Jeff, one of my mentors in the field of Emotional Intelligence assessments, recently had an epiphany while conducting a workshop for a client. One of the exercises during the workshop was to ask participants to use one-word adjectives to describe how their “best” boss, as well as their “worst” boss, made them feel. Not surprisingly, he got the following results … valued, appreciated, trusted, supported, etc. versus worthless, stupid, angry, unappreciated, etc.
It was then when Jeff decided to go off script and, just out of curiosity, asked the participants how their “average” bosses made them feel. The word most often used was “indifferent” and here’s Jeff’s epiphany …
… organizations too often focus their efforts on improving poor managers while “good enough” managers are the much bigger problem.
Think about it! If you’re the leader of an organization with multiple levels of management and your people described the manager leading their team as “indifferent”, how would that make you feel? How do you think it makes the team members feel? Given the 80/20 rule (where on average only 20% of your managers are top performers and 80% are average) wouldn’t/shouldn’t alarm bells start going off knowing that 80% of your managers are considered to have minimal or no positive effect on the people they lead? Stack that against these two recent findings:
- 94 percent of employees in workplaces with quite good to very good management relations are significantly more satisfied and, thus, are more engaged and productive. (McKinsey Quarterly – September 22, 2020)
- Recent surveys indicate between 55 and 65 percent of employees are currently looking for a new job and two of the top reasons for leaving (no surprise) are the corporate culture and poor leadership. (Forbes – July 28, 2021)
Jeff subsequently shared his experience with a number of us and Ed, another of Jeff’s mentees, had this to add, “Average managers are worse than poor managers. If a manager is known as being a poor leader, people normally can find workarounds and eventually (hopefully) the poor manager will be asked to exit the company. However, if the manager is average, what do you do with that? They just kind of hang around. Never bad enough to be terminated, but not doing enough to truly inspire their people and we all know uninspired employees produce uninspired results and that is a tremendous cost to organizations.”
But, here’s the good news. Instead of investing in efforts to make a poor manager into an average manager, move them into an alternative career path (inside or out of the company) and instead invest in making your average managers into ones who will inspire next-level performance out of their employees. You’ll get a much bigger return for your investment.
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