“Justin, you can learn the most from your worst managers.”
-Marlan Downey
The Audio Podcast of this post is avaliable here (runtime 5:50).
I've been fortunate to have had a handful of world-class mentors and managers, but I've also had my fair share of bad managers. I’ve come to completely agree with my father that I did, in fact, learn the most from the worst managers. So for this posting, I would like to share with you my top 5 ways to build a better business from what I’ve learned from my worst managers. But first, here’s a disclaimer.
Any similarity to any company I’ve worked for is purely coincidental. The following are a compilation of maxims I’ve learned over many years and dozens of companies. These maxims are meant for educational and thought-provoking purposes only and should not be taken too seriously by anyone who can't recognize them for what they are.
Now that the CYA is done with, here’s my top 5:
Number 5 :: Grease the tires, don’t crack the whip.
Often the best way to improve productivity is to find out how to make your employees’ lives a little easier—not harder. Work flow charts, quarter-hour time reports, daily (or even weekly) staff meetings are all fine on paper, but these methods prove to take up more time than they save. The added problem with adding useless protocols is the fact that once implemented, they must be enforced. Suddenly, what sounded great during the senior management meeting has now become a full-time job for the manager to discipline all the employees who, themselves, are running scared trying to figure out how to fill out their TPS reports correctly.
A good manager makes their employees’ lives easier so they can work better and smarter. Consider a flexible time schedule so parents can come in early and leave early enough to pick their kids up from school. What about implementing an automated time and attendance software rather than insisting on manually entered time sheets? How about an extended-hour, but four-day work week? Birthdays off would be nice. Providing computer chairs rated for extended use would allow for fewer breaks to stretch and crack joints you didn’t know they had.
“Cracking the whip” takes a lot of time and creates animosity toward the manager and the company at large. “Grease the tires” and your employees will thank you in improved productivity and lowered churn rates.
Number 4 :: Praise Publicly and Punish Privately
Every manager has a style all their own for working with top-performers and weak-performers. However, a good manager will praise his or her top-performers publicly so the whole company can hear. This will create a standard for excellence in the company and provide your top-performers a much-deserved boost.
Reviewing your employee’s performance and providing criticism is healthy and entirely necessary to help them reach their full potential, but this critical conversation should be two-way, constructive and always private.
As a side note, employee performance reviews should also not be conducted inside the office or during office hours. You don’t want a visit to your office becoming synonymous with punishment. You also don’t want your employee’s moral to be at an all-time low at the beginning of the work day and expect them to actually get any work done at all.
Praise publicly and punish privately. Get these backwards and you will soon be looking at an empty office.
Number 3 :: Collaboration not Competition
There’s a terrible idea going around that creating some competition within the workplace is a good idea. Somewhere along the line a manager decided that if the employees were in competition with each other that their performance would be optimized and everyone would win out in the end. As it turns out, the opposite is true.
Competition within a workplace brings out the worst in people—not the best. By artificially drawing the battle lines between employees or teams of employees you cut them off from one another. Provide adequate spoils to the victorious team and you will soon see sabotage, miscommunication, and neglect.
The answer is collaboration. Provide incentives by all means, but allow the talent in your organization the freedom to work together, pool their resources and talents inside and outside of the organization. Then, prepare to be dazzled.
Competition between employees creates a poisonous corporate culture which will no doubt spill over to your clients, the work will suffer and your company will suffer.
Number 2 :: Don’t count paperclips.
In the first business class I took at SMU, the professor split the class into groups and put each team in fancy conference rooms, with fancy whiteboards, and gave us all fancy corporate titles. After a few minutes, the professor returned and poured hundreds of paperclips of assorted colors on the table in front of us. We were told that we were a company now and if we could figure out the exercise before she got back, we would have a head-start. She said she’d be back in 10 minutes to let us know what we were supposed to do and that the winning team would automatically pass the class with an A.
Immediately, my GPA-conscious team sprung into debate. Some were separating the paperclips into colors, others sorted them by size and still others were chaining them together. Everyone had their own ideas for how to get a head-start.
After 10 minutes, she returned and asked us what we were doing. Our “Managing Senior Chief Executive Officer” answered cautiously, “we’re formulating a business opportunities matrix based on all available information.” She replied, “You’re exactly on the wrong track. Come with me.”
As it turns out, the point of the exercise was to illustrate how all too often businesses will focus on analyzing all the wrong things. We focused on the paperclips and started counting. To this day, I don’t know why. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.
The point of the story is for us all to pay careful attention to the things a company is measuring. Is tracking time and attendance, task completion speed, timeliness, or personal space cleanliness really relevant to employee performance or managerial decisions? Maybe you’re just counting paperclips.
Number 1 :: [You tell me]
What’s the number 1 learn from the worst business managers? I could go on and on, but I’ll ask you. What have you learned from your worst managers?
Ultimately, it’s important to think back to those terrible managers, so we can look forward to solutions that will not just make for better managers and happier employees, but for a better business.
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