In today’s gig-influenced workplace, managers are feeling the pressure: Loyalty is fleeting, motivation is murky, and authority is no longer a given. But what if this transactional landscape isn’t a disadvantage but a powerful opportunity?
By embracing their role as potential deal makers, managers can unlock new forms of leadership power, drive performance, and build more agile, responsive teams. Here’s how to turn transactional management into a strategic advantage:
- Understand, accept, and embrace management as a day-to-day negotiation.
This is the new reality of managing people. Accepting it means abandoning the top-down assumptions of hierarchical leadership and letting go of insult when direct reports resist your authority and make demands. It means constantly answering the questions that are always on every employee’s mind: “What’s the deal around here? What do you want from me? And what do I get from my hard work—today?”
Does that mean everything is open to negotiation? Of course, not. In fact, to become a transactional manager, the first thing you must do is decide what is non-negotiable. What are the basic performance standards for which employees should expect nothing more than to be treated fairly, paid for their work, and keep their jobs? Those are your deal-breakers. Whatever they are, be very clear about them. That becomes your starting point. Just remember that you’ll have to remind people of that basic “deal” on a regular basis.
- Recognize that everything is up for negotiation.
Don’t be alarmed by the idea of negotiation. Many of your employees are probably negotiating with you already on a regular basis. It’s only a problem if you are not negotiating back.
This means you have to be prepared to negotiate and get really good at it, taking control of the dynamic and using the ongoing negotiation to drive performance. Let’s say you want an employee to be ambitious about achieving a particular set of goals by a particular deadline. How do you know what’s fair? What’s reasonable? You find out by negotiating. Let market forces decide. See what negotiation yields.
- Tie financial rewards and detriments only to measurable instances of employee performance.
For this strategy to succeed, you must:
- Give every individual a chance to set and meet ambitious goals and deadlines on a regular basis.
- Keep an accurate ongoing analysis of each individual’s performance.
- Document everything clearly and consistently in writing.
- Also tie non-financial rewards to employee performance.
It is true that in most organizations, shared rewards and detriments often are allocated without regard to individual performance. And it is true that these do contribute to important business goals such as employee wellness, corporate culture, overall morale, and feelings of belonging. But unless you want to run a club instead of a business, you should make as many rewards and detriments as you possibly can purely be contingent on measurable individual performance.
- Use each employee’s unique needs and wants to make custom deals.
Every employee has at least one needle and haystack—a unique need or want. Look for these needles in your individual performers and use them to make custom deals in exchange for exceptional performance.
- Have the discipline and guts to enforce every deal you make.
You must be prepared to enforce every deal you make, whether it’s for increased financial rewards, non-financial rewards, or needles in a haystack. No deals should be permanent. Every deal should be on the table all the time, contingent on the direct report making good on their commitments to you. When your direct reports deliver for you, you deliver for them. If they fail to meet expectations, you must call them on that failure and withhold the quid pro quo.
