HOW EFFECTIVE IS YOUR MANAGEMENT STYLE?

 
Ask yourself: “Can I easily identify or characterise my management style?” Check: ‘Am I hands-on or hands-off?’, ‘Do I adjust my preferred style enough for different staff?  and ‘How do my staff react to how I manage them?’.  An earlier article highlighted the need to balance attention to rules, relationships and results. Do you? What is most important about your style in your world?

Lots of questions, but, as promised, no answers: it is up to you to find your own – and you can! Help may come from deciding your criteria to judge your management style: so, do you always push for results, do you help employees to develop, are you fair and consistent, do you generate respect and ways of working with your staff that inspires them to give their best, do you encourage teamwork?

Managers need three main competencies: conceptual (eg planning and prioritising), social (ie interacting with staff, colleagues, bosses, customers and suppliers), and technical (eg problem solving and improvements to products and services for the business they are in, and its markets). There was a time when ‘getting the work done through others, by developing individuals and building teams’ was seen as the best way forward, but the need to work faster and the increasing tendency to channel communication through managers has pushed many to think it is easier to do many jobs themselves. Work pressures have also pushed many managers into being technicians (or the best technician has been promoted to manager before developing sufficient conceptual and social skills!).

Adverse effects of being
very hands-on

Being very hands-on will come at a cost to staff development and teamwork. Taking on a lot of the work may adversely affect your abilities to plan and prioritise. Being very hands-off may reduce staff respect for you and annoy customers who need your attention urgently. What is the answer?

Among other things: be aware of your style and its effects, try to balance being hands-on and hands-off according to the levels of skill and maturity of your staff, and try to develop your staff so you can delegate more and make time for planning and customers. The key is to ask yourself (when you get a moment!): is my current style working? (If it is, then it must be OK – yes? – but what about the future?).

The above diagram depicts the discussion so far. Ask yourself: ‘Where would each of my staff place me on the hands-on hands-off spectrum?’. Check: ‘Where would they (and my boss) like me to be more?’.
Hands-on managers often espouse ‘Theory X’: the attitude that the average worker is lazy, dislikes work, has to be directed, and lacks ambition.

This may be an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy, involving managers in extra work and stress, and a focus on limited business goals. The more optimistic ‘Theory Y’ managers at the other end believe people enjoy work, will respond positively to feedback, will exercise self-direction, and will rise to stretching goals. Theory Y managers prefer a participative style with staff (somewhere to the right of the centre line in the diagram), allowing them to empower people and achieve productivity at the same time.

Wage bills are business killers, so a key part of your role includes raising people’s value for the business, and for their benefit too. You would not let expensive equipment rust, nor seed corn rot, would you?! You might be very firm with workers who gossip and prefer shuffling paper, but more trusting and looking to the future with staff who want and prove skills development.
What happens if and when you take your staff into confidence about business issues when setting goals and delegating work, and ask for their views about work innovations, skills development, job satisfaction and stress? Although surveys show stress and heavier workloads are in the top three problems at work, why should you not set stretching goals? – after all, your role is to make a difference and add value. (Why not get good staff to set their own goals?) Behind stress and workloads comes ‘relationships with management’. Too much hands-on may look like dictatorship and depress stronger staff’s motivation and contribute of ideas.

Too much hands-off may look like absenteeism and stress weaker staff unsure what to do (it is your job to tell them!). What happens if you allow any Theory X or Theory Y predisposition to override proper assessment of the quality and maturity of your staff?

Back to: ‘Is my current style working?’. Consider this:  management efficiency is concerned with ‘doing things right’ and relates to inputs and the most economic use of resources; management effectiveness is about ‘doing the right things’ and relates to outputs and results. Do you agree with gurus who say ‘Effectiveness is more important than efficiency because the manager must be doing the right work; only then does it matter that the work is done efficiently.’? (Hint: how managers achieve results and its effect on staff is important!)

Management involves integration – of changing work demands, with varying levels of staff skills and maturity and motivation, and often with limited resources. These factors require managers to prioritise many different things: in particular, their concern for people and concern for production. Next week, ‘time management’.

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