When someone is new to managing people, it may be reflexive to think in terms of careful monitoring and control. However, that’s the easiest and perhaps laziest approach to take. The more thoughtful approach, which also requires baseline confidence, is to partner with experienced employees.
Giving Employees Space to Work
Some people intuitively understand the concept of working with an employee rather than dominating and controlling—i.e., managing—them, but those with lower emotional intelligence and/or those who are less secure need to be taught.
Managing involves giving highly detailed assignments. A person being managed is directly or indirectly discouraged from taking the lead in their work. They are taught to copy the manager on everything and not to take any action without the manager’s express approval.
Employees are taught to only do their work once they have step-by-step instructions from their manager. For example, in the publishing industry, this might mean giving an employee highly detailed information about a topic being reported on, rather than trusting in the employee’s intelligence and judgment to explore the topic on their own and develop their own take on the subject they are researching.
Partnership, on the other hand, means less, rather than more, shared documentation. Sometimes shared documentation is necessary for a work group to have a shared resource, such as a database of client names and contact information. Other times, the employee can be allowed to work on their own, creating their own database of information, which they can share as they see fit with their manager and others in the department. For instance, the manager allows the employee to keep their early research for an assignment to themselves, trusting they are being productive during the brainstorming process, and understanding they may not be ready to share findings and leads at that point.
Direct One-on-One Communication
When an inexperienced manager come in—particularly one who is newly leading mid- and upper-level employees—they may feel insecure. That feeling of insecurity sometimes pushes them to copy their higher-ups on communication with employees, rather than communicating directly and privately.
For example, rather than calling or e-mailing an employee with the idea of setting up regular meetings for the work group, the manager might decide to send a directive to the employee with executives copied. The better approach would be to pick up the phone: “Sally, I had an idea I wanted to run past you. What do you think about weekly operations meetings with your group? As I understand it, you haven’t done that in the past, but I thought it might be helpful. If I could sit in on those meetings, I could get a better sense of how your group works and contribute ideas where I can. Would you be onboard with doing that?”
Establishing Two-Way Feedback
Thinking in terms of partnership vs. management requires two-way feedback. It can’t just be the manager giving instructions and directives and then monitoring. It also must be the manager letting employees tell them what they need to do their jobs better. In that respect, employees get to have a hand in how the manager does their work and what the manager delivers as part of their job.
Managers can be trained to proactively solicit this feedback in regular one-on-one meetings. The frequency of such meetings will vary depending on the manager’s availability, but even if it’s just once a quarter, there’s value to using part of this time to solicit feedback.
The employee should be given a chance to reflect ahead of time about what the manager can provide them to help them do their jobs better. The manager could send an e-mail a couple weeks before the meeting letting the employee know they will want to discuss not just the employee’s work during the meeting but how the manager’s work intersects with the employee’s, and what the manager can do to make their own work more helpful to the employee.
How Does Your Corporate Culture Lean?
Not all corporate cultures lean toward giving even experienced employees a wide lead. Your organization may prefer a tight leash on employees, with detailed, controlled assignments and close monitoring. However, my observation is that most organizations leave management culture and approach to the individual manager. In the void of creating a deliberate management culture, managers fall back on whatever comes naturally to them.
When a manager has high emotional intelligence and is a secure person, the results are usually a high-performing, happy team. When a manager lacks emotional acumen and is insecure, the result is a team with members who feel like they are not given the respect and empowerment to work up to their potential.
Does your organization train managers to partner with, rather than manage, employees whenever possible? If so, how do you do this? If not, why do you feel a management rather than partnership approach works better for your organization?