high-performing contributors are especially likely to contribute to disengagement. These newly minted managers often lack the skills needed to engage team members. The skills, capabilities, and motivations that make for a top contributor are usually not the same ones that result in a top manager.
These high-performing contributors can become excellent managers, but often they need to be given guidance and development in order to succeed.
The firm’s professional development program should train and monitor new managers carefully to help them make the transition from performer to manager without risking discouragement to these managers or disengagement for their teams.
How Does Professional Staff Disengagement
Impact the Firm?
From a business perspective, the results of poor manager practices often manifest in the following ways:
• Increased turnover and the associated replacement costs
• Poor professional staff performance
• Missed deadlines
• Low quality work product
• Decreased morale and motivation
• Increased employee complaints
Without decisive action by the firm, the problems associated with this can quickly mount.
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Compounding the issue, recent studies indicate the bad habits devel-
oped by new managers, if left unchecked, are unlikely to improve on their own. For example, a study performed by Towers Perrin,15 one of the world’s leading management and human resources consulting firms, found that managers of all tenures, across a number of companies surveyed, received low marks from employees on the behaviors that have the most significant impact on employee engagement, including:
• Recognizing and rewarding good performance
• Empowering employees
• Encouraging innovation and new thinking
• Exercising good decision making
• Team building
• Providing goals and directions
• Communicating effectively
• Global thinking and understanding the big picture
• Coaching and developing the skills of employees
• Displaying integrity
To maximize staff engagement, the firm must develop engaging managers and promote the fair and equitable treatment of all employees. “It has been my experience from observation and from looking at the data that an employee’s perception of being unfairly treated by the organization is a major push towards cynicism or other distancing from work,” states Leiter.16 Being considered fair is often one of the most important and often overlooked elements of an engaging work environment. Employees will lose faith in management’s good intentions and passion for a company when they perceive that company decision making is arbitrary and capricious.
Improving Manager and Staff Engagement
The firm can take early preventive action to help orient new managers (as well as “not so new” managers who’ve missed the basics) and avoid the issues discussed earlier. A condition of promotion within the firm should be the completion of manager training to help managers gain the skills they need to handle their new responsibilities. In their 2004 Workforce and Workplace Forecasts December 31, 2003, Roger Herman and Joyce Gioia, strategic business futurists and certified management consultants, state that as employers discover the impact of serious inadequacies in management and leadership,
“up and coming managers will be expected to learn and practice leadership skills before assuming new positions.”17 Stressing the importance of continuing to give new managers extra attention during their first few months in their
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new role, Leiter adds, “The transition to managerial status is itself a stressful time of identity shift for many new managers. The extra attention may be warranted just to assure that the new managers’ own engagement is maintained throughout the evolution from the individual contributor role to the new manager role.”18 Some firms also provide follow-up training for new managers six months after promotion to reinforce their skills after they have additional context for understanding.
The initial manager ramp-up period should include the following steps: 1. Start with a solid new role orientation. Orientation must be the starting point for any role change, especially one resulting from a promotion into a totally different job. Orientation provides new managers with an overall direction and structure that enables them to see and understand the big picture of their new role. When newly promoted managers receive orientation, they are trained in the basic rules and objectives of the new role as well as information on tools and resources they can use to succeed. A few specific items include:
• Expectations the company has of them in their new role
• Where and how to gain access to reports, people, and information
needed to do the new job
• A clear understanding of the incentives and disincentives impacting this new role
2. Training. When professionals in a “doer” role are promoted to a management role, many of their former core skills, knowledge, and experience become context that helps them to understand what their team is doing but are not necessarily helpful to them in their new role. To effectively execute their management role, they need a new set of skills (e.g., leadership, communication, negotiation, hiring). Once new managers are oriented into their new role, training can inculcate the new skills needed. Effective training will give new managers tools and strategies that they need to get their new job done. Orientation should take place before they assume their new role; management training is most effective after new managers have been in their role five to six months. By this time, they have developed a better sense of the management role and challenges, which gives them the ability to more fully appreciate the skills taught in the training program.
3. Coaching. By now, it is a well-known fact that most of what is learned through training programs, if not reinforced, is almost immediately forgotten.
Coaching is recognized as the best way to increase retention and application of what people learn in training. I, therefore, recommend that you engage either an internal or external (professional) coach to support the retention, in-ternalization, and application of the skills taught in your manager training programs. The type of coaching I refer to is the process outlined by W. Timothy Gallwey, author of the Inner Game series. Gallwey has referred to his
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coaching approach as a “better way to [effect] change [in people].”19 Gallwey’s interpretation of coaching can be referred to as removing internal obstacles to performance.
4. Testing for engagement. The best way to determine how well your efforts in creating engaging managers are paying off is to conduct blind surveys of professional staff. In conducting these surveys, the firm asks employees to anonymously rank their managers as leaders who communicate clearly and produce a sense of personal connection with work and company objectives as well as a sense of belonging to a high-performance team. The Gallup Q12
questions20 are an excellent example of this type of survey. Another in-depth example of an engagement feedback tool is the “Preventing Burnout and Building Engagement” program run by Leiter in conjunction with his university-based research center. Leiter consults with organizations far and wide in planning, conducting, analyzing, and using the information from these surveys to create more engaging work environments.21
5. Give managers feedback. Incorporate the results of the engagement survey into manager performance feedback. Recommend corrective actions where needed, and turn engaging practices into institutionalized best management practices in the firm.
By incorporating a program that promotes fully engaged managers, the firm can avoid the costs outlined earlier and ensure that newly promoted managers are best positioned to succeed in their roles as engaging leaders.
Summary
Managing people in a professional services organization for peak results and growth requires that you:
• Be very clear on the skill, passion, and talents required.
• Know the size and composition of the resource pool.
• Set and balance individual utilization targets to achieve the highest sustainable level of quality output the professional staff.
• Develop a comprehensive global view of billable staff and the drivers that impact the need to increase and decrease the resources.
• Understand the ideal for a bench resource pool if your firms business pattern requires one.
• Automate resource management administrative processes when the
labor / capital trade-off is favorable.
• Develop management practices that fully engage professional and administrative staff.
“The strength of an organization is not I, but we,” stated the German poet, novelist, play wright, and natural philosopher Johann Von Goethe.22 In
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a professional services organization, “we” represents the company’s most important asset. If, therefore, the firm is to enjoy the competitive advantages that result from organizational excellence in professional services, it will not come solely from the efforts of the senior management team, or those of a few company heroes. It will come only from the mass efforts of a well-managed, well-directed workforce where all individuals embodied in the collective “we”
pursue excellence with all of their talents, capabilities, skills, and passions.
RESOURCES
Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzales-Molina, Follow This Path: How the World’s Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential (New York: Warner Books, 2002, pp. 40– 41).
Joe Santana and Jim Donovan, Manage I.T.: A Step by Step Guide to Help New and Aspiring Managers Make the Right Career Choices and Gain the Skills Necessary for Peak Performance (Austin Bay Publishing, 2002), pp. xii, 124–138.