3.2 Management roles and behaviours

Organisations that value the knowledge, experience and commitment of their employees are shifting towards a participative and distributed approach to managing. Often described as a ‘coaching style’ of management, it involves a firm transition from the micro-level control and supervision of employee tasks and performance to partnership based on a shared understanding of what needs to be done and how it is to be achieved. Line managers who adopt a coaching style provide employees with regular and timely feedback, recognition of their achievements, clarity of objectives and practical assistance in problem solving and improvement. They facilitate individual learning and development, and actively encourage employee engagement in innovation and improvement activities.

Consider these questions:

There is ample evidence to suggest that in most workplaces, formal appraisal processes have little impact in performance improvement. More often than not, they destroy it. The cyclical appraisal is little more than a ‘tick-box’ exercise, poorly understood by line managers and regarded with apprehension by appraisees.

Blame cultures are still remarkably common. They lead to concealment, risk aversion and sometimes to bullying, so pose a significant corporate risk.

What you measure is what you get. But it’s much easier to measure things that can be recorded on spreadsheets rather than those vital but intangible assets like co-operation, creativity and commitment. KPIs and targets have a way of creating perverse behaviours, distracting management attention from what should be done to what can be measured. Innovation and improvement become luxuries.

GE Mining is one example of a company moving away from performance management based on individual rankings (for which GE was famous under Jack Welch), towards mutual accountability, trust and a commitment to delivering for each other. GE Mining’s aspiration is for a culture that will help its adaptation to a changing workforce and changing markets, enabling it to offer a unique proposition based on advanced technology and integrated customer service. For such companies this involves jettisoning many aspects of traditional culture and practice, and creating an entrepreneurial ‘start-up’ ethos which includes a radically different approach to performance improvement:

Performance Improvement Regular improvement meetings Coaching conversations Learning lessons – not blaming Duty of candour – employees are expected to challenge Team reflection Incentivising collaborative behaviours Facilitating participation in innovation and improvement activities

Performance improvement occurs when the coach provides a safe environment for creativity and risk taking. Mistakes must be viewed as lessons learned and setbacks are opportunities for development, providing employees with the confidence to learn and develop.

Changing the mindset and behaviours of some line managers can be challenging, not least when their whole experience of managing is one where they’ve been expected to be in control. Delegation, empowerment and trust seem to weaken the authority, and status, of the manager. Re-orientating managers to their new coaching-centred role needs to be taken seriously by those leading change, and it needs to be recognised that some people will never make the change. Once an individual manager has been given every opportunity to embrace the new ways of working, if they remain obstinate it is often better to part company with them rather than risk the spread of their negativity to others.

When done well however, the change to a new role can lead to remarkable transformations.

Objectives
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