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I am a massive fan of both giving and getting great feedback. And yet I know that many managers avoid giving feedback – or even worse give it in ways that are so subtle as to be pointless.
What Every Manager Should Know About Feedback is a superb article that reflects much of what I teach on my Giving and Getting Great Feedback workshop.
I recommend both the article and workshop highly.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has spent much of his life researching ‘flow’ – that state of being when you become fully immersed in a task and time flies by. This flow state can only occur when the level of challenge is carefully matched to your level of skills and confidence. Flow is most likely to occur when you are faced by a demanding but achieveable task. Flow matters for managers because it a state that is associated with optimal performance. It is also closely associated with learning and self improvement.
It strikes me that delegation used in conjunction with feedback (another pre-requisite for the flow state) and coaching provides managers with the perfect tools to ensure that team members get a balance of skill and challenge that will enable them to enter the optimum state of flow at work.
Employees who are operating outside of the flow channel – either bored or overly anxious are likely to be performing well below their potential.
The thing about the flow channel is that you cannot remain stationery. Unless you are confronted with new challenges it is likely that boredom will become an issue and performance will dip.
This piece of research caught my attention recently;
“While 84 percent of organizations know that workforce effectiveness is important to achieving business results, only 42 percent of those surveyed say managers devote sufficient time to people management.”
What stops managers from spending time on developing workforce effectiveness?
Why do so many managers ‘duck’ managing people.
For me the managers job is not about ‘managing people’. It is about providing them with a relationship to the organisation that allows them to develop their potential and to do great work.
In my experience managers that work systematically on building this relationship and then use:
to develop each persons contribution to performance very soon become outstanding managers recognised as leading high performing teams.
However it does take time – perhaps 60-90 minutes per week for each person managed to do the most effective job. But the returns on that investment can be enormous – I would estimate productivity gains per person to be in the region of 25-40% within 6 months.
Whenever you see an organisation doing something consistently well, you can be sure that there is an effective social system behind it. The social system is made up of both a hard and a soft landscape. The hard landscape is that of meetings, information flows and decision making processes. The soft landscape is to do with behaviours, attitudes, values, respect and commitment.
Effective managers recognise their role in developing both the hard and soft landscapes of the social system – but recognise that it is the soft landscape – the way people and teams work together that really drives culture and performance.
When trying to initiate change, less effective managers work on the hard landscape. They change the organisational structure, replace key people or alter what is measured and rewarded. While such changes maybe necessary, they are NEVER sufficient.
It is the interactions between people that need to be changed, the information flows and the decision making processes. If people are not having the right discussions or behaving in ways that drive values and performance then the managers’ job is to influence them to adopt different ‘value creating’ behaviours.
In most cases this can be done using feedback. In other cases it may require more concerted efforts at coaching for the desired behaviours.
Recognising and shaping the behaviours that drive values and performance is the hallmark of an outstanding manager.
The social system changes and enables the organisation to perform consistently well because managers use mechanisms that ensure that the right conversations happen consistently and frequently. These conversations improve the quality of decision making and encourage behaviours in people’s every day work to accomplish the elusive goal of culture change.
This is the title of a provocative post over at Management Issues.
Rather than adding value to their organisations, two thirds of British managers actually create negative working climates that leave employees feeling resentful and frustrated.
Research by Hay Consultancy has shown that a fifth of UK workers are frustrated in their jobs, with rigid bureaucracy and poor management structures and systems hampering innovation and productivity.
Half of workers believed they did not have the authority to make decisions crucial to their jobs, with the same proportion complaining of being discouraged from participating in decisions that directly affected their work.
Managers were failing to design jobs in such a way as to capitalise on the talents of their workers, Hay also argued.
More than a third of the workers polled believed their job did not make best use of their skills and abilities.
The study of more than 3,100 leaders across 12 industries found that close to half of the managers were creating demotivating climates for employees, while a further 15 per cent generated only a neutral environment.
Good managers who really add value (in the eyes of their employers and their team members) are few and far between. Just a quarter of managers were able to create a high-performance climate, according to employees, and only an additional fifth managed to generate a ‘moderately energising’ working atmosphere.
But while the findings do not surprise me the headline (Get rid of managers and we’ll all be happier) does.
Getting rid of managers is not the answer. Managing their failure to perform is. In my experience if we manage managers well – tackle management under performance – and make sure that they manage effectively using feedback, coaching and delegation it is possible to quickly build a management culture that promotes high performance.