Managing For Results

In a challenging economic environment like ours, the only way to ensure the continued viability of companies is to focus on performance and reward it accordingly. What should be on the minds of executives is how they can effectively measure and manage performance at all levels within their organisations. More and more organisations are implementing performance incentive schemes for their staff and these companies have already started seeing a turnaround in their performance. The only way to guarantee future success is to focus on issues of performance and rewards. However, many companies often miss it in that it is not only rewarding performance that is important but effectively managing it. As a manager, you need to motivate your team to get things done. Motivation is beyond remuneration or handsome incentives. As a manager you need to bond with your staff. You also need to develop relationships that inspire employees to get involved and do more.

Many organisations these days have mercenaries. Their employees are there just because they want to be paid at the end of the month. Performance in this case is driven by the fact that the employee wants to make “ends meet.” When you ask these employees how work is like, there are really upfront and tell you, “I hate my job!” Whilst there may be many other reasons why employees grow to hate their job yet still do it, a primary reason is a poor subordinate – boss relationship. Very few managers have the requisite people skills needed to effectively manage their subordinates for performance. This only makes sense because very few managers have been trained to do so. Many managers have been taught to manage by objectives and metrics to monitor performance, and they have this misconception that bonding with your team members will be seen as a distraction at best or weakness at worst.

Leaders should develop personal relationships with their subordinates. The productive manager is less like a football coach with a whistle around his neck and more like a belayer helping climbers reach the next goal. While it is true that companies with abundant resources can afford to use fear as a motivator and absorb the cost of more frequent hirings and firings, this approach frequently ends up with a demoralised workforce, high staff turnover and poor service delivery.

Many employees are emotional hostages to their work places. They are hostages to emotions such as anxiety, fear and ambition. This negatively impacts on performance. George Kohlrieser (George Kohlrieser, 2001), argues that to escape from these emotional hostage situations, each employee needs a secure base — a person, place, goal or object that provides a place of protection, gives a sense of comfort, and a source of energy. This is where managers are most important.

As a manager, you are there to motivate people to respond to the changing goals and circumstances. You define and direct what needs to be done and you inspire employees to accomplish that. Too often, your subordinates do not give you the results you want because there is no relationship between you, the manager, and the employee. An example would be employees’ response to change. Employees do not resist change itself, rather the pain of change and the fear of the unknown that comes with it. As a result, employees think more defensively, they hold back and resist pursuing success and playing to win. In the workplace, leaders who show concern and interest in their employees' lives and have a predictable set of rules, create a healthy attachment that empowers others to embrace the risk of pursuing success.

Employees want to be cared for. They want to feel that their manager genuinely has their interests at heart. Effectively managing for performance will require that managers move beyond simply giving instructions and demanding results. I am not suggesting that managers should act as “caregivers” or “parents”; rather that these insights help managers work with people's strengths and tendencies, rather than against them. Isolating an employee with authoritative demands and intimidation triggers a sense of isolation, threat, and fear. Then the brain slams the brakes on the ability to take initiative and makes it harder for people to think productively.

Behavioural psychology teaches us that humans will behave more favourable to crisis situations if they feel they have support. Strongly subordinate superior bonds can help teams survive and thrive in crisis situations. In the same light, a thing that managers often miss is that employees will respond more favourably to a rebuke, for example, where they feel that there is a positive relationship between you and them. When you look at it, developing relationships is also psychologically rewarding to those who give it, generating a sense of reward and connection.

For more information visit our website 

Harnessing the power of teams in organisations?

One of the key challenges facing organisations today is building effective teams that will help the organisation achieve its goals. The need for teamwork at all levels of the organisation cannot be over emphasized. For organisations to achieve superior performance, employees need to work together. However getting people to work together towards achieving a common goal is a challenging assignment for all managers. Part of the reasons why we undertake employee engagement surveys is to help managers assess and improve teamwork in their organisation.

What is a team? There are two key characteristics of a team; the presence of a unifying task and interdependence among the members in accomplishing the task. Besides these, the environment in which a work team operates also plays a key role in the success of any team effort. Putting together an effective team is not an easy task. In most cases people pretend to work together on the surface but there will be deep-rooted divisions within the team that need attention for the team to succeed.  It is easy to talk about teams when in actual fact it is a group of individuals who share nothing in common besides having the same paymaster.

If only organisations could understand and harness the power of collaboration in group relations, there would be a marked improvement in performance. Ordinarily employees are geared to work in teams and the primary role of management in this case is to integrate team practices into everyday work patterns. However, before embarking on this exercise, it is important to assess and understand the teamwork environment in the organisation. Without a thorough understanding of the said environment in the organisation, team building efforts may fail because you might be addressing the wrong team issues. There is also a need to understand team-working styles of each team member. This information can be used as a basis for giving feedback to the individual and fellow team members. The strength of this approach is that information gathered herein normally leads to self-awareness and self-correction.

Effective teams, to a large extent, rely upon the psychological capacity of team members to work together. Individual team members need to have an appreciation of their role in the team and how it affects the effectiveness of the team. The members need to have a clear sense of the goal the team is trying to achieve.  They need to have a collective sense of reality, where each one clearly understands not only their role but also that role of other team members.

In a presentation to the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations Symposium, Susan Long (2000) noted that most people in work teams or organisations saw their role as the single most important without which the organisation would not operate effectively. It is this kind of attitude that forces people to be single-minded in dealing with work colleagues or fellow team members to the detriment of the team.

Considering the number of different groups individuals are members of and the roles they play in these groups at work, there is potential for difficult inter -group relations. The effectiveness of any team efforts revolves around the ability of individual team members to integrate the different roles, values, and the way they exercise authority in groups. The way people exercise authority is very critical in the success of team working in organisations. Without clear authority and boundary definition, work teams spend most of their productive time engaged in counterproductive behaviour.

For a team to be effective there must be a way of containing the anxiety arising from working in a group. When a group of people meet especially in the work place a number of group dynamics take place and, if not handled properly, can destroy the team. You are probably wondering about situations in your own organisations where people rarely work together towards achieving the organisation’s goals. In most cases it will seem there are personality clashes when in actual fact, it is all to do with group dynamics related to how people exercise authority in groups. The bad attributes of the team are often projected onto other people or departments within the organisation. This is normally a source of frustration and conflict that characterizes work teams in organisations today.

Without the ability to understand the deep-rooted psychological basis of group relations, team building efforts will continue to produce lukewarm results.

Visit our website for more information