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<\/picture>Bruce Tulgan, founder of Rainmaker Thinking<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u201cThese employees, particularly younger employees, are often labelled as overly sensitive. However, their resistance is typically less about the feedback itself and more about the timing of that feedback. Why give a direct report the freedom to create their own plan and timeline only to derail that plan with your thoughts and opinions late in the process? That information would have been more valuable before the employee started going in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis type of leadership comes off as careless at best and manipulative at worst.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tulgan adds that while the goal for many managers is to have self-starting employees, the reality is that this is something of a pipe dream. There will always be a cohort who are very good at managing themselves but they are in the minority. And at some point all employees will require input from someone who is closer to the top of the business and more privy to its priorities.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not feasible to have everyone making their own decisions when there are overarching business decisions to be made,\u201d says Tulgan. \u201cEmployees need someone more experienced to guide them and remind them of the goals, deadlines and ground rules applying in that business.<\/p>\n
\u201cSelf-managed employees may feel they are the authority on their own work but, if they exist in a vacuum of self-accountability, they will struggle to feel engaged. Employees today want to know that their efforts are effective and will result in a final product that is valuable to the right people \u2013 not just themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some employees have turned avoiding their boss into an art form because they fear an interaction will add to their workload or undermine a task they have already completed.<\/p>\n
However, while someone can run, they can\u2019t hide as the boss will always have a level of power, control and authority that can affect an employee. As such, it\u2019s better to bite the bullet and talk to your boss to make sure you know what they think should take priority and what are the concrete actions expected of you. If you don\u2019t, there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ll end up totally frustrated when you discover later on that you\u2019ve been singing from what, in your manager\u2019s eyes, is the wrong hymn sheet.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re not getting direction from your manager, you should go ask for it and, in turn, your manager should be asking what support, resources and guidance you need so you don\u2019t run into unnecessary problems,\u201d says Tulgan.<\/p>\n
As the debate about remote versus in-person working rumbles on, Tulgan says one of the myths about having everyone together is the assumption of an alignment of purpose that may not in fact exist. \u201cThere can be an illusion that because people are sitting together and working the same hours, they share common goals and priorities. That\u2019s a pretty lazy way to look at things from a managerial perspective,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cA good manager is actively interested in what everyone is doing and how they can help them to do it better. In my view, managers who say \u2018I don\u2019t want to hold their hands or to micromanage them\u2019 is fooling themselves. We\u2019re working in a complex environment. Everything is going faster than ever before and even the simplest of jobs is now more complex than it used to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cKeeping it together means managers talking to their people regularly \u2013 every day, every few days or once a week \u2013 to make sure they\u2019re aligned. If they don\u2019t, they will end up doing most of their managing when things go wrong and they have to step in to fix problems that shouldn\u2019t have arisen in the first place. At least that\u2019s my take on it after 30 years of talking to half a million people in the workplace and working with over 400 organisations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tulgan says hovering over someone while they work is not good management and if a manager is telling someone to dot this i and cross this t, that\u2019s effectively two people doing the one job. Where the manager\u2019s skill comes in, he says, is in how they calibrate their interventions.<\/p>\n
Some people simply need more guidance than others. Some tasks require more oversight than others. When someone is new to a job, they will need more input than when it\u2019s a familiar routine.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the manager needs to figure out is how much direction and feedback someone needs with the task in hand right now because it\u2019s often a moving target,\u201d says Tulgan. \u201cManagers should make decisions based on what people need and if you\u2019re not talking to your people, how do you know what that is?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"