Are your employees going on Web to disgruntled.com?

Last month we said that too much emphasis on reducing employee turnover could cause a firm to keep the wrong employees. Because of the inherent limitations of hiring, many employees managers hire won’t be good performers.

Some of these employees improve through retraining or by transferring to other jobs, but errors in the hiring process always will produce a steady flow of employees in and out of an organization.

A number of readers pointed out that incompetence is not unique to staff positions in a company. Time and again, we hear stories about managers who don’t know what they’re doing and drive their workers crazy, a recurring theme in the Dilbert cartoon series.

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Nor is Dilbert just a reflection of Scott Adams’ personal animosity with management — take a look at www.disgruntled.com. This site is filled with stories submitted by workers about the chaos and craziness of the modern American workplace. Bosses are one of the favorite targets of workers’ ire and, while the stories are not substantiated, the vigorous feeling with which the stories are recounted tells us as much about the discontent with incompetent supervision as the details of the stories themselves.

The need for managerial competence is not new. What should get us to focus on competence today is this finding: Managerial incompetence is one of the most critical and controllable causes of employee turnover. Companies that subject workers to managerial incompetence create their own labor shortages.

Employees who quit regularly cite difficulty working with their boss as the reason for leaving. They won’t say it to the boss, the HR department or the business owner, but they say it consistently in anonymous surveys.

Lack of stock options or raises are other reasons employees mention for quitting. Yet companies in the same industry offer increasingly similar compensation, and it’s well-known in the recruiting industry that giving an employee a counter-offer can simply postpone the inevitable — within six months that employee is likely to move to another job. Whatever caused the employee to look for another position hasn’t changed. The continuing irritant is often the boss.

Any organization can tackle this cause of self-created labor shortages. Making good decisions about promoting managers is easier than hiring new workers, because the company has more relevant information. The problem is that this information is too often misused or ignored.

People often are promoted based on their competence in their previous job, rather than their competence for the much different job of being a manager. Sometimes the worst thing a company can do is to force an employee to accept a promotion when he or she lacks the skills needed to be successful in the new role. If a firm doesn’t have the resources to develop managers, it needs to hire or promote those with demonstrated capabilities to manage effectively.

If the organization makes a substantial investment in management development, determine whether training is producing competent managers who work well with employees. Most management skills can be learned, but not by sending a person to a day-long workshop.

Identify what skills are crucial, as well as what opportunities exist for managers to receive focused training and continuing practice on the skills. Ensure that the management culture rewards and supports good skills on a day-to-day basis. Act rapidly to refocus managers on essential competencies when they are not interacting effectively with employees and to remove the managers when necessary.

There’s no secret list of management skills. What may be helpful is to center attention on the skills that make a big difference in whether employees can work with their boss. Despite rapid technological changes, obsolescence of technical skills is usually not the problem. In fact, managers need to evolve from being a technologist to being a manager of others with higher levels of more specialized expertise.

Effective managers seek out and cultivate workers with expertise at least equal to their own, and they’re not threatened by others’ competence. Ineffective managers, on the other hand, spend time trying to hide what they don’t know behind a wall of bravado and bullshit.

Managing a group of highly skilled colleagues requires superb execution of the so-called soft skills — listening effectively, delegating responsibility and creating opportunities, skills, and exciting outcomes for employees. Other soft skills include developing worthwhile and effective objectives and workable plans for achieving them, and interacting with others in ways that demonstrate respect and stimulate real involvement.

Employees know when they leave a good boss, they are much less likely to have one at the next job, however attractive the offer may be. But if they don’t have one now, they have little to lose and everything to gain by leaving.

On Management, written in cooperation with The Center for Human Function & Work (CHF&W) in Boulder, examines critical issues about managing the human side of a business. Joe Rosse is associate professor of management at CU-Boulder and an associate of the CHF&W. Bob Levin is director of the CHF&W. Comments, questions and topics are encouraged and can be mailed to The Business Report or e-mailed to Joseph.Rosse@Colorado.Edu.