Working With Others

I’m co-facilitating a management development program this week.  When I do this work, I often think about the managers I have had earlier in my career.  Given that the research suggests that 80% of the people who leave an organization leave because of a bad manager, the probability of a person encountering at least one is pretty high.

One of the characteristics of at least one bad manager that I had was to consistently cancel our weekly update meetings because of other “more pressing issues.  Not only did I go for weeks without meeting with this person, this manager had the audacity to ask me to complete my own performance review because the manager “did not have time.  At the time, I thought that I was the only one who had experienced such behavior.  Unfortunately, this kind of managerial negligence occurs more frequently than one would expect.

Most employees want to know what is expected, how they are doing (i.e., feedback), and the chance to develop.  Meeting with a direct report on a regular basis is a critical management responsibility that offers an opportunity to provide these basic wants for employees.  Failure to do so is likely to result in a de-motivated employee who is likely to look elsewhere for employment.

Twin Cities based WCCO-TV had the following lead story on last night’s 10PM news: “Good Question: Why do People Hate Their Jobs? The story reported that about fifty percent of the people surveyed (and 61% of those under 25!) reported that they hate their jobs and twenty percent believed that they would be with a new employer this time next year. The story goes on to say that the biggest gripes are about employers’ bonus plans, promotion policies, performance reviews, workload, and work/life balance. And people report that the most important part about their jobs is the people with whom they work ,their co-workers. Here are a couple of observations:

First, Dr. Mick Sheppeck (whom I’ve known for about 15 years) alluded to the fact that employers and the world of work need to change. To go a little deeper, companies that started up twenty-five, fifty and even a hundred years ago have policies and procedures about compensation, promotions, workload and performance expectations that are more reflective of the era in which the company began rather than the expectations of workers today. For example, many of these policies and procedures came about in the era when two parent households had one wage earner (usually the husband) and there was no need for child-care. Now we have dual wage earner families, as well as single parent households that seek more jobs that have flex time that provide the work life balance so many seek. While some companies offer flextime, many still lack this option.

Second, given that what people like most about their jobs seems to be their co-workers, we once again have evidence that working relationships matter a lot. Companies that invest in creating environments where people can work and play well with others will reap the benefits. Companies that do not recognize how important these working relationships can be will suffer the consequences.

About a month ago, I commented on the University of Minnesota’s hiring a new head football coach without any previous head coaching experience (The Hiring of a CEO , That is Head Coach). On Saturday, February 17, 2007, the Regents of the University of New Mexico named current Oklahoma State University president David Schmidly as the university’s next president. Of the five finalists , all of whom were qualified to lead this university , Schmidly had the most experience and the Regents picked him. In short, The University of New Mexico hired on the basis of experience rather than potential. Before his tenure at Oklahoma State, Schmidly had served as president at Texas Tech University as well. The last president that the UNM Regents hired had not held any university-level leadership roles; furthermore he lacked a track record of academic scholarship , which is usually a prerequisite for high-level administrative positions in academia. That president and the university parted ways over a year ago. So it is not surprising that this time the Regents went for the person with the most experience.

Leading a major state university is a challenging endeavor unlike leading any other business organization. I have heard a university described as a confederation of faculty loosely held together by a series of parking lots. And I have heard the act of leading a university is more akin to herding cats. As a president of a state university, one has to manage the relationship with numerous constituencies including the faculty, the regents or trustees, the legislature, alumni, and the various accrediting bodies that give the university the ability to grant degrees. Then there is the matter of the financial integrity of the place, the facilities, the athletic programs and so on. This is one job where experience does count and a track record of accomplishments is critically important.

Late on Monday I received a call from a client in Chicago to postpone a team building session because of the impending snowstorm , at least three of members of the team were not going to be able to make the meeting.  When I learned about all of the flight cancellations at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, I thought the decision to reschedule was a good one.  The irony is that I am hunkered down in my office in Albuquerque, NM watching the snow pile up here! Yes, Virginia, it does snow in New Mexico , in fact, the official seasonal snow totals for Albuquerque are twice that of Minneapolis, MN!  Go figure!

Since today’s snowfall will slow things down considerably, I thought I’d catch up on various projects and administrivia that mounts up when I’m on the road.  I came across a file labeled “job titles.  Early in my career, I became amused by some of the names people had for the jobs they held and started keeping track of them.  For example, back in the early ˜90’s, when the British company Grand Metropolitan owned Pillsbury, the Pillsbury leadership team decided to organize the company around eating occasions.  So that decision lead to the job title “Vice President of Breakfast , I always liked that one.  I found my most unusual job title at a metaphysical conference I attended couple of years back at the invitation of some friends in Santa Fe, NM.  This New Age gathering included many organic and health foods companies as well as massage therapists, tarot card readers, and astrologers and was quite fascinating and pleasantly unconventional.  At one booth, was a young man who described himself as a “neoarchaic ecstatic shamanic technician. I never really got a satisfying explanation of what he actually did but he seemed very happy about it.

My point in this story is that the culture in some organizations places a lot of emphasis on job titles and the position power that comes from them. I have witnessed emotional pleas on the part of employees for their company to change their title by adding designations such as “director or “vice-president because those titles would provide “more credibility , even though such a designation would be totally inappropriate.  I have also worked in organizations where job titles were totally absent , in order to find out who did what people had to talk with each other , and this approach works well in smaller organizations.  Regardless of job title, we still need to clearly spell out the performance expectations for each job and ensure that everyone is contributing to the overall results of the organization in some way.  That’s where the effort needs to occur.

Finally, a question that people often asked us in grade school was “what do you want to be when you grow up?  In my era we answered, doctor, teacher, fireman, police officer, etc.  I wonder how many elementary school students today would say a barista at Starbucks or even a neoarchaic ecstatic shamanic technician? My how jobs change.