1.2 The Manager's Role

So as we move on, the manager’s role is, according to Marcus Buckingham, who is the author of a book called Now, Discover Your Strengths. Marcus Buckingham says the point of management is always the same thing, and that is to cultivate performance, to deliver results, to get people who help deliver those results. The manager has a huge impact on the organization, some very positive and some detrimental. In a number of research studies, it has been determined, it has been validated that the primary reason that people leave their job is because of the boss. The Saratoga Institute conducted 700 exit interviews with people who have just quit. They were asked, why did you leave? The boss was the primary reason. The Gallup Organization conducted a survey of two million workers who have left and transitioned from one job to another. They were asked, why did you leave? The primary reason of those two million respondents was the boss. So what’s wrong with the boss? Why do people leave the boss? Do you think people leave a boss who is a leader, pulling and motivating and influencing, or do you think people are leaving a manager who is driving and pushing and focused on things and not necessarily on people? The HR profession segment of management is now looking at manager. They used to 10 years ago, 15 years ago be focused on people leaving. It wasn’t the boss’s issue. It was really the people, for one reason or another, just left! Now today with the cost of replacing employees, anywhere from 50 to 300% of a person’s annual salary depending upon the level of sophistication and complexity of their job, HR managers are now tracking the numbers of people that leave by boss. It’s not always the employees’ issue now. Many bosses are being coached and counseled and given the opportunities to attend developmental classes and seminars in order to improve their leadership skills in order to help retain individuals. So the manager has a huge impact as they are responsible for six different parts of their job. So the six different parts of their job as a manager needs to satisfy customers. Think about it. Who are customers? We’re gonna come back to that. Also, a manager is responsible to lead others. Yet, we said just previously that some managers aren’t very good at leading. We also said that managers need to act with integrity. Fourth, they need to respect diversity, they need to deal with global challenges, and lastly, they need to continually improve the department or function or team. So let’s look at each of these six focus areas of a manager’s job responsibilities. So first, customers. Who are customers? Can your boss be a customer? Can the person sitting next to you be a customer? Is it only the person who buys your product or service? Well, the body knowledge called management differentiates and says customers exist both internally and externally. Your boss can be your customer. Your boss says, would you complete this report and give it back to me? Therefore, you are doing something that the boss has asked you to do, and the output goes back to the boss. What happens if you totally mess up on that report and give a report back to your boss and your boss is totally unhappy with your work. Is your boss satisfied? What happens if you continually deliver reports to your boss that aren’t very good? Problematic. How about the person sitting in the desk next to you? If your job is to look at time cards and to do the processing to make sure that the time cards are input into a spreadsheet so a person can get paid every week or every two weeks, and you pass your work to the next person in the desk next to you who is going to take that Excel spreadsheet and then put it into the system in order for the people to get their paychecks. What happens if that report is all messed up? Some people are getting a whole lot of money. Some people aren’t getting anything. Who’s gonna be unhappy? Well, the employees for sure. Their paychecks aren’t gonna be right, and the person who you gave that report to is certainly not happy. May or may not say something to you, but most probably going to complain to the boss. So your peers are also your customers. In public, the neighborhood, potential clients, employees, customers who buy your external product and suppliers. My son, Ian, works for Caltrans. His job is to visit with the community, to hold community meetings. When a California highway department project is going to interrupt a neighborhood, he needs to go out and visit with those constituents and hear their complaints and listen to them, so his customers are the community. So customers, then, are anyone, either individual, in either internal or external, who uses the output of your organization for its members. Expectation is clearly the anticipation that something is going to happen. Alignment, a common understanding that we’re moving in the same direction. Quality, quality is not what we think it is, but it is, do we understand the customer’s expectations, specifications, and is the output going to make that person, the user, happy? So quality is about matching needs of the customer with deliverables, the output, and is the customer happy? So we also said that a manager’s focus needs to be on leading others. We’ve already talked a little bit about this in this module. So, and just to recap a little bit, leading is creating this vision and helping people to see the steps. Initiating momentum, staying connected with change, having people want to follow voluntarily, inspiring and gaining commitment, and providing support. Another focus is continuous improvement. There are all kinds of continuous improvement initiatives within organizations, within management. Also, we all have our own continuous improvement goals that we are striving for, 100% perfect score. We are Zero Defects, TQM, Six Sigma, these are all initiatives that designed to help us get as close to perfect as we can. So in this Continual Improvement Process, the manager needs to challenge the process, and continue to ask why, to establish performance standards and develop plans and to measure and analyze, and to keep the plan on track. If it’s not on track, figure out why it’s not on track, and achieve on time delivery so that customer satisfaction is achieved. We also said that a manager needs to act with integrity. What’s that about? Well, that means transparency, that means honesty, that means integrity, that means doing right things right, regardless of the challenges and issues. Another one of the focus areas is diversity. Now, we generally think of diversity as cultural or physical disability, but there are other kinds of diversity that a manager needs to address. Cultural diversity. We’ve talked about that. We’ve talked about the different influences of customs and religions. Disability, not only mentally disabled, but what about veteran’s disability issues? How do we incorporate and bring those into the work force, into the community? People, people have or come in all kinds of diverse packages. We have different education. We have different learning styles. We have different personality. Trade, the supply chain. We had different regulations. We have different types of policies and piracy in parts of the world, and workforce issues. Equal pay for equal work, women’s rights issues, child labor issues, the aging population. So a manager has to incorporate all of these diversity aspects into their plan and what they are doing. The last of the focus areas is dealing with global challenges, world issues. So we have a changing business model, very static and autocratic, and very traditional. We have functional, and we have new model, very self directed team-based models. We have economy and finance issues, inflation, exchange rates, world crisis, terrorism, 9/11 type of issues, nuclear issues, natural disasters, floods and tsunamis and earthquakes. We have political issues. What about corruption? What about religious wars? What about protests? Social issues are also something that a manager has to do, with stem cell research, population changes and growth and world hunger, human rights, and technology. Whoa, technology. Talk about the role of technology. It’s all over the news these days. Piracy, privacy, hacking, social media, huge challenges for the manager in almost any kind of organization. So in module one we have explored two essential themes in this body of knowledge called management. We have talked about, what is, is there, and what’s the difference and similarities between a manager and a leader. We have also explored, what is the focus area, the responsibilities for this manager in an organization. So with that, I thank you for being part of module number one. I am Dave Nagy, and I hope that I will see you as you join in in subsequent modules. Thank you.