6 Negative Managerial Behaviors

As an employee working in a multinational organization in a middle management cadre, I have encountered certain management attitudes and behaviors that I feel act as an obstacle to them being able to discharge their management responsibilities effectively. In fact, these behaviors tend to negatively influence the working environment which in turn serves to deteriorate the circumstances further, resulting in unhappy employees, poor morale, low productivity, and a stressful environment for all concerned.


Below are some of the harmful behaviors that I have observed among managers that can have a negative effect on  the working environment.

 
1) Failure to 'Lead By Example'

What is critical to effective leadership is leading by example or "walking your talk". You will never earn the respect of others if the examples you set are not congruent with the values that you want your staff to have, for example: honesty, discipline and timeliness. The best managers practice what they preach. Many leaders and managers say they want change and continuous improvement but do nothing for the change.  Instead, they expect their subordinates to bring changes by improving their individual competencies themselves.  For employees, there is nothing more powerful than observing their superiors do the actions or practice behaviors that they are requesting from their staff. As Mahatma Gandhi said,"Become the change you wish to see in the world, and it will happen."

2) Communicating Poorly

Good communication means telling staffs your expectations about them, your work standards and your problems. Failing to keep your staffs informed or having the attitude that your staffs are supposed to know what to do is a clear step towards poor performance at the workplace. 'Expecting them to know' is a very unsafe notion to have as people have different opinions, views and values about work. I have on many occasions noticed managers give instructions like, "Do the report" and "You are the senior person now. You should know how to do it. Do I have to tell you?" and nothing else. Questions from the recipient are then disregarded with the statement , "Surely you know how to do a report." When the report is then submitted a few days later, the manager throws a tantrum and makes statements like, "Why have you put only the summary of expenses and revenues? Where are the details? Why have you not put in charts and tables, why have you not quoted examples?" My contention is shouldn't all these have been communicated before the report was made? It would have saved time, effort and most importantly, prevented the report maker from being demotivated.

A significant factor in communications is 'good listening', a skill I feel many managers lack. Managers seem to prefer the 'you listen to me as I am the boss' syndrome. As much as you want your staffs to know how you feel, they would also want you to know how they feel. Good listening will enable managers to really be aware of the problems of subordinates and more importantly, enable them to get feedback on work activities. This will then enable managers to take action to improve operations, procedures, policies and customer care.

3) Failure to Train and Develop Staffs

Well-trained employees at all levels of your organization are integral to achieving your business objectives and raising your business performance. Your staffs need up-to-date skills and best practice methods to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. This skill and knowledge building process is an important and valuable ongoing investment in your business.

Many managers in most of the organizations I have seen make the assumption that their staffs will eventually 'catch on' or will automatically get to know their job through a process of time. Yes, this is possible, but learning through experience is a very slow way of learning. Training helps to accelerate this learning process. I believe managers must spend at least 25% of their time coaching and training their staff. Even a person like Meg Whitman, the CEO of E-Bay admits, "My weakness is that I haven't done enough day to day coaching and mentoring." I have heard many managers telling, "It's no use spending money training staffs because as soon as they get the skills , they will want to leave to join another company."  My answer in the form of a question is usually, "What if you don't train them and they do not leave to join another company?" There is always a risk that staff after being trained may take these skills elsewhere, but the greater risk I believe is for managers not to train them and thus have untrained incompetent subordinates.
 
4) The Fear Factor

This seems to be the favorite  method used by managers. Threatening seems easy, as the results are instantaneous. When a manager barks, "Practice your management philosophy somewhere else and obey my orders. I will make sure that  it will affect your evaluation." Chances are that the manager will kill the ideas that could benefit the organization and thus your subordinates will  never ever think for the organization's benefit.  The preference for this method is because the response was in line with the command and it was 'easy'. But fear only works short term. Fear will cause people to retaliate negatively in the form of poor quality and quantity of work, absenteeism and apathy towards their work and in extreme examples, even sabotage. All of these are costs to the organization, but are usually ignored as they are difficult to quantify.

Another problem with this attitude is that the working environment becomes tensed and stressful; these are clearly unsuitable conditions for good quality and quantity of work. The employees in a sense become 'robots' who are happy to do the bare minimal at the workplace. On the other hand, motivating people with strong leadership skills , will bring out the best in them. Recognize, reward, encourage and appreciate them and this will increase worker output to a substantial extent. Employees thrive on recognition and appreciation and want to be treated fairly. This is something that seems to be lacking in many organizations.

5) Showing Favoritism

Ironically, many managers prefer to have favorites although they like motivating by fear. This is mostly because they feel that certain employees have more knowledge then them and can expose and magnify the manager's lack of knowledge. When it comes to the crunch, they prefer to 'tolerate' rather than terminate even if the favorites under perform and promote them rather than employees who have more experience with the same level of qualification who rightfully deserve so. It is a tragedy that it is this 'face of management' that gets abused again and again by a minority of preferred employees. If asked, I am sure most of us can name at least five preferred people in our organizations who are contributing less than others at the same level; in other words,  they are liabilities to the organization. Yet, we are perplexed when the management takes no decisive action against these people. Why is this so? Why do organizations pay good salaries and yet do not demand good services in return? Again, I attribute this to our culture where we have our own likes and dislikes that come to play at the time of evaluating subordinates and giving promotions. 

I know that it's a human factor to like and dislike people but, in a professional environment, managers must learn to put aside their feelings and evaluate every person under them on the basis of performance. Otherwise, the organization will lose out as it takes only one of these types of employees to have a negative and demoralizing effect on the rest.

6) Focusing on Quantity rather than Quality

Many a times, managers are only focused on the ends and not the means. They tend to manage 'quantitatively'. The management is only geared towards achieving certain numbers and nothing else. When this happens, these managers become blinded by these numbers. My argument here is that these numbers only represent successful and well thought out procedures and policies of an organization. 

Compromising on quality and not implementing quality policies will damage the organization's effectiveness and its reputation in the relative markets.

  There are even some organizations that hire managers on a one or two year contract basis, who are then informed that the renewal of the contract is dependent on their performance: in short, profits. Hence, these managers tend to focus on short term targets and most importantly play the numbers game. These are usually achieved in the long term detriment of the company concerned. In his book, 'Good To Great', Michael Collins states that the companies which are great never become successful overnight. It was as a result of prolonged stewardship of the company of an individual who displayed very good leadership skills and importantly, focused on long term goals. 

I find that most managers are ironically aware of the above and yet when asked, "Why don't you try to reduce these negative behaviors?", the answers vary from "It's too difficult" to "I don't even have time for my work, so how do you expect me to concentrate on these other factors?" My answer has always been that, "Being a good manager is never easy." 

                                                                 
So have you identified your negative managerial behaviors? Those who are able to reduce or even totally eliminate most of these behaviors will surely reap the rewards in the long term, specifically in terms of managerial excellence, and with that will come more satisfaction, motivation and fulfillment in your managerial career.