A Managerial Boost
“My Manager is My World,”one employee scrawled across a twelve question survey conducted by the Human Resources Department under the direction of the Executive Team at a large financial institution where I was working as a middle manager a few years ago. It was this employee’s way of telling us that all of the carefully constructed questions on company strategy, executive vision, and goal clarity were of little relevance to those working in the trenches. All that mattered from day to day was how it felt to work in that employee’s world - and the world, it seemed, was defined by the immediate department manager.
As it turns out, the overwhelming majority of research in psychology, neuroscience, and business, agrees with this single employee’s candid assessment of the reality in today’s workplaces.
EMOTION RULES AT WORK This month the Harvard Business Review published a recent neurological study conducted on hundreds of knowledge workers in several industries to learn more about the connection between how we feel at work, and how we perform at work. This new body of research, “Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance,”conducted by the Harvard Business School under the direction of Professor Teresa M. Amabile, provides a unique look at how employee emotions really impact ROI, and who has the most influence over our emotions at work.
It may seem obvious to say that when people come to work they don’t check their hearts and minds at the door - but, that’s just what many business leaders today expect. Most employees quickly learn to keep their emotions hidden, and many become adept at convincing those around them that they are acting with logic and objectivity at all times. This extraordinary ability on the part of knowledge workers to mask how they really feel at work makes it all too easy for managers to believe that employees’ private thoughts and feelings at work don’t really matter.
But, whether it’s your superstar employees, your key contributors, your team players, or your most challenging people, one thing remains fact: the way employees feel has a direct and significant impact on work performance and the business bottom line.
It may stun you, if you are a manager, to learn what power you hold over how your people feel on a daily basis. Your behavior as a manager dramatically shapes your employees’ lives at work. In his national bestseller, First Break All the Rules, business guru Marcus Buckingham reminds us that employee opinions are formed by the employees’ immediate manager more than by the policies or procedures of the overall company. Unlike Wall Street and the business press, employees don’t put their faith in the myth of “great companies”or “great leaders”. For employees, there are only managers: great ones, poor ones, and many in between.
In fact, positive feelings toward the immediate manager ranked higher as a requirement for staying in a job than company pay, benefits, perks, or a charismatic corporate leader with a clear vision.
So, what does this tell us? It tells us that people leave managers, not companies. And science can explain why: recent research in neuroscience has found that emotion and cognition are tightly intertwined. Areas of the brain associated with rational thought and decision making have direct connections to areas associated with feelings. They do not exist in separate psychological compartments, and they interact in highly complex ways.
In research on the neurological response of employees to manager behavior, even small gestures were shown to have a dramatic effect on work performance. Specific events such as a manager rolling up her sleeves and working alongside the team, or a high-level executive bringing pizza to a team working overtime, or another department manager allowing their own team time to pitch in and help a department meet a deadline gave employees the sense that their work and their individual contribution was important and valued.
People perform better when their workday experiences include positive emotions, which generate more passion for their work, their leaders and their organizations. If you are still reading this, you are probably thinking at this point, “Well, this is all just common sense - understanding that people’s emotions are connected to their behavior is just plain good management!”But, research consistently suggests that most managers are not in tune with the emotions their people are feeling on a day to day basis; nor do they appreciate how pervasive the effects of these feelings can be on work performance.
LOSS OF INNOVATION Regardless of the industry you are in, today’s leaders are showing alarm at what they describe as a loss of innovation. But, a few changes in your work environment can make all the difference. Positive emotion has been proven to drive employee creativity in the workplace. People are over 50% more likely to have creative ideas on the days they experience positive moods than on other days. Even better, this creativity lasted an average of two days past the original day of positive mood.
THE ROLE OF THE MANAGER The vast majority of the events that shape work emotions are caused directly, or indirectly, by immediate managers. While bringing in donuts and coffee as a surprise one morning, or organizing a lunch party for an employee birthday, are certainly proven methods for heightening employee mood (the research proves it works) - these lighthearted fun-style emotional support activities are not the most powerful motivators in a manager’s toolkit. Performance assessment research indicates that two managerial behaviors trump all else when it comes to employee passion and motivation at work: empowerment to move forward in work, and being treated with dignity and respect.
It turns out that being able to make progress at work is a very big deal for employees, even if that progress is small. The good news is that there are several ways that managers can ensure employees make progress in their work each day:
- Provide hands on help, advice and coaching. Offer your help; don’t wait for them to ask.
- Make sure employees have the resources and the time to make positive progress at work.
- Respond to successes and failures as rewards and opportunities for learning.
Unfortunately, the bad news is that employees report that their managers are more likely to hinder progress at work through behaviors such as:
- Encouraging team members to compete against one another.
- Placing unreasonable or unnecessary time pressure on projects.
- Responding to successes and failures with a purely evaluative approach.
Peter Drucker once wrote, “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work”. It’s time for a shift in the way we think about leadership. It’s time for managers to make their top priority paying attention to how people feel at work. When managers ensure that the environments they oversee are conducive to positive emotions and the progress of good work, unprecedented productivity, creativity and innovation are sure to follow.
