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Monday, March 07, 2005
Night Manager: Think group but don’t forget individuals
By Kiko Antonio
Night Manager
It all sounds so sensible: Expect the best from your employees, and they’ll give you their best. On the other hand, expect little from employees, and they’ll give you meager performance in return. But the interplay between managerial expectations and employee performance is more complex than this. To be sure, expectations exert a powerful impact on an individual’s performance. Yet managers who believe that they’ve done their job merely by defining and declaring high expectations — without involving employees in the process — will likely get the same poor results that bosses with low expectations receive.
Too many managers leave out a crucial first step while setting expectations: finding out if their direct reports agree with and buy into the proposed expectations. Just because a manager wants a certain level of performance doesn’t mean an employee can provide it. Managers need to find out what employees think of the proposed expectations. People are more committed to objectives that they’ve helped to define. They also feel more confident that they can reach the agreed-upon goals.
Think group, but see individuals. Big goals inspire people at the collective level, but you then need to work with each person based on their roles, strengths, and passions. You can’t — and shouldn’t — expect the same performance from everyone. Some people can and will work sixty or seventy hours a week; others can’t or won’t but can still contribute valuable results. You need to put people in situations where they can be successful.
No matter how actively employees participate in the expectation-definition process, they won’t rise to the occasion unless they understand in concrete terms what’s expected of them. Other executives believe that too much detail can set the stage for a limited response and maintain that clarity is still possible with less specificity.
Still, clarity of expectations isn’t enough. Employees must see defined objectives as realistic and achievable. Expectations and performance are linked in a bell-shaped curve: High expectations can lead to improvement — until the expectations become unrealistically high. That causes overload, stress, and diminished performance. Yet many senior managers intuitively feel that they should constantly push their subordinates, setting ever-higher objectives and performance targets.
Goals should be difficult, but not so difficult that employees will see them as impossible and hence reject them. Employees must believe they can achieve their goals if they try —a personal attribute called self-efficacy. When self-efficacy is high, people set more challenging goals. They also persevere when they encounter setbacks, and they respond to negative feedback with more effort rather than with defensiveness.
(kiko_antonio(at)yahoo(dot)com)
(March 7, 2005 issue)
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