Your best people leave first!

People don’t leave jobs, they leave poor managers. They may join for the company, for the opportunity, for the skills or the money, but at the end of the day, they leave poor managers.

If you’re not convinced, try this visualization.

Have you ever had to work for, or work with, a bad manager? You may not remember exactly how bad it was, but ask your friends, ask your significant other, they’ll remember and be able to tell you the type of impact it had on you. You might be working for one right now. Think about the impact of that person on you and those around you? How did you feel day in and day out?

Did you find yourself productive or drained? Successful or Stressed?

If you worked for a bad manager, then the chances are very good that you did not find yourself productive or successful.

When you are working for a bad manager all problems are magnified.  Your pay is too low and your vacation too short, even your chair isn’t good enough. You aren’t happy at work and you are looking for band-aids to put on the problem. Think about how much time you spent dreaming about the next weekend or the next break. A bad manager doesn’t even have to be hard on you in order for you to be affected. Have you ever watched a manager seem to pick on or harass another member of your team? How did it feel watching from the sidelines? Did you feel more loyal or motivated? Probably not.

For a while most people will try to address the symptoms.  A raise or more vacation time might buy the company your time for a little longer, but unless the underlying problem (the bad manager) is resolved, the end is always in sight.

Companies spend so much time investing in the skills of their employees and strive to make them experts in their field, to make them more productive, more efficient and more effective. At the same time, they throw away so much potential because bad management seems to be an organizational blind spot.

How do you get bad managers?

If you take away the obvious answer, where bad managers actively hire and train bad managers as they climb the ranks, there are a few patterns that can illuminate the situation.

• Good team members model their behavior after their current and past managers in the hopes of being promoted. They don’t necessarily know what is good or bad management practice, but over time they’ve modeled themselves after bad managers. Management training alone may not do much to fix this.
• Good team members advance in their own area of expertise, and whether their organization promotes by merit or by time, eventually these team members make the transition from team member to manager. The problem is that they’re not set up to succeed, and they often think of management as an extension of whatever job they had before. These new managers are not effectively mentored and often only get management training once they’ve started to visibly fail. In many cases that’s already too late.
• Sometimes good team members are promoted to management and they muddle through the daily tasks. Sometimes they get training or mentoring, just enough to get the right deliverables out the door. That’s usually not enough training or mentoring to be an effective manager or a good leader.
• Sometimes organizations hire established managers from outside the organization. Some are good and some are bad. How much due diligence is done, before, during and after the hiring, will be the deciding factor on the quality of manager that is hired. Most organizations want to know ‘what’ managers have accomplished in their past and don’t really want to dig into the ‘how’.

If you take away the two outliers, bad managers hiring bad managers and ambivalent managers hiring potentially bad managers, then the pattern becomes much clearer.

The first step is training. The problem is that although organizations spend a lot of time and money training their team members to be experts that tends to be where the training stops.  After all, the mindset goes, you were great at your job, so you should be great at leading others who do that same job.

Wrong!  What made you a great individual contributor does not equip you to lead a team.  Often, those skills are actually at odds with each other. The motivations are also different and in some cases at odds as well.

As a team member, it’s all about what you can do. As a manager, it’s all about what your team can do.

As a team member, your work is done when you finish your deliverables, commitments, duties, etc.  As a manager, your work is done when all of your team has successfully finished and you have taken the time to either praise or correct as and where needed. You’ve taken you team’s output and used it to make your next 1:1 or coaching session more effective. You’ve looked ahead and thought about the challenges your team is going to encounter in the next two to four weeks and have started to clear the way for them by getting the resources they need or removing barriers to their success.

Bad managers stand out in front of their teams, and figuratively point at themselves, highlighting how important and how great they are.

Good managers stand beside their team, highlighting how great their team is.

The second step is a culture shift in organizations. This culture shift needs to focus on developing an organizational structure with good leaders in management roles. This is not a short-term objective, but efforts have to start in the short term if organizations are going to see the results. The culture shift also has to hold managers responsible for their behavior. Today it’s common to see bad managers retained because of their other knowledge or successes.

It’s common for companies to state that their people are their greatest assets. At least that’s what everyone says. Poor senior managers seem to say it, but their actions don’t bear that out.

After all, nothing gets done without your people, your team members. Without them there would be no need to manage anything.  Well-managed organizations understand the correlation between employee turnover and lower profits.  They know that happy employees are more productive and more efficient. These well-managed companies know that employee engagement is the most effective way to increase productivity and innovation. They know that by demanding good leadership across the board, they minimize the Human Resources nightmares and legal exposure that poor managers seem to generate.

There are still a lot of poorly managed companies who have not made these simple connections.  Good leaders require training and mentoring to become great.  Great leaders will build great teams.  Great teams will produce great results.  But it all starts with investing in your manager’s leadership training.

If it’s that simple why isn’t everyone doing it?  For most companies it is because there is no clear ROI. How much will a $1500 training course for a manager yield the company?  The answer can’t be calculated in real revenue, so the training or development gets pushed off.

In other companies, training is paid for, but nothing changes because everyone is too busy to implement change. It’s as though the little check-mark that indicates someone went to training is what creates positive outcomes.

What does this mean to you?

If you’re a team member, and want to make the transition to management, learn what that transition will mean. Check out our blog series on at https://www.thresholdlearning.net/blog/001 . Understand the distinction between leader and manager and start to develop your own leadership – you’ll need it even if you don’t want to become a manager. Finally seek out good training, not just to learn what you have to do to be a manager but how you have to do it in order to get the most from your team.

If you’re a manager looking to promote from within your team, spend some time with your management candidates and go through some of the discussion in the blog entry above with them. Help them understand the role shift, as well as what training and resources are available to them before they start to flounder. One of the most important things you can do is to set them up for success as a manager, not as a super-team-member.

If you’re an organizational leader, most of the answers are going to come from within. You know what value your organization puts on good leadership at every level. You know the differences between what you say is important and what you show to be important by your organization’s actions. You know where your poor managers are, and whether you turn a blind eye to it or not. Any lasting culture change in your organization is going to start with you. Within your teams you have the seeds of great leaders, some who have made it there despite your organizational culture. Like all important decisions in your organization, it starts at the top with a vision and the will to put your people first. If you are looking to build better leaders, we offer both standardized and custom training that can be tailored to your organization's requirements.