Leaders: Don’t Let Your Public Distract You From Good Management

I used to get frustrated when I would hear someone try and distinguish between a ‘manager’ and a ‘leader’ as separate things, because I always thought of ‘leader’ as an adjective to describe a good manager. There are many managers, but few that I would call ‘leaders’.

A recent discussion on the Employee Engagement Network on the ‘Biggest Mistake of Leaders’ got me thinking about this topic again, and why there are such different opinions on how to engage a work force.

To me, the discussion came down to two opposing views:

‘Individualization’ – Leaders that are successful at engaging their employees learn to see the world through the lens of each employee that defines their needs and values.
‘Commonality’ – Engagement will come by a leader recognizing what common needs and values people have, and leverage those to motivate an organization.

This debate reminded me of a quote that I will attribute to colleague Omer, but he claims it is originally Covey (but I can find no such quote from him, so Omer gets the nod): “Managers leverage your unique talents. Leaders tap into our common desires, hopes, dreams, aspirations.” Importantly, Omer suggests that the key words above are actually a superset for the leader since they are still a manager as well. I thought about this a lot as I tried to reconcile the two points of view, both of which having apparent merit.

So lets –for the purpose of this discussion– make a distinction between ‘leader’ and ‘manager’ as follows: I often see ‘leader‘ as referencing senior executive, while a ‘manager‘ is often associated with lower echelons like the ‘first-line manager’ who is someone leading those who have no reports themselves.

In this situation, what is the difference between the (senior-)’leader’ and the (first-line-)’manager’?

Their Public

For the manager, their public and their direct reports are one and the same. There isn’t a separate group of people who recognize the manager as their leader, but do not have a day-to-day interaction with this person.

As anyone who has experienced a progression beyond first-line manager to higher levels of leadership will attest, there is a different kind of relationship that exists between the leader and those beyond their own direct reports. These are people that may occasionally look to the leader for guidance and validation, but spend most of their time interacting with an agent of that leader (their manager).

I characterize this group of people beyond the leader’s direct reports as their ‘public‘. For example, a senior manager with 15 first-line manager reports, each of which having ~10 employees, has a ‘public’ = 150-15 = 135 (for the moment, we will ignore the increased complexity created my ‘matrix’-style organizations). 135 people who are executing on the Sr. Manager’s wishes, but don’t necessarily know them via a personal relationship. As you go up yet another level, this usually increases by a factor of ~15-20.

As this public grows, it requires new skills to be developed by the leader to successfully motive the workforce. Clearly the 1-on-1 attention that a manager can give to their reports to create engagement is not even an option for a senior leader with a sizeable public. This problem becomes more acute as more levels are created, which is why a tipping point in organizations is often discussed at around 150 employees. Skip-a-level sessions can bring back a bit of this 1-on-1 interaction, but they are necessarily infrequent due to the demands placed on a senior leader.

Much like in politics, being able to read the public, and create a platform that the public can rally behind, becomes a key skill of a leader. This can be characterized as the ‘commonality‘ approach that was one side of the engagement debate. It is an important and necessary skill. The leader then has to struggle with how much time is spent in front of their public, and how much time is spent motivating their direct reports.

But it does not absolve the effective leader from ‘individualization’!

What I get most from Omer/Covey’s quote is that the engaging leader has to take both approaches (commonality & individualization) to fully engaging their work force.

One of the key responsibilities of the leader is as a role model. If they want their own reports to get the best out of their people, they have to continue the behaviours that made them exceptional managers when they resided lower on the totem pole. If the leader gets sloppy with their direct reports, this will translate downward in the organization as well.

In closing, the leader has a great opportunity to influence their organizations in two ways: 1) via their influence on their public and 2) by setting the example for their direct reports to follow and pass down the chain.

Employee Surveys, Why Bother?

The annual Employee Survey –often a kitchen sink of questions to address the agendas of HR, marketing, communications and senior leadership– can be a time consuming affair for those involved, slicing-and-dicing results by role, region, tenure, sex, customer contact, organizational structure, etc., and all the resulting work disseminating those results.

All that work can give you the false impression that something is actually being done to improve things.

Executives: “We expend a lot of resources on this every year, and nothing changes, why bother?”

Employees: “I do this survey every year, and I never see anything change as a result, why bother?”

Great questions!

Being in the ‘engagement business’ I have given a lot of thought to, not only to how these surveys are constructed, but to their overall role in ‘engagement’ in particular:

1) If it Won’t Lead to Action, Don’t Bother

You already have lots of other indicators of the health of your business (or lack thereof); take a look at your margins, turn-over, absenteeism, revenue, or any other metric that you have associated with business success, to give you a good indication of how ‘engaged’ your employees (and customers) are. Creating yet another measurement, without corresponding outcomes, will just lead to more frustration in your workforce, and more work for the people that have to slice-and-dice this data.

2) If You Can’t Determine Engagement on a Work Group Level, Don’t Bother

The majority of the contributors to employee engagement lie within the employee-manager & peer-peer relationships of individual teams. If there is no opportunity via the survey to identify teams (and managers) that have fostered an environment for high engagement, you have lost the ability to hold anyone accountable for improving it. You are actually back to the condition shown in #1 above (no opportunity for action).

3) If it Takes Longer than 10 Minutes, Don’t Bother

A survey that takes 30 minutes or more to administer leads to too much data to reasonably analyze, and becomes too onerous to apply more than once a year. Engagement level can be a great indicator of present productivity, but if the granularity is ‘every 12 months’ or more, you can’t possibly reinforce any behaviours that would improve it. It becomes as inert as the annual performance review, where a manager discusses with the employee how he/she has performed for entire year. If you want something to actually happen, you need to shorten the feedback loop between action & feedback.

So Why Bother?

As you can probably tell, I am not 100% convinced on the survey approach, but it can be a useful tool if the cautions above are considered. If you fundamentally believe –as I do– that engagement has a direct correlation with business performance, you may be satisfied with measuring other business metrics on a team level, with the knowledge that high performing teams are highly engaged teams. If you aren’t convinced, do a survey and see this correlation for yourself. This is also recommended if you are worried your other performance metrics may be on shaky ground, or if you want to get an early look at what next quarter might look like… you might.