Whats the Value of a Good Manager - Essay Example

"People leave managers, not companies” – Peter Drucker New Age ‘Knowledge Workers’ Peter Drucker, the management guru, had stated about twenty years ago that management should stop thinking about managing people and, what is most important, stop thinking of the available human resource as employees. Instead, the management should imbibe a paradigm shift in attitude and start thinking of available human resource as ‘knowledge workers’ as they would surely become the most valuable asset of any 21st century business organisation. While defining the most important characteristic of ‘knowledge workers’, Drucker went to state that “they must know more about their job than their boss does – or else they are no good at all”. (Drucker, 1999) Such a drastic statement surely requires an explanation and Drucker had explained what he meant through two beautiful examples. He had first taken the example of service engineer who surely does not know more about the product than the production manager but most definitely knows more about the idiosyncrasies about the customer than the production manager can ever hope to. In a situation where customer interaction is of primary importance, the service engineer surely is head and shoulders above the production manager. In another example involving an airport mechanic, Drucker proceeded to state the obvious – the mechanic knows much more than the airport manager about the technical health of a particular airliner. Thus in both these examples, the ‘knowledge workers’ know more than their bosses. Pushing his point further, Drucker stated these ‘knowledge workers’ did not acquire their technical knowledge while working in the organisation nor are they dependent on the organisation to teach them how to apply in practical situations the technical knowledge they have already acquired. So, these new breed of workers join an organisation with pre-acquired knowledge and apply them as they have already been trained to do so. (Arthur, 2001) But the success or failure of a job depends entirely on the technical competence of the workers, more so in current scenario where the manager is less knowledgeable than his subordinates. Thus two important corollaries emerge from the given situation. The first among such corollaries is that these ‘knowledge workers’ have extremely mobility in labour markets and can switch jobs very easily and the second very vital corollary is that the management should surely devise ways and means to retain them as any labour turnover will surely bring in its wake a corresponding drop in corporate productivity as a ‘knowledge worker’ leaves the organisation with his pre-acquired knowledge. Thus the latest challenge that a management in a 21st century workplace faces is to work out newer and more appealing incentives that would motivate these prized human resources to stay with the organisation for a reasonable period of time. (Erickson, 2008) Theories of Motivation While on the subject of motivation one can not overlook Abraham Maslow and his theory of hierarchy of motivation. According to Maslow, people get motivated by unsatisfied needs and needs can be arranged in some sort of a pyramid where some of the needs remain at the lower half of the imaginary pyramid and thus need to be satisfied first before those needs that are located near the apex of the pyramidal structure. (Maslow, 1943) The needs that remain nearer the base are physiological needs; safety needs and to a certain extent social needs. As long as a person feels some sort of deficiency in these needs, he or she can be motivated to work towards fulfilling these deficiencies. Managers at workplace can motivate workers to perform towards attainment of corporate goals by promising incentives that would fulfil these needs. However, physiological needs which consist of air, water, food and sleep are too basic and must be satisfied anyway for an individual to survive. So, any sort of employment has got to ensure that this need of the employees is fully satisfied if the organisation wants its employees to remain with it. (Maslow A. , 1954) Equally vital, but can be considered only after physiological needs are satisfied are the safety needs that consist of living in a safe area, medical insurance, job security and adequate financial reserves. These needs are some of basic needs of every human being and forms an integral part of the compensation package nowadays, irrespective of the corporate hierarchy of the employee. No organisation can hire a decent employee unless physiological and safety needs of an individual are fully and adequately covered by the compensation package. (Maslow A. H., The farther reaches of human nature, 1971) With the basic requirements taken care of, an employee, being a social animal that he or she is, would like to ensure that social needs that consist of friendship, belonging to a group and giving and receiving love are fulfilled to the maximum extent possible. While the aspect of giving and receiving love being an intensely personal phenomenon without the scope of any form of corporate intervention, the other two aspects of friendship and belonging to a group are very much within the ambit of corporate management and managers play a very vital role in ensuring a friendly and cordial atmosphere in the workplace. (envison software incorporated, 2009) Managers, by virtue of their official position, happen to be the leader of their subordinates and can take a proactive approach towards creating such an ambience in the workplace and if the sense of belonging becomes strong, it might translate into a form of loyalty to the organisation that might in most situations overweigh financial or other benefits that an employee might get if he or she switches organisation. All managers dream of permeation of such a loyalty among their subordinates but many tend to overlook the painstaking measures that are absolutely necessary in order to foster such a close bond between the employees and the organisation. (Cappelli, 2000) Google, which happens to be one of the best employers in the world employing some of the brightest minds, provides certain perquisites that are rarely found anywhere in the corporate universe. This company, for example allows new parents to bill up to $500 on the company for take-out food. This keeps the new parents happy (naturally, who would like to cook food after a 12 hour work day) and the child happy and obviously the company happiest as it does not lose on productivity even though it has new parents in its workforce. The other possibly one of the least publicised perquisites of working in Google is free laundry and dry cleaning services that is offered to employees. It is not laundry allowance but actual washing, cleaning and drying of clothes done while the employee works and kept ready when the employee is about to leave for home after a not less than 12 hour shift. These benefits are over and above free lunches, company sponsored bi-monthly flashy picnics and completely free medical backup. But one must never underestimate the role of the managers as they assiduously try to create a sense of fellow feeling among employees and a close bonding between each employee and the company as a whole. Ask any Googler (as the employees of Google prefer to call themselves) and the pride in them in being an employee of Google is almost palpable. (wisestartupblog.com, 2008) All the needs that have been discussed till now are somehow or the other related to some form of physical requirement and thus form the more immediate basic needs of an individual. These needs, as already mentioned earlier, have to be fulfilled by all modern companies that deal with knowledge workers. But there are other higher needs that are equally important but cannot be fulfilled through monetary incentives. Esteem needs that consist of recognition, attention, social status, accomplishment and self respect are entirely a matter of the mind that can be satisfied only if the company, or, more specifically, the immediate boss ensures that this need of the subordinates are adequately fulfilled. While the needs of accomplishment and self respect are essentially internal motivators, that is personal motivators that work within an individual’s mind and urges the person to put in that extra bit of effort or work that extra mile, the needs of recognition, attention and social status are predominantly external motivators that have to be provided by the manager for a person to put in extra effort at his work. In a sense, if viewed in continuum, these needs are natural follow through of the need to belong to a group. Once a person finds his secured place within a group the next most obvious requirement is to gain importance in that group. It has got nothing to do with financial incentives; it is on the contrary a completely non-financial incentive that works wonders on the psyche of an employee. The other most important aspect of non-financial incentive is that it has no upper limit. Physiological needs are not unlimited, thus the motivation to satisfy them, though very basic and extremely necessary, can be effective only as long as these needs are unsatisfied, and, once these needs are satisfied they fail to motivate an employee to increase his or her productivity. However, esteem needs are unlimited (can one put an upper limit to level of recognition, attention and social status one desires or craves for?). (Shellenbarger, 2000) Thus, non-financial incentives those try to satisfy esteem needs remain a very strong motivator and can equally act as a very strong de-motivator if employees feel that they are not getting that pat on the back or that public acknowledgement of excellence at workplace from superiors that every subordinate so eagerly craves for. One can hardly overemphasise the important role that mangers play in this regard. It is the manager who is the human face of the company with which employees interact and if the manager fails to pay enough attention to the esteem needs of subordinates, workers leave the manager (and hence the company) in search of a better and more accommodating, sympathetic and understanding manager. (Casciato, 2006) The other need that happens to sit at the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid of hierarchy of needs is self actualisation need that is essentially an internal realisation that only a very few people can attain. Those that can actually attain self actualisation reach a stage of profound happiness and harmony that are more of a spiritual experience rather than something that is connected to everyday workplace. As this happens to be basically an internal realisation of an individual, it really need not be discussed in detail in the present scenario. Coming back to non-financial incentives and their continuous effectiveness as motivators, one has to recognise the contribution of another psychologist, Frederick Herzberg and his Two-factor theory. Herzberg felt (somewhat alike Maslow) that employees would not in general remain satisfied for a long period with working conditions that satisfy basic physiological and safety needs and would sooner rather than later attempt to switch over to jobs that tend to satisfy higher level needs of an individual. (Herzberg, Mausner, & Snyderman, 1959) Herzberg added another factor to the basic theory of need fulfilment of Maslow and that is ‘satisfaction at workplace’. According to him a worker would surely choose that job which gives him more satisfaction over one that fails to match with the former in terms of ‘satisfaction at workplace’. Herzberg developed his motivation-hygiene theory after interviewing at length numerous engineers in and around Pittsburgh and came to the conclusion that jobs that have the capacity to satisfy the needs of achievement, competency, status, personal worth, and self-realization of an individual are jobs that satisfy an employee. Actually he went on to subdivide the satisfying potential of a job into two parts – hygiene factors and motivators. While the hygiene factors (that manly consist of monetary aspect of compensation package) essentially deal with fulfilling lower category needs such as physiological and safety that can cause immense dissatisfaction if not present in adequate measure but hardly any positive satisfaction by their presence, motivators deal with inherent job conditions that generate a sense of achievement, personal worth and self realisation in the minds of employees and provide them social status and a public acceptance of competency. Thus hygiene factors are necessary to prevent dissatisfaction in the minds of employees while motivators are needed to generate job satisfaction. (Herzberg, The Motivation-Hygiene Concept and Problems of Manpower, 1964) Thus it is apparent that in order to have a satisfied and hence motivated workforce, not only a job should have enough challenges to motivate the employee to put in his best, his or her effort must also be adequately recognised to keep the momentum going. And, it is not financial incentives that can motivate an employee but those non-financial incentives that bolster his social status and self esteem are the ones that prompt and urge employees to put in ever more efforts. (Hackman & Oldham, 1976) Role of Managers It can safely be concluded now that money is not a motivating factor but its absence highly de-motivates an employee, and in this age of ‘knowledge workers’, managers are the key interlocutors in the highly complex job of retaining human resource in the face continual lucrative offers from market competitors. In the current scenario, companies and their managers must forget winning over ‘knowledge workers’ through monetary incentives and perquisites because what they offer will very soon be matched by another company, instead consider these workers as volunteers who have come forward to share their knowledge and expertise with the company. The only way to keep these volunteers happily engaged will be by throwing challenges at them and keep them totally aware of the corporate mission of the company. Now, this can never be done only through employee newsletters and emails, it requires the active involvement and healthy interaction between managers and subordinates to successfully send across the proper picture of corporate mission. Modern day mangers must also identify the better performers and offer them options of further upgrading their skills which not only will increase their social status among peer group but also their workplace productivity. The current century will also witness an unprecedented information explosion, not so much in the technical sense but in the way available information will be used and analysed, and all stakeholders in a corporate entity will be much more aware than what they are now at present. So, the importance of ‘knowledge workers’ will keep on increasing and so will the necessity of preventing them from floating away to competitors. Managers have a crucial role to play in these circumstances as they are the motivators that can keep their subordinates happy by creating an environment where transparency and two way communication is encouraged and where each employee is perfectly aware of what is expected of him or her. Managers should also encourage each and every worker to contribute outside the immediate work area if the employee feels he or she has the potential to do so. This will provide immense workplace satisfaction to an employee as he or she will have an enhanced feeling of personal worth and self realisation. However, a perception of fairness and equitable treatment by superiors is possibly the single biggest factor that motivates people to stay with a company and managers have a huge role to play in this regard. They have to keep their personal biases and likes and dislikes at arm’s length while dealing with their employees who must never feel slighted or snubbed. This happens to be a critical issue with ‘knowledge workers’ who have a very high level of market mobility. (Heathfield, 2009) References Arthur, D. (2001). The employee recruitment and retention handbook. New York: AMACOM. Cappelli, P. (2000, Jan-Feb). A Market-Driven Approach to Retaining Talent. Harvard Buisness Review , p. 103. Casciato, D. (2006, December). Managers Motivate and Retain Best Employees by Rewarding Performance. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from Best Practices in Emergency Services: http://www.emergencybestpractices.com Drucker, P. (1999). Management Challenges for the 21st Century. New York: Harper Business. envison software incorporated. (2009, April 10). Maslow's Theory of Motivation - Hierarchy of Needs. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from envision software, incorporated: http://www.envisionsoftware.com/articles/Maslows_Needs_Hierarchy.html Erickson, T. (2008, July 9). Peter Drucker's Prediction: The End of Line Managers as We Know Them. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from HarvardBusiness.org: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/erickson/2008/07/peter_druckers_prediction_the.html Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through design of work. Organisational Behaviour and Human Performance, Vol 16 , pp. 250-279. Heathfield, S. M. (2009). Top Ten ways to retain Your Great Employees. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from About.com: http://humanresources.about.com/od/retention/a/more_retention.htm Herzberg, F. (1964, January-February). The Motivation-Hygiene Concept and Problems of Manpower. Personnel Administration , pp. 3-7. Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. B. (1959). The Motivation to Work. New York: John Wiley. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review 50(4) , pp. 370-396. Maslow, A. H. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. In A. H. Maslow, Self-actualizing and beyond (p. 41). New York: Penguin Compass. Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper. Shellenbarger, S. (2000, January 26). To Win the Loyalty of Youir Employees, Try a Softer Touch. Wall Street Journal , p. B1. wisestartupblog.com. (2008, December 5). The Best, Least Known Perks of Working at Google. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from wisestartupblog.com: http://www.wisestartupblog.com/google/the-best-least-known-perks-of-working-at-google/2734/ Read More