Management Theory: how to keep a straight face?

In My Humble Opinion
21

With due respect, if you aren’t learning anything from stuff like this, you are not trying to learn.

The point here is not that you should literally use this line of questioning, which of course comes off as sounding weird and stilted; it’s that the correct way to begin a conversation is often by putting the person at ease, especially if you are in a position of power over them. Reflect on your own conversational approach; might it be taken as confrontational? Do you start by asking specific, probing questions that could be taken as a challenge or criticism? Oh, everyone will insist up and down they’re great at this, and yet workplaces are full of people who really could make a lot of improvement in the way they talk to their co-workers, or could write much better emails, or who come off terribly in meetings.

If you really are great at this stuff, fabulous, move on to the next lesson. If not, you may need to revisit how you do that sort of thing.

Thudlow Boink is right in that a lot of this stuff is just stating the obvious, but there’s some value in re-reading that stuff. We all do tend to fall into bad habits and reviewing and practicing the fundamentals is just smart.

If the worst thing that happens to you is that SOME of this stuff isn’t useful to you, is that really the worst thing? And I’ll bet some of it might be quite useful to you, and that stuff will be worth trudging through the other stuff.

22

It’s not that I think it’s too basic. It’s that I think it’s wrong. Those tactics don’t put me at ease; quite the opposite. I’ve witnessed my boss put these principles into action for the last two years, and I feel the outcome has been the opposite of what was intended. Now I’m being explicitly asked for feedback on the source material. Should I refrain from criticizing anything, either staying silent or prevaricating diplomatically in a way that doesn’t convey disapproval, when I think the result is bad for our organization? Should I refrain from criticizing the source materials but criticize my boss’s implementation, allowing him to think I think he’s the one who can’t get it right? Or does anyone think there’s any room for honesty in the feedback I’ve specifically been asked to give on the source material, which is where I think the problem lies?

23

Before answering this question, can you elucidate: a) what would be your desired response, and, b) how likely are you to get it, given everything you know about your boss?

24

Ultimately, your role as a manager is to allow the people on your team to be successful. Give them the tools and guidance they need, and stay out of their way when they have what they need. This is the point of the regular one-on-ones - make sure that you and your team member are on the same page regarding what “success” is (goal setting and assigned tasks in the near-term; career ambitions and office politics in the long term), and having regular feedback on whether the team member is successful, or needs assistance from you in getting there.

One thing that is hard for managers is to figure out how to best have this interaction with different members of the team. What worked for you as an employee may not work for some members of your staff. What didn’t work for you as an employee may be exactly what one of your team members needs. Some of the management and leadership training stuff is really about understanding what types of interactions people might respond to. Understanding and establishing a baseline of how to connect with each person makes the conversations much easier when you need to do performance coaching, or when an promotion opens up and you need to find out if a team member is interested in it.

I’ve had staff members who preferred very transactional one-on-ones: “I’m finished X, I’m doing Y, I would like help from so-and-so to accomplish Z”. They were fine and could be great employees. Others preferred the conversational tones and more ongoing career coaching and future planning. I was able to help some of them discover new passions and move to better roles. But with everyone, I need to build the trust with them that they won’t feel like I’m asking them to justify their existence and interview for the job every month, because that will cause them to not tell me when they are struggling, and when they are struggling I will be more difficult to find out why. The type of intervention for a struggling employee is very different if they are having competence issues, versus interpersonal issues in the office, versus personal life issues.

Part of being a manager is building that trust. The personal connection and asking about the weekend works to build that trust with a lot of people. But there is a key - you have to actually care what the response is, and you have to be a little vulnerable yourself. If you’re just following a script of “make small talk”, it will come across as insincere and will have the opposite effect.

25

@aktep makes a great point.

My boss is very aloof on a one-on-one basis. He doesn’t do the friendly chitchat stuff before he brings up work-related business. He always jumps right into work stuff. If you come by his office to tell him something or ask him a question, he always says “What’s up?” You can tell he doesn’t mean “What’s going on in your life?” He means “Why are you here right now?”

It’s not my favorite interpersonal style, but I appreciate the no-nonsense of it all. It works for me. But my colleagues (who report to someone else) only have negative things to say about my boss. They think he is a jerk. Sometimes I’m inclined to agree with them, but for some reason his jerkitude doesn’t stop me from getting along with him. I could see it working out differently if I were a different kind of person, though. I have never given him upward feedback (the term my organization uses to describe constructive criticism from an employee to their boss). But if I did, I’d probably tell him he should try to engage more.

26

I know how to keep a straight face in meetings … my dad taught it to me. As long as you don’t have to be the one talking, simply write ‘fuck you’ on the inside of your mouth with the tip of your tongue. The concentration it takes helps you keep a solemn face. [he learned it from his army career =) ]

As to the waste of time and reading assignments, suck it up? I know it is pretty much a waste of time, but he is the boss. Unless you have some way of appealing to his boss?

27

Managing people is hard work, and if you have a management “style” then you are doing it wrong, as you need to adapt your management to the situation.

The stuff in the OP is just one management style, that works in some situations.

You job is to tell people what to do, give them goals, and hold them accountable to those goals. And you should try to do it without being resented. That’s not actually something that comes naturally to most people.

The exercises and stuff in the OP aren’t meant to be used word for word in the workplace, they are meant as examples for the reader to learn from.

One of the things that you learn from some time as a manager is how to give positive and corrective feedback. If you don’t like the lessons that are taught, find a better management training program, and show it off. Develop your own techniques, demonstrate them and implement them.

It sounds to me like you went into this whole thing starting from the perspective of it being and unnecessary and unwelcome intrusion into your life, and as long as you have that attitude towards it, it will be.

Is there absolutely nothing in the whole program that you didn’t get some sort of benefit out of? Anything that you didn’t already know? If not, then that is your feedback to your boss. “Hey, I can see how this would be useful to a new manager, but my experience is such that I don’t really need it.” Or if, there actually was something that you learned, lead with that, “While I did pick up this management technique from the program, most of it is rather rudimentary.” For the things that you actually disagree with, sure point those out. “I think it is not appropriate to say or do this, the way that the program teaches, and here is why.”

You’re in management now, which means that you never bring a problem to your boss without bringing them a solution as well.

28

I believe you have no choice but to be honest. That doesn’t mean you have to say ‘this sucks!’.

Can you start your conversation with the boss using an overview of what’s good about the material - like that it does encourage communication and consideration of the employee. Then discuss some specifics of the material and difficulties with it. Finally how you would modify the approach.

Can you tell us a little more about the situation?
Is this something the company has paid for?
Does the boss have some emotional attachment to the material? Philosophical, Religious
Is somebody else in the company pushing it?

Our company was big on Larry Wilson - “Workplace Behavioral Style”. I think somebody was getting a kickback. We just had to live with it.

29

@QuickSilver
My desired response would be, at a minimum, “huh, I hadn’t thought of it that way,” with at least some degree of openness to reconsidering his strategies. I think there’s a reasonable chance of at least that. My ultimate goal would be to change all the things I think aren’t working for us. I don’t anticipate that happening right away, but I don’t think it’ll happen at all if I say nothing.

@aktep and @Voyager, I think either of you would make a much better management blogger than this Mamie person. I have a bit of management experience myself, and I’ve come to believe in a few principles, none of which are discussed in any of the dozens of pages I’ve been assigned to read:

  • Meet people where they are. Don’t pry into people’s lives if they don’t volunteer information, but listen if they do. Give advice to those who ask for it; don’t micromanage people who are performing to standards just in a different way than you would. Text with people who prefer texting; meet face-to-face with people who prefer that. The first thing I did was talk to the previous supervisor to avoid asking people questions they’d already answered; the second was to touch base with my people to ask about their preferred mode and frequency of communication. Some wanted regular scheduled meetings; others just wanted to be able to call me with questions and wanted to know when was too late at night to call. (We work crazy long hours, hence why I don’t want to subject them to mandatory meetings to talk about their goals.) Not only was this not addressed in the materials, they advised us to “communicate constantly” and to make sure we communicated to our employees what OUR preferred mode of communication is. Fuck that noise.

  • Focus on fairness. Don’t just react to complaints; look for people who have been quietly holding the whole ship together and find ways to take the pressure off, or reward them for doing more than their share. Don’t try to substitute empty recognition for meaningful compensation. The best employees seldom complain; they just pursue the better opportunities waiting for them outside the company. I’d like this to be a regular topic at our meetings: who has the highest caseload, or largest number of complex cases/high-maintenance clients? How can we give those people a little extra help?

  • Fix the problems. There is always something broken, missing, or inefficient that’s creating extra work for the employees, slowing them down, making them feel frustrated, and communicating managerial indifference. I already had a chat with each of my people about their frustrations and came up with a solution to one issue, and taught the secretaries how to implement it. So my boss is open to my perspective, but he’s still got this devil on his shoulder whispering “use emojis to seem more approachable!” (Yes really.)

@aruvqan and @wguy123, you guys are hilarious.

@Crane this is all my boss’s doing; it’s not coming from his boss. It’s mostly free resources; anything paid for comes out of his pocket.

30

Well, falling back on Wilson - your manager is an Amiable/Amiable. Relationships are more important to him than competence. He wants to hold hands and do it together as a team. He wants you to love him and his plan.

You appear to be an Analytical/Driver. You want to understand the problem and implement a solution. Which you are quite capable of doing.

That’s a tough communication gap. But it sounds like you have already made inroads. Perhaps you can use your technique on your employees and the bosses technique on your boss. Ask him about his weekend and send him texts with emojis.

31

I…can’t believe I don’t have a job. :thinking:

Look, take it from someone who has held the coveted “management” title for 15 years in companies that include the Big-4, Fortune 500 financial companies and Silicon Valley tech companies. It’s not rocket science (I mean…unless you work for NASA or SpaceX or something). All you have to do is a) connect with your people and b) be a leader.

For “a”, really you just want to be yourself. You don’t have to be their best friend (and it’s probably better if you aren’t), but you still want to touch base with them from time to time and see how things are going. No one likes the disingenuous manager pretending to care about their home life.

Also each person on your team is different and you need to figure out how to connect to them differently.

“b” means that your people are going to be looking to you for guidance and direction. Anything from dealing with a difficult client to procedural stuff within the company. It doesn’t have to be a strict top-down hierarchy. In fact, most places these days you should be listening to your people for feedback and advice. But they WILL be looking to you for guidance and direction. Personally, I have found nothing more demoralizing than the absentee manager who pops in every few months mostly because he forgot something at his desk.

Basically your job is to make your team members successful.

Another thing - I always like to reference Tom Hank’s character in Saving Private Ryan when he’s telling Edward Burns he never complains to or in front of him. Gripes always go up.

32

You got it.
Perhaps you could find some management blogs/sites that make more sense to you and introduce them, and thus hijack your meetings into something a bit more useful. It would be an example of managing up, which is an important skill to learn. They shouldn’t directly contradict what your manager is giving you - at first. But it could show initiative while making it seem you are behind the learning from blogs model.
You actually only learn from feedback -either when you mess up or positive feedback when you do something right.

33

There are tons of management books out there and I’m sure most are perfectly valid. But personality plays a big role.

One person’s “jerk” boss is another persons favorite boss because they give clear objectives and performance guidelines to meet. If he tells me to A,B and C and I tell him I need resources X,Y, and Z, he gets them for me.

One person “great boss”, friendly, easy going but goals are muddled and Bob who lazy and incompetent gets the same performance rating i do because he and the boss talk about baseball all the time. And if i need resources from Bob, he says he’ll try but Bob might be busy…

Gruff taskmasters probably aren’t my favorite people to work for but the “I wanna be everyone’s pal” types can be even worse.

Is your boss a hands on person who gives you lots of great guidance helps you with all your projects? or is he a micro-manager? The answer can often vary by the employees own personality.

34

For perspective, when I retired last year I was a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company. What that means, among many other things, is that by the end of my career I had gone through literally hundreds of either training sessions or readings. For a long time I was deeply cynical about that experience, but what I discovered (prompted by a rapid series of role changes) was that pretty much anything I read or participated in had, at a minimum, some small notion of value I could take away.

Sometimes I could take away a lot more than a small notion, and I came to realize that my cynicism & indifference to anything but productivity had turned me into a strong manager but shitty leader, and that I was sabotaging those trainings before I even gave them a chance.

msmith has it right upthread when he talks about being connected and leading being the two keys. The devil is a little in the details (though he makes a lot of good points):

  • Connecting is pretty easy if you’re a little extroverted, and genuinely interested in people. If you’re not, however, the kind of training the OP discusses can be very hard to pull off, and I’ve watched people try to do it. I haven’t seen many succeed, but I did watch one guy effectively convince himself that maybe he’d himself be a better person if he learned more about the people around him, and to my surprise that seemed to work, and people responded to it. That example aside, however, the exact people most in need of creating that kind of interaction tend to be the ones least amenable to that kind of training. It’s a hard problem.
  • The need for leadership is a little more tricky, because it varies so much by function. I had a department that was essentially widget production, and all they wanted was to be appreciated, and to be given the tools to get their shit done. That was easy. But I also had a number of departments of highly poachable people, technically complex, who wanted jobs that gave them a sense of personal value. That was harder, and required different skills. It’s not clear to me from your post what sort of situation you’re in.

All that said, and back to my point, based on your initial reaction to the training, I think some sabotage is going on. It seems unlikely that there isn’t something of value in the training that you couldn’t describe to your boss, and I don’t mean in a cynical way, I mean something that might actually be valuable to you. It might just be a different way of thinking of interactions, and to the point other people have made, it doesn’t have to be verbatim from the training. But surely there’s something there.