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Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 2 of 3

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Goals and Boundaries

We’re going to use some diagrams to show you how this all works. In all of the diagrams, we use a target as a symbol for the goals of the position and an ‘X’ as a symbol for the starting place of the person in that position (they are about to begin to achieve their goals).


Figure 1: Manager’s Route to a Goal

Manager’s route to a goal

The first diagram, labeled Manager’s Route to a Goal, illustrates the path that you would take to achieve the goal. Perhaps you started the business or the department, or perhaps you already held the position responsible for this goal. Nevertheless, you’ve already acquired the skills and experience to achieve this goal, and you know exactly how to do it. To you, it’s a straight line – you do some activities in a certain way, and there you are at the goal. Simple.

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About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.

Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 1 of 3

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We frequently remind managers, as well as aspiring managers, that management is a new career. As surely as teaching is different from accounting, management is different than the role that a person held as an employee or as a start-up entrepreneur.

Many new managers, however, find themselves overwhelmed. Instead of focusing on the day-to-day job that earned them their promotion, they now must manage a bunch of other folks with a seemingly endless stream of needs and demands.

So oftentimes, a new manager is just flying blind. She’s trying to deal with a whole array of unknowns, and she already had enough of those.

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About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.

New Tool Release – Value of Employee Productivity

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StrategyDriven contributors are pleased to announce the release of Diversity and Inclusion – Value of Employee Productivity.

Loss of productivity costs resulting from acts of incivility and poor managerial behavior are staggering and yet goes largely unrecognized. There is no financial statement line item, no general ledger entry, and no budget explicitly set aside for this expense that can cost an evenly modestly sized company hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Likewise, those companies taking action to improve their workplace environments can realize significant financial rewards by doing so.

Using the StrategyDriven Value of Employee Productivity nomograph and method outlined here, organization leaders can gain a better appreciation for the direct monetary value associated with a change in employee productivity and begin to better value their diversity and inclusion initiatives.

StrategyDriven Premium Members can access the Cost of Employee Distraction by clicking here.

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Relational Leadership and Employee Retention – A Match, part 3

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This series of articles explores the connection between relational leadership and employee retention. I discussed creating a ‘learning – thinking’ organization in the first article and a trusting organization in the following two. This final article examines creating a respected organization.

Respected organizations are often marked by the depth of esteem in which the community holds them. Because the community embraces the company, it produces a deep sense of pride in the employees. Community Marketing becomes strategic to a respected organization.

Relational Leadership is people-centric. People are defined in the relational diagram as employees, vendors, customers, and community. Many business plans leave out the community component or treat it lightly deeming it disconnected to the business purpose. Actually, a Community Marketing strategy helps define the business purpose and elevates the concept.

Figure 1: The Community Marketing Strategy

The relational diagram involves the entire spectrum of people. Just like the Building Blocks of Trust, you can’t skip a people component and be truly relational.

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About the Author

Frank McIntosh is author of The Relational Leader (Course Technology PTR, Cengage Learning 2010). During his 36 year career, Frank has worked with many of the most recognized companies and executives in the world. He has provided consulting services for peers across the country and helped initiate Junior Achievement programs in Ireland, the Ivory Coast, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Uzbekistan. Frank was inducted into the Delaware Business Leaders Hall of Fame in October 2008, one of 38 individuals so honored and the first not-for-profit executive to receive this distinction in Delaware’s 300 year business history. To read Frank’s complete biography, click here.

For more information regarding this subject, visit Frank McIntosh at his website www.FJMcIntosh.com.

Set the Stage for Engagement

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Low pay is a dissatisfaction for employees but high pay by itself won’t keep the best people around. Transactional leadership might be a motivator when money and better benefits are available, but today’s climate seems to lend itself more to transformational leadership where a caring leadership can stimulate innovation, creative thinking, and productivity.

In Healing the Wounds, David A. Noer writes how the emotional impact of downsizing and the subsequent extra workload disturbs employee morale and productivity long after the fact. The study found that such feelings of stress, fatigue, and depression can last five years and more, imposing a strain on organizations’ competitiveness. Not only was there a sense of unfairness and anger over top management pay and severance, but symptoms of insecurity, anxiety, and fear that discouraged innovation and creative thinking. As Noer wrote, “There seemed to be a much stronger feeling among lay-off survivors that the organization was not in the business of looking out for its employees and that their loyalty was to themselves and to their unit, not to the overall organization.”

Clearly, after as much as five years, employees still suffered from the “survivor-blaming phenomenon,” as Noer called it. Managers and their staffs were unhappy and could be easily tempted to check out other job possibilities if they surfaced. New recruits heard stories that made them question their decision to join the company ranks.

Gallup, one of the world’s top research organizations, has always found the ratio of engaged to disengaged employees to be problematic. The recent economy would suggest the situation to have become more severe. This would suggest a review of corporate management practices to see that these 12 elements as proposed by Gallup are supported within the organization:

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About the Author

Florence Stone is editorial director for AMA and editor of MWorld, AMA’s quarterly membership journal. She is the author of Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring, The Manager’s Question and Answer Book and The Essential New Manager’s Kit.

To learn more about the American Management Association, click here.