Unfortunately, yes, and perhaps much more than you would like to think.
We hear, and we have also observed, that the number one reason employees leave their job is because of their boss. More than not, the root cause of employee issues rests in whom you choose to manage them.
The results of poor management leads to high turnover, low employee morale, poor productivity, poor customer service and the need for voluminous policy and procedure manuals to ensure that the manager follows the rules.
Yet unfortunately, the role and impact of the direct supervisors are often overlooked when senior management or business owners contemplate improvement questions such as:
- How can we improve morale?
- What’s a good compensation system?
- How can we recruit and retain better people?
- How can we improve customer service?
Simply, as long as you do not deal with supervisor/manager competency and impact, you cannot effectively deal with any of the questions raised above. It’s like trying to come up with a model to explain how our solar system works using the earth as the center of the system. It just won’t work, no matter how hard you try to make it work. Replace the earth with the sun and it works beautifully.
Money spent to improve the effects of management is wasted unless it’s spent to address poor management first.
Great businesses work to insure good management; poor and even mediocre companies give it much less thought.
Some indications of people wanting to get promoted that may not make the best supervisors include:
- They will have more status and authority
- They feel there is no one else they would want in that job, so they will go for it
- They will make more money
- They won’t have to work as hard (they will tell other people to work hard)
- They can work better hours
What all of these have in common is that the reason for promotion is all about the person being promoted – hardly the stuff of great management and great organizations.
In our Quick Tips on Thursday, we will discuss how to approach identifying and addressing the issue of poor management.
Copyright 2010 Kubica and LaForest
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