I’ve had a funny month. One of my clients has demoted one of their managers and fired another. A second customer is considering buying out a minor shareholder who’s also a manager.
All of these managers are not able to do their jobs as it relates to managing other people or themselves. It all seems to relate back to feedback, influence, and communication. I’ll give one example.
When Managers Don’t Manage
One of my construction clients had an excavator operator who screwed up and caused unnecessary damage at a work site. It was bad enough that the operator was going to b e suspended.
His manager didn’t know how, or didn’t feel confident enough, to do the suspension himself. He asked the general manager to do it for him.
At this point I’ve got a couple of questions. Like how come we’re discussing the fairly straight-forward suspension of an operator at the executive level? Or why a manager in a leadership position is unable to confront poor performance? Or how somebody got hired into a manager role, claiming to have exactly this kind of experience?
After they started digging (pun intended) into the manager’s performance and work history they found other issues. They decided that if that general manager has to do his job for him, then why pay the guy? Ultimately they decided to let that manager go.
Which means that the general manager is now (still) the bottleneck for operations. He has to spend time finding a replacement, run operations in the meantime, while juggling that with his “real” job of building relationships with existing customers and finding new ones in a new operation in a new city.
How well do you think he’s going to do at hiring a good operations manager with all that on his plate? Oh, yea, he’s also short an operator while the original problem child is on suspension.
Get Good At Giving Feedback
So what? Well, if you’re in a “manager”, making your “general manager’s” job easier means handling things at the lowest level possible. If you’re not comfortable at giving specific, fact-based feedback and applying the appropriate consequences, then start now.
Yes, you’re going to suck at it and be really uncomfortable with it at first, especially if you haven’t done it before, had a good example of how to do it, or had training. Too bad. All those excuses have a solution, but none of them should hold you back from starting now. Everything is practice until it isn’t. So start practising.
If you’re the “general manager”, then stop hiring for just experience and knowledge. Look for the ability to develop, coach, and mentor team members. Look for the ability to create teams. For the experience admitting mistakes, fostering trust, taking responsibility, and being comfortable with conflict.
Question for the Comments:
Try giving positive feedback every day for a week, and noticing what impact it has.
Other articles you may find interesting:
Why Delegating Work to Your Staff Is Good For Them
You Need To Get Good At This To Be A Good Leader
How to Give Positive Feedback
Bernie works as a leadership and business coach, consultant, and facilitator. He believes there are simple things outstanding leaders do well, and that not to do anything about bad leadership once you know about it is abuse. Check out what he does with RESULTS.com
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