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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Manager Tools.
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This is Sarah and I'm mark.
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Today's podcast 3 Current Modern Management Scams,
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Part 1 of 2 as always, our content has been crafted by humans and is now certified by the proudly Human Corporation. The questions this cast answers are how can I tell what popular management guidance to follow? What is Manager Tool's opinion of generational manager? Should I have a dialogue with my directs when I give negative feedback? Are engagement surveys a good idea?
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If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Every year we hear the exact same thing from attendees of the Effective Manager Conference. What comes next? Well, the answer is the Effective Senior Manager Conference. And the next one is happening March 12th in Austin. This isn't a repeat of what you've already learned. It's the next step level. The same practical, actionable, no nonsense guidance that you've come to expect from Manager Tools. Built specifically for senior managers ready to tackle bigger challenges and lead at a higher level. If you've been wondering what comes after the Effective Manager Conference, this is it. Visit manager-tools.com austinesmc that's a u s t I n e ESMC to learn more and secure your spot today. So today we are talking about some current common management scams, essentially, and for those folks who've been listening to us for a while is going to be a bit of a compendium of some of the guidance that you've maybe heard in other podcasts. I love that we're releasing it today because we have so many new people part of the community who haven't found this guidance yet or don't know this guidance yet. And now that we've got like 2,000 podcasts, finding all of those individual podcasts is going to be trickier for those individuals. So today we're just going to bring together three of those ideas that that for some of you might be familiar, but some of you might be new and different.
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B
And if they get touched by these, they can dig into the other podcast, particularly Engagement, which I think I mentioned in this cast. We wrote a hundred thousand words on engagement, even though we hate it.
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Exactly, exactly.
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So basically, management scams are inevitable. There's no way around it. There's two reasons for them. First, the vast majority of people who write about management don't know what they're talking about either they're a 25 year old who's just starting their career, has a social media outlet for giving advice, which is inevitably bad, and they might say they learned about it in school, but they did not learn about it in an undergraduate program because management in terms of how managers manage people is not taught. It's not even taught in MBA programs either. It's not taught in psychology, it's not taught in organizational theory because the professors don't know anything about it. Or the other thing is they're a company whose business it is to sell new management training to large companies who buy training.
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A
And I think actually when you say that, Mark, they're a company, I think it might surprise people to realize that big management training companies really don't know anything about management. But folks, they don't.
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They don't.
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Their goal is not to learn more about, understand more about, delve into management. They're looking to meet their next quarter's revenue and profit numbers and therefore they will latch on to any idea that they think that they can sell to their clients, irrespective of the underlying principles and the foundations and whether or not it works for frankly. But that's not their role. Their role isn't to figure out whether or not what they're saying works. It's to sell things people will buy.
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B
Yes, exactly. And the second reason is that large companies must buy management training but also know nothing about management. They haven't studied it. They don't do studies of what works in their company or doesn't. In fact, the closest thing to it is engagement. And as you'll see, they don't use the engagement results in any way that's useful or professional. So what they do, what big companies do when they're thinking about buying management training is they use social proof to use something that other companies have already bought. And that's easy if you're. I don't mean to be negative to hr, but HR happens to be the one that actions this stuff so often that makes it much easier to sell it internally if other companies are buying it. And that's why we see these management trends. Those other companies also didn't really know what they were doing. But once one company trumpets their success, and they will, even though almost no companies ask managers about whether or not after they went to training that they used the training and that in fact worked. So the idea that it's success is really vague. And frankly, why wouldn't they say it was successful just to justify their own investment, no offense. And so other companies more easily can sell the same investment to their leadership. Now I use social proof because that's an important psychological concept, but it might, might also be called more pejoratively, the bandwagon effect. Hey, they're doing it, so we're going to do it. Which is not a way to distinguish yourself. Not a way to differentiate yourself, not a way to reinforce your own culture, which everybody says they have their own culture, which you can find on their website, which of course is not their culture. But it's just easier to do what other people are doing.
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Well. And I might also say, Mark, if another really big, really well respected firm is doing something and you are a smaller firm and you don't have the maybe time or the money, whatever it may be, to invest in figuring out what the right thing is, it's really easy to say, well, they're kind of a big deal. They're doing it. If they're doing it, it must work.
- [06:09]
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Yeah. In fact, those management training companies target them specifically at big companies because as Willie Sutton said when he was asked, why do you rob banks? He says, because that's where the money is. That's why they go after big companies because their programs take big money costs, big money investments to do it. And a lot of small companies should not be doing those things because they don't have the infrastructure to support the kind of things that the management training suggests and they don't have a big enough HR department to help those managers implement the guidance and so on. So it's just terrible. And folks, this has been going on for over half a century. So in this guidance we're going to highlight the three biggest management training scams. By the way, scam is probably a little bit of a electric word. You could call them myths that you want, if you want. I call them scams because these people ought to know better. And in many cases they do. A lot of these big manager training companies, by the way, they don't teach some of this stuff anymore. They're on to the next thing. They don't want to train the next thing. They want all of their people training the new thing so they don't have any other people sitting around waiting to train the old thing.
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Yeah, that's exactly it.
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And we're also going to talk about what you should do if you are trained on them by your company or you read a book where these scams are touted, if you will.
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A
Yeah. So our outline today, we got three things for you. First off, scam number one, generational management. Scam number two, engagement. And scam number three, feedback, dialogue and conversations. So let's start with generational management. And so, folks, just to be clear, generational management teaches managers to manage people differently based on their age. Group. The more accepted formal definition, if you will, is the practice of tailoring leadership styles to accommodate diverse values, communication preferences, and work styles of different age cohorts. Baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, et cetera.
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Exactly. And folks, generational management is a total scam. It's totally false and it's ugly, frankly. Okay? It attempts to group people based on age and then tell managers how they should manage all those people in any one of those groups in similar ways. Folks, this is rank discrimination. As we have said for 20 years, managers manage individuals. How would you feel if somebody says, well, I'm. I. I've said this before in front of groups and people always get it really quickly. What if somebody said you're a new hire to a manager and the manager brings you in? Let's say you're a woman or a person of color, and they say, hey, look, I've had some experience in managing women before and because you're from that group, I'll be managing you just like I've managed all the other women who have worked for me. Wouldn't that immediately bother you ethically and also insult you personally?
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Oh, yeah, both. Yes, all the time.
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You're smart enough to know that you expect to be managed as an individual. And a manager who says, I'm going to manage you based on your gender, your race, your skin color, or your age is wrong. Morally and ethically wrong.
- [09:25]
A
Absolutely. Folks. There are two important principles that generational management essentially violates. The first is really, really simple. A belief that people are actually different based on when they were born. So? So, for example, you've probably heard that millennials and Gen Z feel differently about the workplace than previous generations did. Well, you may also recognize, if you've heard these things, some phrases about these younger, if you will, generations. So, for example, Gen Z want their professional lives to be more closely aligned with their personal values. Or millennials want more work family balance than their parents did. Or Gen Z wants more chance for advancement and professional growth. You've heard all these things. Sad about the younger generation, whomever the younger generation may be at the time, but exactly, we throw them around.
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And this is how deeply you have been deceived by this scam. These are all phrases from what has now been changed. These are all phrases from a Wikipedia entry about the baby boom generation. The baby boom generation, when they were young, wanted these same things. Now, later in your career, you might start out your career thinking, I really do want more work, family balance. And then you get promoted a couple of times and you realize you're going to have to make some hard trade offs because you have a chance to become a very senior executive. And thanks to the money, you will be able to take care of your family and possibly your kids families for the rest of their lives. And so your viewpoint changes based on your relative success. These broad generalizing statements have been true about every generation that has ever come into the workplace. But generational management, touted extensively by the large management training and HR firms looking for fresh approaches to sell to their large clients, has always been incorrect and it always will be incorrect.
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A
Yeah. And folks, if that's not enough for you, you want more proof, consider this paraphrase from a letter to the edition of the New York Times.
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It's a letter to the editor.
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Oh, sorry, a letter to the editor. Sorry, A letter to the editor of the New York Times. And I quote, the young professional men of today want to come in late, want to take long lunches, want to leave early, and then expect rapid promotions as well. And that letter was printed in 1895.
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Yeah. So what is that? That's 135 years ago. How many generations is that? It's before the baby boom generation.
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Before the baby boomers? Yes.
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Yeah, yeah. The fact is folks, and when you think about this, you'll get it all 40 year olds have always thought all 20 year olds are stupid and entitled. And all 60 year olds have always thought that both groups were stupid and entitled. This is because of a real thing in psychology called the curse of knowledge. Once you learn something, you forget you ever didn't know it. And you then also assume that other peoples know it too. So you forget you didn't know it when you were 20. You assume everybody knows it, including the 20 year olds, even though that goes against the history of you not knowing it. But your memory has essentially papered over
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that you've forgotten how dumb you were.
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Yes, exactly. You don't like thinking about how dumb you were. Believe me, we've told stories on air about how dumb Mike and I were when we started our career. So when young people, all young people join organizations, they are seen as naive. And to be fair, to some degree that's true. If you've never worked in a large organization, you went to secondary school, maybe you went to college or university. Those things weren't large corporate organizations or large governmental or large academic organizations in terms of working on the business side of the university that you just attended. And again, this is only because their leaders, the 40 year olds, the 60 year olds, have forgotten how they. The. How naive they themselves were when they began their professional lives. Because it's easier to think. It's helpful. It's egotistically supportive to think, well, I've always known this. I mean, how could they not know that?
- [13:51]
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Yeah. And I mean, Mark, right now, this is kind of a tangential example, but I'm working right now with Win Morgan over at Veolia to help him train people on our effective manager and effective communicator content.
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Yeah, we've licensed him and doing train the trainer. You're doing train the trainer with him?
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Yeah, exactly. And oftentimes I'll find he explains something. Usually it's a series of steps. It's some sort of process. Or it's like a process. Exactly. Or it's instructions about the next activity. And he'll explain it in a way that it's clear to me, someone who knows the process deeply, it's clear to me he knows what he's talking about. But also simultaneously, it's clear to me that if he said those words to a person who was unfamiliar with the process, they would have no idea what he was talking about.
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Exactly.
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Because when you learn something so well, when you know a process so deeply, all of us have had this experience before. You tell someone and it's like, why can't you understand this thing? Like, I've said this like 14 times. Like, why are you still struggling? It's kind of that same concept.
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It's the curse of knowledge.
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You know it so well, you can't even remember a time when you didn't know what you know now.
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And so you can't imagine somebody else not knowing it.
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Exactly. Like, how do you. How are you asking that question? Really? Yeah, really. So what is our guidance for what you individuals ought to do when you are confronted with generational management, whether you learned about it searching for managerial guidance on your own or your company makes you attend some sort of training about it.
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Yeah.
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No. You cannot manage people based on their age any more than you can manage someone based on their gender or their skin color or their place of origin. Managing other people is about learning each individual's strengths and weaknesses and helping them become effective as an individual. Period.
- [15:58]
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There you go, folks. Generational management is a scam to be avoided. People are not different because of their age. They are different because they're individuals. It is the manager's responsibility, your responsibility, to learn about the individual by building a trusting relationship with that individual. And we recommend, obviously, we're going to be what's the word. We're going to be a little bit selfish here and say, and by the way, when we developed all this stuff, we didn't know that generational management would come into being. But it's a perfect foil for the Manager Tools approach which is you focus on the individual. We recommend you do that by using Manager Tools one on ones to get to know your people and develop a trusting relationship. Trust is the single biggest indicator, single biggest metric in terms of managerial effectiveness. Results in retention. As trust goes up, results and retention go up. And you must learn about them as a person and not as a member of a group. We strongly recommend you listen to our Career Tools hall of fame cast called Managing Culture Cultural Diversity the Windy Curve where we talk about this and we give you statistics about why people believe things about people in other countries, which is just not true. But, but the statistics suggest it might be true, when in fact it is not.
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Exactly over here at Manager Tools, we have always believed that great management is a fundamentally human skill and now we've got a certification to prove it. Manager Tools is officially purely human Certified, meaning every framework, every tool and every recommendation we deliver comes from real human experience and expertise. No AI generated advice, just proven people first management guidance trusted by professionals in over 180 countries. That is the Manager Tools standard and now it's certified. You can learn more about us@manager-tools.com so now we're going to go into scam number two, engagement. Now folks, the Employee Engagement Movement. Something that we have many, many podcasts about and we'll link to them in this guide. The Employee Engagement Movement started with an academic paper by psychologist William Kahn in 1990. You might think that with the significance which is paid to engagement today, that this was a large study done on numerous professional employees. However, unfortunately, as with the start of many other of these management trends, Professor Kahn's work had very little grounding in corporate organizations.
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Again folks, for the record, this is Mark. I did all of this research myself. I dug through all of the history of all of the papers written on engagement. I bet you if you ask a thousand executives who have touted and then therefore used engagement in their organizations, they have never heard the name. William Kahn.
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Agreed.
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And that's. That should be an indicator. That should be an indicator. His original paper was a theory, the basis of which is sound in our opinion, that the level of engagement employees had at work made a difference in their effectiveness. Now I think what you would find out is if they were effective, they felt more engaged, just like we teach, don't try to make your employees happy and hope that they'll become productive. Yes, it's true that there are a lot of trite phrases out there which say happy employees are more productive than unhappy employees. That's true, but it gets the cause and effect backwards. Productive employees are happier than unproductive employees. And your job is to drive them productivity. And since your job is not to manage the emotional state of your directs, you're supposed to teach them, help them learn how to be happy from their productiveness. In the same way here, as I said, somebody who's productive is going to be more. It's going to feel more engaged to the organization. It's a bit like the housing crisis of 2008, which most people who have studied it know. The origins of it were the idea among governmental employees that since owning a home is a very good indicator of someone who is middle class. And I'm not, by the way, I'm not just talking about the middle class in the usa, where Sarah and I are, but rather there's a general belief that middle class, the economic middle class in countries, is the reason why the economy does so well. The building of a middle class has been huge to Mexico. Mexico's improvement in the last 50 years has been incredible because people have gotten to the middle class and they've started being able to buy their own homes. So in the US Government, there was an idea that, well, if homes are, are a good indication of middle class, why don't we make it easier for people to buy homes? In fact, at the time, what they did was they changed the discussion, the vocabulary around credit worthiness, from saying someone had a risky or below standard, a poor credit score, or they were a poor credit risk. They literally changed that to a phrase that is sort of value neutral called subprime. Okay. By the way, if you're, if you hear somebody say subprime, that means loaning to someone who doesn't meet the accepted standard for whatever they're borrowing money for. So the idea was, let's get these people homes, and then of course, we will have made them middle class and that will be beneficial to the, to the country and to the world, frankly. Unfortunately, what happened was since the home industry had been built on, you really have to have a good credit rating to buy a home because you're going to be paying for it for 30 years. If you lower your credit standards, you massively increase the number of defaults on those loans that happen. And that's what led to 2008 debate. It's when you put engagement before productivity or happiness, before productivity or home ownership, before middle class, the standard of being in the middle class. You put the cart before the horse and you end up creating real, real problems. Nevertheless, this start of the engagement concept, you might think, well, there was some, there was some significant corporate input or there was some studies done on corporations and so on. Now you'd be mistaken. The start of engagement was tested on 12 camp counselors and staff and 12, only 12 employees of an architectural firm which was privately owned and small. Okay, he interviewed them. Professor Kahn, who I still think highly of, interviewed them regarding their, quote, moments of engagement and disengagement from their work. He then applied his conclusions from those interviews to his beliefs regarding his theory, which to be fair to him is how many psychological concepts are initially tested and then grown. And his theory was that bringing one's whole self to work was necessary for them to engage effectively. We, by the way, have since learned that bringing your whole self to work is not, not an effective professional development process. But be that as it may, so
- [23:29]
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folks, that was essentially the beginning, the seed, if you will, of engagement from that beginning for the next decade. Other psychologists continue to evaluate, extend, and then further evaluate that theory.
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Yeah, that's how it works.
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And there appears to beyond this. Again, Mark did this research only one paper with a larger sample size attempting to validate Professor Kahn's work. There are many other scholarly articles regarding the theory. But as is often the case with these studies and papers, the authors reasonably attempted to combine their own psychological theories with Dr. Kahn's theories. Kahn's original ideas have somewhat gotten lost in the ongoing growth of the employee engagement theory. Though to be fair, this is again normal in psychological research.
- [24:28]
B
Yeah, it wasn't organizational research, it was psychological research. But starting at the turn of the century, employee engagement really started to take off. And to be fair, with a name like that, who doesn't like employees who are engaged, it stood a better chance than normal among fads. We all still love a good turn of phrase. What this meant was that outside of the academic world and the research going on, human resource consulting firms and HR management firms and HRIs, human resource information system platforms were free to create engagement businesses without being tied to a fully developed, fully measured and fully tested concept.
- [25:11]
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And folks, the only reason any of this is possible is because most corporate organizations, the customers, if you will, of the HR industry don't do exhaustive reviews of all the theories that underpin all of the products that they purchase. But they do like A marketable concept. And what company, going back to what Mark said a second ago, doesn't want your employees to be engaged? We're not monsters over here. Of course we want engaged employees.
- [25:42]
B
Yeah. And this is the genesis of the explosion of engagement roughly 25 years ago. Now, just the idea of engagement was popular, but firms who wanted to sell services around it were not tied to the original idea or the academic research in any way.
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A
No, no, absolutely not. Of course they weren't. They just took the idea and ran with it. Again, going back to what we said earlier, because their goal is to sell things. Two people and folks. The earliest significant player in this engagement industry was Gallup with their Q12 engagement survey. They started earlier than most, and in our opinion, their Q12 survey is probably the best we've seen. Gallup is known for their research, and we generally admire their work.
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We do.
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Since then, others in the engagement industry have created their own surveys measuring what they believe are the indicators or drivers of engagement.
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And this is one of our problems with the engagement industry. They all say they're measuring the same thing, engagement, but none of them are because they can't infringe on competitors. Surveys. And engagement is impossible to define unless you create something and then say, we believe this is what engagement is based on these questions. And so they're all right. Some have 12 questions, some have 25 questions. Some have 45 questions. Sadly, some have over a hundred. Think about that in terms of the time of day you have to spend filling out an engagement survey. I actually know of one company who they were so careful about the engagement survey, they would not let people do it on anything but their desktop computer or the laptop logged into the corporate system locally, rather not at home. And managers had to take 45 minutes out of the middle of their day to take the engagement survey. And their employees, too. And folks, they're all different questions. Some subtly, some not subtly at all. They literally say they're measuring the same thing and they don't ask the same questions. And in fact, again, they use wildly different questions. This can't all be engagement unless engagement is loosely defined. And so much the better for companies who are attempting to profit on it.
- [27:59]
A
Thanks, folks. Join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now, help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only. Please.