Managers: ill-informed by design?
My name is Eric and I’m the founder of Spot.coach. I was previously the CEO of Wanadoo (acq. Orange) and Venda (acq. NetSuite). In this article, I reflect on my experience as team lead and coach to discuss the design flaws that prevent managers from helping their reports be happy and engaged at work.
Becoming an executive coach has helped me reflect on my experience managing and being managed.
One of the things that struck me the most is how the role of a manager has design flaws. Indeed, managers are in a poor position to help each team member to thrive.
They have great operational knowledge and provide critical professional guidance to their reports, I’m not denying that. But here are 3 of the fundamental flaws that, I believe, are preventing managers from best dealing with the humans in teams.
In the examples below, let’s assume Alice is the manager. Mike and Sarah are her direct reports.
1/ Infrequent data points
To best deal with each team member, the manager needs to observe each individual’s actions and behaviours. Through looking and listening, managers gather data points in an effort to learn about what drives their employees’ motivation.
The difficulty lies in the infrequent and discontinuous methods on which managers base their analyses.
For example, Alice (the manager) would need a lot of data to understand who is feeling inapropriately recognized for his/her efforts. Being in a meeting once a day together isn’t enough to come to that conclusion.
2/ Surface data vs in-depth data
As a manager, Alice, might decide to schedule 1-on-1s to get deeper insights — great idea! But the risk is that she will gather surface data points that shouldn’t be actionable. The reality is that most of her team members are unaware of what might be driving their behaviours.
For example, Mike might say that he feels like he is working too much. But that’s a surface data point. Mike was working in M&A, 60 hour weeks before and didn’t report a work-life balance issue. What is truely insightful is why he feels that way.
This might lead to some poor actions by Alice, like hiring more to deal with the workload or working less projects at the same time.
A good data point would be that Mike feels like not everyone cares as much as he does about the company. When he invests long hours, he feels like he is pushing alone. This makes him consider that he is working too much.
3/ Positively-Biased Data
It’s hard for someone to show a sign of weakness to their manager. Managers set compensation and promotions, for example. So employees typically have incentives to show strength and resilience.
Most managers think they are great managers yet research shows that it is absolutely not the case. It is very probably comes down to the fact that their teams aren’t as honest as the manager thinks.
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At Spot.coach, we’re building a solution that overpasses those three fundamental flaws and are already helping the most ambitious managers build highly engaged and performing teams!
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Eric
