We need to talk about People Managers | IMPROVING HR

THE BIG IDEA

As soon as you delve anywhere beneath the surface of research into employee engagement, you arrive at a very simple, profound truth:

The immediate manager makes the difference

Strategy, culture, organization, executive presence – they all have some bearing…

But let’s say it again, because it’s REALLY important

The immediate manager makes the difference

So, join me in my time machine as we revisit a conversation from the mid-2000s.

To set the stage, I was leading work on colleague engagement, including our annual survey and follow-up action planning. In a steering committee meeting, we were discussing how our focus would be on first-line manager accountability for follow-up. The term “People Manager” was being used liberally.

And, it was at this point that Nick spoke up: “They’re not People Managers! No-one is 100% a People Manager!”

There followed a semi-heated discussion of the pressures on Managers for productivity, for science (we were, after all a R&D organization), for meeting budgets, and on, and on, and on. The argument was that People Management – and the pursuit of being a stronger People Manager – was secondary to delivering results.

Nick had spoken the truth that we all knew was prevalent on the ground. Whether it was right, or justified that it be that way, it was the reality for the majority of managers in the organization.

Thing was, by all accounts, Nick was a GREAT People Manager; so natural that he had something of a blind spot about his own capabilities. His interjection in this conversation was not about resistance or refusal, it was about how to best position our tools, resources and training to help people become better People Managers, even if the organization culture didn’t recognize/support that as a priority.

When I think about HR’s relationship with People Managers, I think about that conversation… A lot.

You see, I think there is a prevailing belief-set in HR that can be summarized as:

We make up for broken managers

Now, it’s easy to see how this comes about. I mean, you only need to be involved in a handful of employee relations cases to see how a manager can do/say/decide things that are spectacularly inappropriate, and that’s before we even get into more structured issues such as discriminatory practices, etc.

There are, indeed, broken managers out there

(and, sadly, if you’re in HR, there’s a good chance you’ve had one ?? )

But, because HR tends to get called in to solve these situations when things have already got pretty thorny, we can quickly come to draw themes from relatively small numbers – and confirmation and recency biases make it all the worse. And, at the same time, in the regular run of things, we rarely get to work with great people managers at the same depth/intensity as we do the not-so-great.

Live that for long enough, and the belief grows:

We make up for broken managers

When this belief-set is particularly strong we may see “solutions” such as:

• Compliance based training (including signature of completion – to be used to exonerate the company in any future legal action)
• Mandatory, templated performance reviews
• Tight, rules-based recognition and reward structures
• Skip-level approval of local manager decisions
• Organization-wide action planning for people process improvement

In essence, when HR makes up for broken managers, we remove their latitude to manage – said differently, we don’t give them the opportunity to break things.

TRY THIS

In this belief-set, which clearly could be argued to share symptoms with over-protective parenting, we reduce the risk of employee grievances, lawsuits and chaotic outcomes

(and, oh, how we in HR love to avoid risk!)

but here’s the thing….

When we constrict all managers’ latitude in order to protect against broken managers, we shackle those managers who are so very far ahead in capability.

In essence, through a myopic focus on “bad apples”, we miss the tree and the blossom!

(as an aside here, I’ve spent 30 years in HR puzzled by the fact that HR professionals – who have, more often than not, never managed a single person – can have such strong opinions about People Managers… But that’s a different conversation for another time)

Here’s an acid test: when did you last see a People Manager being celebrated publicly in your organization simply for the fact of being a great people manager? And, if you did, how often does it happen?

The fact is that in any organization of a reasonable size, there’s going to be a bell curve of People Manager capability – idealized, it looks like this:

Now, from many years of going deep into employee engagement and performance data (and allowing for local variance) that curve actually looks closer to this:

Which, for the purposes of our discussion breaks down into 3 groups:

• Group A – The damaging rear (including our “bad apples”)
• Group B – The developable middle
• Group C – The way-ahead-of-anything-we-can-do leaders

The point here is not a theoretical analysis, it’s the fact that, if your HR culture is in the belief-set of “we make up for broken managers”, then you believe A is the majority of the curve – which just isn’t the case. Worse, your solutions fail to develop B, and negatively impact C.

Instead, we should be ensuring our focus is:

• Group A – turn it around or don’t be a People Manager
• Group B – here’s the support to do it well, and the learning to do it better
• Group C – teach us how to do it better, mentor B and A who want to improve

USE THIS

This belief set is so endemic in HR, that it can be hard to unravel. And doing so can lead to the kind of conversation I described earlier

(which, ultimately, was about Nick challenging us to find a better way to position the importance of people management)

I’ve found the most effective approach is to go at this through the means, rather than the ends, and that means looking at our processes.

In fact, I’m going to re-share a tool here that was originally discussed in BUSINESS FOCUS ( Aug 2022) , because it’ll work for our purposes here – reference that article, and then use this tool to examine each process that touches People Managers.

BONUS POINT! For each process identify where you can use group C to teach group B!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

“People leave managers, not companies” ~Buckingham, Coffman (First Break All The Rules, 1999)

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