Managing/Leading Employees in the New Age©
In 1981, a CFO to motivate his troops every week shouted …“I can get anyone off the street to do a better job than anyone here right now!”…….
In 1993, a CEO was heard blasting his HR Director………….I DON’T HAVE TO BE A GOOD MANAGER, I AM THE LEADER OF THIS ORGANIZATION! Unfortunately, this “leader” never understood that no one wanted to follow him because of his weekly public beareatings …. he called them meetings!
These were fairly typical scenes, which I personally witnessed during my 30 years in the ranks of corporate America. While Dilbert does a brilliant comedic interpretation of this type of behavior, millions of employees in organizations across America still endure management/leadership emotional abuse, called directive or autocratic management style. Is this the result of untrained, unskilled leaders and managers or mindless managers simply following old, outdated business models of management thinking? The answer could be both!
This is 2006, what has changed? Not much yet, but it must!
The Old Rules of Business Management and Leadership Must Stop!
If there ever was an “old school of management thinking,” the icon would be Jack Welch not-so-affectionately known as “the slash and burn” guru of General Electric. Jack Welch named, “manager of the century” in 1999, according to many brilliantly influenced decades of thinking around bottom-line, profitability! He led the rebel call to “down size, right size, reorganize, restructure, get rid of organizational “fat.” Employees became numbers to be reduced……..slash 10% per year minimum! Manager/leaders across America followed suit, bought books, got tougher! Authors such as Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman jumped on board with “First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, championed by corporate leadership as the new manager bible for staffing and managing employees.
As a middle manager I lived through a Fortune 500 Corporate mandatory “stack ranking” of employees. I was ordered to get rid of the bottom 20%, ignore the middle 60% and place on a pedestal the top 20% the “talent pool” of employees!
In 2006, here’s the question, is corporate America better for having gone through all this chaos? Employees are disenfranchised and millions of America’s displaced workers will never be able to retire. Gen X’ers and Gen Y’s, having witnessed the disloyalty of corporations toward their parents and grandparents are rejecting corporate America and seeking entrepreneurial opportunities.
Baby Boomers, beginning in 2006, are retiring from organizations and employers are scrambling to create retention and attraction programs for employees; and they are wondering out loud, “What has happened to employee loyalty these days?”
Thank Goodness for Fortune Magazine’s July 24, 2006, Article by Betsy Morris……….
Titled, Sorry, Jack, …………Welch’s Rules for Winning Don’t Work Any more: Once upon a time, there was a route to success that corporate America agreed on. But in today’s fast-changing landscape, that old formula is getting tired. And, a search is on for….the New Rules.
I spent two decades of my manager life in corporate America feeling like the little kid in the fable, “The Emperor Has No Clothes” (was I the only one seeing the ridiculous abuse and neglect all around me?)…………thank goodness for this brave article, perhaps signaling a new age of enlightenment around managing people inside of organizations.
Managing People – Old Playbook, New Age Playbook
Old Playbook: Directive, Authoritative Managers & Leaders
New Age Playbook: Participative, Facilitative Managers & Leaders
Directive, authoritative styles of managers and leaders will no longer be tolerated throughout the 2,000’s, why? Because employees now have a choice of employers, most employers are now painfully aware of the vanishing labor supply. There are approximately 76 Million Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, being replaced by 52 Million Generation Xers. You do the math!
The New Age Employee - Intolerant of Management Genocide
As outlined in my article (Summer edition, 2006, of Sharing Ideas), “Manage Generation Culture Clash in Organizations,” younger generations of Gen X’s and Gen Y’s have been raised in an American society of equality. Younger generations expect to be heard and valued. Old authority styles of “chain of command” simply won’t work! In fact, many younger workers don’t even understand the concept.
New Age Leaders and Managers must follow a model of allowing employees to participate in decisions affecting them. They will need to be skilled in facilitating discussions and gaining consensus among workers; they will have to learn win/win negotiation strategies. This will require training and development and a much higher skill level of Managers and Leaders in this New Age of Business Management.
Betsy Morris, in her Fortune Magazine Article calls this the need to lead employees by “inspiring” them versus “ranking” them:
Old Rule – Stack Rank Employees, Eliminate Them
New Rule – Inspire Them
This is truly not a new concept, Kevin and Jackie Frieberg in their best-selling books, Nuts! And Guts! outline the success of Southwest Airlines, one of the most profitable companies in the US. Southwest has followed this model of participative management leadership since their beginning. Other companies which are blowing the doors off profits also understand and follow this new age playbook, companies like Synovus Financial Services, led by Jimmy Blanchard, Roy Spence, GSD&M, the nation’s third-largest advertising agency, and Quad/Graphics, one of the world’s foremost printers.
Jack Welch’s old playbook embodies the concept of fear-based management and autocratic leadership. However, according to the Freiberg’s, gutsy leaders have dismantled fear-based management and replaced it with heart, soul, discipline, loyalty, humor – and long-term record profits! Indeed, leaders like Colleen Barrett, President and Chief Operating Officer of Southwest Airlines, known as the Queen of Hearts, are applying the New Age Leadership model, and not only having the loyalty of their employees and customers, but earning record profits for their shareholders and sharing them with their employees!
Old Rule: Rank Your Players; go with the A’s
New Age Rule: Hire Passionate People
These New Age Management organizations hire people for their personalities and souls; they understand that they can train the necessary skills. Old school, old philosophy management companies hired for skills and knowledge, and then wondered why they had customer service problems!
Paradigm Shift in corporate America: Customers Rule
Old Rule: Shareholders Rule
New Age Rule: The Customer is King
In New Age Managed companies, the employees are actually regarded as valued customers by management and leadership. These companies understand that if they take care of their employees, their employees will take care of their customers. These companies do not historically have customer service problems.
In addition, the New Age managed companies are also focused on identifying the needs of their customers by asking them. What a novel concept? I actually worked for four years for a Fortune 500 Financial Services company which was so large that management could not determine who the real customer was. They were completely in-focused, not out-focused on the real customer.
Jack Welch’s mantra was “real (authoritative) men make their numbers”……yes, indeed, Jack, but at what cost? The New Age leadership mantra of leaders like Colleen Barrett could easily be, “real participative leaders exceed their number projections by nurturing the souls of their employees and customers.”
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Peggy Pattison, Author, Speaker, is an acknowledged expert in management/leadership, KISSuccess™ Performance Solutions (a peak-performing management training series), and the author of “At First You Cry…And, Then You Fly!” and Your Power Formula to Success, http://www.peggypattison.com
