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HR's Big Job? Help Managers Be Better Managers
Dec 19I read this post on Wednesdays Off about a bad manager that started this way:
My boss’s style of management is, shall we say, unique? His idea of building team work is to irritate each of us until we band together as a group , united by our common goal of making a voodoo doll in his image.
You need to read the rest of the story. It just gets better.
I know we have a lot of jobs to do in HR. But one of the most important is to help managers be better managers, not look for management workarounds because “our managers aren’t up to the task.”
UPDATE: Michelle Malay Carter at Mission Minded Management has a super post about this titled Managerial Leadership: What Doesn’t Get Measured, Doesn’t Get Done.
About the Author
Frank Roche
Frank started IFRACTAL over 7 years ago with Sarah Chambers. Together, they've created HR communications and HR software for some of the world's leading companies. Frank is also studying Flamenco guitar and origami.
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Frank,
Yes, I agree. I agree. And, I think HR’s time would be well spent helping the ORGANIZATION help managers be better managers by seeing that consistent, integrated systems, practices, and policies for managerial leadership, organization design, and talent management are in place.
Systems drive behavior and telegraph values. We can coach and train one “bad” manager at a time, and then send him back into a disfunctional system, and we will get more of the same.
Or we can spend our time at the system level to eliminate conflicts of interest and roadblocks to productive work, and watch everyone respond positively at once.
I’m OK. You’re OK. Let’s fix the system.
Regards,
Michelle Malay Carter
Michelle, you’re right, it’s the system that needs to get fixed. And it’s the system that allows bad managers to figure out workarounds. I’m all in favor in Up or Out for bad managers, but there has to be a process that supports being a good manager to make it work. Thanks for bringing that up. Excellent.
Why on this topic in particular do I feel like we are saying the same things that my B-scholl professors were saying in the late 1970s? have companies made so little progress?
Rick, it’s sad, huh? Here we are headed into 2008, and it’s the same old stuff, redux. I’m afraid bad managers abound in each new generation.
True enough, Frank. Bad managers abound in each new generation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We would go a long way toward fixing things by putting people in management jobs who have both the aptitude and desire for the work. We don’t do that. Mostly we promote good salespeople to sales manager, good accountants to accounting manager, etc. Then we need to help them through a transition that most often lasts over a year. We don’t do that. We figure that they can make one of the hardest transitions in business in a couple of days. We could provide training to help them learn the new tasks they will need to do. We could provide a peer support network. We could provide a development system that follows an apprentice training model. But we don’t. We make it sink or swim and let those bad managers take the whole team to the bottom with them.