What’s missing from most job application packs?

You want to attract the best possible candidates for your vacancy.  You’ve prepared a detailed job description and person specification.  You’ve put together an attractive reward and benefits package.  You’ve included information about the organisation, its strategic vision, culture and achievements (or have this information easily accessible on the company website).  You’ve highlighted the exciting career prospects and development opportunities available to staff.  What could you possibly have forgotten?

There comes a stage in most people’s careers where the whole interview and selection process becomes a two-way thing.  It’s not just about the organisation choosing who they want to employ; job seekers also have their own list of essential and desirable factors that make for the ideal employer.  Job details are clearly important, as is information about the organisation and the context in which the job operates.  What tends to be missing, and is hard for job seekers to find for themselves, is information about the person who will be managing them.   There’s sometimes an indication of the job title, but unless this is a very senior post, it’s often nigh on impossible to find out much about the actual person.

It has been said that people leave managers not organisations; is it so unthinkable therefore that job hunters may want more than the briefest information about the one person who potentially has the power to make their working life a genuinely rewarding experience or a complete nightmare?  Is the opportunity to ask a few questions at the end of an interview really enough to reassure the applicant that they aren’t entrusting the future of their career to a complete psychopath?

It might perhaps be a step too far to expect the recruiting manager to complete an application form of the applicants’ own design (questions might include staff turnover rates, average number of sick days taken by team members and the amount per head invested in their development); similarly managers may be reluctant to provide references from two people they have managed.   At the very least however, the manager’s name should be provided, accompanied by a brief career history and perhaps the link to their LinkedIn profile. 

As a recruiter, you wouldn’t rely on sketchy information and trust to make such an important decision as who to appoint to your vacancy.  Why then do you think a job applicant would be satisfied with knowing next to nothing about the person who possibly has the most significant influence over the success or otherwise of their next career move?

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk



Five Great Articles About Bad Bosses

Talk to most people who have worked for any length of time, and they will have a bad boss story.  It seems that bad bosses are everywhere.  Perhaps it is just that the bad experiences stick in the memory, while good management is taken for granted and only exceptional cases get noticed.

No-one sets out to be a bad manager.  This collection of great articles highlights the consequences of getting things wrong and provides guidance on becoming a better manager.

1.     The Costs of Mistreating Employees by Frank Sonnenberg

Frank Sonnenberg is author of Managing with a Conscience: How to Improve Performance Through Integrity, Trust, and Commitment.  In this post he identifies the potential consequences of treating employees badly

2.     How to utterly destroy an employee’s work life by Tersea Amabile and Steven Kramer

Based on a long-term research project, the authors identify four ways that managers can leave you frustrated, unmotivated by the job

3.     Top 10 Excuses for Being a Lousy Manager by Dan McCarthy

Bad bosses often have a hard time taking ownership for their flaws.  Here are some of the most common excuses managers use to justify their behaviour

4.     Are you a bad boss? 7 Management Moves to Avoid

Inc. identifies seven of the ugliest management tactics in the business world, along with better ways to handle the challenges

5.     What Are Good Things About Having A Lousy Boss? by Bob Sutton

The author of Good Boss, Bad Boss brings the positive side of having a bad boss. 

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

Empowerment – fool’s gold or the real thing?

Over the years, the term empowerment has become part of everyday management language.  It has all the hallmarks of a winning concept: by giving individuals greater control over decisions that affect their work, they feel more engaged and fulfilled, and at the same time productivity and quality improve.  What’s not to love?

On closer inspection however, there’s a faint whiff of snake oil about the whole thing, managers giving back what they took away in the first place.  While of course there are individuals who find problem-solving and decision-making difficult at the best of times, many have no problem with these at all.  So, what robbed people of their natural abilities, and instilled in them instead a sense of learned helplessness? 

Empowerment is not just about adding vitality to a flagging workforce, with the implication that it is the workforce that needs to be fixed.  There is something rather patronising about a manager acting as Lord or Lady Bountiful bestowing on their people the power to use their own judgement, provided they stay well within the clearly defined limits of their pay grade. 

As well as thinking about how to empower staff therefore, managers should be focusing on eliminating the ways in which the organisation actively disempowers them.  There is little point introducing empowerment measures unless these are accompanied by a thorough overhaul of the organisational structures, policies and procedures that prevent individuals from using their judgement.   Without a culture where trust is clearly demonstrated, risk is acceptable and blame avoided, empowerment is likely to become yet another idea that sounds good in theory but achieves little in practice.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk



Five Great Management and Leadership Blogs

Over the last week, I have read many great blogs on leadership and management.  Here is a selection of ones that particularly caught my eye.

Conquering a Leadership Paradox by Kevin Eikenberry

When someone is promoted to a management position, it is likely this isn’t as a full-time manager/leader, regardless of what the job description says.  They still have other work to do too. It is likely these responsibilities are more closely connected to the individual’s past comfort level and expertise (using the skills that got them the promotion in the first place).

The Top 10 Reasons Lying Will Corrode Your Self-Esteem by Steven Berglas

The Russians have a saying: “With lies you may get ahead in the world – but you can never go back,”  What liars are not aware of is that using deceit to “make it” is the easy part; it’s staying on top that is hard, and enjoying one’s success, long-term, is hardest of all.

Counterfeit Leadership by Frank Sonnenberg

How do you spot a counterfeit leader? These are the individuals who spend much of their time playing politics, protecting their turf, and promoting their self-interests instead of addressing difficult issues, making tough decisions, and introducing the change that’s required to achieve long-term success.

Nine Reasons Managers Struggle by Michael McKinney

Former CEO and president of Verizon Wireless, Denny Strigl explores nine specific behaviours that leaders do and don’t do that make them serious performers, marginal performers, or failures.

The Joy of Leadership by Jon Mertz

If you are leading in a way consistent with your values system, then the expression of this consistency will shine through in your interactions and actions with others.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

Management clichés: management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things

Like most clichés, Peter Drucker’s much quoted distinction between management and leadership, has lost its original impact and to some extent meaning through repetition and being taken out of context.  In a recent interview in the New York Times, a successful entrepreneur and former senior executive at Dell, Microsoft and Apple described Drucker’s aphorism in a somewhat alarming way.  Admitting that he thought he was a lousy manager but a pretty good leader, he depicted management as ‘dotting the Is, crossing the Ts, giving reviews, doing all the HR stuff’, while leadership requires understanding of the broader context, which may lead to decisions contrary to company policy.  

This seems to be a rather impoverished view of what management is about, reducing it to little more than administering company policies and procedures.  Is that really what organisations expect and need from their managers?

Over the years, much has been written about the differences between leadership and management, resulting in a proliferation of conflicting opinions and models.  Leadership has perhaps become associated with high-status activities to do with strategy, change and innovation, while management is seen to be much more mundane, concerned with operational implementation issues.  While having a distinction may be useful in that it promotes greater understanding of the range of perspectives needed to run an organisation successfully, the problem arises when people try to separate leadership and management into distinct activities undertaken by completely different people.   

Management involves much more than just administering company policies; to use another of Drucker’s observations, “management’s concern and management’s responsibility are everything that affects the performance of the institution”.  In order to help the organisation achieve its strategic goals, managers must have an in-depth understanding of the broader context, and possess the ability to challenge existing ways of doing things.  So although management includes ‘doing all the HR stuff’, this is far from blindly following company policy and ensuring compliance.  It involves considerable leadership skill to motivate, inspire and engage people, which may occasionally mean using judgement to weigh up the risks involved in acting contrary to policy. 

So although it is clear that being a manager requires the use of leadership skills, can a leader be effective without management ability?  Some leaders may concentrate on creating and communicating the vision, while the interpretation and implementation of this, together with the day-to-day management of the organisation, is largely delegated to others.  The way these leaders manage their direct reports may be fundamentally intuitive rather than based on following set procedures.  This approach relies heavily on trust and respect for management, for without these there is a risk that the vision will never be realised and management will be forced into a Cinderella role, while leadership plays the Ugly Sister, full of self-importance and frankly rather ridiculous in its lack of understanding of the practicalities of life. 

Where effectiveness (doing the right things) and efficiency (doing things right) are both required for success, so are leadership and management, and in most cases, these cannot be divided into completely separate roles undertaken by separate people.   

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

A passion for management

In the past, when children were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, traditional responses would include becoming a doctor, train driver, pilot and even explorer or astronaut.  Our present fascination with celebrity has possibly moved the emphasis more onto becoming famous, whether as a pop-star, actor or perhaps just for being famous. 

In any decade though, it is unlikely that manager would have been any child’s career of choice.  Being a manager is something few aspire towards; it is something people become while doing something else.  Scores of dedicated nurses, enthusiastic IT boffins and successful salespeople take on management responsibility, not because they are passionate about the challenges it offers, but as a way of earning more and progressing their careers.  For others, being a manager is seen as a stepping-stone on the path to greatness – the dues you have to pay if you want to become a senior executive with all the power and perceived glamour that entails. 

Having taken a step onto the management ladder, people often find it is not always a comfortable experience.  They spend less time doing what they love, and more time being caught in the middle of the organisation, blamed by both those above and those below for all its ills. According to research by the Hay Group, many company directors in the UK believe middle management to be the single greatest barrier to achieving company objectives, while dissatisfaction with a manager is a major factor in employees looking for a new job.

Given all of this, it would understandable if people were less than passionate about being a manager; and yet passion is exactly what managers need if they want to succeed.  It takes passion to motivate, engage and get the best out of people, and a passion for success and delivering the organisation’s strategic goals is what senior executives need from their managers.  

It is difficult to be passionate about something if your focus is elsewhere.  Many managers see the people management aspects of their role as interruptions that get in the way of their real work, be that caring for patients, solving some technical problem or closing a sale with a new customer.  Similarly, understanding the wider context of what is happening in the organisation sometimes seems like a distraction that has little to do with the day job. 

Turning irritation into passion takes effort; it starts with paying attention to what’s happening around you and instead of looking for quick fixes, getting curious about what’s creating the problems in the first place.  Curiosity sparks interest, and from here genuine passion can be ignited.  Passionate managers are rare, but hugely influential.  Although being a manager may not have been your first career choice, becoming a passionate one is something to aspire towards.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

While we’re binning appraisal systems, let’s shred the SMART objectives too

Over the years, a compelling case for abandoning the formal performance appraisal system has been established.  Fred Nickols for example argues that it ‘devours staggering amounts of time and energy, depresses and demotivates people, destroys trust and teamwork and, adding insult to injury, it delivers little demonstrable value at great cost’. 

Less has been said on the subject of SMART objectives.   The setting and reviewing objectives is central not just to most appraisal schemes, but also to the wider field of performance management.  For years, managers have been encouraged to make sure objectives are SMART, and yet many fail to do so in one way or another.   While a widespread inability to set SMART objectives is not necessarily a reason for abandoning them altogether, it does raise the question of whether their use is as vital as is often stated.

What was intended as a helpful mnemonic has over time become blurred, with people disagreeing over the numerous versions of what the five letters actually stand for.  The A seems to attract the most variants, including attainable, appropriate, achievable, agreed, assignable, actionable, ambitious, aligned and aspirational.  But even the M, which most people accept stands for measurable, has alternative versions in circulation, including meaningful, motivational and manageable.   Some people favour the longer form SMARTER, adding to the confusion with even more permutations of meaning.  If SMART in itself is open to such wide interpretation, it can hardly be a reliable measure against which to judge objectives.

Another major problem with using SMART is that while it may have some application for something relatively small and self-contained, work often involves a level of complexity that cannot be captured by applying a simple formula.  Where objectives are set as part of a formal appraisal process, there is a temptation to condense them into a single sentence in order to fit the space available in the documentation.  This in effect reduces the objective to little more than a sound bite, which is unlikely to be sufficiently detailed to ensure accountability.

Organisations today face constant change and require people to be increasingly flexible.  Employees need to be much more agile, frequently checking the shifting expectations of a range of interested parties.  The setting and reviewing of simplistic SMART objectives fails to reflect this, particularly when part of an annual ritual of performance appraisal. 

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk