CHAPTER OUTLINE
Employees Are Smart and Demanding
We Have Ambivalent Feelings about Leadership and Followership
We Really Don't Like Being Told What to Do Managers Behave Badly
Lion tamer, U.S. president, inner-city high school teacher, air traffic controller. To this list of the most stressful jobs, add one more: manager. The headline on a tech industry blog suggests, "First, Kill All the Managers."[38] Another blog, entitled "I Don't Want to Be a Manager," says, "Middle management has become a euphemism for meddling, ineffectual supervision and frustrating career coma."[39] It's surprising that more people don't hide under their desks when the boss comes around to tell them they've been promoted.
In fact, it appears that many people do hide when faced with the prospect of a promotion into management. A 2009 study by Randstad, the global temporary staffing company, found that more than half of employees say they don't want to move into management roles.[40] A consultant reports that, in one of his client organizations, more than one-third of engineers promoted to management jobs went back to their old roles in less than six months. Why? "Because [software] code does what you tell it to do the first time and you don't have to ask how the kids are."[41]
What makes being a manager so unattractive? On one level, the answer is obvious—just look around today's workplace. As downsizing lengthens everyone's to-do list, expanding workloads add new burdens to the manager's job. With many organizations expecting managers to act as player-coaches, both performing and overseeing work, their roles often become complex and unwieldy. Organizational flattening and widening of managers' spans of control stretch their ability to spend time coaching, or even to become acquainted with, any individual employee. It's hardly surprising that respondents to the Randstad study cited increased stress as the number-one reason for avoiding management responsibility. They also said they hated the idea of handling disgruntled employees (like themselves, perhaps), dealing with loads of administrative paperwork, and having to terminate people, many of whom were peers not long before.[42] Given the disinclination of people to take on manager jobs, Randstad predicts what it calls a "looming manager shortage."[43] They recommend that, to deal with the shortfall of managers, organizations need to reconsider how they define managerial roles. We would agree—and we have tried to do so in Chapters Five through Nine.
When you consider the full array of leadership and management responsibilities that fall to people with supervisor and manager titles, one thing becomes clear—managers have difficult jobs. Workload pressure from downsizing, unworkable ranges of responsibility, and wide spans of control all burden managers' jobs, increase their stress levels, and reduce their effectiveness. Little wonder employees are skeptical about the competence of the people to whom they report.
Familiar as these factors are, however, they don't fully explain why managers so often find their jobs frustrating and unfulfilling. To understand that story, we must look beneath the superficial effects of workday realities. We must go to a deeper stratum of mental and emotional elements that affect how people experience their work and their relationships with peers and managers. Thanks to our psychological infrastructure, we workplace inhabitants have many attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics that can make life miserable for managers.
What about the workforce itself—how has it evolved, and what does that evolution mean for the challenges managers face? A few data points describe salient traits of the current workforce:
More human capital to invest. About 30 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force now has at least a bachelor's degree, compared with about one-quarter in 1998. Between 1992 and 2010, employment grew by about 21 percent, while the proportion of participants with degrees grew by 63 percent.[44]
Confident in their ability to direct their own work. In Towers Watson's 2010 global workforce study, 78 percent of the respondents said they feel comfortable managing their work on their own, with little direct oversight from managers.[45]
Willing to stay put, if it pays off. Average tenure with their current employers stayed relatively stable from 1996 (at 5.0 years) to 2008 (5.1 years) for all workers 25 years and older.[46] That stability stretches back to 1983, when the average tenure for this worker group was also 5.0 years. More than 80 percent of respondents to our 2010 global workforce study said they either had no plans to leave their current employers or were not actively looking to move but would consider another offer if presented. About two-thirds defined their preferred career model as working for no more than three organizations over the course of their professional lives.[47]
Willing to move if staying put doesn't pay off. Average tenure for workers in the prime earning ages of 45 to 54 dropped from 8.3 years to 7.6 years between 1996 and 2008. For workers in the 55–64 age group, average tenure fell from 10.2 years to 9.9 years. Social strictures against changing jobs have decreased for all age groups. Seasoned workers with plenty of knowledge and experience (that's right, human capital) are ready to change companies if they think it will pay off, in financial and other ways. This behavior seems particularly characteristic of the male working population. Average tenure for men in the 45–54 age group fell from 10.1 years in 1996 to 8.2 in 2008.[48]
Highly connected to information sources. Some 63 percent of adult Americans now have broadband Internet connections at home, compared with about 42 percent in 2006. More than 80 percent of homes with educational attainment at the college level have home broadband.[49]
Highly connected to each other. The average corporate user of e-mail can expect to send and receive more than 150 messages per day. That number is projected to grow to more than 230 by 2012. Business users report that they currently spend about one-fifth of the workday on e-mail.[50]
Connected in evolving new ways. Social media play a growing, though still modest, role in the workplace. On the one hand, more than half of office workers with Web access have at least one social networking account (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and the like).[51] The social networking site Facebook claims to have more than 400 million active users.[52] And it's not just teenagers who are friending each other; the fastest-growing Facebook demographic group is women above the age of 55. Almost half of Facebook's U.S. audience is now 26 years of age or older.[53] Meanwhile, Twitter has put together a community of millions of users in little more time than it takes to tweet your BFF. By one report, total tweet volume exceeded one billion messages a month as of the beginning of 2010, more than double the volume four months earlier.[54] On the other hand, only about a one-fifth of computer-enabled workers say they access their social media sites during work hours.[55] In-person contact remains the number one channel of conversation about work-related news and events (49 percent of global workforce study respondents choosing it most often) compared with various forms of online connection (37 percent selecting these as most frequent).[56]
Well-informed about employers. Google lists hundreds of job search Web sites. These include megasites like
Monster.comandCareerbuilder.comthat offer about a million current job listings. Web sites likeSalary.comandVault.comprovide detailed reward and culture information on almost any large company.Hardened by ups and downs in the labor market.[57] People who have been in the labor force since 1992 have witnessed cycles of unemployment that graph like an Alpine postcard. Unemployment went from 7.8 percent in June of that year down to 3.8 percent in April of 2000, back up to 6.3 percent in the middle of 2003, down to 4.4 percent in March of 2007, and up again to 10 percent in December of 2009.[58] Periodic mass layoffs have weakened the bonds between individual and organization. From 1998 through 2010, annual mass layoffs (defined as single-establishment separations that lead to 50 or more individual filings for unemployment insurance) ranged from a low of about 900,000 in 1999 to highs of more than 1.5 million in 2001 and 2.1 million in 2010.[59]
Ready to look out for themselves. About three-quarters of the participants in our 2010 worldwide survey said they carry the primary responsibility for managing their careers, ensuring their financial futures, and seeing to their personal health and well-being. Far lower percentages said they felt confident in their ability to execute these responsibilities.[60]
These trends have produced a smart, savvy, self-sufficient, and wary workforce. In the words of one observer, "Today's workplace requires an enlightened, demanding, and independent workforce that has no problem voting with its feet when unhappy."[61] These workers want a manager who recognizes their abilities, meets their need for information, tells them the truth, respects their freedom, and rewards their success. The manager who fails finds himself with an investor who withholds his human capital, or who takes his investable portfolio to a job that offers a higher return.
In his movie History of the World, Part 1, Mel Brooks (as King Louis XVI of France) explains why people—some of us anyway—strive to achieve leadership positions. As he skeet-shoots catapulted peasants, the Brooks character faces the camera and says, "It's good to be the king." Any evolutionary psychologist worthy of his autographed photo of Charles Darwin can tell you why it's good to be the one on top. The answer is simple—because being higher on the organizational ladder brings more of the goodies that everyone values. In one laboratory experiment, high-powered individuals more often helped themselves to extra food, chewed with their mouths open, and got crumbs on their faces and on the table.[62] And high-level people feel better too—on surveys, those with greater power more frequently express and experience positive moods and emotional states.
Some form of leadership emerges any time groups coalesce. Even in laboratory settings, leader-follower structures quickly appear. Despite many organizations' new-age efforts to create leaderless teams, there really is no such thing. Leaders arise spontaneously, even when groups set out to be leaderless.[63]
It's easy to see why leadership behaviors would tend to evolve among humans—their survival and reproductive advantages are obvious. But what is the one thing absolutely required to be a leader? Followers, of course. And why would a followership psychology exist? After all, followership benefits are much less obvious than the gains from being top dog. Indeed, at the individual level, we can expect that followers will generally do worse than leaders in terms of resource accumulation, survival, and reproductive success. Who will most likely obtain more wives and girlfriends (let alone more financial and other resources), Donald Trump or a janitor in one of his buildings? Because of the wealth and status that have accompanied Trump's elevated position, his fitness advantages (that is, factors that help people find mates, survive to reproduce, and thereby pass their genes on to future generations) are staggering.
Yet followership has its benefits too. Corporations headed by successful leaders tend to do better than corporations with mediocre leadership. At the micro level, consider a military unit led by an effective noncommissioned officer. Good sergeants train their troops well, build teamwork and camaraderie, help motivate soldiers to take the hill, and do all they can to keep them alive and safe. In the words of one senior Air Force officer, "The First Sergeant is the heart and soul of a healthy organization and is absolutely critical to a unit's ability to achieve mission success ... not only do they professionally know their Airmen, and therefore the climate of the unit, they're also uniquely gifted at reading the indicators of a potential problem well in advance, and act quickly to mitigate.... I contend they're some of the most powerful leaders ... you'll find in any unit."[64] Because followership has its rewards, many of us are content to fall in behind a successful leader. Indeed, the human mind has an evolved facility for evaluating one's relative status in a hierarchy and assessing the costs and benefits of competing for a higher position.[65] In choosing to follow, we avoid potentially dangerous status battles required of those who aspire to leadership dominance. Those battles range from physical conflicts to political contests to proxy fights.
Nevertheless, in forgoing the battle for status, we inevitably give something up. Hence, the decision to follow rather than lead is bound to engender resentment. So followers end up with a deep ambivalence. As one anthropologist sums it up, "This would have produced in each individual a complex set of competing motivations—including tendencies both to dominate and not to dominate, both to defer and to resist domination, both to share and to be opportunistically selfish, all according to circumstance."[66] When modern organizations foster hierarchies that frustrate our counterdominant tendencies, stress builds. And we direct our frustration at those who benefit from their higher positions in the hierarchy. We have to wonder how much of the resentment about micromanagement has a genuine cause (an overattentive, controlling supervisor) and how much of it stems from internal conflict that leads us to label any manager actions as micromanagerial. Perhaps the fault, dear employees, lies not (entirely) in our managers, but (partly) in ourselves.
Our inherent internal conflict about leadership has an important corollary: we really don't want to follow orders. Being directed reminds us that someone else gets to call the shots. Still, if we must give up authority, we want those who have it to exercise it appropriately. As a result, we place a heavy burden on managers to hit a small target between being too assertive and not assertive enough. A research study conducted by Daniel Ames and Francis Flynn at Columbia University concluded that there are two ways to get assertiveness wrong: by falling short when it's time to take charge ("Why won't she deal with the lazy sales reps who are dragging down the team's performance?") or by acting too aggressively ("Being hard-driving is fine, but this guy just won't listen to anyone else's opinion").[67]
The happy medium is happy indeed—it constitutes the most effective behavior in the eyes of employees. The research showed that managers who manifest moderate levels of assertiveness accomplished just as much as the most assertive, but with far lower social costs (in the form of disgruntled employees). This doesn't mean, however, that effective leaders are always moderately assertive. Rather, they display a range of situation-specific behavior. They take firm control of the reins when necessary and let the horses run free when they're headed in the right direction. The researchers concluded that, in the optimum range, "assertiveness may fade into the background, allowing other attributes with positive, linear relations with leadership to become more salient.... Like salt in a sauce, too much overwhelms the dish; too little is similarly distracting; but just the right amount allows the other flavors to dominate our experience. Just as food is rarely praised for being perfectly salted, leaders may somewhat infrequently be praised for being perfectly assertive."[68]
Every time a manager makes the wrong choice, he creates discontent. Of the two possible transgressions, of course, too much assertiveness engenders greater resentment. Hunter-gatherer groups that survive today try to force the right balance by maintaining highly egalitarian structures. They deal with their assertiveness aversion by insisting that their leaders circumscribe their roles and submit to the will of the groups they lead. Attempts by individuals to assert dominance can lead to disobedience or ostracism of the leader. In extreme cases (as among the San bushmen of Africa, Eskimos of North America, and Yaruro of South America), the band may execute the offending leader.[69]
In corporate organizations, bad boss behavior rarely leads to violence, but it can lead to lawsuits. In 2007, legislation was pending in New Jersey and at least three other states to give employees the right to seek damages if a manager created an abusive environment. In New Jersey, the bill specified that an individual who felt he or she had been wrongfully treated could sue for as much as $25,000.[70]
Our data suggest that the behavior of supervisors and managers explains some of the resentment that people experience. If we define a manager's job in ways consistent with our definitions of leading and managing, a summary position description would contain elements like these:
Defines what the group needs to accomplish and suggests performance goals that are strategically relevant and challenging but achievable
Communicates strategic requirements clearly and openly and obtains the resources necessary to achieve success
Understands what motivates each person and creates opportunities to get people to invest their human capital toward achievement of the collective goal
Uses an egalitarian process to determine what actions the team should take and consults employees before making decisions that affect the jobs they do
Coaches and builds people's strengths (that is, enhances their human capital) so that they become increasingly skilled at executing the tasks required for individual and group success
Builds teamwork and a sense of togetherness among group members
Monitors group and individual performance and ensures that results are recognized and that rewards are fairly distributed
Holds people accountable for their performance and their contribution to achieving group objectives
Encourages new ideas and novel ways of doing things, to improve the group's arsenal of processes and techniques
Table 2.1 shows ratings of managers from Towers Perrin's 2007 worldwide study of ninety thousand employees. The right-hand column indicates percentage of employees who agreed or agreed strongly that their managers effectively perform the job sketched out above.
In four of the nine areas—providing reasonable performance goals, understanding individual motivation, consulting employees, and coaching to build skills—managers fail to exceed the 50 percent favorable mark. In every area, managers fall short of 60 percent favorable, a modest enough goal.
Little wonder employees are irritable—the downside of manager performance takes a high emotional toll. A study of workplace emotion by a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota led to this conclusion: "Our results revealed that employees experience less optimism, happiness, and enthusiasm when they interact with supervisors than when they interact with customers, clients, and coworkers."[71] In another study, researchers tracked the emotional states of employees in a light manufacturing company. Using palmtop devices, the employees received periodic signals during the workday; the signals prompted them to record what they had been doing and what emotions they were feeling. Over the course of several weeks, people said that about 80 percent of the interactions they recorded with supervisors were positive. By comparison, the participants scored about 70 percent of coworker interactions in the positive category.[72] But the real story emerged when the researchers calculated the power (rather than just the prevalence) of positive and negative interactions. Whereas negative coworker experiences produced a depressing effect about 3.6 times as great as the positive emotional effect of positive peer interactions, negative experiences with supervisors were more than ten times as powerful as positive ones.[73] Clearly, when it comes to interactions with managers, a win some/lose some approach doesn't produce a balanced emotional state over time. Little wonder employees find that overassertiveness and other manager transgressions reduce the engagement, enthusiasm, and optimism they feel at work. And little surprise that managers, faced with the emotional outcomes of this asymmetrical effect, so often find their jobs stressful and unfulfilling.
Table 2.1. Managers Behaving Badly—Employees Give Managers Low Performance Scores
Survey Item | Percent Agree/Strongly Agree |
|---|---|
Source: Closing the Engagement Gap: A Roadmap for Driving Superior Business Performance, Towers Perrin, 2007. | |
My immediate manager: | |
Provides performance goals that are challenging but achievable | 50 |
Communicates clearly and openly | 51 |
Understands what motivates me | 43 |
Consults employees before making decisions that affect them | 44 |
Effectively coaches and builds the strengths of employees | 43 |
Supports and promotes teamwork | 57 |
Recognizes and appreciates good work | 59 |
Holds people accountable for performance goals | 57 |
Encourages new ideas and new ways of doing things | 51 |
The next chapters will challenge common assumptions about managers' roles and the means by which they contribute to organizational success. As we explore the meaning of the job, we will remain mindful of the human desire for autonomy and self-determination. These needs are deeply programmed into our psychology. The implication: the best manager does his work with the lightest touch. As one team of sociologists has written, "Leadership may be unnecessary and even resented when people face relatively simple or routine coordination problems.... Here lies an important leadership lesson: except for certain well-defined situations, people will perform better if they are left alone."[74]
This admonition will guide us in developing a new model of manager performance, a model that makes managers central to an organization's quest for competitive advantage, but paradoxically out of the limelight. We will suggest that the best line supervisors influence the work environment directly, defining tasks, developing employees' human capital, and planning for the future. They focus unerringly on creating the context for individual success, but they deal with employees in subtle, nuanced, and effective ways. We saw an example of this notion with supervisor assertiveness. Managers who exercise the right level of assertiveness produce strong results with low levels of social strain, but draw less attention to themselves than either their too-quiet or too-intense counterparts. This paradox (manage better by managing less) will serve as our compass as we navigate the manager's job beyond its currently charted boundaries.
Some of what we will build into the manager's job will make it seem easier than its current form ("Great, I can waste less energy trying to design circuits with one hand and write performance reviews with the other"). In fact, the recommended role will actually prove both more challenging and more fulfilling, just as creating an impressionist work is harder but ultimately more rewarding than painting by the numbers. We may not transform managing into an art, but we hope to upgrade it to a valuable, and fully appreciated, craft.