Killing Employee Productivity

Killing employee productivity
Over the past 25 years, my laboratory has been companies in over 30 countries. I have been a witness to rapid change and no change at all.
I have met executives that were willing to change and change fast and I have met others that are simply, because of their psychological characteristics, unable to change.
We have to understand that what we call the work place, has changed. What we call employees has changed. There are different opinions on what has caused this change, one of the best ones I would say is the microchip or the internet.
We now understand that knowledge has replaced brute force, emotional intelligence has replaced, well, not replaced, but at least has become more important than intellectual intelligence.
Yet, when we go into companies, we find that the workplace has remained essentially an anachronism, a formal, highly regulated, highly controlled environment where the very few dominate the many. In some cases, one dominating everyone else, this one being the President of the Company.
Stated differently, the workplace culture has changed little in most companies, while there has been more technological change in these last three decades than in the previous 50,000 years.
I recently sat in a management meeting with the President of the company and his direct reports when he said to them that he didn’t have the answer to the problem they were facing and that he knew no one else in the room had it either. (Later he told me privately that he knew the capacity of each of his direct reports)
What he did at that precise moment is to tell everyone that he didn’t trust their judgment and that none of them were bright enough to at least try to come up with an answer.
This executive is indeed a very bright man, he is a visionary and we could say he has been relatively successful in his career but one thing he has not been able to do well is to develop his employees.
In many companies, most of the training offered is generic and it seldom challenges the employee to think differently or to improve their skills and performance. They leave the training and in one month they have forgotten 80% of what they supposedly learned.
This is why employees fall into a comfort zone, they become complacent and little by little become less productive.
I have come to the conclusion that most managers don’t know how to manage, motivate, or mobilize their work force. One important reason this is so is because they have not taken the time to understand, really understand, the workforce. What is worst, they have not taken the time to understand themselves.
In frustration, they attempt to impose anachronistic methods of managing, ineffective ways of persuading and lousy ways to motivate their employees.
This is the reason that we find many employees coming in late, leaving early, doing as little as possible to get by or what is worse, not doing as much as they are capable of doing.
This is also the reason many employees never do anything until they are told, then doing only that and then standing around waiting for further instructions before doing anything else or the very common practice of bringing the body to work while leaving the mind at home.
What about always having an excuse when something wasn’t done, with answers that I bet all of you that manage people have heard: “It is not my job, nobody told me, how was I supposed to know, I never was trained on how to do that, I didn’t get the memo, I don’t understand your handwriting, I wasn’t there when you gave the order, you must have told somebody else, thought it was me, and forgot” and one I love, “I can’t read your mind”.
I can mention a lot more phrases that I have heard as a consultant, but I think you get the idea.
What is important here is that if you manage people, you must understand your own personality and the personality of the people you manage. You need to do this so that they can work as a team and you can count on them to help you reach your goals.
In today’s world no one can do it alone, no one knows all the answers, no one is immune from rapid changing conditions.
You need people to help you and to do that, they need to be motivated to do so.
Don’t allow your company to develop a negative environment where motivation, productivity and initiative are squashed or eliminated altogether.