Managerial skills are the softer skills of building relationships with employees, suppliers and customers. These skills call for emotional intelligence, which we never get round to consciously building throughout our education - which stresses the hard skills thoughout.
However, this blog post by Bob Sutton where he quotes a research by Dacher Keltner who explains why perfectly normal people turn into jerks when they become the boss:
My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain's orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior."
So what's the solution? How can you take away the heady intoxication of power away from a manager?
Could turning an organization that is more democratic and consensus driven yet focussed on responsibility and accountable be the answer?
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
ReplyDeleteWithout good government, life is nasty, brutish and short.
I saw a post today that 40% of happiness lies in intent. Maybe 40% of good governance lies in intent. Good articles of association that specify good governance.
I understand that in Norway (unfortunately I don't read Norwegian) it is a statutory obligation for managers to make their employees happy . . .
It is perhaps Power that even attracts people to becoming managers. However, there is a difference between 'power to be/do' and 'power to control'. The former needs to be inculcated and the latter shun.
ReplyDeleteManagers that are jerks perceive their job to be distributing resources around and issuing instructions to satisfy their egos. Managers that are not good get motivated by the vision of achieving something with the resources and potential at their disposal.
To me, an 'organisation that is more democratic' can only exist if care is taken to acquire employees that are themselves democratic by nature. This is because people join organisations mostly after they become adults and have some ingrained traits and innate motives that are difficult to separate them from. For example, someone with an inferiority complex. How do we get rid of this innate thing?
However, an organisation can also work on its culture with management showing the lead in the way they conduct themselves as managers. Most often, one's behaviour reflects the traits of one's boss. That way, a democratic CXO will often point his subordinate managers' culture vectors in the direction of democracy.
That said, democracy alone does not solve the problem of jerk managers. IMHO, people are in general jerks because of a deep fear somewhere lurking in their minds. This fear has to be eliminated. Perhaps allowing people to make mistakes without penalising them for it (upto a certain point) is a good way of eliminating this fear.
Ok, my reply is getting longer than normal, so let me stop here. Perhaps I must start writing a blog where I can share more thoughts on this.
Hi Guatam. Let me try to tackle your question, at least from an American perspective. I'm not qualified to suggest just how this might translate across cultures.
ReplyDeleteWhen a person is made responsible for the performance of a group, he or she is expected to do three kinds of work. Leadership work involves establishing purpose and direction. Management work involves balancing individual needs and strengths, goals and priorities. Supervision work involves dealing with individuals and the tasks they perform.
In order to do that well, a person must be willing to: a) make decisions; b) help others succeed; and, c) talk to people about their behavior and performance. This work is the core of being responsible for a group. You have to show up with the basic willingness and aptitude. If you do, training and development can make you better. If you don't have them, you will be like a person with no art talent trying to learn to paint landscapes well.
The first problem we have is that we don't select people for management positions who have these aptitudes and, therefore, are likely to succeed. We also don't help people make an informed choice about whether management work is for them. And we often don't offer parallel career tracks for individual contributors.
So, we wind up with a bunch of people working as managers who don't have the aptitudes for the job. Then, we don't train them in the basic skills they need.
Most managers are left to sink or swim. The problem is that if they sink, they take their team to the bottom with them.
To make matters worse, we don't understand that most of how to lead is learned on the job. Training, at best, can provide 10 to 20 percent of what you need. The balance you learn on the job. If you're lucky there is a development program to help you.
We don't give most managers feedback on their management work. Results are only part of the issue. Every manager has the job of accomplishing the mission, but also the job of caring for and helping the people to develop. Alas, we rarely tell managers that.
Finally, we don't tell managers that what they've entered into is a lifetime quest for improvement. So they're to be forgiven if they figure a couple of training sessions will do the trick.
To sum up, we have so many managers who are jerks because we promote a lot of the wrong people and then give them no help to get better.
:) that was an interesting way of describing power! I'd been working with managers over the last few years to help them build engaged teams. The primary obstruction i find is making Managers focus on the result and the people both. In today's workplace the increaing focus on results and outcomes is so strong that some Managers even though they might have the intent, can't really focus on the 'relationship building aspect' for their teams.
ReplyDelete