Month: December 2006

Years ago I appointed a manager who was a complete disaster, but I didn’t get a clue of this during the appointment process. The problem only appeared when he started work and it turned out that he did not have a clue how to communicate or even get on with the people who worked for him. In contrast to this he was very good at dealing with his peers and me as his manager, which made it very difficult for me to understand just what his team were complaining about.

I’ve seen this again a few times since then and now I can characterise the symptoms. There are some people who think that the team they are part of only includes those who are their equal in the hierarchy and their manager. They simply don’t see themselves as part of a team with the people who work for them.

This affects all of their relationships with their team. Specifically:

• They don’t share their ideas, concerns, hopes etc
• They don’t really listen to their staff. In particular they don’t really appreciate the ideas that their staff have
• They don’t acknowledge that their staff have a role to play in the difficult work the manager is responsible for, such as contributing to strategy or politics.
• They only occasionally talk to their staff in terms of the wider picture (if at all). Normally they deal with individuals about individual details.

This is so demoralising for the team involved, since, more than anything, this is disrespectful. It also fragments the team, stops them seeing the bigger picture and thereby reduces their effectiveness. It even ends up significantly undermining the manager concerned since they are refusing all the support they could otherwise get from a loyal team.

Quite often someone gets appointed to be a manager for the first time because they are such a diligent worker.  They have their own routine and way of getting things done and all of a sudden they have the resources of other people to help them.  The natural temptation for these new managers is to use these people as though they were extensions of themselves.

That means expecting the team to do the things they want done and work the way they work.  If the team is sufficiently compliant then this is generally a successful strategy.  Quite often the team are not that compliant but after a great deal of brow beating they appear to be.  Occasionally some people make a stand to retain their individuality and it all turns nasty.

If that isn’t bad enough then it gets much worse as the manager rises up the chain of command and the person they are responsible for in turn become more senior.  The more senior the team, the more they expect to think for themselves and the more they can resist the push to homogenisation.  The result of this is a painful process to go through as they learn how to manage their team in a different way.

Unfortunately that is the path I followed and it took me some time to learn this the hard way.  My advice would be for new managers, or experienced managers who are now experiencing the pain to learn a different way now.

This better way is to recognise the team as a collection of individuals, each of whom works in a different way and each of whom needs to be treated as an individual.  Getting the best from people is no longer a matter of dominance, but one of discussion, negotiation, understanding and all the other best practices I talk about here.

The strength of a team that works as a team of individuals is far more than the team that works under a single authoritarian control.  It is hard work at first to curb the urge to be a control freak, but the rewards easily outweigh it.

If there is one skill that is a critical requirement for being a senior manager then it is the ability to read people and and understand what they want, what they don’t want and what they feel about the things that are going on around them.  This is very similar to empathy, but in a conscious way.

So much of what we say is unsaid, if you see what I mean.  There are lots of reasons for this: some people (more than I can ever quite believe) are very cautious about what they say; sometimes the stakes are high and people don’t want to give things away; and some people are just not very good at saying what they want.

Now I’m not saying that the ability to read people is needed to gain a competitive edge, as though it were some form of mind reading.  Though that is definitely a skill that all good salespeople have.  What I mean is that many of us are only looking at the world with one eye open, if that, so having both eyes open allows you to spot the other people that have both eyes open – and they generally turn out to be the most senior people in the room.

Don’t make the mistake of equating good awareness with good communication skills.  Many people can be great at empathy but rubbish communicators.  The two are not related.

Reading people does not come naturally to many, it has to be learnt as a skill.  I only know one way of learning this skill:

When I’m in a meeting I try to take a step back and examine the other people.  I try to read their expressions and their body language; work out if they are comfortable with what is being said or uncomfortable; try to work out what they want; are they straining to say something; are they bored; and so on.  This means getting inside their heads and learning to think like them, understanding what drives them and therefore what their motives are in specific circumstances.  Over time this becomes second nature.

Just remember I’m not talking about any kind of intuitive feelings.  This is detached observation.  When I forget this and try to rely on intuition alone (if there is such a thing) then I generally mess up.