Industrial age, where workers were monitored closely to maximize their time on machine to secure daily production, is long gone however many of the current age team leaders and managers still monitor time-booking, utilization, and practice micromanagement. Many project managers insist that they want to be in every email, every meeting no matter their requirement in it.
This behavior from leaders tells us that they seemingly doubt or distrust their team members, or they do not know what to do with their time. Often managers and leaders label their workforce ‘lacking ownership & accountability’. It seems to be favorite for leaders to think their team members are ‘not responsible’, ‘lacking commitment’, ‘lacking motivation’ and so on and so forth.
What kind of response do you think this kind of leadership behavior results in? How do you think the team members of such leaders would behave? It is common knowledge amongst leaders /managers that it is not right but somehow the culture or expectations from the managerial hierarchies seem unable to come out of this unproductive and damaging habit and way of working.
Such leadership actions only increase employee disengagement. It is not surprising that Gallup surveys still show very low level of employee engagement.
It is high time organizational leaders recognize damaging characteristics of their organizations and change. Managers in the middle layers cannot make these changes even if they wish to.
Organizations need to recognize that we are in an age where customer expects instant resolutions and responses. Responsible responsiveness can only be improved if you make your customer facing frontline staff independent and capable of making quick decisions in real-time without fear of being reprimanded.
Such a responsible behavior can only be developed if the managers and leaders make their people independent and focus on instilling outcome-based accountability rather than clock-in and clock-out time stamps.
Leaders at the organization level need to support this by adapting their measurement mechanism because what gets measured gets managed. If you measure utilization, people are creative enough to tell you how busy they are. If you measure outcomes and tune your performance management system to it, people will start focusing on outcomes and deliver outcomes.
This paradigm shift to change their performance management is even more relevant in today’s virtual workplaces where most of your workforce is working from home or working on client’s site.
