We expect our managers not to be biased when it comes to the people who work for them regarding race, gender, and sexuality. Why do we accept that proximity bias cannot be overcome, so you’ll have to come to the office?
The conclusion to be drawn from this research is that we need better managers. Period.
Personally, I wouldn’t use the term lazy. I don’t think they are just being lazy, I think parents and managers default to this approach because they don’t know any better. They haven’t been given clear direction on how to parent or manage, and they’ve been overwhelmed with the variety and often conflicting information they can get. Without clarity, they’ve defaulted to the simplest solution – do it yourself.
For managers, that looks a lot like Jake describes it. Fixing the work of your reports instead of providing feedback, reminding them repeatedly about deadlines, needing to see them in the office working, being CC’d on every email, and generally just looking over their shoulder at every turn. I don’t know many managers who want to work that way, yet we all know there are plenty of managers who do. As I said earlier, I don’t think they want to be lazy, I think they lack the proper training and clarity about managing. How much better could they be, and in turn the people who report to them be, if our organizations provided that?
Given recent events, I faced the question posed in this post and came to the same conclusion. Should you post that you’re #OpenToWork? A tale of two labor markets. Economic theory suggests that the people laid off or searching for a job in boom times are different from those laid off in a recession. If…
The most engaged and productive people in your workplace also need room to grow and develop. Not offering that to them is inviting them to go elsewhere. Not offering career development to your high performers because you are wasting all of those resources to fix your lowest performers will not cut it. They deserve more than that, and someone will give it to them.
At work, we are asked to make adjustments all the time. In our modern, technological jobs, we are constantly facing change. The individuals and teams who will succeed are the ones who’ve gotten comfortable with it. They’ve prepared for the change and know they can adjust on the fly because they know the work well and are used to making the proper decisions. Those who don’t have a deep understanding of what is going on will overreact to change and commit turnovers.
She mentions a round of layoffs as an example of breaking trust, and I’m glad she included that. All too often, when a round of layoffs occurs, senior management will return to talking about the culture or set of core values they expect all employees to follow without ever acknowledging that it’s different now. You can’t just return to talking about the importance of teamwork and diversity when you just canned 10% of the team as if nothing happened.