understanding of the customer’s industry and its problem process, and you have developed a repeatable solution that will get better as each new instantiation leads to more useful features and a more engaged ecosystem of partners.
Next Target Customer. For start-ups, this will normally be an adjacent segment, either a new use case from the same customer base or the same use case from a different segment. For established enterprises whose size dictates that target market segments can never be material to total revenues, winning a target market segment creates a hook for M&A as well as makes you a lot more knowledgeable about which companies are worth acquiring.

Target market initiatives are the most reliable play in the B2B innovation playbook, as witnessed by the staying power of Crossing the Chasm, currently in its fourth decade of being in print, pushing two million copies in total sales worldwide. In closing, then, let me leave you with eight great reasons for building one into your next annual plan:

Gain market adoption for a disruptive technology. This is the classic chasm-crossing play.
Penetrate a new geography. Establish your reputation as a worthy vendor.
Get out from behind the market leader. Gorillas can never defend themselves against highly focused chimps. All they can do is try to isolate you from making any further progress.
Anchor a turnaround. When your enterprise has been on a losing streak, it is critical to “win one for the Gipper.” Target market initiatives are your best bet.
Solve for the “stuck in neutral” problem. When the macro economy is in the doldrums, and customers are slow to buy anything, a truly problematic use case overcomes their hesitancy.
Capitalize on a great niche opportunity. There are use cases where the size of the market is small, but the trapped value is enormous, and you can build a major franchise without ever leaving the segment, as has happened in CAD, Wall Street, health care, and aerospace.
Exploit the “granularity of growth.” In mature markets where average growth rates are in the low single digits, there are always pockets of double-digit growth around problematic use cases. You just need to target them directly.
Capitalize on a market in transition. As markets are working through long-lead transitions, short-term progress can be made locally rather than globally. The evolution of the hybrid workplace would be a current example.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Your Work Isn’t Transformative

Leave a reply

Your Work Isn't Transformative

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Continuous improvement is not transformation. With continuous improvement, products, processes and services are improved three percent year-on-year. With transformation, products are a mechanism to generate data, processes are eliminated altogether and services move from fixing what’s broken to proactive updates that deliver the surprising customer value.

A strategic initiative is not transformation. A strategic initiative improves a function or process that is – a move to consultative selling or a better new product development process. Transformation dismantles. The selling process is displaced by automatic with month-to-month renewals. And while product development is still a thing, it’s relegated to a process that creates the platform for the real money-maker – the novel customer value made possible by the data generated by the product.

Cultural change is not transformation.Cultural change uses the gaps in survey data to tweak a successful formula and adjust messaging. Transformation creates new organizations that violate existing company culture.

If there the corporate structure is unchanged, there can be no transformation.

If the power brokers are unchanged, there can be no transformation.

If the company culture isn’t violated, there can be no transformation.

If it’s not digital, there can be no transformation.

In short, if the same rules apply, there can be no transformation.

Transformation doesn’t generate discomfort, it generates disarray.

Transformation doesn’t tweak the successful, it creates the unrecognizable.

Transformation doesn’t change the what, it creates a new how.

Transformation doesn’t make better caterpillars, it creates butterflies.

Image credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

People Will Be Competent and Hardworking – If We Let Them

Leave a reply

People Will Be Competent and Hardworking - If We Let Them

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Go to just about any business conference these days and you’re likely to see some pundit on stage telling a story about a company — often Blockbuster, Kodak or Xerox — that got blindsided by nascent trends. Apparently, the leaders who rose to the top of the corporate ladder were so foolish they just weren’t paying attention.

These stories are good for a laugh, but they usually aren’t true. People who lead successful companies are, for the most part, competent, hardworking and ambitious. That’s how they got their jobs in the first place. There are, of course, exceptions. People who have a talent for self-promotion can get to the top too.

Still it’s much better to assume competence. That’s how we learn. The truth is that we all get disrupted sooner or later. It doesn’t only happen to silly people. Every square-peg business eventually meets its round-hole world. Smart, competent people fail all the time and, if we want to have a chance at avoiding their fate, we need to understand how that happens.

Mismanagement Myths

During Apple’s rise, Microsoft was considered to be big, slow and incompetent. Its CEO, Steve Ballmer, had foolishly dismissed the iPhone and the company never seemed to gain traction in the mobile world. It launched weak products, such as the Zune music player and the Windows phone. Its failed acquisition of Nokia just seemed to add insult to injury.

Yet still even accounting for Ballmer’s mobile missteps, Microsoft’s business continued to perform well, growing its revenues at double digit rates and maintaining high margins. How can that be? Most of Microsoft’s revenues don’t come from the consumer categories that business journalists tend to cover, but in selling B2B products and services to CIOs. While everyone was focused on gadgets, it was building a monster business in the cloud.

When you look more closely, the clever pundits often miss the real story. Blockbuster didn’t ignore Netflix, but executed a viable strategy and still failed. Kodak didn’t ignore the market for digital cameras, in fact its EasyShare line were top sellers. Unfortunately, selling digital cameras couldn’t replace the profits from developing film. Yes, Xerox PARC failed to successfully market the PC, but its invention of the laser printer saved the company.

The reason why pundits tell the caricatures rather than the real stories is that imagining CEOs to be fools makes us feel better about ourselves. After all, if only foolish people get disrupted, then we—assuming we are not fools—should be okay. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. Being smart and working hard won’t save you.

Why Do Smart, Competent People Fail?

There are many reasons why smart, competent people fail. A very common one is a category error. For example, Steve Ballmer didn’t think anyone would pay $500 for a phone, but the iPhone wasn’t just a phone, it was an entirely new business model and ecosystem. People would not only pay for it differently (through their mobile plan), they would also use it very differently than earlier phones.

That opens up a very different set of issues. How do we know if we’re making a category error? We put things into categories for a reason, to understand their relations to other things. For example, a plate is something that goes on a table. But sometimes, such as the case with a commemorative plate, they go on a wall. So when does a plate become commemorative?

Other famous failures ran into similarly thorny issues. The CEO at Blockbuster, John Antioco, developed a viable strategy and executed well, but failed to gain alignment among important stakeholders. Kodak marketed digital cameras, but they weren’t nearly profitable enough to replace developing film. Xerox PARC was designed to build the “office of the future,” not to market consumer products like the Macintosh.

What at first might seem like CEOs asleep at the wheel actually exposes some very thorny issues. How much alignment do we need before pushing an important strategy forward? What do you do when your cash cow dies? When you shoot for the moon, how should you hedge your bets?

These are tough problems with no obvious solutions. But notice that when we assume that the leaders were competent, it forces us to think about them much more seriously and, hopefully, learn something useful.

Seeing Competence All Around Us

I was recently talking to my friend Bob Burg, co-author of the Go-Giver series, and something he said reminded me of a short Borges essay I’ve long admired, called Borges and I, in which the acclaimed author writes about the challenges of balancing a public persona with a private one. I brought it up during our conversation and promised to send it to him.

The whole essay is just two short paragraphs of Borges comparing himself, who drinks coffee and walks the streets of Buenos Aires, to the famous author who will live on in posterity. “Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” he wrote.

Unfortunately, in sending Bob the essay, I screwed up. Because it was so short, I didn’t send a link but copy-pasted the text into the body of the email and, carelessly, didn’t include the title or the author’s name, which made the whole thing impossible to understand. Most people would have just written it off as something stupid. Bob did something different.

Instead of imagining me a fool, he humbly wrote me back, apologized for his inability to understand the essay and asked if I could explain it to him, which gave me the opportunity to correct my mistake. In doing so he did both of us a service. He got the small benefit of reading an interesting essay and I got the enormous gift of being able to redeem myself.

When we assume those around us are competent—not stupid or lazy—we do far more than give them the opportunity to be their best selves. People who feel validated actually tend to perform better too.

We Are Always Wrong

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes in our own story. Unlike others, we are witnesses to our internal process and get to observe our logic develop. So our thoughts makes perfect sense to us and it can be incredibly frustrating when others don’t see it as we do. Our inclination is to imagine them to be fools, simply incapable of grasping basic concepts.

That’s why pundits tend to tell such facile stories. Blockbuster wasn’t paying attention to Netflix. Kodak ignored digital photography. Xerox PARC invented breakthrough products, but neglected to market them. None of these stories are accurate, but it’s far easier to portray a failure as a silly blunder, than admit to ourselves how easily it could happen to us.

The hard truth is that we’re always wrong. Sometimes we’re off by a little and sometimes we’re off by a lot, but we’re always wrong. We succeed not by coming up with the “right” idea from the start, but by taking a Bayesian approach and becoming less wrong over time.

The best way to do that is to assume other people are smart, competent and hardworking. Lazy fools will make themselves obvious soon enough. But by seeking out intelligence and virtue, we are not only much more likely to find it, but also to identify and correct deficiencies in ourselves and our thinking.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.