Will Sr. Managers Change? LO7776

jpomo@gate.net ("jpomo@gate.net")
Fri, 7 Jun 1996 09:19:39 +0000

Replying to LO7766 --

On Thu, 6 Jun 1996 16:23 Ivan Blanco wrote in part -

> > Joan write:
> >
> > >The most important aspect of this human condition is that the boss
> > > gets to decide how employees will act, what they do. If the boss
> > > acts a certain way, employees will not be fearsome of their jobs
> > > and will creatively commit themselves to do their best against the
> > > highest standards of performance available, against all high value
> > > standards. This includes being the best as concerns LO. Similarly,
> > > the boss can act in a different way and cause employees to be
> > > dishonest, play their cards close to their vest, not perform up to
> > > normal value standards and not be good for LO.
>
> Generally, people would follow what the managers do and not what they say.
>
> > >So it is up to the boss to decide which actions he/she will use
> > > because the response of employees has been preordained. If you
> > > are interested in knowing what these actions are, email me
> > > separately.
>
> But is it true that the manager's actions have already been also
> predetermined by the system? Or would managers decide on an action even
> if it is going against teh book?

People follow because since birth they have been strongly influenced to
conform to what those in positions of authority want them to do. Parents,
peers, teachers, churches, the media, government and finally bosses all
tell them what to do and what to think. These authorities want us to
accept external direction rather than be internally directed by our own
values. The result is that the vast majority of people act to conform much
more than by their own values. This includes bosses as well as those not
in management. So bosses conform just as often as their juniors do.

My only point was that any boss can choose to stop merely conforming and
start acting toward their juniors in a way to turn them into highly
motivated, committed and creative team players who love to come to work.
How? Let's look at some actions which can be taken to create trust and
commitment.

TRUST

A giant issue is that of trust. Executives do not blindly trust anything
and anything they don't know about they distrust. They never distrust
things about which they know everything there is to know. Their
subordinates act in an identical manner. Bosses must share all of their
knowledge about everything and only then will the issue of trust
disappear, essentially by removing all distrust and never providing
anything to distrust.

COMMITMENT/OWNERSHIP/INFLUENCE/LISTENING

We have found that bosses cannot directly create commitment, but that
commitment is an automatic result of the employee's feeling of ownership.

We have found that bosses cannot directly create a sense of ownership
(ESOP's being a very good example), but that ownership is an automatic
result of the employee being able to influence the outcome of what goes on
which affects him or her in any way, even indirectly.

We have found that bosses cannot directly create influence, but that
influence will result if the boss always listens to anyone's two cents by
providing adequate access to every person so that they can complain,
suggest or ask questions and always provides high quality answers in a
timely fashion to the originator and provides that person and anyone else
the opportunity to do it again before anything is changed or before the
issue is considered put to bed.

This also creates great trust since we cannot distrust anything we know
everything about and have had the opportunity to influence. This process
results in sharing with employees whatever knowledge they need about why
or what the company is doing. My associate and author of our book, while
in charge of a 900+ person unionized group, only had one thing which he
would not tell fellow employees over a seven year period.

The above process must be carried out both one-on-one and in groups (my
associate used 40 person groups so that everyone would have an opportunity
to participate). He developed a set of dos and don'ts for these
interactions in order to effect the best possible leadership, to keep them
on the goal of answering complaints/suggestions/questions and to enable
junior bosses to learn how to conduct them. These interactions were
effective beyond anyone's dreams.

Many of these rules were designed to allow people in the group to give the
solution or design the solution to problems brought up. This all important
practice makes everyone into a problem solver and starts them on the road
to being strong/independent thinkers. The boss must never give an answer
that can be gotten out of someone else. Asking the right questions and
protecting high standards are far more important leadership actions for
the boss to conduct. Besides, people need to know that they can produce
solutions just as often as anyone else and that rank means more
accountability and not more smarts or more knowledge, only knowledge of a
different sort, only attention to a different set of details called
leadership, not "things".

The above are some of our tools for managing people and there are many
more, enough to cover every aspect of interacting with people.

Hope this explains better, Joan
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joan Pomo The Finest Tools for Managing People
Simonton Associates Based on the book
jpomo@gate.net "How to Unleash the Power of People"

-- 

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