First rule of management: Show up

When we ask employees what causes them to be loyal to their manager they use short, simple words: support, encouragement, feedback, available. Ask them what causes disloyalty – where they advertise freely and frequently how hopeless, helpless or worthless he is – and you get long, angry sentences that vary in content, but are identical in spirit: my manager is missing-in-action.

Bear in mind our research shows that a little under half the people we ask are defined as Detractors (using a loyalty score developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Havard’s Fred Reichheld) when it comes to their manager – these are unhappy employees who can damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth and impede growth by under-performing and switching off.

That’s a lot of missing managers! Where are they? And why, given they are responsible for their team, aren’t they showing up?

Based on our research, observing 1000′s of [frontline and middle] managers and noticing where they spend their time and energy, we offer 3 reasons (more technically know as ‘excuses’) and suggest 3 commitments any manager can make to improve performance and switch people on:

Excuse 1. Managers don’t want to be there.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but the truth is many managers just don’t want to be there. When they signed up to be a manager it wasn’t to spend time managing people. Most first-time managers, where the problems all start, weren’t promoted for their people skills either (which explains why so many don’t have any). The qualities that get you promoted from an individual performer are inner-focused (determination, persistence, functional-competence). Great managers – with loyal, engaged and productive team members – are other-focused (supportive, encouraging, communicative), which you can only be when you actually turn up and spend time with others.

Excuse 2. Oh, the meetings we’ll go to.

Now, more than ever, frontline and middle managers are being dragged from one meetings to the next. Project meetings, product development meetings, change management meetings and meetings to discuss the forthcoming meeting meetings, to name just a few. All day, every day. Always exactly an hour long and almost always bullshit meetings designed to keep people from getting anything done.

It’s absolutely bonkers that so many managers are attending so many meetings. Sadly, the purpose of most of these meetings is to help the organiser not look complacent (when they actually are) or for attendees to look important (when, in fact, most people think you’re a complete twit for wasting so much precious time). If the bean-counters calculated the actual cost of all these meetings (total number of people-hours x average hourly salary) and linked them to bonuses I suspect the length of meetings and number of participants would plummet over-night. Just because people are there, at work, doesn’t mean they haven’t got better things to do than hang out in meetings.

Excuse 3. The Desk-jockey

PC is the new drug of choice for most frontline and middle managers. It is viciously addictive. Once it has you in it’s grubby little paws you are destined to spend your days gazing desperately in to your monitor: working on incredibly important reports that no-one reads or long, unnecessary email conversations about nothing very much or fiddling with spreadsheets or surfing the net or playing Minesweeper (that’s what they think you’re doing). It’s no wonder there is no time to get real things done. PC must be feed.

How to stop this?

Make 3 small, but critical commitments:

1. Want to be there. Right in the thick of it, with your people. You don’t have to do their job and you can’t afford to create a dependancy or get under people’s feet, but you have to want to be available more than you want to sneak off to meetings or get sucked in to feeding your PC. You’ll have to stay focused, because ‘showing up’ and ‘doing nothing’ look the same to the uninformed and you’re instinct will be to look like your doing something, even if it’s really doing nothing very useful.

If you don’t want to be there, that’s ok too, but maybe being a manager isn’t right for you (it isn’t, move on). And if you’re recruiting or promoting managers, find out what they think managing is all about, why they want it and how they’re going to make the leap from inner to other focused.

2. Avoid bullshit meetings. It isn’t as hard as you think. Prioritise team meetings (and make them count), performance planning and coaching sessions, block out your diary, share the responsibility for meetings with peers and shorten them (the meetings, not your peers). Learn more about avoiding bullshit meetings here…

3. Walk around. The first step, like any addiction, is to know you have a problem. Monitor how much time are you spending at your desk (and in meetings). Cut it in half. Then half again. Instead, get up and walk around. Let people know you’re available, give people feedback and coaching. Let people know when they’re doing a good job and correct them when your expectations and their actions don’t match. Walking around is a vessel for doing what matters most – not a leisurely jaunt around the office.

About the Author

Jason Moore consults on culture and leadership effectiveness. He is also an entrepreneur, author and coach. Jason co-developed the Humanistic/Performance Culture – Performance Improvement Diagnostic (a performance improvement system that works across many levels of the organisation. The H/PC is a transformational – yet simple and practice – online diagnostic. It reduces risks, builds competence and drives business growth with evidence-based accountability and real-time feedback) and blogs his thoughts on making work a better place to work. Follow Jason on Twitter or download his eBook: Meeting of the Living Dead.