Steven R. Smith's Blog: Managing for Success Blog

My last blog explained why a manager’s most important duty is to hire good people. Without the right people in the right positions, your department will always be mediocre-- no matter what else you do.

Today we’ll discuss the hidden reason for turnover, and the greatest threat against retaining good people in any organization. The reason is poor management!

Turnover is a symptom of poor management. If bad managers and supervisors didn’t chase away so many workers, the high cost of turnover- and the need to hire and train replacements- would diminish.

Consistently, over the years, studies have shown that workers leave because of their immediate boss in about 70% of cases. They don’t quit their job- they quit their boss.

Most managers and supervisors are not bad people, but they got promoted because of their good technical or professional skills, not because they have good managerial skills. And once promoted, most don’t get the training they need to succeed in a management position.

Consequently, many managers fail, and employee satisfaction never seems to improve. Dissatisfied, turned off, unmotivated employees look for better jobs, and the organization continues with the challenge of attracting and keeping good people.

An employee with a decent boss and a good job with responsibility, autonomy, and opportunities to achieve, is unlikely to look for a different job. But for this to happen, managers and supervisors must learn how to create enriched jobs that motivate and lead to satisfied, happy workers.

This takes training and the manager or supervisor’s willingness to listen and learn. Sadly, most fail to recognize that they could do a much better job, so they don’t seek training. So the need to attract and keep good people continues on. And the real problem-poor management- never gets fixed.

For managers who do recognize they need training, a small investment in time and cost is well worth it when you consider the benefits of less turnover.

My 150-page book: Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers was written to help managers and supervisors learn how to succeed in their jobs. It includes chapters on enriching jobs and motivating employees, and on the management style needed to achieve this.

Steven R. Smith is the author of Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, a concise, 150-page guide to help managers and supervisors succeed. It is based on the author’s 42 years of industry experience at 15 different companies. For more information on this book go to: http://www.Successfulmanaging.com

The 2001 best seller, Good to Great (Jim Collins), is an important modern business book about how companies become great. Collins examined 1435 firms, but focused on 11 from different industries that went from good to great based on stock price improvement with sustainability for at least 15 years. To help understand why these companies were so successful, Collins compared each to a similar, but less successful, competitor in the same industry.

Stay with me here- we are getting to the point about hiring!

Collins found that the great companies had CEO/leaders with a blend of humility and professionalism, and a strong desire to build a great company. These CEOs tended to be modest and understated, as opposed to CEOs at their competitors who had less humility and big egos. CEO humility, it turned out, helps to build trust and allows employees to contribute without fear. As a manager, humility is a good trait to have.

But the other major finding from this study was that leaders who took their companies from good to great focused first and foremost on placing the right people into the right jobs. Lacking that, all other efforts are futile.

Therefore, arguably your most important duty as a manager, and before you do anything else, is to hire exceptional people into the right positions- or find them internally.

Collins concluded that with the right people in the right positions, other challenges, such as managing and motivating employees, require little effort. The right people can change direction more easily and are motivated by their inner drive to produce superior results.

People are not your most important asset- the right people are! So look for character, basic intelligence and work ethic- in addition to the specific knowledge and work experience required to get the job done.

As the department manager, putting the right people into the right jobs is your most important responsibility. Ignore it and your department will always be mediocre. To succeed, you must hire top-quality people into key positions; conversely, anyone who is not right for a position should be replaced.

Based on my experience, most managers do not devote the necessary time and energy to the hiring process. But now that you understand why proper hiring is so important, you can take this process very seriously.
When you hire someone you are adding a spoke to your department wheel, and a weak spoke will drag down the entire department. It makes no sense for you to plan and coordinate departmental work if you do not have the right people in place to get the job done. So take the time to get the right people on the bus and into the right seat.

Do not be penny wise and pound foolish when hiring. Be willing to invest enough money and effort to get the level of talent the position deserves. Set the pay scale high enough to attract the best qualified people.

Your job is not to be best at the technical or professional work being performed in your department; it is to hire the best people possible. They, not you, will be doing the work. If they are good, you will look very good. And the better they are, the more you can sit back, watch productivity grow, and feel great.

I’m won’t spend time here on how to plan and implement the hiring process. That is covered in depth in my book, Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, available at Amazon.


Steven R. Smith is the author of Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, a concise,150-page guide to help managers and supervisors succeed. It is based on the author’s 42 years of industry experience at 15 different companies. For more information on this book go to: http://www.Successfulmanaging.com.

Theory X vs. Theory Y
In his book “The Human Side of Enterprise,” Douglas McGregor explained that our experiences, assumptions and beliefs define how we think and react to events, and thus our management style. He defined two opposing sets of managerial beliefs and behaviors and called them Theory X and Theory Y.

Theory X managers assume employees dislike work, avoid responsibility, do only the minimum required, can’t be trusted, and have little desire to solve problems or advance within the organization. With these negative assumptions and beliefs, Theory X managers think they must micromanage everyone, tell them what to do and how to do it, and yell a lot. Is Theory X manager is a very unpleasant person to work for.

Theory Y managers, on the other hand, assume the opposite. They believe most employees want to learn, do a good job, use their talents, accept responsibility, manage their own work, control their own fate, solve problems, make decisions, achieve positive results, be recognized for their good work, and grow within the organization. If you have a Theory Y boss who respects you and your work, you are quite lucky. And you most likely enjoy your job.

So which boss are you, Theory X or Theory Y? What you believe and practice will determine the results you get. Your management style becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To Succeed You Must Adopt Theory Y
If you practice Theory X, as many managers still do, you are creating unhappy, unmotivated employees who are giving you mediocre results. Most likely turnover is high. Your department could be so much better and much more productive.

But if you practice Theory Y, most likely your people are happy, motivated and productive. This is especially true if you 1) give them meaningful and challenging jobs, 2) provide them with opportunities to achieve, 3) recognize them when they achieve and 4) allow them to plan and manage their own work- as long as the quality is high and deadlines are met.

Consider the Departmental Wheel
Think of your department as a wheel. As manager, you are the hub and each employee is a spoke. Your job is to make each spoke as strong as possible. You do this by hiring and developing exceptional people, giving them meaningful and challenging jobs, providing the necessary training and education to do the job well, helping them set goals, coaching them when needed, monitoring goals and performance, and making adjustments as necessary.

Think about it. With you, a Theory Y manager as the hub, you can maximize the effort and output of each person in your department and each spoke will be strong. If you build a strong team who support one another and departmental goals, everyone will be moving in the same direction. Then you can’t help but have a successful department. Consequently, you will be perceived as a successful manager. By delegating and focusing on everyone else, you are helping yourself. Develop your team and you will benefit as much as they do—probably even more.

Steven R. Smith is the author of Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, a concise,150-page guide to help managers and supervisors succeed. It is based on the author’s 42 years of industry experience at 15 different companies. For more information on this book go to: http://www.Successfulmanaging.com

Let me stir up the pot a bit by saying salary is not a motivator. It took considerable time for me to convince my book editor of this, so I know how hard it is for some people to accept.

First lets review Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, one of the best management tools you will ever discover. Conclusions were based on extensive research in the field of job attitudes, first conducted with engineers and accountants, then substantiated by 16 more studies among a wide variety of populations.

Herzberg identified two distinctly different sets of factors in the workplace: one set (motivational factors) leads to employee satisfaction and motivation. The other set (hygiene factors) leads to dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The key to remember is that when hygiene problems are corrected, dissatisfaction goes away but motivation does NOT increase.

Motivational Factors
Factors leading to employee satisfaction and motivation relate exclusively to the job itself—the work a person performs. The most important factors here are job achievements, recognition for those achievements, interesting and challenging work, and job responsibility. When these factors are present in a job, the worker is likely to be satisfied and motivated.

Hygiene Factors
Hygiene factors relate to the work environment, not to the job itself. Those most likely to cause problems are company policy and administration, interpersonal relationships (especially with a boss), salary and benefits. Correcting any of these problems will remove dissatisfaction, but will not motivate the employee.

Salary
Salary is the most interesting hygiene factor because it is often used in an attempt to motivate even though salary is not a motivator. Salary becomes a problem when perceived to be significantly lower than salaries of others doing similar jobs in similar organizations. Correct this problem and the dissatisfaction goes away- but motivation does not increase.

Except for a short period of time, people are never completely satisfied with their compensation and will always want more. The best thing you can do is to pay an equitable salary while providing great jobs with plenty of responsibility, purpose, autonomy, and opportunities to learn and achieve.
Some managers give raises for the wrong reasons: e.g. in the hope it will improve employee performance. This makes no sense when you consider salary is not a motivator. Compensation should be fair and equitable to avoid dissatisfaction, but going beyond the point perceived as equitable is a waste of money because it does not motivate.

Be careful with expectations regarding salary and bonuses. Research indicates that a salary bump increases happiness temporarily for up to six months. But that salary increase also creates future expectations that may not be realistic. If an employee receives a $1,000 salary increase one year, but only $500 the next year, he will be disappointed. Psychologically he is taking a $500 cut in his raise. After the first raise, the baseline expectation for the next raise becomes $1,000.

Annual bonuses can have a similar effect. A bonus smaller than the one received the previous year creates disappointment. And you can be sure that everyone looks back to see what they received the previous year.

The Bottom Line on Salary
Remember, employee motivation comes from the psychological benefits derived from the actual work a person does. This includes the feelings that come from achievement on the job, and recognition from others for those achievements. It does not come from workplace hygiene factors, like salary or other benefits unrelated to the job itself.

Steven R. Smith is the author of Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, a concise,150-page guide to help managers and supervisors succeed. It is based on the author’s 42 years of industry experience at 15 different companies. For more information on this book go to: http://www.Successfulmanaging.com.

Motivation is the unique human ability to experience psychological growth from our achievements, and the hidden force within that causes us to take action.

Why Is Motivation Important?
When workers are truly motivated, their own internal generators take over and they want to do the work. Many will seek more hours at work and less outside stimulation. Turnover decreases and productivity increases. As a manager, this is what you want, right?

Herzberg’s “Two-Factor Theory” is one of the best management tools I have ever discovered, so lets discuss it here today.

The Two-Factor Theory of Motivation
Also called the “Motivation–Hygiene Theory, Herzberg, a clinical psychologist, published it in his book: “The Motivation to Work” in 1959. His conclusions were based on extensive research in the field of job attitudes, first conducted with engineers and accountants and then substantiated by 16+ other studies among a wide variety of populations.

Stay with me here. Herzberg identified two distinctly different sets of factors in the workplace. One set (motivational factors) leads to employee satisfaction and motivation. The other set (hygiene factors) leads to dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

Motivational Factors
Herzberg found that factors leading to employee satisfaction and motivation relate exclusively to the job itself—the work a person is doing. Primary motivational factors are job achievement, recognition for achievements, type of work (interesting and challenging), and job responsibility, advancement and growth. When these factors are present in a job, the worker is likely to be satisfied and motivated. Output increases while turnover and absenteeism decrease.

Hygiene Factors
Primary hygiene factors that can lead to dissatisfaction and unhappiness are company policies and administration, relationship with supervisor, salary, and other benefits. Note that these hygiene factors relate to the work environment and not to the job itself. While it is important to identify and correct major hygiene problems to eliminate dissatisfaction, correcting them will not motivate your workers.

Management Confusion
Managers who don’t understand the difference between motivational and hygiene factors often try to motivate workers by manipulating hygiene factors- work hours, days off, salary, bonuses, or other benefits. But this doesn’t work because motivation only comes from the work a person is doing- the job itself.

It’s hard for some managers to accept that the benefits and perks they spend so much time and money on do not motivate their employees. Yes, a salary far below what others are making at a similar job in similar companies will cause dissatisfaction and unhappiness. And if you make it fair and equitable the dissatisfaction will go away- but motivation does not increase. Money means little if you hate your job.

Remember, motivation of your employees comes from the jobs you give them to do and the psychological benefits they derive from their achievements while doing that job, and from the subsequent recognition you give them. It does not come from environmental (hygiene) factors, like salary, parking spot, free lunch, more vacation, or other benefits unrelated to the work itself.

The Bottom Line
Spend less time identifying and correcting hygiene problems, and more time creating important, challenging jobs for your workers that provide plenty of responsibility, autonomy, and opportunities to achieve. Then find those achievements and recognize them publicly and privately. This is the path to real employee motivation.

Steven R. Smith is the author of Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, a concise,150-page guide to help managers and supervisors succeed. It is based on the author’s 42 years of industry experience at 15 different companies. For more information on this book go to: http://www.Successfulmanaging.com.

Last month we showed you how employee motivation comes from the job itself—the work a person is doing. Jobs that motivate are interesting and challenging with lots of responsibility and opportunities to achieve – thereby allowing the employee to experience the ensuing motivation. This also gives the manager more chances to recognize achievements, which adds even more to employee motivation. You create jobs like this through the job enrichment process.

Components of an Enriched Job

Hiring the right people into the right positions is your most important duty as manager; next is to design enriched jobs for your people. Here are three important attributes of an enriched job:

A Complete Job: Try to give the employee complete responsibility for a job that results in a definable product or service. Don’t split up responsibilities; give all the pieces to one person who should be able to see a real change in the product or service when the job is done. A complete (non-fractionated) job streamlines workflow and improves efficiency. When tasks done by separate people or departments are combined into one job, bottlenecks and delays are eliminated.

Decision-Making Control (autonomy): Give the worker as much control as possible over how and when the work is completed, as long as it gets done right and on time. Allow competent employees to schedule their own work, deviate from normal procedures in unusual situations, and to have real authority and responsibility for cost and budget control.

Direct Feedback From the Customer: Depending on the type of work done in your department, it may be possible to assign one employee, or a small team, responsibility for all the work for a specific customer. Allow these employees to get direct feedback from the customer on performance and any problems. If there is a problem, the employee gets an opportunity to fix it before the boss intervenes. Of course, you must check periodically to be sure the job is being done correctly.

All Three Components Are Important: All three components of an enriched job are important and interrelated. If a job is incomplete (fractionated), the employee feels little ownership and has little control over decision-making. Positive feedback means little to any worker who does only part of the job or has little input in the process of doing the job.

The Job Enrichment Process

By studying your overall department workflow and developing streamlined processes, you will improve efficiency and make it easier to enrich individual jobs. Major steps:

1. Analyze Department Workflow/Processes: Analyze the type and time requirements for primary department tasks, and develop flowcharts.

2. Analyze Related Tasks Inside and Outside the Department: Determine if any important workflow tasks are performed outside your department, but could be done inside. Conversely, identify tasks done in your department that contribute little to departmental workflow processes and could be done elsewhere. Make the changes if you can.

3. Reorganize Workflow/Processes if Needed: Most processes can be streamlined and improved. Depending on the volume of major tasks and your customers, you may want to divide your department into multiple work units. Evaluate the possibility of having individuals in your department perform all the work for specific customers.

4. Evaluate Each Employee: Review the skill, training and education of your employees, so you fully understand their capabilities. Meet to discuss current responsibilities and what they like and do not like doing.

5. Enrich the Job: Based on individual capabilities and interests, and on workflow processes, redesign individual jobs. Combine logical tasks and add responsibilities to make each job more challenging, complete and less fragmented. Give the worker as much autonomy as possible for getting the job done (planning, timing, progress reports and budget control).

When possible give the employee responsibility for doing all the work for a specific customer, along with a direct performance feedback link. Check periodically with customers to be sure they are completely satisfied.

Evaluate the Need for Training

By enriching jobs you are adding more responsibility and autonomy. Therefore, you must determine if more individual training is needed and, if so, provide it.

Potential Job Enrichment Concerns

Enriching jobs may scare some people, so be sure to discuss what you are doing, and why. Explain that the new job will be more complete, with more responsibility and opportunities to achieve, more autonomy, and more direct feedback from the customer.

Most employees want more responsibility, but some will not. If a worker does not want to accept the new responsibilities, you must address the situation. Perhaps you can switch some responsibilities between employees, or move the unhappy employee into another job within the department. If this isn’t possible, and reluctance persists, help move that worker into another department or out of the company. Remember, your most important duty as manager is to get the right people into the right positions.

Steven R. Smith is the author of Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, a concise, 150-page guide to help managers and supervisors succeed. It is based on the author’s 42 years of industry experience at 15 different companies. For more information on this book go to: http://www.Successfulmanaging.com.

(#2 in a series)

In my last article I wrote that your real job as manager/supervisor is to get your departmental work done through others, not to do it yourself. You have other, managerial, work to do. Delegation is a critical management skill and the unwillingness or inability to delegate is a leading cause of management failure. By delegating meaningful assignments to workers capable of doing it, you will be developing their skills and freeing up time for you to do your managerial duties.

Delegate All You Can Using Your Technical Background Properly
Having a strong technical or professional background is a real benefit if you use it correctly. It helps you to understand the technical aspects of the work, and to delegate properly by explaining the assignment comprehensively: what is to be done, why it is important, and what the results should look like (your expectations). Furthermore, your technical background enables you to effectively coach throughout the assignment if you are asked for help.

HOWEVER, a strong technical or professional background is a disadvantage if you continue to do the work yourself, if you micromanage after delegating an assignment, or if you insist on having things done only your way. Just because you are capable of doing the work is not an excuse for doing it yourself. Unfortunately, many poor managers don’t understand this.

If you are personally involved in any workflow, be sure to act quickly. If you delay any decisions or any part of the work process, you become the bottleneck. I once had a boss who had to review and approve every market research study proposal. He sat on them so long that, by the time he decided to approve the study, it was almost to late to do the work.

What to Delegate
Delegate anything that is challenging, meaningful, adds responsibility to an employee’s job, or can help develop his or her skills. Try not to do any meaningful work or assignment yourself if someone else in your department can do it, unless it is confidential or intended exclusively for managers. By delegating meaningful work you make the employee’s job more challenging, reduce frustration, resentment or boredom, increase job satisfaction, and help build self-esteem.

How to Delegate
Using your professional or technical knowledge as an advantage, clearly define the assignment, goals, deadlines, and your expectations. Explain why the work is being assigned and why it is important to the company or the customer. Ask how the employee feels about the assignment and discuss whether any new training is needed. Then ask for a commitment. People are more likely to commit to an assignment if they understand its importance and believe in it. Moreover, if they fully understand the assignment, they can be more creative in their approach to getting the work done.

After You Delegate
Once you delegate a project, get out of the way. Make yourself available as a coach and consultant, but avoid micromanaging, which can disrupt the process and cause employee frustration. Do not pull up the roots just to see how things are growing.
After you delegate and explain a major assignment, wait a few days and then ask the employee how things are progressing. Ask if any questions have come up since the project was assigned, and ask about the project timeline. The answers will tell you how well the employee understood the assignment and if anything needs clarification, and it alerts you to signs of anxiety or confusion that could impede the desired results.

What Not to Delegate
Some managerial duties or assignments should not be delegated; you must do them yourself. They include planning, preparing budgets, hiring, enriching jobs, setting goals, conducting performance reviews, staff development and sensitive assignments requested by top management.

Also, don’t give an assignment to someone who is not good at or does not like doing that type of work. Doing so will force people to be mediocre. Put people into positions where they enjoy their work and are good at it.

(#1 in a series)
In an earlier article I wrote that the primary reason managers (and supervisors) fail is because they are not properly trained. Most are promoted into these positions because they have very good technical skills (they know how to do the work), but few are trained on the specific skills needed to manage people and departments. Consequently, they don’t understand what their real job is.

A Manager’s Real Job
Yes, you are capable of doing the technical or professional work performed in your department. Maybe you can do it better than anyone else (that’s why you were promoted), you like doing the work, and training others is time consuming. So it seems natural to keep doing much of the work yourself. Don’t fall into this trap; doing departmental work is not your job (unless you have a very tiny department).

Your real job is to perform the duties only a manager can and should do, and to leave the actual department work to the people hired to do it. Spending your time on non-managerial work means you won’t have time for your managerial duties- your real job. You may even be so busy doing non-managerial work that you perceive questions from your employees as interruptions- something you should never do.

But here is the biggest problem of all: if you don’t delegate appropriate work to your employees you stifle their growth and development, minimize their opportunities to achieve and to be motivated, and you lower overall department productivity.

As manager you are judged on the success or failure of your employees. Measurements such as department productivity depend on everyone’s combined efforts, not yours.

Your real job is to nurture and coach employees so they excel individually; your success comes from their collective accomplishments. Because your success is so closely tied to theirs, you should do everything in your power to help them succeed.

Consider the Departmental Wheel
Think of your department as a wheel: you are the hub and each of your employees is a spoke. Your real job is to make each spoke as strong as possible. You do this by hiring the right people for each position, designing challenging jobs that provide opportunities to achieve, providing necessary training and education, helping individuals set goals, coaching as needed, monitoring performance, and making adjustments as necessary.

Think about it. If you maximize the effort and output of each person in your department, each spoke in the wheel will be strong. If you build a strong team that supports one another and departmental goals, everyone will be moving in the same direction. With a successful department you will be perceived as a successful manager. By focusing on everyone else, you are helping yourself. You will benefit as much as they do—perhaps even more.

Conversely, if your department wheel has weak spokes, it doesn't matter how hard people work. Your department will always be mediocre. Weak spokes will consume much of your time, perform poorly, require careful watching and inevitably someone must clean up their mess. Furthermore, tolerating weak employees is unfair to your strong employees. Poor workers cost you time and money both while they are on the job and while you spend valuable time replacing them.

So remember, your real job is to nurture, develop and coach your employees, and to get the work done through them- not to do it yourself. Beyond that your real job is to perform duties only a manager can do. In the next article we will discuss delegation, a key skill of great managers.


Steven R. Smith is the author of Managing for Success: Practical Advice for Managers, a concise, 150-page guide to help managers and supervisors succeed. It is based on the author’s 42 years of industry experience at 15 different companies. For more information on this book go to: http://www.Successfulmanaging.com.

Results from employee satisfaction surveys continue to show that poor management is an ongoing problem. Poor management leads to low employee satisfaction resulting in more employee turnover. This becomes a very expensive problem when you consider the time and cost of screening, hiring, and training replacements, as well as the loss of productivity while new hires are being trained.

After observing managers for 42 years at 15 companies, the reason so many managers fail is clear to me: they were not trained to manage. Most managers are promoted into supervisory positions because of their technical or professional abilities, not because of their managerial competence or skills.

Few people understand that effective management skills are very different than skills required to succeed in a professional position. Over the years I kept running into managers, competent in their profession, who somehow believed they had the knowledge and skills to manage people and departments without any management training. This belief is common because they just don't know what they don't know. Having technical skills does not make you a good manager. Worse yet, many managers learned bad management habits from past supervisors and colleagues. They managed as they had been managed, and by emulating their peers, they become poor managers themselves.

If your supervisor appointed you to the position of company pilot, you would immediately say, "Wait a minute! I don't know how to fly a plane. I need training!" But when the same person made you department manager, how did you react? Did it even occur to you to ask for management training? But to be effective in your role as manager or supervisor you need specialized training and education, just as you do to become an engineer, a scientist, or a pilot.

Now its time for you to sit back and think about how good you really are. If you are typical of today's manager, chances are you're not as good as you think, even though you are doing your best. Don't be afraid to acknowledge that you don't fully know what you should be doing as a manager, why you should be doing it, or how to do it most effectively.

So make the decision now to go out and get the best management training available to you, regardless of how long you have been on the job. Open your mind to new ideas, learn and apply them. With proper training you too can become a successful manager. You will be happier; so will your employees and your boss.