Page 154 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

The Real Job of Managers C141

The pretzel logic behind these two mindsets is “either I must be
really nice to employees or really mean.” Managers at winning em-
ployers know there is a third path, which may include “nice” and avoid
“mean” but, in truth, is about neither. It’s about something completely
different. It’s about creating a relationship where employees feel their
manager is genuinely interested in helping them be productive, giving
them ongoing feedback that may include an occasional course correc-
tion, and celebrating employee success even when it might mean the
employee will grow to be promoted into another job outside his or her
current department.
Victor Frankl, writing in his remarkable book, Man’s Search for
Meaning, describes his response to the horror of the concentration
camps: “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal
behavior.” We aren’t comparing poor workplaces to concentrations
camps (although some of the employees we’ve met at low-engagement
workplaces might), but it’s reasonable to argue that the odd, unpro-
ductive behavior we see from some employees is their way of trying to
make an “abnormal” situation more “normal.”
If we, as leaders, start behaving in ways that are in the spirit of win-
ning employers, we might be pleasantly surprised to see the response.
We’ve known this, of course, for many years. Douglas McGregor, one
of the first in our profession to challenge leaders about their assump-
tions and the way they manage people, said:

I become steadily more persuaded that perhaps the greatest dis-
parity between objective reality and managerial perceptions of it is
an underestimation of the potentialities of human beings for con-
tributions to organizational effectiveness. These potentialities are
not merely for increased expenditure of effort on limited jobs, but
for the exercise of ingenuity; creativity in problem solving; accep-
tance of responsibility; leadership in the relational sense; and de-
velopment of knowledge, skill, and judgment. When opportunities
are provided under appropriate conditions, managers are regularly
astonished to discover how much more people contribute than they
had believed. 6