Management at Work

By Karen McHenry

From: At Work Newswire

As with many things in life, working well with your boss is a two-way street. You expect your supervisor to manage you and to give you direction. However, managing your boss can actually be a good way to advance your career.

What does it mean to manage your boss? Sometimes managing your supervisor is also referred to as “managing up.” Managing up is really all about creating and maintaining a relationship with your boss. When people have a strong rapport, they are more likely to work cooperatively and productively. Relationships tend to flourish in situations where people have complementary personalities. However, personality is only part of the equation. There are specific actions that you can take to start building a stronger relationship with your manager. Here are two things you can do:

• Take time to understand your manager’s perspective. It’s important to take the time to understand who your manager is. What are his or her qualities and characteristics? From a business perspective, what does your manager need to achieve? This information will give you good insight into how you can help your manager succeed and also what to expect when working with him or her.”Managing upwards must be an active process,” says Steve Miu, director of technical marketing at Signiant, a software company. “To expect it to happen automatically or easily is unrealistic.”
• Work on developing trust. All strong relationships are built on trust. By delivering your work dependably and demonstrating your integrity, you can show your manager that you are a trusted partner. Having a trustworthy and dependable team is invaluable to managers, when the pressure mounts to meet deadlines and goals.

Once you have started the process of cultivating a healthy relationship with your boss, there are particular work styles that help to maintain that connection. Best practices include the following:

• Confirm expectations. Before embarking on an assignment, be sure that you have a clear understanding about what your manager expects. No one likes surprises and there is nothing worse than spending time on a project, only to find that your assumptions about what was needed were incorrect. Communicating openly with your supervisor definitely can help in this area.
• Learn about your manager’s work style. As you spend time with your boss, you will learn how he or she prefers to work. Perhaps they prefer to communicate through e-mail, or maybe they like to have brief status meetings early in the morning, before the rush of the day begins. With this knowledge, you can tailor your interactions with your manager to best meet his or her preferences.
• Understand what is important. For different assignments, your manager may be looking for different types of information or presentation styles. It is important to understand what format will be most useful for a deliverable, such as a quantitative analysis, an executive level presentation, or a written report.
  
  Steve Miu notes, “Be sure to understand all the information that a manager needs. He or she may want data on all the parameters of an ongoing assignment, so it can be reported up the management chain through status reports or other vehicles. Every company has different standards, based on its technology and market. These factors can influence the types of information you need to communicate to your manager.”
• Respect your manager’s time.In today’s hectic business environment, time is perhaps the most constrained resource. Respect your supervisor’s time by saving the most important questions for him or her, and handling as many issues independently as possible. If there are tasks or duties that you can assume for your manager, it is likely to be much appreciated.
• Provide positive feedback.As employees, we value positive feedback and the same goes for our managers. If there are certain things that you feel your manager is doing well, let him or her know. If your feedback is sincere, you shouldn’t fear that it will be perceived as empty praise or an attempt to curry favor.

By following these guidelines, you will be on a path to forging an improved and more productive relationship with your manager. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule and you may run into difficult supervisors from time to time. Bear in mind that there will always be circumstances and attitudes you cannot change. Don’t take it personally and realize that the best thing you can do is to bring a positive attitude to the situation.

You may be thinking that this managing up business seems like a lot of work. If you are wondering whether it’s worth the trouble, consider the possible benefits. By becoming a trusted employee who understands and meets your manager’s expectations, you are more likely to receive positive performance reviews. In addition, you are more likely to receive interesting and high-visibility projects. If and when the time comes to consider another job, the relationship you have built with your manager will translate into positive references. Given these facts, can you afford not to manage up?

Karen McHenry consults to the software industry on strategy and new product development, writes on business, technology and career issues, and teaches at Endicott College.

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Management expert Professor Henry Mintzberg has argued that a manager’s work can be boiled down to ten common roles. According to Mintzberg, these roles, or expectations for a manager’s behavior, fall into three categories: informational (managing by information), interpersonal (managing through people), and decisional (managing through action).

This chart summarizes a manager’s ten roles:

In the real world, these roles overlap and a manager must learn to balance them in order to manage effectively. While a manager’s work can be analyzed by these individual roles, in practice they are intermixed and interdependent. According to Mintzberg: “The manager who only communicates or only conceives never gets anything done, while the manager who only ‘does’ ends up doing it all alone.”

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “The Successful Manager: Managing in the Modern Organization” course, please click here.

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American psychologist Bruce W. Tuckman developed an influential model of team development, first enunciated in a 1965 article “Developmental sequence in small groups,” published in Psychological Bulletin. Tuckman’s model traced the evolution of a team through four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. Tuckman argued that these stages were necessary to build an effective team.

COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Bruce Tuckman’s team model:

Tuckman’s model has remained on target. The four states of team development that he identified are still regarded as the main stages. His emphasis on the dynamics of team progress remains valuable.

The limitation of the model is that it suggests that once the four stages are completed in the initial formation of the team, then a steady-state emerges in which the team simply performs well week after week, month after month, year after year. But many cases show that teams require continual monitoring and intervention by team leaders to keep a performance edge.

Without continual attention from team leaders, teams tend to degenerate into contending cliques in which personal animosities destroy team effectiveness.

In other words, Tuckman’s model describes the early stages of team development – the stages from which a team is launched successfully into its business mission. But there are later stages which are crucial to continuing team effectiveness which Tuckman ignores, and thereby suggests do not exist. But they do exist and they are very important to the continuing success of a team.

The challenge of building and continuing effective teams goes well beyond the development stage.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading Teams” course, please click here.

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Harvard Business School professor John P. Kotter outlined an eight-stage change management process in his 1996 book, Leading Change. This framework has been embraced by many as an accurate representation of the steps needed to effect major change within an organization.

COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Kotter’s change model:

Kotter’s Eight Stage Change Management Process is a useful approach. Followed carefully, it will produce good results. That said, it requires some care in application.

The eight steps aren’t of equal importance, nor should a leader spend equal amounts of time, effort and resources on each. The first stage is crucial–people must understand that there is a problem that needs to be solved, or an opportunity that it is important to seize. They must also be helped to believe, if it is true, that they will gain, not lose, from the change.

If people don’t accept the need for a change, and if they believe they are going to suffer from it, then resistance will mount and Kotter’s eight stages will need to be extended to several more, under the heading, “Overcoming resistance to change.” But if the first of Kotter’s steps is done correctly, then resistance can be avoided, and there will be no need for an extended effort to overcome resistance to change. This is the most important observation to be made about Kotter’s model– how important it is to focus on step one and get it right before moving on.

The second stage of the process reveals it as a highly political approach–not in the negative sense of politics, but in the positive–that it involves a number of people working together to accomplish a purpose. Kotter advises us to form a guiding coalition to direct the change process. It’s a coalition because he thinks we should have the various stakeholders included.

Finally, the process Kotter describes shouldn’t really be considered a management approach, per se. Instead, it’s a process for leading, not managing, change. Managerial approaches focus on clearly defining objectives, making detailed plans, setting time tables, assigning responsibilities, and monitoring progress via supervision and metrics; and finally, intervening when things are going well.

In contrast, leadership approaches focus on energizing other people to take action. Kotter’s process is a method of energizing others around a goal. Hence once a need for change is established via the first stage, then developing and communicating a vision and empowering others to act on the vision become crucial. These are leadership activities.

Why does Kotter recommend a leadership process rather than a management approach? Presumably because he thinks it is more likely to be successful. Probably that is true. Nothing is more difficult than to achieve a change in the culture of the organization (Kotter’s final stage) by using managerial methods. People have to be brought to welcoming change via leadership; since they can rarely be put in that position by direction and orders.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading and Managing Change” course, please click here.

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COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Y and William Ouchi’s Theory Z (a description of these models can be found here):

McGregor’s Theory X and Y are as useful as ever. The distinction describes attitudes of a manager toward employees. McGregor says that adopting Theory X is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy – because a manager thinks people have these negative attitudes, he treats them that way, and they respond by adopting Theory X behavior.

In contrast, often if a manager adopts Theory Y it also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People treated as if they have good work attitudes, in fact behave as if they do.

Still, McGregor was perhaps more hopeful than merited by the reality of the workplace. When he first published the distinction between Theory X and Theory Y, there were very few Theory Y practitioners. Now there are many. But sometimes people who are treated in a Theory Y way, respond with Theory X attitudes and behavior. A manager must be realistic about what he or she actually encounter in the workplace.

Ouchi’s Theory Z is largely ignored – not outdated, but ignored. Long-term employment has largely disappeared, and few if any employers now aspire to it. Employees may well prefer long-term employment, but without employer support, can do little to achieve it. Americans still stress rapid decision-making; consensus is not an ideal here. Slow and qualitative evaluation has never displaced the importance of annual performance reviews and quantitative goals and measures in American business.

Formal controls are preferred; spectacular failures like that involving Societe General and it’s rogue trader reinforce demands for formal and explicit controls. Finally, since employees are not long-term, and are formally controlled, the role of concern for employee and family has largely disappeared in the American workplace.

In retrospect, Theory Z was Ouchi’s interpretation of the Japanese model of employee relations which in the early 1980s seemed to power Japanese firms which were outcompeting US firms. Ouchi was urging US companies to adopt Japanese practices to become more competitive. But since Japan’s economic stagnation began in the 1990s, and continues to this date, the attractiveness of the Japanese model has much declined.

This is unfortunate, because the Japanese model continues to power international business powerhouses like Toyota and Sony, even if the Japanese home economy has been paralyzed by political ineptitude. Many US firms would be better performers if they made a shift of focus to longer-term performance, as is suggested by the Theory Z model.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “The Successful Manager: Managing People” course, please click here.

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Twentieth-century psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an influential three-stage model of how organizational change occurs. Lewin’s model was based on his observations of group dynamics and organizational development. This “unfreezing-change-refreeze” model focuses on how people can be motivated to accept organizational change and reject and replace the status quo with a new approach.

COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Kurt Lewin’s Change Model:

Lewin’s change model continues to be useful. More recent management insights, however, have modified the way we look at organizational change.

Recent thinking about managing change stresses the importance of the Unfreezing stage. Far too often people identify a problem then spend time and effort figuring out a solution. Finally a solution is arrived at and the people involved, usually only one or two, become very excited. They jump to what Lewin labels the Change stage. They take their solution to a broader group in the company, only to have it rejected. Yet they’re sure that the solution was the right one.

What has gone wrong? The answer is that a person should never offer a solution before others accept that there is a problem. People don’t want to fix things that they don’t think are broken. When we insist that they do, they are most likely to reject our solution. Worse, once rejected a solution is likely to be discredited for the future, even when the problem becomes apparent to all and it was in fact the best solution.

Since Unfreezing is so important, how should we go about it? The first thing is to get people close to the situation. Let them discover for themselves what the situation actually is by coming face-to-face with the problem. To get police sergeants to recognize that traditional police tactics weren’t working, the police commissioner of a large city reassigned many for a period to high crime areas. It worked. Once the sergeants realized that there was a real problem in the field, they became open to solutions that the commissioner was prepared to offer.

In the financial services industry executives who are aware of the importance of the Unfreezing stage insist that managers in their companies “manage by the facts.” What they mean is that managers should not accept explanations for results that are based on assumptions rather than on actual data. When managers look at the facts, they often get a very different picture of what is happening than before and begin looking for solutions to the new problems they perceive.

Stage Two of Lewin’s model is insightful and correct, but sketchy. Modern thinking has elaborated the Change stage into multiple steps, adding depth to it.

Stage Three, Refreezing, is misguided.

A modern manager doesn’t want to freeze anything in a rapidly changing world. This stage is better rephrased as “Consolidation” of the new so that it becomes the culture of the moment. But we want to keep it flexible so that it can be more readily unfrozen when new problems arise and when change again becomes necessary.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading and Managing Change” course, please click here.

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Twentieth-century psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an influential three-stage model of how organizational change occurs. Lewin’s model was based on his observations of group dynamics and organizational development. This “unfreezing-change-refreeze” model focuses on how people can be motivated to accept organizational change and reject and replace the status quo with a new approach.

The chart below outlines the three stages.

Lewin argued that organizational “refreezing” offered people a sense of stability, but that it should be a brief stage, as further change might become necessary. As consultant Ron Knowles has written:

“Refreezing” implies a return to a previously frozen state, but this is clearly unrealistic and not what Lewin intended. He envisioned a continuous process of unfreezing, changing and refreezing, during which one set of changes is followed by another set of changes in a constantly evolving pattern.

For COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Kurt Lewin’s Change Model, please click here.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading and Managing Change” course, please click here.

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A key to effective time management is focusing on results, not on the amount of activity or tasks completed. This MindEdge video explores this topic in more depth.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Time Management” course, please click here.

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American psychologist Bruce W. Tuckman developed an influential model of team development, first enunciated in a 1965 article “Developmental sequence in small groups,” published in Psychological Bulletin. Tuckman’s model traced the evolution of a team through four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. Tuckman argued that these stages were necessary to build an effective team.

The chart below outlines the four stages of team building in the Tuckman model.

In 1977 Tuckman added another stage to the model: adjourning. In this phase the team completed its task and dissolved. (Some have also labeled this fifth stage “mourning,” as members of an effective team will feel some level of disappointment and sadness when their team is broken up.)

You can find Tuckman’s original 1965 article here in Word document format.

For COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Tuckman’s model, please click here.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading Teams” course, please click here.

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A key time management tool is the task list or to-do list. This MindEdge video offers some tips on using task lists.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Time Management” course, please click here.

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