How To Improve The Front Lines

There is a recent study from Monster in which 38% of respondents called their boss "horrible" and 54% total gave their boss a 1-2 rating on a five-point scale, with five being the highest. In good (maybe?) news from that survey, 17% did rate their boss as "excellent."

It is common business journalism fodder to diss on bosses, and I am not here to do that. I have compassion for managers because it's challenging! It's one of the only roles in a company that has to manage two ways. Executives don't tend to manage up and execution-level workers don't manage down. Managing in two directions can be very fraught. I've been in those roles and I know!

So how can we better prepare leaders for this dual-natured role? Culture is founded in every day experiences and managers are the front lines of that.

Here, let me allow MY manager, Joe Terry , to briefly explain that:

How do we start?

1. Encourage connection individually and personally with team members: Compassion, empathy and understanding is the key to a powerful working relationship believe it or not! That's one of the biggest lessons of COVID: work isn't "the be-all and end-all" for everyone. You need to know who your people are beyond the deliverables to understand how the whole team will fit together.
2. Encourage flexibility: Flexibility is the perk of this decade, bar none. People want it. You should be a manager of outcomes, not activities. Managers who encourage and promote flexibility, and who realize the importance of a 4pm ballet recital, are the managers we remember and brag about to other friends.
3. Promote accountability: When the team at CULTURE PARTNERS works with clients, we hear a lot about a lack of accountability in their workplaces -- and the need to foster more. Accountability is a complicated topic, and easily misunderstood, but we help our clients inspire positive accountability to drive results.
4. Promote adaptability and resilience too: We have some research coming out shortly about this. We studied 243 organizations. We ranked them by eight attributes of culture, and then wanted to tie those attributes to long-term financial returns. One culture type stood out amongst the rest: It was adaptable cultures. More coming on this soon!

Elsewhere This Week

Here is a good article on Worklife about generational stereotypes:

I actually once wrote a book about all this!

Here's the essence of it: most ways we look at a specific generation at work are just stereotypes reinforced by lazy business media. It's ridiculous to label entire swaths of people based on the age bracket they happen to fall within. These are just ageist stereotypes hiding in a socially acceptable generational label. The generalizations hold us back from seeing people as people and advancing the purpose of our organizations. So stop that.

This is from Peter Cappelli at 美国宾夕法尼亚大学 - 沃顿商学院 :

Personally, at this point, I think "employee engagement" is a dead concept. You should want employees to find purpose and meaning in their work, absolutely. You should want managers to be bridging the gap between "the numbers" at the top and the tasks at the bottom. I just think what happened with employee engagement is that it became a way to quickly sell software that purported to "engage" your people. SaaS cannot engage people. Managers and relationships and the quality of the work can do that. Engagement is the extent to which one's focus and attention is on the task at hand. Fulfillment is about purpose. That's more powerful and impactful. Long live employee fulfillment.

And in line with some of my ideas at the top of this post, here's Rebecca Zucker of Next Step Partners? writing in Harvard Business Review about managerial burnout:

I am always surprised how we talk often in business about "candidate experience" and "employee experience" and "customer experience" but we never seem to discuss "manager experience," which drives so much of how the company feels day-to-day.

OK, one more. I had to rage this week at the new meme called "lazy girl jobs"

I like the antiwork movement, honestly. I think it's a good reminder that companies handle people wrongly and the people have a voice. But "lazy girl jobs" makes me want to scream. Why is this idea gendered at all? If anything, we should be lifting up young women as they start their careers and finding ways to empower them with jobs where they feel confident, but don't burn out. We can discuss burnout antidotes without poking fun at young women. Do better antiworkers.