The Psychology of Traditional vs High-Performance Management
People join companies but quit their bosses.
First, a few eye-openers.
· Over 50% of employees quit their job because of their managers.
· Over 50% of global companies have difficulty addressing employee retention.
· 92% of employees said that they would stay with their jobs if their bosses showed more empathy.
· A global survey of employee attitudes suggests that a whopping 82% of people don’t trust their boss.
· 71% of employees would accept a pay cut to take a better job.
· Those whose managers consistently help them manage their workload are 8x more likely to stay at their company.
· Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their companies.
· Companies with engaged employees pull in 2.5x more revenues compared to competitors.
· Higher levels of engagement affect business outcomes such as: 41% lower absenteeism, 24% lower turnover.
Two fundamentally different Management Styles
Today there exists two fundamentally different management styles: - 1. Traditional Management styles (Autocratic, Transactional and Commanding) and 2. High-Performance Leadership styles (High-Performance and Transformational).
Traditional (Managing, activity-orientation)
Traditional management styles are typically structured like this: A senior executive or board holds all the power; they are in command and use their power and influence to lead. They appear at the top of the organisation chart. Below them are senior managers, then middle managers, with employees at the bottom. We call this an organisational hierarchy. The Traditional management styles are the most pervasive, they are still in use in the majority of the world’s organizations.
Because the Traditional organization has many layers of management, many people need time to weigh up and coordinate issues, it takes a long time to make decisions, therefore many managers may feel their opinions are being ignored.
In terms of interpersonal communication, senior management messages easily get distorted as directives move through the Traditional hierarchy. This is because each manger may interpret the words in different ways, by the time the message reaches employees, the message may be different from the original intention.
Traditional managers embrace process, seek stability, and control, and instinctively try to resolve problems quickly – sometimes before they fully understand a problem’s significance.
Traditional managers set expectations for the employees below them who need to meet certain goals, but the manager receives the reward for achieving those goals.
Authority is assigned to the position rather than the individual.
Traditional is about control, rules, regulations, boundaries and the source of all new business and ways of working.
Traditional managers are influential because it is in the best interest of subordinates for them to do what the manager wants.
Traditional pays most of its attention to a company’s goals and objectives, emphasising increasing sales or profits to please the shareholders, which can lead the company to neglect social responsibilities and business sustainable development.
A Traditional personality can deter people from bringing you the brutal facts.
Traditional managers can be blind to work and employment issues and slow to react to change. Regrettably, employees have learned that the way their manager’s act is what the path to success looks like, so they model it.
Traditional does not individualize the needs of subordinates or focus on their personal development. Traditional managers exchange things of value with subordinates to advance their own and their subordinates’ agendas.
High-Performance (Leading, visionary)
High-Performance styles are around 30 years old and are viewed as being new and progressive.
High-Performance develops flat, self-managing, self-organizing, high-performance teams.
These teams attend to the five functions of Traditional management: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling leaving the High-Performance leader free to concentrate on strategic matters.
High-Performance leaders tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are willing to delay closure to understand an issue more fully.
High-Performance leaders have much more in common with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with Traditional managers.
People who are more adjusted, sociable, ambitious, and curious are much qualified to become High-Performance leaders, whereas people who are more confident and appear therefore as more competent are much more likely to become leaders.
Higher levels of cognitive ability (IQ) also increase an individual’s likelihood to emerge as a leader.
While the same personality and ability traits described above help leaders become more effective – they are not just advantageous for emergence – the best leaders also show higher levels of integrity, which enables them to create a fair and just culture in their teams and organizations.
The ultimate measure of leader effectiveness is the performance of the leader’s team or organization, particularly vis-à-vis competitors.
Leadership is a resource for the group, and effective leaders enable a group to outperform other groups.
High-Performance leaders are generally more emotionally intelligent, which enables them to stay calm under pressure and have better people skills. Conversely, narcissistic leaders are more prone to behaving in unethical ways, which is likely to harm their teams.
High-Performance leaders are described as being Level 5 (by Jim Collins in Good to Great) as they set up their successors to succeed, have a workmanlike diligence and attribute successes to others.
High-Performance leaders get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, then figure out where to drive it. (Who comes before what.) They know that people are not your most important asset - the right people are.
They make rigorous people decisions, when in doubt they don’t hire – they keep looking and they know to put their best people on their biggest opportunities.
Their management teams debate vigorously in search of the best answers, and they confront the brutal facts of their current reality.
High-Performance leaders create a culture wherein people have a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for the truth to be heard. They create a climate where truth is heard which involves four basic practices:
Lead with questions, not answers.
Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
Conduct autopsies, without blame.
Build reg flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored.
They understand that spending time and energy trying to motivate people is a waste of effort as if you have the right people – then they are self-motivated.
Traditional Management
Traditional management dates to the early 1880s and the Industrial Revolution were cotton mills enforced a type of control known as the command-and-control structure - a term referring to keeping subordinates in line. This approach based on the hierarchical and often brutal British military and naval traditions typically involved the development and implementation of strict rules of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour with harsh consequences for breaking the rules. The Traditional style underwent a refinement in the 1920s because of early team’s research and another after WWII with the advent of the corporation bringing about the management style that dominates many of today’s organisations.
The structure of the Traditional organization is like the military system, which is hierarchical, organized, and disciplined. Power flows vertically and downward, employees are organized by department and are managed according to a chain of command. Each department has its own rules, the manager of the department is responsible and reports to the senior manager above. Every employee strictly follows the business strategies, has their own job description and accountability to their superior making Traditional organizational structures fixed and rigid.
The hierarchy of decision makers, executives, managers, and employees worked well when the companies operated in relative isolation from the rest of the world and simply manufactured physical products. By contrast, today increasingly companies have become globalized, they not only produce physical products but also sell ideas, which encounters disadvantages when using Traditional management approaches.
The Traditional styles are not about to disappear anytime soon despite being plagued by employees who are dissatisfied with their jobs and are unhappy with management who provide little or no support and motivation. In many cases, managers still see their employees as units of labour, easily replaceable and not worth investing in. These organisations are also inferior at training their mid-level managers, preferring instead to invest in leadership training for senior executives.
If you want to understand why some companies have a toxic culture, underperform relative to their potential, and eventually collapse - look no further than the quality of their management teams. Whereas competent managers cause high levels of trust, engagement, and productivity, incompetent ones result in anxious, alienated workers who practice counterproductive work behaviours and spread toxicity throughout the organization. The essence of incompetence is easy to define, it is a function of the detrimental effects a manager has on their subordinates. Incompetent Traditional managers are the main reason for low levels of employee engagement and the prevalent high levels of passive job seeking and self-employment.
Employees are growing frustrated at not having input into their work and they frequently leave when better opportunities arise. Employees are insisting on higher levels of job satisfaction and want their managers to be open and honest, fair, and reasonable, and to value them and their contributions. The new workforce for example is demanding that their managers act in a collaborative, supportive, and motivational manner. They are expressing that they will not accept the old command and control approach, which they view as being more like managing and directing versus leading, and they consider Traditional management to be suffocating, unreasonable, and unnecessary.
Today's new generation of employees are vocal about what they want their workplace to look like; they are suspicious of the older Traditional management styles, which they view as managing, administering, and in some cases stifling, unreasonable and unwarranted. They want managers who are trained in High-Performance styles, who will recognise them for their efforts, and who work in a collaborative, supportive and motivational manner. They want a say in how their workplace is managed, where free-thinking, empowerment, service, and community are put ahead of self-interest. They have a greater need for feedback and reinforcement than their predecessors and look for praise for their being tech-savvy.
Today's employees are demanding higher levels of job satisfaction and managers who are more like leaders, who are open and honest, fair, and reasonable and value their team members contributions. Today's employees respond favourably to High-Performance and being a High-Performance Team member. These fulfil their willingness and desire to work across teams and their need for positive reinforcement and praise. No matter how they are viewed, the simple truth is that the new generation looks at work dramatically differently from the previous one.
Traditional Management Behaviours
Planning.
Responding to direction set from above.
Establishing purpose.
Setting goals, objectives, and strategies.
Executing plans, improving the present.
Establishing a budget.
Managing around constraints.
Organizing.
Exercising control through authority and formal influence.
Establishing or changing team activities.
Making decisions.
Solving problems.
Scheduling.
Designing the organization.
Staffing.
Organizing and recruiting staff, providing structure.
Controlling subordinates, directing, and coordinating.
Managing discipline.
Setting roles and responsibilities.
Obtaining, allocating or releasing resources to deliver objectives (People, equipment, facilities).
Performance management and appraisals.
Succession planning.
Leading.
Focusing on things, looking inward.
Doing things right, managing change.
Using authority, avoiding conflict, acting responsibly.
Reactive, minimizes risk, maintains stability.
Maintains the status quo.
Time management.
Delegates.
Controlling.
Collecting, analysing, and reporting performance information.
Identifying issues and taking corrective actions.
Designing controls.
Establishing procedures.
High-Performance Leadership
High-Performance is all about creating a safe workplace to have conversations and freely voice ideas. It is a process that changes and transforms individuals. In other words, it is the ability to get people to want to change, improve, and be led. It involves assessing team members motives and strengths, satisfying their needs, and valuing them. It places team members; first, it creates high levels of mutual trust, accountability, and collaboration. Open communication is a crucial feature, as is the concept of shared leadership. Creativity is encouraged with no room for public criticism of individual team members' mistakes. High-Performance leaders pay special attention to everyone's needs for achievement and growth, and their behaviour demonstrates acceptance of individual differences.
High-Performance supports agile environments, especially where failure carries a higher risk. You want the development of a product to be error-free, but you don't want that to hold back the progress and growth of future improvements. High-Performance maintains a consistent development process, while high-performance leadership facilitates creativity and innovation, leaving people free to come up with new ideas.
High-Performance is where a leader works with their team to identify change, create a direction to guide the change through a shared vision. High-Performance leadership behaviours influence team members and inspire them to perform beyond their perceived capabilities and to achieve unexpected or remarkable results. It gives team members autonomy over specific jobs, as well as the authority to make decisions. This induces a positive change in team members attitudes and the organisation, transforming team member expectations, aspirations, perceptions, and values are into something better.
High-Performance leaders are focused on their people; they are a role model who set high targets and expectations. Team members look to this style for strong values, courage, and a sense of ethics. To succeed with this style, a manager needs to be emotionally mature - not going off the handle, being erratic or inconsistent.
Three types of organisations usually need a High-Performance leader. The first is an organisation that is stuck in the past and needs modernisation before it becomes outdated. The second type is an organisation that needs restructuring or improvement to produce good results, such as a company turnaround. The third type is technology-based organisations, where rapid business and technology change is the norm. Essentially, a high-performance leader is often needed in organisations where radical or rapid change is constant or necessary.
Today’s workforce responds favourably to High-Performance, where free-thinking, empowerment, and service and community are put ahead of self-interest. This newer model satisfies their desire to work across teams and their need for feedback and praise. No matter how they are viewed, the simple truth is that today’s new workforce looks at work quite differently than their predecessors.
High-Performance Leadership Behaviours
Has organizational awareness.
Understands and interprets the purpose of the business.
Knows who the customers are.
Knows the stakeholders.
Understands and develops various, different relationships.
Is a chosen field subject matter expert.
People management skills.
Understands that the right employees are the greatest asset.
Introduces Psychological Safety.
Introduces team member Engagement.
Leads team members by example.
Inspires, supports, and motivates.
Shows commitment and passion.
Is accountable.
Sets individual performance goals.
Empowers team members so that they can achieve their goals.
Mentors for professional development.
Provides feedback and always gives a reason why.
Has honesty and integrity.
Exudes positivity.
Knows how to effectively delegate based on a team member strength.
Progressive leadership style.
Has a High-Performance or Transformational leadership style.
Builds self-organising, high-performance teams
Knows about managing upwards, downwards, and sideways.
Has people leadership skills. Is fair and reasonable, open, and honest, has charisma, uses emotional intelligence and is s a good influencer.
Is consistent, creates a culture of clear accountability with no public criticism of individual team member mistakes.
Is part psychologist, is collaborative, gets team members to do more than they originally intended by delegating work based on team member strengths.
The High-Performance leader promotes active listening and shared leadership. They make a point of speaking last, encouraging team members to discuss and resolve issues and to make decisions as a team.
Manages a High-Performance Team.
High-Performance leaders encourage autonomy and empowerment in all team members making team members feel strongly that their work is esteemed and self-congruent. Team members are usually self-motivated, intellectually stimulated and constantly challenged to be open-minded.
Their team members have a set of personal and professional drivers that internally motivate them against non-self-motivated team members who do not possess these same drivers and therefore require external motivation. Self-motivation means that team members do more than they originally intended and often, even more than they thought possible.
High-Performance leaders encourage their team members to innovate and create change that will help grow and shape the organisation's future success. This is accomplished by setting an example at the top through a strong sense of corporate culture, team member ownership and independence in the workplace. They do this without micromanaging - they trust trained team members to assume authority over their decisions in their jobs. Team members are given more room to be creative, look to the future and find new solutions to old problems. Team members on the leadership track will also be prepared to become high-performance managers and leaders themselves through mentorship and training.
High-Performance leadership enhances commitment, involvement, loyalty, and performance of team members who exert extra effort to show their support; they emulate their leader to emotionally identify with them and maintain obedience without losing any sense of self-esteem. High-Performance leaders are strong in adapting to different situations, sharing a collective consciousness and being inspirational while leading a group of highly motivated team members.
High-Performance leaders set challenging expectations and typically achieve higher performance outcomes as a result. They manage team members as valuable individuals, identifying and developing their talents. They are supportive, encouraging, and motivational. The High-Performance leadership style also positively influences the behaviours of Traditional managers to be more open, collaborative, and far more considerate towards the needs and development of their team members.
High-Performance leaders delegate tasks as a means of developing team members. Delegated tasks are monitored to see if the team members need additional direction or support and to assess progress. High-Performance leaders expect higher performance outcomes from their team members by giving them stretched goals and setting more challenging expectations outside of a team members normal comfort zone. They create a culture of clear accountability.
Who would you prefer to work for?
Courses currently available