Managers often get blamed for employee dissatisfaction, but instead of running to fix them, perhaps the approach should be understanding how bad managers are made. Below is one secret recipe passed along for countless generations.
You’ve probably heard the expression, “people don’t quit their companies, they quit their managers” (or something similar). Whether you agree with this statement, or not, managers are often perceived as the root cause to most employee ills. From micro-managing, gatekeeping, talent hoarding, talent burnout, they are the first stop on the blame train.
Instead of trying to fix bad managers, let’s try to intentionally make them using some old, expired ingredients that have been sitting on the shelf too long.
Here’s my recipe:
- 1 jar of pungent Culture (full of inert additives)
- 3 cups of Behaviors
- 4 bags of Business Process (crushed or minced)
- ½ cup of Training
Add a dash of Bitterness, a hint of Resentment and soupçon of Hubris, and BAM! You’ve got yourself some pretty bad managers. To ensure quality and potency though, let’s check how we’re sourcing our key ingredients.
Culture – can’t make a bad manager without it. Using a jar-full will ensure its stickiness. It will also overpower your other ingredients, creating a strong, lasting taste. To create the right mixture, companies should:
- Ensure people fear failure or taking risks
- Incentivize a highly competitive, self-centered environment
- Focus on goal achievement, not how the goal is achieved
- Exercise blind reliance and submission to hierarchical structures
- Emphasize that hierarchical authority is the same as expertise
- Advertise leadership as an exclusive club with benefits
- Continuously blame managers for poor employee engagement
- Keep decision-making upwards and pass responsibility downwards
- Treat all employees like children instead of adults
- Assume the worst intentions from your employees
- Consider only what can go wrong versus what could go right
Behaviors – Culture greatly enhances the flavor of manager Behaviors. As managers, they should:
- Keep talent for themselves
- Take credit for the idea of others or the team’s success
- Have high distrust of their direct reports’ abilities to perform work unsupervised
- Always act in interest of self-preservation
- Spend time embellishing and self-promoting their leadership qualities
- Assume a sinister intent or negative outcome with fresh ideas
- Keep employees busy so to allow little time for personal development
- Be willing to “bend” the rules to meet goals
- Prevent direct reports from sharing ideas directly with leadership
- Preview and review all work that will be shared outside the team
Business Process – nothing like a crushing or minced Business Process to bring out the flavor of frustration. Be sure to use copious amounts.
- Promote most technically proficient people regardless of interest in people
- Ensure the management role is the only career path to increase pay
- Create complicated and unnecessary processes to remove chronic underperformers
- Design Performance Management systems with little or no transparency
- Reward those self-interestedly seeking to court favor with leaders
- Overburden managers with unreasonable expectations and little authority
- Provide little or vague expectations for what managers should be doing
- Limit or prohibit feedback mechanisms from employees
- Avoid direct communication or advance notice of decisions impacting employees
- Keep organizational structures reliant on siloes
- Make organizational changes with little notice or awareness
- Insist managers “own the rating” when leaders change ratings during calibration
- Implement policies or cumbersome processes as the immediate response to isolated incidents
Training – that special ingredient that the more you add, the better you think it will taste. It’s the paprika of corporate explanations when something doesn’t work, like putting a bird on it. Almost always used sparingly or way too much.
- Do not provide time for personal development
- Eliminate training budgets first when cost-cutting
- Limit or do not provide adequate manager training, resources or support OR
- Emphasize training, but on their own time or cost OR
- Constantly rotate managers to “gain experience” with little regard to their direct reports
- Rotate them into different areas without any training so they appear unqualified to lead
- Create insecurities by providing little or no constructive feedback on their performance
- Keep managers siloed or disconnected from each other to avoid sharing lessons learned
- Force “required” training that has no applicability to their job or career
- Promote internal mobility but do not provide tools to assess or improve skills
- Assume all managers learn exactly the same way and already have the same base skills
- Neglect to show how the work being produced is connected to company goals
Congratulations – you are well on your way to removing the shroud from your monstrosity and belting out, “It’s ALIVE!!”
You are probably wondering why I took this approach when writing this. In a twisty way of thinking, sometimes we can learn a lot from intentionally creating the thing we don’t want and reverse-engineer solutions for it. For starters, one way to re-think the manager problem is to start seeing them as employees first, then as managers.
As for the recipe, it’s possible your company has some of these ingredients in-house already. That’s ok, you don’t have to use them. Just throw them out and get some fresh ones – believe me, it will make all the difference. BAM!
Twistymind 
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