Good news and bad news for managers

Thumbs down and thumbs up The gaps between the kind of behaviour employees expect and what they actually experience from their managers are highly significant, according to the latest Krauthammer survey.

People’s expectations are not being met in a range of fundamental areas. And yet, despite these failings in managerial performance, around 70% of employees still appear to trust their managers.

The study gives clear signals that employees expect certain behaviour from their managers, such as to analyse their work problems together, involve them in solving dilemmas, admit their mistakes spontaneously and seek the feedback of their employees regarding their own performance. However, employees seem to get what they want only around half of the time.

“It is striking that the fundamental management notion of ‘helping people forward’ is so weak,” said Ronald Meijers, Co-chairman of the Board and Head of the Research Department of Krauthammer. “What would happen to the quality of management if high standards became the norm? On the other hand, ‘modern management’ has only been practised for 100 years. So let’s preserve our hope and realism. Like parenting, management is very difficult to do well and is both undervalued and undersupported. This is a mistake. Management is about people’s lives – it is simply too important to neglect,” he added.

Despite the fact that the survey revealed significant failings in managerial behaviour, 68% of people have high – or very high – levels of trust in their manager. So trust is apparently resistant to failings in management performance. However, around 14% of people actively mistrust their manager and 4% even have low levels of trust in their manager or don’t trust them at all, so there is still room for improvement.

The study focuses on four areas that Krauthammer argues are key to sustainable performance, namely:
1. How managers exercise discipline
2. How managers generate directions
3. How they make decisions
4. How they secure delivery

Within these four areas, 30 core management practices were surveyed. The top ten most wanted* forms of behaviour suggest that employees want more collaboration with their managers:

91% would like their manager to analyse their task problems together, 47% experience this.
80% would want their manager to find a common solution in a conflict situation but only 47% of managers do this.
75% would want their manager to involve them in solving problems and dilemmas, 38% experience this.

In addition, employees would like to see the managers trusting their benevolence as

82% would expect their manager to admit their mistakes spontaneously, 46% experience this.
76% would expect their manager to create the right context before implementing a change, 32% experience this.
73% would like their manager to acknowledge objections and to use questions to form a response, this happens in 33% of the cases.

The first Krauthammer Observatory was published in April 2007, and over the next four years Krauthammer will explore management behaviour in Europe on an annual basis. The material has been organised into a “dashboard” – a model for management behaviour, and over the coming years the dashboard will be filled with ever more data concerning the behaviour employees seek and receive.

16 Jul 2008

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