Motivate, empower, lead: Sharpen skills year-round

The beginning of February is a good time to look at “Groundhog Day Management.” We’re not thinking of management that only shows its face once a year and then runs away for six weeks. Instead we’re thinking of management concepts that, like Bill Murray’s Feb. 2 in the “Groundhog Day” movie, keep coming back again and again.

Your employees can see these Groundhog Day chestnuts coming back one more time, so it’s a good thing to be able to see them yourself. Once you recognize Groundhog Day Management for what it is, you can move forward to some techniques that really work.

Our three favorite Groundhog Day Management techniques are motivation, empowerment and leadership. Motivation and leadership are things that managers in organizations always are being told they need to do more of, and empowerment is something that employees always are being told they are being given more of.

While each of these terms can refer to useful concepts, we find that they too often are simply magical beliefs that executives and owners wishfully hope can replace hard work, careful planning, money and resources to solve workplace problems.

Motivation

You got an under-performing workgroup with no esprit d’ corps and a lousy attitude — sounds like it’s about time for their manager to motivate them. And what about the employees who seem more interested in looking for new job prospects than in doing their job? They need motivation. That crack systems programmer you reassigned to application development no longer seems interested in her work. Her manager needs to motivate her, too. Right?

Notice that these three references to “motivation” actually refer to much different things. In the first case, employees are dissatisfied with conditions in their workgroup; in the second case, employees have better job or earnings prospects elsewhere; in the third case, the employee is underutilized and bored. In each case, we can explain the situation much more effectively when we don’t use “motivation” as a term to cover up a management problem.

The late psychology professor and community leader Bruce Ekstrand used to refer to motivation as a “garbage-can concept” — in both senses of the word: Motivation is used to explain so many things that it explains nothing. And motivation never explains anything that can’t be described in simpler and more useful terms.

Empowerment

As a magical solution, empowerment works much like motivation except that the onus falls on the employee rather than the manager. Give employees responsibility and a sense of ownership and they’ll become intrinsically motivated to work hard, please customers, and act as stewards of the company. Not a bad concept, but too often empowerment programs are really a cynical exercise designed to make employees think they have a voice without providing real autonomy or authority. It doesn’t take long for workers to catch on to your hidden agenda, and then you’ve got even more problems.

Leadership

“We need more leadership” is a phrase frequently uttered by board members of failing organizations. One of us when managing a division of a company remembers being upbraided by the CEO because the division’s administrative assistant “w asn’t demonstrating leadership.” Not coincidentally, that was also the reason provided for eliminating her approved merit increase. And Boulder HR expert George Crochet remembers the revelation he had doing a management job analysis at a large data systems company. “All the managers said they needed leadership skills,” George says. “They all knew that was an automatic ticket to expenses-paid off-site training.”

Is leadership some elusive quality that some are born with and others just lack? Is it something that only certain gurus have been gifted to enlighten the rest of us with? We think not.

We see no evidence for some magical quality called leadership. The active verb and behavior of “leading,” however, is something that can have a significant impact on organizational performance. The challenge is that the specifics of leading change from situation to situation and organization to organization. Good leaders in a surgery suite will act differently than those who are good leaders on a trading floor.

But there are two universal dimensions of effective leading that underlie what we often think of as “charisma.” The first is identifying what is right; that is, what direction an organization should be going and what actions are necessary to go in that direction. The second crucial behavior is taking responsibility for carrying out these actions, including being a role model for ethical behavior. Without this kind of leading, leadership is just pomp and manipulation.

So how can you awaken from your own Management Groundhog Day Nightmare? The first challenge is to resist the temptation to invoke easy magical solutions. Instead of falling back on “motivation problems” or “leadership gaps,” put the effort into a hard-nosed and self-critical diagnosis of the real reasons for performance deficiencies. You then have a much better chance of finding a solution that actually fits the underlying problem.

On Management, written each month 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.

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