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Talent Management Perspectives

Published November 2007

Accidental Sabotage: How Talent Managers May Undermine Their Own Success

 

  Agatha Gilmore

You might just be your own worst enemy.

According to Quint Studer in his new book, Results That Last: Hardwiring Behaviors That Will Take Your Company to the Top, a lack of proper training leads many managers to unintentionally sabotage their own and their companies' success.

"We're dealing with symptoms all the time, when the root cause is we just don't develop and train managers well," said Studer, a health care consultant and career speaker. "It's not about an 'initiative,' it's about hardwiring good leadership practices that survive beyond the leader."

The problem stems from the fact that many managers are promoted internally to fill vacancies, often being ushered into the new positions quickly and unceremoniously, Studer said.

"We'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars standardizing a logo, standardizing a message, standardizing what pen to use — yet we don't standardize good leadership," he said.

When faced with difficult decisions, untrained managers will unconsciously fall back on natural human tendencies to deflect blame and avoid confrontation, Studer said. This creates a disjointed corporate culture Studer calls "we/they."

Take, for example, a situation in which an employee asks his supervisor if he can leave early to catch his son's Little League game.

"If the answer's yes, then I [as the supervisor] am the hero," Studer said. "If the answer might be no, I don't say no. I say, 'Let me go talk to my boss.' Then I come back and say, 'I did what I could.' I'm the good guy, somebody else is the jerk. And even though I feel better as a middle manager — because I've appeased the situation — I've positioned top management negatively, so the employee doesn't have confidence in the direction of the organization."

The employee is also led to believe that his supervisor is powerless within the company, which can be frustrating and disheartening. For this reason, it becomes even more important for a manager who doesn't know the answer to a question not to avoid the problem by escalating it to his superiors, Studer said.

"You say, 'I'm going to research it, I'm going to look into it, I'm going to follow up on it.' You don't have to say, 'Let me go talk to this boss or that boss,' because you reduce your own leadership," he said.

The tendency to avoid confrontation also can result in managers giving inadequate workers a pass, Studer added.

Studer's consulting company, the Studer Group, estimates that between 50 percent and 60 percent of all low performers manage to stay off the radar.

"If you allow a performance issue not to be addressed, that sucks the energy out of the rest of the organization," Studer said. "Your high performers end up leaving. Your middle performers end up backing off. The only person really enjoying his work is the low performer."

This is also the reason that many initiatives fail, Studer said. Even if the industrious employees get on board early on, they will go back to old behaviors if the low performer is allowed to carry on.