Managing Is Hard: Provide Needed Tools

City and town managers understand that organizational success is dependent upon having motivated and engaged employees – employees who are willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. These hard-working, passionate workers drive your municipality forward.

While we understand that the level of productivity in your municipality correlates directly to the level of employee engagement, both productivity and engagement are dependent upon having good front-line supervisors. Study after study shows that organizational excellence requires supervisors who are best at getting the most from their people.

Imagine what it would be like for your municipality to be experiencing:

• Productivity that trends upward.

• Workers who are motivated and engaged.

• Employees who constantly perform at exceptional levels.

• External job candidates who are lining up to join your organization.

• Communication that is open and honest.

• Employees who get along.

• Unions that are supportive.

Unfortunately, for many municipalities this is a dream. Supervisors focus their time on toxic employees who drain much of the energy and life out of the workplace and unions that defend them. And while supervisors are consumed with these non-performers, the star performers are ignored and often taken for granted – a recipe for disaster and a mistake many supervisors make.

Managing people is hard and complicated because we often spend so much time addressing the same problems repeatedly. Let’s face it, managers and supervisors spend too much of their precious time addressing the same problems, the same people.

These same managers lament that they squander 90 percent of their hours dealing with the bottom 10 percent of their workforce. When they are not counseling or disciplining them or somehow trying to compensate for them, they find themselves creating new, complicated, tamper proof systems and procedures or hiring redundant people to compensate for poor performers. In all my years in consulting, working with the Fortune 500 companies or municipalities, managers and supervisors regularly tell me how exasperated they are by trying to manage poorly performing employees. Why? Why do managers continue to do this? What was it that Einstein said about doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results?

STRATEGIES TO SUCCEED

Let’s look at some strategies for success. Focus on things that provide your municipality the biggest bang for their buck. Whether they are new innovations or services, your limited and precious time must be directed toward things that will generate the greatest benefit and value for your community.

The same principle must be applied when dealing with employees. Your top performing employees generate more productivity, better performance, new ideas, and they usually do it without turning the municipality and you upside down. Why upset everyone? Yet, these stars often get the least attention from their supervisors who are more focused on problem employees. This equation must be changed.

Managers need to reassess their thought processes. Stop trying to fix the unfixable. To be successful, managers and supervisors need to emphasize raising the bar in their departments and municipal government. When your focus and attention are directed toward your stars, you’ll find your organization soaring upward.

To make matters worse, we often show our best performers our appreciation by promoting them to become front-line supervisors or department heads, tossing them a few coins in the process. Then we throw them into the battle without providing the tools, training and guidance critical to managing well.

Municipalities are only as strong as their supervisors. It is here where most organizations break down. And without seasoning and knowledge, these new supervisors can make mistakes that hurt many organizations: make bad hires, tolerate poor performers, keep dead wood, avoid confrontation, say dumb things, get confused by employment laws, alienate the union and over-think and over-complicate things. Bottom line: These once promising performers become unprepared supervisors, never understanding how to deal with people and destined to fail.

As managers, you rightfully preach the importance of creating workplaces where talent is developed, appreciated and respected. You know that in such an environment performance and retention soar. Putting supervisors on the line without training is like building a sand castle at low tide. It will stand for a while, but we all know what happens when the first wave hits.

NOT AUTOMATIC

Knowing how to supervise is not something that naturally comes to people. It is learned and developed and with good training, lots of coaching and mentoring, along with experience and time, one can become good at it. It takes a lot of time to develop a new supervisor but it takes even more time to deal with the effects of poor management.

Managing people is about forging strong relationships with your staff and being able to engage in honest, genuine conversations with them. Only when people believe in their boss will they follow her or him. Surveys consistently show that the relationship between supervisors and workers can make or break an organization. In fact, strong front line supervisors, more than the manager or other top-level department heads, is the most critical factor in engaging their workforce.

Management development initiatives must emphasize coaching, counseling and relationships. Credibility and caring are two essential ingredients in managerial effectiveness. Supervisors must understand that they can only gain their employees’ trust over time through forging strong relationships. When employees firmly believe their boss genuinely cares about them, then and only then will they be willing to follow. When front line supervisors develop functional expertise and relational competence, then municipalities hum.

But how can you ensure that your training efforts will be successful? To begin, follow a few basic steps:

1. Training must be relevant. Theoretical approaches often miss the mark. New supervisors should understand the “whys” and the theories behind the training, but more importantly, they need to understand the “how to.” How are they going to apply what they just learned? When are they going to apply it? And, when they try it, what can they expect the results to be? If training isn’t “real,” it won’t be used.

2. Training should be linked to organizational strategies and day-to-day behavior. This gets back to the issue of relevance. Learning for the sake of learning is good, but will it help the supervisor do the job better today and tomorrow? Will it benefit the organization today and tomorrow? What is learned in the classroom must be relevant and immediately applicable. If the supervisor can’t use the information right away, studies show that it will be forgotten.

3. Training must be followed up with on-the-job coaching and support. If managers do not reinforce what is learned in the classroom, the learned behaviors will be extinguished. Supervisors often leave the classroom motivated and eager to “try out” what they just learned. However, without ongoing support and reinforcement, supervisors often revert back to their comfort zones and “do things the way we always have.” For this reason, the new supervisor’s boss must play an active role in training each new supervisor.

4. The manager must also actively support the training efforts. In most cases, the manager should attend the trainings. If supervisors believe it is not important enough for “the big boss” to be there, it probably is not important at all.

5. Performance appraisals should be used to hold managers and supervisors accountable for applying principles learned in these sessions. If you are not going to incorporate what you’ve learned in the training session, why attend the training? By holding department managers and supervisors accountable, there will be a greater likelihood of application.

6. Training must build around organizational objectives. This makes training more relevant and shows supervisors the importance of their new skills.

7. Include the union. By inviting union leaders into the training, you can begin to break down any “us versus them” mentality that may exist and forge a stronger, positive partnership.

As we’ve previously stated, managing is hard. By providing your supervisors ongoing training and coaching, they will immediately be more effective in their jobs, adding real value to the municipality. Performance will improve. Better decisions will be made. Tough employee issues, including attitude, performance and behavior will be resolved faster. And supervisors will be more comfortable providing their employees honest feedback, praise and recognition.

The issue is simple. Managing does not have to be a struggle or complicated as long as you have competent, well-trained front-line supervisors.