If you’re a technology manager you need to move jobs roughly every five years to avoid being seen as a job-hopper or a plodder writes Jennifer Foreshew in The Australian’s IT section: Don’t job hop, IT managers told.
She says younger technology workers should look at moving on every two to three years.
For more on this see How long should I stay in a job?
There comes a time in every manager’s life when a junior oversteps the mark.
If the offence is too serious to go unnoticed, yet not bad enough to crank up formal discipline, you need to have words with the person.
How you handle this will have a long-term impact on your relationship with the junior – it can also have a wider impact on how you interact with the rest of your colleagues.
Aim to deliver a powerful, unambiguous message reinforcing good behaviour while correcting or halting bad behaviour. You need to do this without alienating or demotivating the junior.
What’s more, you need to do it within the context of company policy and employment law. Balancing these forces requires a subtle approach and a workable game plan.
The One Minute Manager suggests a useful basic template for disciplining subordinates.
Although the book’s corny approach borders on the embarrassing, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson offer useful advice on administering day-to-day management discipline.
The “One Minute Warning” goes like this:
While this is a good basic template, it doesn’t always work.
The One Minute Manager was written for Americans. They take certain workplace ideas as understood, these don’t necessary translate into other cultures.
Workers in New Zealand and Australia are generally stroppier than their US counterparts, are more argumentative. We have been conditioned for better or worse by a more confrontational industrial climate.
In the early 1980s, a British friend of mine refined this technique, which she described as a “One Minute Bollocking“. The difference being at the time Pom employees were less susceptible to the kind of empty flattery that goes down well with Americans.
She followed the Blanchard and Johnson recipe up to the last step where she simply told the person that this wouldn’t affect their career prospects and that she knew they were capable of delivering the goods: “Now get out and get on with your work”.
Although British employees are often more deferential than their antipodian counterparts, I’ve found, depending on the motivational needs of the person in question, the British style bollocking generally goes down better than the saccharine ‘warning’.
Under pressure even a decent boss can turn into a workplace bully. They use bullying as a misplaced coping strategy.
This may explain why Unite Union says it was flooded with calls from Christchurch workers in retail, fast-food, security and call centre industries who reported workplace bullying after the city was hit by two earthquakes.
A report on Radio New Zealand quoted union representative Matthew Jones who said reports of bullying increased from one or two cases a week to at least twelve and employers are not doing enough to train managers to handle the problem.
Canterbury Employers Chamber of Commerce chief executive Peter Townsend appears to agree with the coping strategy theory. He says there may have been bullying, but the issue is really to do with post-traumatic stress.
Workplace bullying is never good news and heaven knows the people of Christchurch have been through enough without having to deal with idiotic bullying bosses.
There’s more to keeping talent than paying the best salaries. According to Fortune magazine building the kind of workplace where employees feel valued is just as important.
The story quotes Catherine Hartmann from Mercer who says: “When a company can’t throw cash at its best employees managers should instead lavish their stars with a promising future and have frank conversations with workers about how to keep them motivated and what skills they would like to develop to make them more valuable in the job market.”
Later in the story Fortune reports people want “meaningful work”. Apparently this is even more important in tough economic times.
And of course there’s “intellectual autonomy” – always a key to keeping knowledge workers engaged.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is widely taught as a way of understanding people’s motivations.
The hierarchy of needs is a useful starting point – managers often don’t get past first base when it comes to thinking about why other people do things.
Maslow’s theory isn’t beyond criticism. I’ve dealt with criticism of the way the hierarchy of needs theory misses the spiritual dimension before.
Maslow says people attend to basic needs first and progressively deal with more complex matters until they reach a point he calls self-actualisation at the top of the hierarchy’s pyramid. Not everyone gets that far.
The theory makes crude assumptions that don’t apply to everyone.
Maslow’s idea belongs to a time and place. Maslow was American and he first suggested the hierarchy in the 1940s. The ideas are highly specific to America’s individualist culture where middle-class people worry about their personal needs more than any collective needs.
He makes no allowances for parents worrying about children or workers being concerned about colleagues.
All-in-all Maslow offers a one-dimensional view of how people behave.
As I said earlier, even if Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is wrong, it has value because it teaches managers looking into people’s motivations is important. Too often managers treat people as if there are no external forces driving them.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Tony Golsby-Smith says informal conversations are often a better way to get people thinking creatively, but companies prefer formal meetings.
He says conversations are not about moving through an agenda but involve a full range of thinking and exploring issues. They are different from brainstorming which is just about solving problems. Yet he says holding more conversations and fewer meetings will get problems solved.
Hold Conversations, Not Meetings – Tony Golsby-Smith – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.
