What Kind of Manager Are You?

What kind of manager are you? Do you control your team members well enough to make sure they fully comply with your expectations? Or, do you inspire them to be self motivated to create performance breakthroughs? Do you promote employee compliance or commitment?

Alfie Kohn, in his book, Punished by Rewards (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1993) explains, “It is possible to get people to do something. This is what rewards, punishments, and other instruments of control are all about. But the desire to do something, much less to do it well, simply cannot be imposed: in this sense, it is a mistake to talk about motivating other people.” Kohn here distinguishes management practices that elicit compliance from those that inspire and support commitment. His point is that common management practices and tools are designed to control employee behavior, not to inspire it.

Exploring this further, John Condry, in his research article entitled, “Enemies of Exploration: Self-Initiated Versus Other-Initiated Learning,” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 35), describes differences in work produced by extrinsically-motivated employees and that produced by intrinsically-motivated employees. His research shows that whenever they could choose their work tasks, extrinsically motivated or managed employees chose easier tasks than their intrinsically—or self motivated—counterparts. They were also less efficient performing them, worked less hard while looking busier, produced lower quality work with more errors, were less logical when solving work problems and less creative in their approaches to performing the work.

Unfortunately, controlling workplaces like those described by Condry produce poor performers and also happen to epitomize the typical employee workplace. It shouldn’t surprise us when we feel our teams are not performing to their full potential; research suggests they operate in an environment of compliance and control rather than in one that supports and enables passion and commitment for the work.

The takeaway here is that if we want greater results from our teams, we need to create a workplace that supports intrinsic motivation rather than one that uses extrinsic rewards and motivators to drive employee compliance. Instead of setting expectations and holding people accountable for complying with them—traditional high control management practices—we need to treat employees like partners in the business by sharing more information, trusting them to use that information for the good of the business, supporting them when they take risks to do that and enabling them to choose personal commitment and accountability for the results they produce. Our support for employee intrinsic motivation and inherent desires to contribute through low control and high trust management will encourage employees to do their best work and make us better leaders.

So what kind of manager are you? Low trust and high control? Or, high trust and low control? Unlearning high control, compliance-based management practices can be challenging for many managers. But, if instead of feeling like we have to move all the way to the low control end of the spectrum in one step, we determine to simply begin moving in that direction, it becomes very doable.

Now go out and be a leader…BE THE DIFFERENCE!

Kevin Herring is co-author of Practical Guide for Internal Consultants, and President of Ascent Management Consulting. Kevin can be contacted at kevinh@ascentmgt.com.

Ascent Management Consulting is found at www.ascentmgt.com and specializes in performance turnarounds, leadership coaching, and appraisal-less performance management.