You need to know the rules in order to break them successfully

Line Management

‘Line management’ is the sharpest tool in the management toolbox and the hardest to wield skillfully.  Exposed in junior management, honed in middle management, human motivation is its raw material.

Line management is about getting the best performance from your employees.  It’s a tactical form of leadership, meaning it’s visible and ‘hands on’.  Line management is a subset of skills that intersect with other management skills, overlapping and even conflicting as they operate in tension with each other.  It can be a frustrating technique to develop because success with one team doesn’t necessarily translate with another and the dynamics of the same team can change over time as people come and go.

Line management is almost wholly developed through experience.  Personal coaching and role-play training have a role but are a long way from front line experience.  The aims of this tutorial are therefore limited to giving succour to anyone living the experience right now.  It offers some practical techniques, but mostly it seeks to explain why line management is so darned difficult.

What motivates you?

That motivation comes from within is truer than we realise.  Developments in neuroscience suggest we are not really conscious of our own decision-making: the subconscious decides and then ‘informs’ the conscious part of our brains.  Humans have a knack for holding conflicting, ambiguous, sometimes even mutually incompatible opinions at the same time.  It’s like a scientist that believes in God; or both liking and disliking someone; or doctors that smoke.  We may believe something one week but change our mind the next.  We might claim to behave one way yet be observed doing something completely different.  We lie.  It’s my guess that this contradictory behaviour allows us to adapt to changing circumstances very successfully.  It doesn’t, however, make us easy to manage!

There’s a story about a donkey often used to describe the complexities of human motivation.  If you beat a donkey with a stick it will move forward.  If you dangle a carrot in front of a donkey, it will move forward.  However, the moment you stop these activities, the donkey will stop moving.  The story is used to illustrate the fleeting benefit of carrots and sticks.  Unlike donkeys, people will move forward, or not, because they want to.

What then is the influence of a line manager?

Assert Your Will

You’re the boss.  There’s no point in being the boss if you don’t take decisions, set the standards you expect everyone to adhere to, and assert yourself.  It’s a powerful position, deliberately so.  Becoming comfortable wearing these clothes is one of the first learning experiences a new line manager will have.  There is a certain amount of mental toughness needed for this role.  It’s isolating.  Being the boss introduces a distance with your staff that is there, no matter how much you might think, or hope, that it isn’t.  It’s also enormously enjoyable, liberating and empowering.  However, unless you assert yourself with fairness and consistency, you’re credibility as a boss, and people’s willingness to follow, will be much reduced.

What’s the most useful skill if you want to assert yourself?  Candour.

Let Others to Assert Their Will

Remember how satisfying it is being able to assert your will?  Well, others enjoy it just as much as you, my friend.  The ideal boss is one where people express their opinion, even if they know it is sharply contrary to yours, and perhaps unwelcome; they do so naturally, safe in the knowledge they will not be ‘punished’ for it.  Rather the opposite, they will be marked down if they keep quiet.  This can make for rumbustious team meetings but it recognises the truth that the boss is not always right.

The skill you most need if you want others to assert themselves?  Being able to change your mind.

People skills

It’s not all about assertiveness.  We are all human.  We all need help, sometimes.  If you find dealing with people, with all their attendant problems, wearisome, then line management positions are not for you, and probably leadership roles also.  Dealing with people involves a range of skills including perceptiveness, openness and communicativeness.  Part of you must actually enjoy ‘difficult’ discussions.

Common Mistakes

What are the common mistakes of inexperienced line managers?

Avoiding conflict; some people find conflict excruciating and will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it.  Most of us, find conflict daunting to some degree.  It is why no news is generally bad news.  The two worst behaviours that result from avoiding conflict are firstly, storing things up, and secondly, being vague or ambiguous.  The first is just unfair on your staff, the second leads to confusion.  I’ve talked with people who have come out of a redundancy meeting unsure whether they had a job or not, so circumspect was the line manager in what they said.  There’s no ‘cure’ that makes you enjoy conflict, however it helps to realise that addressing conflict head on, and early, always leads to better outcomes.  And conflicts never resolve themselves; you will have to deal with it eventually.

Treating people like children;   some managers behave as if their employees are delicate little flowers who must be spared from the uncertainties and discomforts of the big bad world.  The most frequent example of this behaviour is not telling staff about unpopular plans until they are far advanced.  Another example is being too liberal with praise.  On visiting New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, President George W Bush told the press that Mayor Brown – ‘Brownie’ – was doing a great job.  No he wasn’t.  The dead were lying in the streets.   If you doubt the wisdom of this, consider that that treating people like children has only one consequence – they start behaving like children, so you have the worst of all worlds!

Inconsistency; while you don’t have to conform to the Victorian ideal of meeting triumph and disaster in the same way, nevertheless a leader that is ‘all over the place’ will not inspire confidence.  Examples of inconsistent behaviour include being indiscrete, ungenerous of colleagues, having ‘favourites’ or encouraging cliques.  People are looking at you, even if you don’t know it, and they will read things into your behaviour that you might not intend.  Whether you like it or not, you are a role model.

Managing Poor Performers

How companies manage poor performance is leading indicator of their future success.  It is the most testing of all management skills.  The purpose is blunt:  either an unwanted behaviour stops completely or the employee is sacked.  There is no middle ground, so don’t seek it.

The first phase of managing poor performance is the observation, assessment, and informal reprimand.  The second phase is formal disciplinary procedure.  The form is the same in both cases: ‘I observed this behaviour.  It falls below the minimum I expect.  It needs to change immediately.  Do you understand?’  Obviously unacceptable behaviour is easy to deal with, but the borderline cases are the toughest.  This is where someone’s heart is in the right place, they just don’t have the skills, or someone has hitherto been performing well in a previous role but the role changed and they can’t adapt.

Uncertain whether a particular behaviour merited the seriousness of formal disciplinary procedures, an HR manager advised me to forget the detailed circumstances of the case.  He suggested I look into my heart and ask myself whether the person’s overall performance was above or below my minimum standard.  I’ve yet to find advice that was more helpful.

The Disciplinary Interview

The good thing about disciplinary action is that it has a binary effect – either the person improves or they eventually leave.  Things never just carry on as before.  The bad thing about disciplinary action is that it is attritional.  You have to be tougher than the employee.  You may be faced with a hard-nut who doesn’t want to change their behaviour and who doesn’t want to leave but who wants instead to fight you and win.  They may believe you are being unfair or discriminatory (for the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll assume you’re not).  Prevailing in such cases is time-consuming, emotionally draining and distracting, but absolutely necessary.

A disciplinary interview is a test of your mettle.  The employee will ask you to justify your position, introduce mitigating circumstances, and deflect the blame elsewhere.  They should have someone in the room with them, and to support them afterwards (this helps you, do not discourage it).  What you must not do is be put off the scent.  You’re there to explain that a behaviour is not acceptable and that’s the message that needs to be repeated.  Keep coming back to that central point, no matter how far from it the conversation strays.  The technique is called the ‘broken record’.

When embarking on disciplinary action, the intention is to improve performance and sometimes this is exactly what happens.  More often, unfortunately, performance doesn’t improve and sometimes it gets markedly worse.  You need to be prepared for any eventuality, even the extreme example of a case going through tribunal and eventually court action.  Spouses may seek to get involved, conversations may be taped, your mental health and that of the employee may deteriorate.  It can get extremely unpleasant.  This is where mental toughness becomes one of the most valuable skills of the line manager.

Managing Good Performers

Compared with poor performers, you’d expect managing good performers to be easy, but it isn’t.  The challenges are of a completely different nature but challenges they remain.  One of the most common, least helpful, and most frustrating thing a line manager can say to a talented, ambitious employee is ‘keep doing what you’re doing’.   What?  No areas of improvement at all?  You should probably spend more time with your best performers pulling them up about every little thing.  Scrape the barrel of feedback.  They can take it.  In fact they will eat it up.

The challenge of managing good performers is finding where the boundaries of their competence lies, and pushing them back.   Managing talented people puts special demands on their boss.  It demands that you take genuine development risks.  Not just a few one-off, delegated tasks to take something of your plate, but full-throated, high-profile projects, or big promotions.  Taking development risks means you are the one taking the risk.  If it goes wrong, it’s your judgement will be questioned.  That’s one of the reasons it’s so demanding.

Managing Average Performers

The vast majority of us are average, obviously.  We want to do a good job but work is just one of several competing priorities in our lives and often not the most important.  Consequently, our motivation waxes and wanes.

It is, for example, perfectly possible for someone to come to work every day, do the minimum required of them, and yet also be an amateur marathon champion; or lead a successful scout group; bring up a young family; or any number of difficult, absorbing tasks.  In other words, be heroically productive in other fields of endeavour.

In these, more typical, circumstances, your job is to be as clear as possible with the person about the opportunities available to them should they reconfigure their priorities.  They should be making a conscious choice, aware of the costs and the benefits, should they decide to direct more of their ‘whole life’ motivational capacity into paid employment, rather than other achievements.  And if you judge them capable, you should be unabashed in encourage them to do this.

On the other hand, you may come across an employee who wants the benefits of working harder – status, money, responsibility – but doesn’t actually want to work harder in order to achieve them.  Your job in these circumstances is to explain that they are being unrealistic, be unsentimental in showing them why, and to describe what they’d need to do to change if they ever want to be taken seriously.

Summary

Part hard-ass, part dead-poets-society, line management is tremendously rewarding.

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