There was a time when I believed the sheer force of will of a manager would be enough to motivate and drive people … through experience I have learned using sheer forces of will is not a sign of a good manager, much less an effective leader; but rather are traits of a would-be tyrant, whose affect will actually drive their people away rather than lead them to success.
Effective leaders are those who appreciate the subtleties of those customers, staff, family, and others they interact with. Success becomes the sum of constant, daily conversations, appreciation, and collaborative alignment of goals.
Are you as successful as you wish to be? Are you an entrepreneur, a manager, a supervisor, or a prospective leader? Are you frustrated; are your people, your customers or your clients not responding how you want them to? Ask yourself, “Would you work for you?” and do so in the context of the following quiz.
See how you do.
Scheduling
Do you try to balance the needs of your organization and the needs of your people when preparing your schedules?
Do you try to have the schedule done at least two, preferably three months, in advance so your people can coordinate their spouse/partner’s schedule with their own? This is particularly important for partners who work weekdays, weekends, and evenings and who may go extended periods with little or no time off with their significant other.
Does your organization have a sick day policy for your people that allows them to be paid should they not be able to come to work? How do you handle inclement weather days? Do you pay your people or are they not paid? Taking this one step further, how understanding is your organization in dealing with additional time off for parents with sick children, parents with daycare issues, people with elderly parents, and times when other medical appointments occur during scheduled hours?
I once worked for an organization that had an employee with almost twenty-seven years of experience who only received two weeks of vacation annually. What is your organization’s policy on vacations? Does your policy reward longevity or punish people for being loyal? I have also seen organizations that authorize vacation requests based on seniority, actually canceling holidays of newer people when there is a conflict, how motivating do you think that is?
Do you allow your people any input on when they get their days off or do you simply schedule them without any consideration of what might be the best day(s) for them?
Salary and bonuses
Does your organization have annual cost of living increases for your people? If not, would you want to earn less money every year because of the effects of inflation? What kind of loyalty, motivation, and incentives do you provide for your people?
Do you have a clearly defined bonus structure? Is it achievable and something the person can influence? Have you promised a bonus program and never actually implemented one; this is a common occurrence in many organizations I have seen.
Is your pay structure transparent? Do your people have incentives to become better at their jobs, develop their skills, and encourage them to want to remain with your organization?
Do you expect your salaried people to work longer than your hourly paid people? Managers, supervisors, and leaders will typically work longer hours than regular staff given the nature of their responsibilities; however, do you ever recognize and show your appreciation, even if it is just a “thank you”?
Organizational Performance
Do you measure performance objectively to truly reflect your organization’s goals and objectives? Alternatively, do you operate with blinders because you rely too heavily on external standards from other organizations when evaluating the performance of your own people? Do you prefer to solve issues with external resources rather than by consulting with your own people, regardless of their experience and skills? Do you regularly use assumptions about performance to make decisions rather than checking the data and facts you have available to you?
Standards and Discipline
Do you have a written, communicated, comprehensive, and evolving policy for your people? How are deviations handled? Do you handle issues in person or via email? Do you indirectly foster gossip and innuendo by skirting and avoiding issues rather than dealing directly with the problems when they occur? Are you afraid of offending certain team members and avoid dealing with their behavior? Do you have favorites for whom some or all of the organizational rules do not apply?
Do you deal with people’s issues with perspective, thought, consistency, and fairness or are you wildly inconsistent depending on the people involved?
Approach to your people
Are you autocratic? Even if autocratic, are you approachable? Do you deal with your people as if they are merely interchangeable “cogs in your machine” or do you appreciate your highly trained people who you feel make valuable contributions to your organization’s success? Worse, are you sometimes approachable and other times not, do you shut down offers and opinions with a flat “no”? Are you extremely rigid and do you have to be involved in every decision that occurs in your organization?
Do you have favorites? Do you find yourself confiding and complaining to “these trusted few” about other staff without ever speaking to the people being discussed?
Are you collaborative in your leadership approach or do you do what you previously planned anyway?
Do you know anything more than just superficial information about your people, such as things they have done, things they are proud of, and things they hope to accomplish?
Do you attempt to speak to all of your people every day?
When was the last time you told one of your people, they were doing a good job?
Do you find yourself frequently looking for things your people have done wrong and cannot remember the last time you went looking for things they did right?
Do you find yourself canceling or avoiding having staff meetings because each time you ask for opinions and ideas, you are frustrated because your people’s ideas and concepts don’t align with yours?
Do your people trust you enough to tell you what they are thinking about your ideas, systems, and processes? Do you care?
Do you find yourself frequently micromanaging and undermining your key people? Do you often arbitrarily change schedules, processes, and priorities without consulting those same key people?
Is it important to you to build your people’s skills and abilities by listening to them and incrementally helping them to be better? Is this a core objective of your organization?
Is your people retention rate decreasing? Are you aware of any people in your organization who are looking for better jobs or careers?
How does your organization encourage risk, innovation, and making good decisions? How does your organization reward failure, subsequent “lessons learned,” and regrouping after setbacks?
Priorities
Do you set priorities or do you have a hundred things you are doing at the same time? Do you regularly override priorities and tasks you have only just assigned to your people and bypass your internal organizational structure?
Although you demand results, do you deliver on what you said you would do for your people?
Do your organization’s short-medium-and long-term goals align within a well-defined arc?
When planning a project or establishing a goal, do you ever define what success should look like, and then review afterward to see if the goal was accomplished?
Are you constantly looking for grandiose “big picture” solutions and ideas while ignoring internally suggested, clearly apparent, and “small or large picture” solutions from your people?
Communication
Do you rely on emails, texts, and memos even though they are not effective communication tools? Are your meetings primarily focused on your direction, and your ideas, and are seldom interactive? Are you aware of how tone affects motivation and performance?
Training
Do you have good recruiting processes based on clear and defined organizational needs? Do you have good or great and evolving onboarding systems? How are your ongoing training and development plans working? Does your training align with your organization’s short-, medium- and long-term objectives?
How did you do?
Most organizations and many managers do not initially score very well when asked these questions.
The “lesson learned” however, is to put yourself in the shoes of your people.
I have found the owners, managers, leaders, and supervisors of many struggling organizations to be intelligent people; they have been successful previously; but are struggling now because they cannot or will not see it is them who are standing in the way of their organization’s success. By considering the questions I have posed today, which are based on common situations and complaints from people in real organizations, they may be able to stem their frustrations.
These managers are losing their best people and their remaining staff are unhappy and sometimes more frustrated even than their supervisors. As a result, these organizations are having to constantly hire and train, all the while everyone is becoming more and more frustrated at their inability to drive success.
I hope as an entrepreneur, manager, supervisor, or someone who aspires to take on any of those roles, ask yourself “Would you work for you,” if the answer is no, then help yourself immediately by starting to change the answers to the questions in this post. Fortunately, virtually every one of the negative answers is within your and your organization’s ability to rectify, some simply by recognizing and appreciating your people’s perspectives and the negative effects of your decisions, policies, and procedures on them and their lives. Other solutions may take more effort and time; however, all of them are worth doing.
Good luck
Paul