Thursday 10 May 2012

Mirror mirror - who is the fairest manager of them all?

The spring 2012 edition of the CIPD Employee Outlook survey makes for interesting reading.  (cipd.co.uk/employeeoutlook).    Taking into account the views of nearly 2000 employees, there are some optimistic signs and also some seemingly contradictory data.  Attitudes to immediate managers appear to be positive and improving, although senior managers are less well regarded.  Contact with immediate managers, especially when the context is the employee's self-development, feedback on their performance or simple praise are correlated with employee engagement, yet these seem to be the topics that managers talk about the least, when meeting with their staff.  More interesting is the difference in perceptions that managers and employees hold when expressing the level of satisfaction with the manager.  80% of  managers think that their employees are satisfied (or better) with their manager - only 58% of employees agree.  Again, the report highlights the correlation between satisfaction with manager and employee engagement. And yet, 62% of respondents rate 'people management skills' as very important as part of their role (women more so than men).

So what's going on?  Managers seem to think that they talk to their people, and at some level, intellectually they understand that focusing on the individual is an important aspect of getting performance, but do they actually do it?  Or is it that employees either expect too much, or perhaps don't recognise that sometimes a conversation can have multiple purposes? For example, explaining task objectives can also be an opportunity for coaching and development.  One of the issues when coaching is that if you are inviting the coachee to think about 'content' they are unlikely simultaneously be thinking about 'process'.  In short, they may not know, or be interested in, what the boss is doing.  Even further, there are so many different definitions of coaching that it would be easy to understand that managers and employees actually have different opinions of when they are/are not being coached.

Trust doesn't seem to be the issue; what scores lowest is the level of consultation and the amount of coaching which occurs.  It's easy to see how these things diminish in tough times, when time is tight, demands are high and workforces are depleted.  

I wonder if managers need more help in the specific language that they use, when interacting with their employees, so that they talk about the things that make the biggest difference.  Part of this may be making more explicit the level of consultation, facilitation and development activities so that employees actually feel that they are involved in the process, that their personal contribution and their own development actually matters.

The report concludes that 'efforts to improve employee engagement will be fatally undermined unless employers place an emphasis on building management capability at all levels.  Increasingly this is about leadership skills rather than management.....leadership tends towards the more emotional aspects of helping people to deliver and is more closely tied to individual personality and authenticity'.  

Friday 4 May 2012

'Trust enters on foot, but leaves on horseback'

This phrase comes from a report on repairing organisational trust, by Rosalind Searle, Veronica Hope-Hailey and Graham Dietz, OP Matters, No 15 May 2012, The British Psychological Society.   We've talked elsewhere about the importance of trust (See our Hints and Tips handout on 'Giving Bad News' in the Executive Lounge area of our website for a brief introduction).  This current paper is of interest because it is focused towards repairing trust, a situation that many organisations may find themselves in, given the current tough times, when circumstances mean that previous promises may not have been met.  The authors highlight four dimensions of trust (Ability, Benevolence, Integrity and Predictability) and they also highlight that an employee may confound trust in the organisation with how much they trust their leader (individual trust).  They also found that trust is not a one-way process; an employee is much more likely to give trust if they, themselves, feel trusted by their manager.

The authors identified 5 types of approaches to trust in organisations:  Trust in each other, trust in leaders, trust in the organisation, trust in external relations and trust in the direct line manager.  The results of their research showed that those organisations which exhibited high levels of trust in each other were not only able to repair damage to trust but had built up a reservoir of trust prior to negative events.  These inter-relationships between interested parties meant that  the organisation could draw on an existing support network of goodwill.  Organisations which relied more heavily on trust in their leaders were more vulnerable to loss of trust, particularly if the individuals concerned were lacking in any of the four personal dimensions of trust (Ability, Benevolence, Integrity and Predictability).  

Other factors that helped organisations repair trust in hard times were those that kept their staff informed, despite the news being bad (Treat your people as adults).  Also, organisations where leaders stayed available and demonstrated a high level of presence with their employees fared better, as did those where there was a 'line of trust' which flowed through all levels of management.  '...the greater the firm relied on the direct interaction between customers and low level employees, then the more crucial it was that the link of trust between senior managers, line managers and employees was not broken'.

Perhaps most interestingly, the re-negotiation of formal contractual relationships with employees also had an effect.  Having the courage to develop more realistic relationships based on current circumstances may be hard to do, but the dividends may be greater in the long run.

You can read a full report in the March 2012 publication of the CIPD journal 'People Management'.

Tuesday 1 May 2012

Creating a Coaching Culture

The term 'coaching culture' has been on the scene for the last few years and still it raises discussion about what it is and how to create it.  The Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) produced a paper May 2011 as a result of surveying 250 large organisations giving some interesting facts.

"83% of organisations surveyed source coaches internally while 65% hire them in.  External coaches are used primarily to coach senior managers. Interestingly,there is more rigour over selecting external service providers than internal coaches. Benchmarks of quality are still needed though in an unregulated coaching industry".

This has been our experience, particularly in the last 18 months where the L&D spend has been towards the senior executives who are experiencing a greater requirement to 'walk the talk' through difficult times and inspire the workforce to do the same. 

In terms of an unregulated coaching industry this is also very true and doesn't serve to show the 'quality' of the coach/coaching team particularly when bidding for large scale projects in tenders.  With no clear indication of  which accreditation body clients would back,we've been in a VHS or Beta max quandry (that's one for all of you of my generation!)  With this in mind we have over the last year decided to go with ILM and many of our team have gained ILM 7 accreditation in Executive Coaching & Leadership Mentoring (no small task and well done all!).  This I hope goes some way to also demonstrate that we are also 'walking the talk'  -a daily challenge for us all.

To read the full report https://www.i-l-m.com/downloads/publications/G443_ILM_COACH_REP.pdf

Kate Peacock