"I am ultimately responsible for the quality of all teaching in
my district. And yet, everyday, in every classroom, there is a
teacher and there are students . . . and the door is shut."
Gerry C., a superintendent for a large public school district,
captures the manager's challenge perfectly: How can you get people
to do what you want them to do, when you are not there to tell them
to do it? Gerry knows what all great managers know: as a manager,
you might think that you have more control, but you don't. You
actually have less control than the people who report to you. Each
individual employee can decide what to do and what not to do. He
can decide the hows, the whens and the with whoms. For good or for
ill, he can make things happen.
You can't. You can't make anything happen. All you can do is
influence, motivate, berate or cajole in the hope that most of your
people will do what you ask of them. This isn't control. This is
remote control. And it is coupled, nonetheless, with all of the
accountability for the team's performance.
Your predicament is compounded by the fact that human beings are
messy. No matter how carefully you selected for certain talents,
each of your people arrived with his own style, his own needs and
his own motivations. There is nothing wrong with all this diversity
-- as many managers know, it is often a real benefit to have a team
of people who all look at the world in slightly different ways. But
this diversity does make your job significantly more complicated.
Not only do you have to manage by remote-control, but you have to
take into account that each employee will respond to your signals
in slightly, but importantly different ways.
If it's any consolation, great managers are in the tightest spot
of all. They are further hemmed in by two fervent beliefs. First, .
. . they believe that people don't change that much. They know that
they cannot force everyone in a particular role to do the job in
exactly the same way. They know that there is a limit to how much
each employee's different style, needs and motivation can be ground
down.
Second, they believe that an organization exists for a purpose
and that that purpose is performance -- with "performance" defined
as any outcome that is deemed valuable by either an external or
internal customer. In their view, the manager's most basic
responsibility is not to help each person grow. It is not to
provide an environment in which each person feels significant and
special. These are worthy methods, but, as great managers see it,
they are not the point. The point is to focus his people toward
performance. The manager is, and should be, totally responsible for
this. This explains why great managers are skeptical about handing
all authority down to their people. Allowing each person to make
all of his own decisions may well result in a team of fully
self-actualized employees, but it may not be a very productive
team.
So, this is their dilemma: The manager must retain control and
focus people on performance. But, he is bound by his belief that he
cannot force everyone to perform in the same way.
Their solution is as elegant as it is efficient: Define the
right outcomes and then let each person find his own route toward
those outcomes.
This solution may sound simple. But, study it more closely and
you can begin to see its power.
First, it resolves the great manager's dilemma. All of a sudden,
his two guiding beliefs -- that people are enduringly different and
that managers must focus people on the same performance -- are no
longer in conflict. They are now in harmony. In fact, they are
intertwined. The latter frees you up to capitalize on the former.
To focus people on performance, he must define the right outcomes
and he must stick to those outcomes religiously. But as soon as he
does that, as soon as he standardizes the required outcomes, he has
just avoided what he always knew was impossible anyway: forcing
everyone to follow the same path toward those outcomes.
Standardizing the ends prevents him from having to standardize the
means.
If a school superintendent can keep focused on his teachers'
student grades and ratings, then he need not waste time evaluating
them on the quality of their lesson plans or the orderliness of
their classrooms. If a hospitality manager can measure his
front-desk clerks' guest ratings and the repeat visits they
created, then he won't have to monitor how closely they followed
the pre-set welcome script. If the sales manager can define very
specifically the few outcomes he wants from his sales people, then
he can ignore how well they filled out their call-reporting
sheets.
Second, it is a supremely efficient solution. The most efficient
route that nature has found from point A to point B is rarely a
straight line. It is always the path of least resistance. Great
managers know that the most efficient way to turn someone's talent
into performance is to help him find his own path of least
resistance toward the desired outcomes.
With his mind firmly focused on the right outcomes, the great
sales manager can avoid the temptation of correcting each person's
selling style so that it fits the required mold. Instead, he can go
with each person's flow, smoothing a unique path toward the desired
result. If one salesperson closes through relationship building,
one through technical competence and detail-orientation, and
another through sheer persuasiveness, then the great sales manager
doesn't have to interfere . . . so long as quality sales are
made.
Third, it is a solution that encourages employees to take
responsibility. Great managers want each employee to feel a certain
tension, a tension to achieve. Defining the right outcomes creates
that tension. By defining, and more often than not, measuring the
required outcomes, great managers create an environment where each
employee feels that little thrill of pressure, that sense of being
out there by oneself with a very definite target. This kind of
environment will excite talented employees and scare away the ROAD
[Retired On Active Duty] warriors. It is the kind of environment
where a person must learn. He must learn the unique combination of
plays that work for him time and time again. He must learn how he
responds to pressure, how he builds trust with people, how he stays
focused, how and when he needs to rest. He must discover his own
paths of least resistance.
Defining the right outcomes does expect a lot of employees, but
there is probably no better way to nurture self-awareness and
self-reliance in your people.
Next week: Releasing each person's potential.