The conventional wisdom is that the relationship between employees and their supervisors is the key to engagement. Bolstering the argument that the relationship is vital is research from Gallup—the organization that, for all practical purposes, invented the concept of employee engagement. It found that about half of people who quit a job do so “to get away from their manager.”
The employee-manager relationship is a key to engagement, but it’s not the only one. It may, however, be the hardest problem to fix. We have been banging our heads against the wall trying to turn people managers into good communicators for as long as I have been in this business—40 years next May. I don’t think the needle has moved much in all that time.
When engagement surveys reveal a problem, CEOs generally turn to their human resources department for solutions. Eleven percent of the time, HR responds by launching training programs meant to help managers improve their communication skills.
The first of these programs I ever saw was from (if memory serves) Pacific Bell. It was an entry in an IABC/Los Angeles Gold Quill competition that consisted of a box filled with training materials. I have seen or heard of at least 100 similar programs since then. Despite these efforts, we’re right where we were four decades ago.
There are good reasons for that. Ultimately, it comes down to this: All the music lessons in the world won’t make a good musician out of someone who is tone-deaf.
The promotion process is broken.
Employees who are promoted into manager positions are rarely elevated based on their people skills. Nearly always they have been performing well in a technical job but have reached the highest pay grade for a non-supervisory job. Seeking to reward them (and keep them from bolting for a higher-paying competitor), the company bumps them up the hierarchy to where they suddenly are managing people.
Some may well be naturals at it. Most, though, not only want to keep doing what got them the reward in the first place; they don’t want to have to deal with their new reports.
Research cited by Harvard Business Review found that two-thirds of managers are generally uncomfortable communicating with employees. In addition, 37 percent are uncomfortable giving direct feedback, 20 percent don’t like recognizing their staff’s achievements, 20 percent don’t like delivering the company line, and 19 percent are uncomfortable giving instructions.
This is a real problem, especially if you subscribe to the notion that employees prefer to get company news and information from their supervisors. If you ask employees where they prefer to get their news, that’s probably how they’ll answer.
If you ask where they prefer to get their news and information about something in particular, such as benefits or long-term strategy, you’re likely to get a very different answer. (As Angela Sinickas has said, if you ask people where they prefer to shop, they may answer “Tiffany,” but that doesn’t mean Tiffany should start stocking produce. Asking where they prefer to shop for groceries will get you a very different answer.)
Training is not a panacea.
Training is unlikely to change much. A few managers might come around, and even fewer may thrive, but in general, you can’t train a tiger to change its stripes.
Of equally dubious help is distributing support materials or deluging supervisors with resources about how to be a better communicator, all of which takes time they would rather spend on the work that will help them reach their targets and earn them bonuses.
Some companies hold people managers accountable for communicating, another questionable tactic. After all, no company is going to weigh communicating more than it does meeting performance targets. Given a choice between a 90 percent weight for reaching targets and 10 percent for communicating, there are few managers who would invest time and energy in the 10 percent at the expense of the 90 percent.
There are businesses that nurture good people managers. In nearly every case, these organizations have baked good management into their cultures; that is, it’s just the way things are done in those companies. They most likely support their people managers with training, resources and communication, but none of it is a program.
Programs have defined beginnings and ends. In organizations where the culture supports people management, senior leaders model the behavior, recognition both formal and informal (also part of the company’s cultural DNA) shines a light on those who engage in great people-manager practices, and the company is more likely to elevate those employees who demonstrate solid people-manager skills.
You can’t create a program to make this happen in your organization. It requires a full-blown culture change initiative supported and embraced at the top.
Ideally, businesses would stop promoting into supervisory roles those employees who don’t have great people/leadership skills. Instead, they could create alternative promotion paths for technical high-achievers to let them perpetuate and expand their skills without requiring them to devote time to managing a staff.
Concentrate on other equally important engagement enablers.
Should companies stop trying to get communicators to do a better job communicating with their staffs? Of course not. They should, however, stop focusing on the employee/employer relationship to the detriment of other engagement drivers.
Consider an employee who believes she and her colleagues have a voice in the company’s decisions and direction. She is excited to come to work every day, because her values and the company’s are closely aligned. She is stoked about working with her like-minded team members to achieve something bigger than herself, and they all see the company’s leaders walking the talk. What’s more, she knows where the company came from, where it is headed, how it will get there and what her role is in making that vision a reality.
Is she likely to quit because she doesn’t feel that she can approach her manager with a question? She might not like it, but the rewards of her work would most likely outweigh the fact that her boss isn’t comfortable communicating with her.
As I noted earlier, the employee-manager relationship is just one cornerstone of employee engagement. Employee voice, company integrity and a strong leader-driven company narrative that helps employees identify their role in that narrative are each equally important. When we focus most of our energy on fixing the (mostly) unfixable, though, we also have less time to build up engagement enablers that are much more easily addressed.
If we direct most of our engagement efforts at new programs to make unwilling managers better at communicating, someone undoubtedly will revisit this topic in another 40 years.
A version of this article first appeared on Shel Holtz’s blog.from Ragan.com http://ift.tt/1TQTPNj via web video marketing
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