Time, not money

I have been reading about yet another child-rearing expert bemoaning the fact that so many parents are buying off their children with gadgets in lieu of spending time with them. The children are not fooled. They are reported as feeling increasingly isolated and exhibiting poor behaviour, despite these inducements.

I don’t want to get into the child-rearing debate here – as a working parent I know what it’s like to juggle priorities – but it doesn’t take much effort to make the mental link with how we manage people at work. The explosion of well-intentioned ‘initiatives’ from line managers and HR functions to retain and motivate employees makes me wonder whether, sometimes, they are trying to compensate for the lack of basic managerial leadership practices.

So, what is happening? Like the parents who, for a variety of reasons, struggle to find quality time to spend with their children are managers facing the same quandary? They are told repeatedly to spend more time communicating, coaching and appraising but often complain that their schedules leave them little room to do so. So, what are their objections? Let me give you some examples from my experience:

‘There are too many meetings I have to attend already.’
‘My staff know what I want anyway – why I do need to spend more time on this?’
‘We do appraisals every 6 months – that’s quite enough, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve never been coached and it didn’t do me any harm.’
‘Coaching is a luxury.’
‘It’s up to the HR function to create ideas for staff retention and motivation – let’s just pay people more.’

You can empathize quite easily, right? Everyone can come up with reasons not to do something. Generally, I find these fall into one or more of the following categories:

1. Managers don’t know what they’re supposed to do.
Every organization has a different definition of managerial roles and their accountabilities. We need some common ground here. I see people being promoted to their first managerial role without systematic preparation. They make up their own version of reality or simply follow their boss’s behaviour as an example (risky).
2. Managers don’t want to manage.
It’s far more prevalent than you may imagine. Technical experts are often promoted because of their knowledge and skills, not because they are deemed the right people to manage others. They are not always aware of the seismic shift that comes when you have to work through others to get the work done. If they don’t value the role, if they don’t enjoy being accountable for others then stress and underperformance will kick in. Training won’t fix this problem.
3. Managers can’t manage because they’re too busy doing their subordinates’ work.
Really? Yes. For a whole host of reasons (they don’t want to leave their specialist role behind or they were not ready for this managerial role in terms of their Level of Capability or perhaps they have to compensate for insufficient capability or resources in their team) their precious time and energy are being eaten away.

Everyone loses as a result.

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