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- [00:00]
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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 2 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 management? Should I have a dialogue with my directs when I give negative feedback? Are engagements surveys a good idea?
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If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. We know you're busy. Finding time to listen to every episode just isn't always realistic, and going back to find a specific piece of guidance can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. Manage youe Tools licensees never have that problem. Every time a new episode drops, we send them the full show notes directly to their inbox, complete with key takeaways and action items. They can review the highlights in minutes, forward relevant sections to their team, and keep a searchable archive right there when they need it. Email show notes are just one of the many powerful benefits that come with being a ManagerTools licensee. Visit us online today at manager-tools.com memberships to find out everything a license has to offer so how do we know that employees who say they're engaged actually are engaged? Well, I mean, you've probably guessed it by now folks. We don't. We don't. In many cases, the engagement industry surveys no longer ask how engaged the employee is. They only ask about what their workplace experience is and from that. Which again has to be different for all of the different surveys because you don't want to infringe on someone else's survey. From that, the survey then infers the employees level of again, this ill defined engagement.
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How convenient for the survey writer. Here's something else folks, and this should strike you. Engagement surveys don't discriminate based on job performance. When surveys are taken and processed and returned to the corporate client, it's all anonymous. You don't get to know whether your best employees feel engaged or your worst ones do or don't. So sure it's an assumption, but it's not data. And because you don't get individual responses, and we respect that from the point of anonymity if that's what you're trying to get to. Not that anonymity is always good and in this case I don't believe it is. It's not data. It really isn't data. It's an assumption is really what it boils down to.
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It's a problematic assumption because, I mean, if you got a really large team, yay, you, Not a problem. But if you have four employees, one very disgruntled employee who may be in or on their way to a performance improvement plan, and you would be delighted to be allowed to let that person go. For example, their survey results count for 25% of your engagement score. And now, despite the fact that you have three superstars who you personally hired and one poor performer whom you inherited from a manager that was not doing their job, by managing and holding that person accountable, your engagement score is low and you are expected to fix it.
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Exactly. And in most cases, you get the survey one time. If your team last week found out the project they're on has been canceled, you're very likely to be going to be saddled with engagement survey results which concern your bosses. And by the way, we say bosses because everyone up your chain of leadership or chain of authority will be able to see your results if they want to. As a dark aside, I hate to tell you most of them don't look, but they can if they want to. They knew the project was canceled. Nobody came down or said anything to the team or for the team on behalf of the company. But now that engagement survey says your team has low engagement, and so therefore that's a problem.
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And folks, I assure you that if you let us have more time, Mark and I could give you a barrage of reasons. We could just keep layering on all of these reasons that we disagree with engagement. Again, we've got tons of podcasts about it, so we've done this before. We could go on and on. But we will give you just one more nail in the coffin of engagement. In the hundreds of instances where managers in the manager tools community have told us of their experience, only one told us that because she had received high engagement scores from her team, she was lauded for her efforts and encouraged to share those efforts with others.
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That's just dark.
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Yeah.
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And I also have never heard of a company that says based on these scores. Here are some things we're going to help you with to help drive the engagement surveys. Basically, every manager that I've talked to does an engagement survey hoping that they get good scores. And on the whole manager tools, managers do better because they're engaged in one on ones. They give feedback, perhaps they're coaching, they delegate, and so on. And they have good trusting relationship with their directs, but they get no joy from that. They're simply lumped in with everybody else in their division. If there's one manager tools manager out of 15. Her results are not enough to raise the total of 16 managers. Averages that the director or senior director looks at or the senior manager looks at and they all get painted with the same brush.
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Yeah. And just to put a little finer point on it, folks, we've heard from a lot of managers in the manager tools community that they had really, really good engagement survey results. And I can even remember, I don't not sure who I was talking to one of them, they were asked how did you get these engagement survey results? And shared that it was through one on ones and feedback and coaching and delegation. And I'm sure the response that he got back was something to the, to the fact that, oh well, we're not doing that, right?
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We're not doing that.
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We're not doing that. No, no, no, we're not doing that. If that's how you got him, then no, we're not. We're not doing it.
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It's deflating. It's enormously deflating. And it makes you think, why should I pay attention to anything? No offense, hr, we love you. Why should I pay attention to anything HR says? HR champions an engagement survey. They get islands where people are really doing well. Nobody goes down and finds out and says, how can we share this with other people? Would you do a podcast with us? Would you do a lunch and learn with us? Would you do a town hall or you know, a small training thing? Maybe you could teach us where you got it and we could study it. Maybe we could share that. Not at one time. Out of Sarah, what do we guess? 10,000, 20,000? Manager tools managers have been involved in engaging surveys easily. Not one. And look. So based on the organization's responses to survey results, engagement surveys are not meant to help individual managers. They're meant to assess the organization's overall engagement, find those managers whose scores are low and put them on notice. But management doesn't happen as a group. Just like we talked about in the previous item, you don't manage people in a group. This is the exact same thing. Now that I think about it. It's literally saying, oh, you're all in our company, so we're going to think of you as a homogenous group. But that's like saying all 20 year olds are the same. Gosh, I've. I mean, I can think of some lieutenants. When I was in the army in my first duty assignment, Mike and I were assigned to the same unit in Hawaii. And if we had all been lumped together, I Mean, we all didn't know stuff. I was very naive at the time. I now know it. I actually learned it the hard way because I had a tough boss who told me I was naive repeatedly. And I realized why would I be expected to know what a colonel who's 40 year old knows when I'm only 22? But imagine all of us getting painted as well. You're not very good. I mean, I knew some really bad lieutenants. Mike, and I know Mike, if he's listening now, knows exactly the lieutenant I'm talking about. The idea that we would be compared to them is ludicrous. But in fact, their engagement scores would be lumped in with ours unless our boss took the time to go through all the engagement scores and talk about what worked and what didn't work with each individual. And that doesn't happen.
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Yeah, it doesn't happen. So the purpose of engagement surveys then is to root out these people that have low engagement and then essentially tell them that they need to have better or higher engagement while also simultaneously giving little to no guidance whatsoever on how to do that other than gaming the survey.
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I guess that's exactly right. Cynical. It's horrible.
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Exactly. So if engagement is so lauded, it's this powerful effect that we're all striving toward. Why wouldn't there be after actions meant to spread those good ideas that lead to engaged workers? And there's no answer to that because that doesn't happen.
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Yeah, we have extensive guidance in our multiple and long. And I know because I wrote them and I don't like engagement. We never did. And we apologize for the fact that we didn't address it until about five years ago, even though many managers were saying they wanted guidance. And the reason we didn't give the guidance is we have a general rule here that we do not tell people how to do things we don't recommend they do. We get that question all the time. Hey, I know you don't like this, but you guys are so good at coming up with actionable plans. Behavioral steps I can take. Can you tell me how to do it? And I write back, we don't give guidance on things we don't recommend you do. And I've had some people write back and say, I know, I know, but I really need some help. I said, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to be party to something that I believe will end poorly. I'm not going to make you more efficient at a bad thing. And I finally ended up writing them and I wrote in over a hundred thousand words, or close to a hundred thousand words about engagement in an annoying detail, so that you would have a roadmap. Because if you get an engagement survey, you do have to action it. So we talked about how specifically to handle every step of the process. And the answer can be boiled down to a few things. I'm not going to go into all of them here. Otherwise we'd have another a hundred thousand word podcast to follow shortly here, and it would be 12 or 15 cards. The first is you can't avoid the survey. But when you get your results, fight for as much detail out of the survey as you can. Even though we've had many people try that and they have been rarely able to get details about the survey. But when you get it, share it with your team and their teams. If you're a senior manager, if you're a director, senior director, vice president, and come up with a plan for working on it using our guidance. In fact, one of the pieces of guidance is we took one of our clients. They all remain an honest, but they were very kind to share the survey with it. And we went through every single question and said, if this happened to you, if you got a low score here, a high score here is. Here is exactly what to do. I think that particular podcast was like 15 or 20,000 words.
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Oh, yes, it was. I. I want to say it was eight parts. I could be exaggerating on that, but it was a lot. It was quite long.
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It was a lot. Yeah.
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All right, so that takes us then to scam number three, and probably my personal favorite scam if you.
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Oh, really? Engagement's my favorite because I hate it so much.
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Yeah. Scam number three, feedback, dialogue and conversations. So having a conversation with your direct as a form.
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Quote, unquote. Quote unquote.
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Quote unquote exactly.
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Conversation with your direct. Joey, air quotes there as a form
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of feedback has been popular for several years, but we've been gathering data about feedback for the past 20 plus years, and all of the data we've ever gathered do not support this idea that dialogue is the best approach. The idea here being to sit down with your direct and go over what they were thinking and why they chose to do what they did in a search for root causes and then hopefully change the way that they're thinking so that they won't make that kind of mistake again.
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Yeah. Now, by the way, folks, we have a phrase for this which is kind of funny because now we have two uses of this phrase. Those of you who have been to our effective executive conference or our effective senior manager conference have heard us talk about swimming upstream. Meaning find out what your boss is working on. Pay attention to your boss's calendar. Don't be surprised every quarter, and there are thousands, hundreds, probably millions of managers are surprised every quarter when they get a whole bunch of things from their boss that they need on short notice. You should know that he is preparing or preparing his boss for a quarterly management meeting, a quarterly operating review, a quarterly business review. And you should know those things because at the beginning of a calendar year, your fiscal year, every boss puts all those things on his or her calendar. So you. You can't over schedule on it because you're expected to be at that meeting and then before that meeting and after that meeting, there's all kinds of energy around it, and managers are always surprised. This happens all the time. Why is this always happening? Well, you haven't swam upstream yet and figured out that's in your boss's calendar, and you should have time in your calendar before and after those meetings when you can be ready to give him or her what they need and then respond to the questions they have gone coming out of the management meeting. That's one form of swimming upstream. This is another form, it's an individual one, where we say you need to swim upstream beyond your direct behaviors and learn what they were thinking and why they were thinking it. Figuring if you can figure out what they were thinking and why they were thinking it, you can turn that switch in a different direction, and then the downstream behavior will never happen again. Well, folks, let me tell you, we also have a podcast called you are not a psychologist. Okay, yes, there are some cases, particularly in the technical space, where root cause analysis is a good thing. But root cause analysis can take an hour or two or longer in some cases if you're involved in a big project. So we don't want to take ideas from root cause analysis, which is a deep dive into a particular situation, and try to apply that to the daily, regular, frequent feedback that directs need. I'll tell you something else, though, okay? This is what really ticks me off about feedback, dialogue, and conversations. Because when they talk about dialogue and conversations, they're only talking about negative feedback.
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Yeah, they are.
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Nobody suggests none of these people who are touting dialogue and conversation. They don't suggest you have a dialogue or a discussion or a conversation when we give positive feedback. That alone, folks, tells you all you need to know about this popular scam. They're only talking about negative feedback. Because they literally don't understand that feedback is both positive and negative. And it's just infuriating to me. It's like calling red green. It's just not. You just don't do that.
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Yeah.
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Nor do they have any clue, let alone any data, that positive feedback and we do is far more important than negative feedback. I've told this story before the NFL many years ago started showing, and I think we've talked about this in a couple of casts. Every single player, the morning after a game sits down with their coach and goes over a video of every single play they played with this incredible software that breaks it down, shows them themselves blown up on an 80 inch TV screen, high definition TV screen. And in the corner of the screen there's also a, a view of the entire play. What is known as the All22 camera that shows all 22 players on the field. And they go over every single play, every single movement of that person's body. Because that's a huge part of what football player, NFL players do. Okay, so they do that and they're given 90 minutes to do it, even though they probably only played about 11 minutes. So that's how detailed it is. And they go over every single thing. And the first couple of years that this technology came out, the NFL made it available to all the teams. The teams loved it, but the players hated it. And it's because the coaches decided that they would show the negatives. They would say, okay, here are the things, here are the things you have to correct. I want you to get better. Here are the things to correct. Players hated it. They started dreading the things because they were going to go in and be told all the things they did wrong. One team, and I'm told I, by the NFL, I cannot share who it was who later went on to win a Super bowl, shortly after they changed this, decided that they were going to do it differently because their players hated it, even though they were professionals and they should be interested in anything feedback related about their performance. And they changed it and said, no, we're going to focus on the posits. We're on going to focus, we're going to reinforce the things that you did right and you did well. Yes, we're going to talk about the negatives, but we're going to focus on the positives. And now that's what's done at all NFL teams. Do the people who want dialogue and conversation know this? No, they don't. Do they know how much more powerful positive feedback is than negative feedback? No, how do we know that they don't know? Because when they say feedback, they, they come up with a solution for only negative feedback. Sorry, little bit of a rant.
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No, that was a good rant. That was a good rant. And it reminded me of the fact that we have a podcast all about the NFL. I think it's the, it's called like the single best. The single best feedback organization. I don't know. I'm going to make sure it gets put in the mentioned. I cannot remember its name, but we have one all about.
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We, we did one just on the NFL. I know I've told yesterday a couple of times, anecdotally.
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Okay, yes, we did. We absolutely did.
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Especially if you want a little bit of. You might say, well, I'm not an NFL player. How does their experience relate to mine? I'll give you an example. There are 500 CEOs in the Fortune 500. These are the people that are widely thought of as the best manager slash executives in the world. There are only 32 starting left tackles in the NFL. You have to be very good as a left tackle to be a starting left tackle. You're in a smaller group than Fortune 500 CEOs. They live and die based on feedback. We should be paying attention to the systems and processes they use in terms of talking about their performance. And they go over every single play, every single week.
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Yeah, you want your organization to be the NFL folks. You don't want your organization to be track day at school. No offense to kids who are, who are doing track day, but also simultaneously, it's like, yeah, you're not the NFL. We get it. Yeah, we get it. Okay, so another thing or another, a reason that these feedback conversations are misguided is because you don't have the time to have this feedback conversation that takes what, 20 minutes every single time your direct makes a mistake. I mean, one of the biggest pieces of pushback we get when we talk about one on ones which are nothing more than a 30 minute conversation once a week between managers and each of their individual directs is, I don't have time for that. So you, you have time though, to have all of these 20 minute conversations with everybody every time they require feedback? No, you don't have time for that. No one has time for that. And in order for you to have time for feedback, which folks think back to, again, our NFL example, they cannot be on the field for 10 seconds without getting feedback about it. So feedback must be brief for no other reason than it should be frequent.
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Yes, exactly. I'll tell you something else about feedback conversation in terms of you don't have time to have that 20 minutes, I think it implies something or allows the inference of something which is very dangerous. I think what the pushback would be from some of the people who tout this scam is they would say this, well, I'm going to let them make the same mistake a bunch of times and when I've seen a pattern, I'm then going to have a 20 minute conversation with them. Okay, well, first of all, it's a lot harder to schedule a 20 minute conversation than it is to have a 15 second or a 10 second conversation. And by the way, if you doubt that feedback the manager tools way takes 10 or 15 seconds, Sarah and I are now going to role play the manager tools feedback model. I'll pretend to be her boss even though I'm not. She's the managing partner and she's going to be my direct and I'm going to give her some negative feedback because she missed a deadline. Hey Sarah, can I give you some feedback?
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Sure.
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When you missed that deadline, it slowed me down getting the stuff to boss my boss. Can you do that better next time?
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Yes, absolutely.
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Yeah. That didn't take even 15 seconds, I don't think. And I stumbled over at least one or two words. Okay, so if you do that every single time, you get four, five, six bites at that apple when your direct makes that mistake again and again and again. What's worse, if you wait until there's a pattern, your direct will think that you've been seeing him or her make mistakes repeatedly. You didn't care about them then and now you're going to have a conversation. Joey, air quotes about an issue. Joey, air quotes about something very important. Why spend 20 minutes in one lump sum which managers say they don't have for one on ones, for instance, rather than five or six or seven 10 or 15 second conversations telling your direct, I care about you, this wasn't done well. Can you do that differently next time? Now you might say, well, sometimes that doesn't work. Yes, sometimes. According to our data, it's 99.7% effective. So 0.3% of the time you're right. And you might have to do so something called systemic feedback, which we have a podcast for which I, in my 35 year career knowing about systemic feedback, have only have to use have only had to use six times. Which gives you some indication of how much time I've saved by not waiting until somebody had a pattern of six or seven instances before I have a 20 minute conversation with them. Look, there's something else here too. Discussions with your directs about their intent in the vast majority of cases are worthless. Why? Because people don't do things to screw things up intentionally. They make legitimate mistakes. They misunderstood something, they got something wrong, they tried to do X and ended up being not X for whatever reason. They're new. They're learning. Okay. Psychologist teaches, though, that if they had good intent before they made their mistake, if you then examine their intent, you reinforce the reasonable intents that led to the mistake, to the bad outcome. You're actually not responsible for your direct's intent or their motivation or their personality or their internal emotional state. You're responsible for the outcome of their work. If you review those reasonable intents when in fact the outcome was bad, it actually strengthens those intents because they seem valid to the direct at the time. And now you may think, oh, I disagree with that. But you'd be arguing, not with me, not with Sarah, not with manager Jules, but all of the psychological world. They don't recommend that you go over all the good intents somebody had because talking about them again reinforces them as good.
- [24:29]
A
Yeah. And that piece, Mark, is exactly why this one is my favorite scam. Because also my favorite podcast of ours is assume positive intent.
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Yes.
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And folks, your directs aren't out there trying to screw stuff up just to tick you off. They're not. They're doing it because they don't know it bothers you, or because they don't know any better, or because they were in a hurry and they made an accident, or it's just they're making a mistake. And when you go back over with them, all of these reasons, which were perfectly valid the first time, you just remind them of all of the reasons they did something that turned out poorly and now they feel like they did the right thing even though it was wrong anyway, which is just ridiculous. It's just. It's. It's nonsensical.
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Yeah.
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And. Yeah, that's why this one, for me is. Is the biggest one.
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B
I love that. I love connecting it to assume positive intent. We should put that in the mentions.
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A
Oh, my gosh. I've been. I've been feverishly scribbling down all of the things that we're saying so I can add them to the mentions. I've already got six.
- [25:30]
B
Yeah, good, good. Further, discussing in detail what already happened isn't effective. Now you say, well, why wait? Every time I give feedback, we're Discussing what already happened. Right? No. The purpose of all feedback, both positive and negative. Sorry to say that those of you who tout dialogue and feedback conversations. So on. The purpose of all feedback, positive and negative, is to encourage future positive behavior. The purpose of feedback is in the future, not in understanding the past. Your job is not to correct the past. Your job is to encourage the right behavior in the future. The more time you spend talking about the mistake, the more they get this mistake in their head. There's a great story about the high school football coach who's teaching a kid who doesn't really know how to kick how to kick. And the kid practices kicking, like trying to kick a field goal in American football. And he does it wrong. And the coach says, this is what you did wrong. So now the kid did it wrong, knows he did it wrong, and then he sees an example of him doing it wrong again. Your brain actually doesn't know the difference between those two things. In golf, there's a general saying that don't say to yourself, if there's a pond or a lake or a river, a stream or creek between you and the green. Don't say to yourself, hit it in the creek. Because what your brain hears is creek or pond or lake or river or stream. Okay? Of course, there's a whole nother thing where there shouldn't be any water hazards on golf courses. But that's just my personal opinion. A long discussion about the past does not focus on the future. Also, it's uncomfortable for the direct if it's negative feedback. And the point of any action, any interaction with the direct about their performance must be the future, because that is the only thing we can do anything about. We can do nothing about the past, only about the future. So this conversation you're having should be rooted in future behavior. You should be encouraging good behavior in the future, not examining bad behavior in the past.
- [27:32]
A
Agreed. Okay. So all that to say, how can you avoid this scam? Just don't buy into this idea that feedback, dialogue or conversations are the right approach. Instead, follow the manager tools feedback model. Focus on positive feedback. Don't make positive feedback five seconds long and then take 20 minutes to address a negative. Your directs are going to come to dread the long conversations when they make a mistake and discount your positive feedback as an afterthought. Something you just said in passing. Well, it wasn't that big of a deal. Because if it was a big deal, there would have been this whole thing in the office.
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B
20 minute thing.
- [28:13]
A
Yeah, exactly. And the more you make positive and negative feedback different. The more you make them into something that they're not. All without being effective.
- [28:24]
B
Yeah, good.
- [28:27]
A
Every year we hear the same thing from our conference attendees. They wish they'd come sooner. If you're in or around Atlanta March 17th and 18th, this is your chance to experience Manager Tools live. The Effective Manager conference on the 17th gives you the foundational tools you need to lead your team with confidence and consistency. The Effective Communicator conference on the 18th helps you say the right thing, the right way in any situation, whether you're presenting to the board, coaching a direct, or navigating a difficult conversation. Two days, two transformative conferences. One great city. Visit us at manager-tools.com training to secure your seat today folks.
- [29:10]
B
I'm going to summarize here real quick. The world of management is full of horrible managerial guidance. A lot of people talk about management and they don't know what they're talking about. We're the only company in the world that has observed over 975,000 managers on six continents in the world doing their work and determining what's more effective and less effective across all ages, all races, all continents, all geographies, all industries. We've done something with as small as a two person firm, a childcare firm in Brisbane, I think it was Brisbane in Australia, all the way up to the Department of the army and Walmart. Hundreds of thousands of employees. Our guidance works everywhere. And look, when it comes to scams, these three happen to be the most popular right now. But there will be more coming as you no doubt learn through the origin of these three. Be careful about following guidance that is touted as popular because it probably had a dark beginning or it was simply sold from one person to another. The fact is, and we know we're being a little bit selfish here, but the answer is to stick to manager tools guidance.
- [30:29]
A
Yep, that is exactly it. Thank you Mark.
- [30:33]
B
You're welcome. Thanks Sarah. Today was a lot of fun. Always ends.
- [30:37]
A
Thanks so much for joining us folks. We hope that this helped you. Now help us help others and tell all of your friends. And of course follow rate and review our podcast and remember, five stars only. Please.