Here’s an excerpt from my new ebook The Type B Manager: Leading Successfully in a Type A World, published through Prentice Hall Press. This section, excerpted from the bankruptcy “People Leave Managers, Not Companies,” examines the basic importance and demanding situations of the managerial role.
People say a lot about managers:
It’s too demanding. It’s too intense.
It’s a wonderful motivator. Her team likes to run for her.
You can do it with it. It makes things happen.
He’s a leader. She is a true strategic thinker.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing. She has no idea.
But there’s one thing I’m willing to bet you never hear. You never hear that control is a simple job.
After retiring from leadership in 2012, I sought to take a step back and take an attitude about what I had done over the past quarter century. When I began to devote time to conducting studies on leadership and artists in other organizations, I sought to gain a broader concept of the common problems managers face and how they are dealt with, compared to my own experiences, one inescapable fact stood out to me: a giant number of painters are disconnected. By “uncomplicated” I mean that they are not emotionally engaged in the organizations they paint for, and therefore, in all likelihood, they are not highly motivated or fully productive.
There are sophisticated differences in how other studies describe “employee engagement,” but the commonalities between other studies are much more than the differences. No matter how you analyze knowledge, in general, between 60% and 70% of painters simply don’t paint (let’s face it) no matter how difficult they are. Let’s take a few examples. Gallup data shows that 30% of painters are “engaged. “Data from Towers Watson shows that 35% are “highly engaged. “Data from Dale Carnegie shows that 29% are “fully engaged. “And those aren’t small studies; the Gallup poll includes more than 350,000 respondents and the Towers Watson poll includes more than 32,000. Gallup then estimated the annual cost of lost productivity in the United States at more than $450 billion. This is a staggering figure. Although it is imprecise, it gives an idea of the magnitude of the problem.
What key points contribute to this epidemic of disconnection?To return to the title of this chapter: “People leave managers, not companies. “In short, the central relationship between the director and the painter plays a very important role. Beyond that, other points also contribute. These come with acceptance as certain in senior leaders, pride in one’s own company, and chronic uncertainty resulting from a steady stream of reorganizations, layoffs, and pressures “to do more with less. “But regardless of the exact constellation of dots, which vary according to the character and circumstances of an organization, there is no doubt that a chronic point of disconnection from the painter represents either a failure of control or a basic challenge to the painter: a challenge to do what is obligatory for a giant number of other people. Stay interested in your paintings, feel smart about your organization and paintings in the most productive way possible.
What does this high-level knowledge mean for you as a manager?This means, first and foremost, that if you find it difficult to practice control, you are not alone. It’s a challenge and has a lot of company. 70% of workers are not working at their full capacity, a very large number of those in control face motivation issues. It also means that there is a huge opportunity – an opportunity to have more interaction with workers and improve the productivity of your branch and organization. To use undeniable numbers, if you manage 10 workers and six of them don’t interact to some degree, and you can achieve an average of two to better interact and motivate them, you’ll immediately make very significant productivity gains.
Of course, the challenge is getting those two employees to succeed, perceiving why they feel the way they do, and how they think. We will analyze those demanding situations and provide them with new equipment to deal with the old control task in the next few pages.
“This is something you’ll probably never be taught in business school,” Gallup CEO Jim Clifton wrote in the summary accompanying his organization’s 2013 “State of the American Workplace” study on employee engagement. “The maximum life resolution you make in your job is more important than anyone else is who you will appoint as a manager. When you appoint the wrong manager, nothing can fix that bad resolution. No compensation, no benefits, nothing.
* * *