There is so much stuff out there telling managers what they should do to be more effective, and how they can be better leaders of their people. This week, I thought I’d take a different approach, and suggest to managers how they might make sure that none of their people care.
It seems that many leaders will read an article or attend a seminar and them come back to the office and do the same thing they were doing before. They then find themselves stressed-out and miserable, as they can never seem to get a grip on their jobs or on leading their people. It seems something is lost in the transfer between reading or hearing something, and applying it to our own circumstances.
As for the people those managers are leading: they all start out with a different level of giving a crap, and they are then pushed towards the mean (or average) of “giving-a-crap-edness” of the culture around them. The great managers push that average line up, and inspire people to come along for the ride. Bad leaders, push the line down, and tacitly encourage people to give a crap about far fewer things, and at far lower a level.
So here are some things bad leaders do to ensure no one cares:
- Enable unnecessary bureaucracy. This is why many public sector organizations suffer with poor morale.
- Not dealing with performance issues. I’m not going to work all that hard for you if I know my peer is doing nothing, and not getting called on it.
- Not administering consequences. People need to know that both good and poor performance will be recognized and “rewarded” as such.
- Micro-managing. If you are going to redo all my work anyway, I’m not going to put much effort into it.
- Playing favorites. OK… maybe a meritocracy only exists in a University Professor’s textbook, but you’ve got to at least try to give the appearance of fairness.
- Reinforce a blame culture. People’s best work comes from taking risks, which they will not do, if they get crucified every time a small error is made.
There are lots of other ones, too, but leaders should start with these ones, and determine to what degree they do these things. The further away you are from these things, the more likely you are to be pushing that mean line of discretionary effort upwards.