The idea for this article is from two observations I made working with hundreds of management teams.
1. All people are self-motivated.
2. The mark of a good manager is not what the employees do when the manager is around, but what they do when the manager is NOT around.
Case in point. My spouse, Cindy, goes to work for a major super market chain as a grocery checker. Before she starts her job, she attends educational programs in what she calls "smile" and "scan" school. There she learns about the history of the company, scanning procedures and friendly customer service skills.
One of the company's key requirements for a checker is to scan each item separately. In other words, no scanning one item, then multiplying it by the number counted.
Her first assignment after school is to work with a checker who has 15 years’ experience, training by her side and assisting as needed. While Cindy is working the register, a lady comes up with ten cans of the same brand of dog food. Cindy starts scanning the items one at a time. The experienced clerk stopped her and to her to just scan one item and then multiply it times the total number of cans. Dilemma for the new checker, who is right?
After a week at the training store, Cindy is goes to her permanent store. How do you think she scans items when she is on the job? It depends on whether or not there is a manager present.
What makes a person motivated to want to do a job the way designed when there is no supervisor or manager present?
First, it is important to understand that there is no such thing as one person motivating another. All people are self motivated. A person decides if they "want" to do the job as designed or not. You can always gauge a person's motivation based on the quality of results achieved and how those results accomplished. Since we are dealing with humans, them we have to consider that this is an emotional concern.
However, people do "inspire" other people. So, the only role a manager has in this process of motivating employees is to set up conditions in the work environment that will "inspire" employees to "want" to do the job properly.
A manager’s style of communication and interaction with the staff creates the daily working relationship between the manager and the staff, as well as how the staff will treat each other. This is the heart of the working environment.
If the staff has a manager that is critical and fault finding, then the staff will be critical and faultfinding with each other. Making sure they do not get nailed by the manager at the expense of someone else’s mistake. CYA (Cover Your Assets) becomes the motto to live by.
A manager’s management style usually falls into one of these categories:
1. Dictator -- "I am ultimately responsible for the success of this department, and my butt is on the line for your actions. You do what I say, when I say, as I say . . . no questions asked. My way or the highway."
2. Coach -- "I know my success is limited by your success when you are working together and with customers. What do you need in education, support, feedback or equipment to do your job well? What are your ideas on how to do your job better or improve the department as a whole? We can only win as a team."
It is also important to have a "team leader aligned with the manager as a role model and support when the manager is not around. Also, a team leader may not necessarily your best performer, but someone who can organize people to work well together..
Too often manager’s operate out of the "Dictator" mode. Most received no training or had a role model to show them a different way. Others just assumed that is how manages people. Hey, being a manager is a tough job, but someone has to do it. For a manager to move to the third style of management, the manager has to understand who controls the destiny of the company.
In the average organizational model, there is a person at the top, owner, CEO, GM, etc., whose perceived responsibility is to guarantee the success and profitability of the organization. They are like the captain of a ship, using navigational tools to move the ship through safe waters. However, the only navigational tool this captain uses is the P&L statement. If the P&L statement is lousy, then it is the captain's job to correct the course of the ship.
The CEO immediately meets with the people hired to make sure their departments are profitable -- the mid-management team. In this meeting, the CEO gives an inspirational speech to help the mid-management team understand that their job security directly relates to their ability to make more money in their department. He gives them guidelines about being tougher with their people, push them harder and clean house of the goof-offs, etc.
These highly inspired mid-managers immediately call a meeting with their staff. They carry forth the same message -- "I am going to stay on top of you people till you produce, if you lazy SOBs cannot produce, I will find someone who will." The sad part about this meeting is that everyone in the department is getting the same message, the good performers and the bad performers.
During the meeting, the good performers are sitting there thinking, "I bust my ass for this company and all I am told is that it is not good enough, this is screwed!". So they get a "give-a-damn" attitude. The bad performers whine because there are no donuts for the meeting and think the meeting is just another dumb, knee-jerk response by the manager after getting his butt chewed by the big guy. Boring!
Unfortunately, we now have a very highly motivated department, but motivated to what kind of job?
To keep up the pressure, the manager really starts watching the numbers, the actions of the staff, and immediately starts jumping on people who are screwing up. The manager has become what I call a "SCUD Missile Manager." ("SCUD" missiles used during the Gulf War. It had a lousy tracking system and tended to just blow up anywhere.) This is a manager who is under a lot of pressure to produce. This person is liable to blow up at anything, anywhere, anytime, especially in front of other employees or customers to add more pressure.
This type of management is distracting to the employees, because every time they see the "SCUD Missile Manager" roaming around, they wonder if they are about to be the next target. This becomes more distracting when they are working with a customer, because the actions of the "SCUD Missile Manager" are more important to them than the customer. So now we have a customer being serviced by a distracted employee. The customer does not get the service expected so they leave, never to return again.
In all of this, the customer is the final receiver of these inspirational meetings from owner to mid-manager to employee. The last irony is when the P&L statement shows more continuing financial problems, the cycle starts again.
To me, the highest indicator of Customer Satisfaction is the customer's desire to spend money with the company. However, the person who has the most control over Customer Satisfaction is the person who directly serves the customer, not the manager or CEO’s brilliant marketing or management plan. Their job is to take care of the people who take care of the customer. I am talking about a managerial form of what goes around comes around.
Let's face it, the best ad a company has is the actual one-on-one experience between the customer and its employee. Employees will only treat customers the way treated by their management.
Copyright, 1997, J. Daniel Emmanuel
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