Are your Employees Over-managed and Under-led?
Are your employees over-managed and under-led? That describes the state of leadership in most of the organizations with which I have consulted over the past 20 years. It’s too bad.
I am not sure how we got this way. I think it’s from two generations of leaders taking too-much-to-heart the old adage: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I think we have lost sight of what the “it” in that sentence is supposed to refer to. As your high school English teacher used to say, the pronoun “it” in this case has a vague antecedent.
The Management Mistake of the Century
The “it” in that saying ought to refer to business processes—and only to processes—not to people. The management mistake of the century is that we have tried to manage employees by measuring and controlling them. And we’ve ignored processes in the process of managing employes. Is it any wonder that employee engagement is so low? No employee wants to be micro-managed. We’re trying to ride a horse backwards. Instead, what we need to do is manage processes and lead people.
I’m not making this stuff up. A lot of other consultants who are a lot wiser and better known than me have said similar things. If you want a wake-up call about leading people, read Peter Drucker’s brilliant book, Management Challenges of the Twenty-First Century. It should be on every leader’s book shelf. And not gathering dust there, either. Re-read it every six months until what Drucker says really sinks in.
The Biggest Question about Leadership and Management
In my management training workshops, I often ask participants, what is the biggest single question you would like to be able to answer about leadership and management? The most frequent response I get is, “How can we hold employees accountable for results?”
I used to believe that this was a legitimate question about the