Do Business Well

How can the manager help? In the new career, the employee is the star. It is his responsibility to take control of his career. It is his responsibility to look in the mirror and make sound choices based upon what he discovers. But what role should the manager play? She is no longer the gatekeeper, picking and choosing from among the most attractive, the most skilled, the most experienced supplicants. What is her role?

One could make a case for saying that since the employee is the star and since companies can no longer guarantee lifelong employment, the manager’s role has become less significant. She should focus her people on performance today, but not concern herself with where they are headed tomorrow. The employee should figure that out for himself. Besides, if the manager invests too much in her people, she might soon be disappointed. Given the speed of change today, she might well end up having to terminate the people she has nurtured so carefully.

The best managers reject this perspective. They know that in this new career they can play some significant roles. They can level the playing field. They can be the ones to hold up the mirror. And they can create a safety net.

Great Mangers Level the Playing Field

This is why creating new heroes, designing graded levels of achievement, and establishing broadbanded pay plans are all so important. These techniques provide an environment where money and prestige are spread throughout the organization. Since the employee now knows he can acquire them through a variety of different paths, money and prestige become less of a factor in his decision making. He is free to choose his path based upon his current understanding of his talents and nontalents. He may still make the occasional misstep, but he is much more likely to focus not only toward roles where he excels, but toward roles that bring him lasting satisfaction and roles that he yearns to play for a very long time.

On this leveled playing field, you hear conversations that you never thought you would hear. Conversations like the one Jeff H., the computer software sales manager, had with his supervisor:

“I love my role. I’m the best in the company at it. I am making a lot of money doing it. And I am having more of an impact than I ever thought was possible in my life. So I said to my boss, I said, ‘Your one objective with me is to see to it that I am never promoted again. If you can do that, you have me for life.’ ”

Great Managers Hold up the Mirror

Great managers excel at “holding up the mirror.” They excel at giving performance feedback. Don’t confuse this with the once-a-year performance appraisal chore, with its labyrinthine form filling and remedial focus; or with the empty, arbitrary employee-of-the-month feedback. The feedback given by great managers is quite different.

It is the kind of feedback that Laura T., the petrochemical executive, gives to her people. She describes a program called Excel, where she meets with each of her twenty-two direct reports once every quarter. “In these meetings we quickly review the last three months. And then it’s on to the good stuff—the next three months. What are their plans, their goals, what measurements will we use? With each of them, we talk about what they enjoy doing and how we can structure things so that they get to do more of that.”

Martin P., the police chief, is less structured but has the same kinds of conversations. “I have sixteen direct reports, and with each of them I probably spend about twenty minutes each week talking about their performance, the project they are working on, how they can improve, and what I can do to help. These discussions happen all the time. With one of my guys, we went to a convention together last month. We accomplished nothing at the convention. But we did on the plane, and in the rental car, and over dinner, and in the lobby of the hotel.”

Jeff H. simply schedules time to travel on sales calls with each of his salespeople once or twice a quarter. “I try to not play the role of the knight on the white horse, riding in and saving the day. Instead I just travel with them, listen to their challenges, watch them with clients. I what I saw for them. We then talk about plans and goals, and together we figure out the best way forward. My role isn’t to correct or fix. My role is to keep them aware of their style and to keep them realistic about what is possible, given that style.”

Other great managers make use of 360-degree feedback techniques or psychological profiles or employee opinion surveys or customer comment cards. Whatever their style, whatever their tools of choice, they are all trying to do the same thing: to hold up the mirror so that the employee has a chance to discover a little more about who he is, how he works, and the footprint he leaves on the world.

Although each manager employed his or her own approach to feedback, in the study of great managers Gallup found that their approaches did share three characteristics.

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