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The Right And Wrong Lessons
As managers gain
experience, they separate themselves into four distinct classes, A, B,
C and D, plus the failures who become hopelessly confused by what
experience teaches them. The
A managers become the best because they mainly learn the right
lessons, which enable them to make the most effective use of the
talents of the people who report to them.
The D managers become the worst because they learn more wrong
than right lessons and end up making ineffective use of their
employees.
The way experience
teaches the D managers the wrong lessons is shown by their tendency to
criticize and threaten their employees excessively.
The people who report to them are five times more likely than
the employees of the best managers to report that they are criticized
and threatened unnecessarily and unfairly. These D managers learn from their experience that they can
get results, at least over the short-run by threatening and
criticizing their employees. As
a consequence, they do this excessively.
The best managers learn, however, that there are better ways to
get results, particularly over
the long-run.
What the D managers
learn from their experience leads to an amazing paradox.
Their employees report in Management Practices Surveys
conducted by Sterling Institute, Inc. among more than 100,000
employees in a wide range of organizations, large and small, public
and private, that the least effective managers are three times more
likely to tolerate poor performance than the most effective managers.
Observation of these managers and interviews with their
employees reveal that when criticism and threats fail to produce
results, the ineffective managers often do nothing because their
experience has failed to teach them how else to improve performance. So they blame their “incompetent” and “irresponsible”
employees and throw their hands up in frustration.
The most effective
managers, in contrast, learn that criticism and threats produce
undesirable side effects, which in time lead to lower performance.
They learn that the best way to achieve better results is to
develop, empower and motivate their employees so that they, in turn,
will be both able and willing to produce the results expected of them.
If performance fails to meet expectations, the A managers take
immediate action to assist their employees in achieving the desired
results.
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Introduction
The
Right
and Wrong
Lessons
Working
Relations
Guidance
and Direction
Control
vs.
Empowerment
Getting
Worse with
Experience
Tolerating
Poor
Management
Performance
Teaching
Ineffective
Managers Prompting
Managers
On The Job Evaluating
Managerial
Leadership
Improvements |
