Manager expectations define employee performance

There was a study carried out by psychologists at Minnesota University in 1977 that demonstrated how other people’s expectations of us influence how we behave. It is as if we sub-consciously pick up how others view us and start to behave accordingly.

Those of you familiar with the Iceberg Theory from the Governing Change management training program will recognize the first law of the iceberg; “We always influence and there is always a reaction (either conscious or sub-conscious)”. From a management perspective the study supports the fact that our expectations of our employees influence their performance. If we see them as high performing they will be. If we view them as ordinary, they will be. I am a firm believer in ‘People are only as good as they are allowed to be.’ When employees are marked as a 3 out of 5 (which is most of them) in their annual appraisal what is the subtle damage to morale and self-esteem? How challenging are people’s goals? What do managers delegate as a result of low expectations?

It is important to expect the best and provide the right resources and encouragement. Change your expectations and change performance.

Happy 100th Birthday Peter Drucker!

Peter Drucker, the man who is credited with modern management thinking would have been 100 years old last week. Let's not forget his vision and wisdom. Here are some quotes from many of his writings and interviews.

"In fact, that management has a need for advanced education – as well as for systematic manager development – means only that management today has become an institution of our society."

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

"What's measured improves."

“Efficiency is doing better what is already being done."

“People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.”

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.”

"Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility."

"To focus on contribution is to focus on effectiveness."

"People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are."

"Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision."

“The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.”

“A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example”

Sport’s Contempt for Management Shines Through

Take a manager who has never played rugby before. Make him captain of England for his very first game. What would happen?

Martin Johnson was a fantastic player. Journalists struggled to put into words just how fearsome he was: “beetle-browed”, “lion-hearted”, “indomitable.” We are regularly reminded that he “achieved everything in the game.”

Johnson the manager is a different proposition, and the press are channelling their own fearsome aggression at him. His England are desperately lacking in creativity, it is said; in 18 months they have gone nowhere.

Sport’s contempt for management is so complete that “achieving everything in the game” is often enough to qualify a famous player to become manager of a top-flight team, when they have had little or no experience of management. Johnson had served no apprenticeship of any kind. He had not spent a single day managing a club side. As a player his qualifications were matchless. Under “Management”, his CV was blank. But, sport seems to be saying, what is management compared to playing? What is the ability to mould a team, to create long-term strategy, to forge agreement where there had been none before, to deal effectively with a host of interested parties, compared to the thrilling exploits of the people on the pitch? “Crash-bang” wins every time.

What is at the root of the attitude to management that is on display here? Simply, that it is not understood. No manager would be promoted to playing for the England rugby team on the basis that he had won everything in management. Why not? Because what it takes to play for England is clear for everyone to see. The physical attributes – strength, stamina, technique – are obvious, and playing just five minutes of international rugby without the wherewithal would have gruesome results. What seems to be less clear to those who make the appointments is what it takes to be a manager.

Consider the challenges which might face a manager. How to create an environment in which others can excel, how to unite disparate elements of a team, how to forge understanding between a range of stakeholders, how to mould a way of playing which utilises the strengths of the players available. There might be some overlap between the skillset of the indomitable player and some of these situations, but not much. What is available to the star ex-player once the chance to lead by example on the pitch has gone? Whatever managerial gifts he was born with, and no more.

Last week a function was held to celebrate those football managers who had presided over 1000 games or more. What was the characteristic they all had in common? “All the lads here who've done 1,000 games worked their way up the ladder,” said Harry Redknapp. “They've not gone in at the top and taken over a massive club. They had to learn their trade and that's why they survived so long." In other words, they treated management as a separate skill from playing, and learned it for itself. What is being asked of the admirable Martin Johnson now is that he learn to be a manager not while managing a low profile club side, but while managing England. Such is the contempt in which management is held that Johnson is being criticised for every mistake he makes as he learns his new job. The attitude seems to be, if he could achieve so much doing all that exciting stuff on the pitch, surely he can turn his hand to this boring behind-the-scenes chat.

Johnson’s erstwhile colleague Josh Lewsey recently criticised the coaches under the England manager, exasperatedly pointing out that one of them achieved nothing as a player. Clearly Johnson still commands great respect among players, as Lewsey confined his comments to those who report to his former captain. But who do the coaches work for? Who is responsible for moulding the talents and input of those beneath him into a coherent approach? That is management.

How Long Should a Leadership Development Course Be?

You have been asked to find a leadership development programme for the managers at your organisation. The choice is bewildering, with companies offering a host of courses which last from one day to six months. What factors should guide your decision making?

First consider what you want the target group to be able to do at the end of the course. If you are looking for them to behave differently when they get back to work at the end of the leadership development programme, and for their new behaviour to be profitable for the company, then the chances are they’ll need more than a two day course.

If you went to university, how long did you spend there? The chances are you were there for three years, and possibly longer. What about other professional training you might have done, whether in the forces, medicine, or in areas such as accounting, corporate finance, etc? How long did it take to gain the relevant experience there? When viewed from this angle it is difficult to see how two days, no matter how engaging they may be, will develop something as demanding as leadership.

What’s the minimum time required for a leadership development course to be effective? Kevin Yates, Managing Director of leadership consultants Mitchell Phoenix, thinks that five or six days over five or six months is the optimum length for a leadership development programme. “The only way we learn and develop something like leadership is to put the principles into practice in the workplace and then to regularly report back on results achieved to a group,” he says. “This requirement to perform, to adapt one’s behaviour and create results through doing so, is only achieved in leadership development courses which are run for a day a month for five or six months. Anything shorter than that, and gains may be made in the first few weeks after the course, but after that they will quickly fade and the investment will be lost.”

Interim CEO Ross Stuart, who has used Mitchell Phoenix in a number of companies including Astir, Linpac and Alderley Group, agrees: “One of the unique features of Mitchell Phoenix courses is that they are done over 6 months, 1 day per month which allows the techniques and training to be used in between sessions and each manger reports back on their successes, embedding the techniques much better that the normal 3/4 day courses.”

What is the effect on delegates? Darren Lewitt, a director at Midwich Ltd, sums up much of the feedback Mitchell Phoenix receive, “I have been on a number of courses in my time. Forget the rest, this is the best. It holds your attention all the way through. Unlike other courses, you are not distracted or fighting to get out. An amazing experience.”

The Four Secrets of Choosing Management Development Programmes

Have you been tasked with choosing a management or leadership development programme for your people? Are you uncertain about what to look for? What are the pros and cons of sending your people to a hotel for a five day residential or a back to business school?

Follow these four simple steps to ensure you make the right choice:

1. Choose a programme that produces business results. Why do you want your people to become better leaders and managers? So that they create stronger business results. A course that does not produce results will not justify the expenditure. Choose a course that produces tangible results in your business from the very first seminar – after all, why wait to see the ROI?

The material covered in Governing Change can be turned into results quickly. This is why my interest remained for days 1-6. The theory can be put into practice and, to paraphrase my own presentation, I have the results to prove it.
Tim Palin, The Metal Centre

2. Look for robust, proven content. If your people are going to create real results, they’ll need practical input which they can implement quickly and effectively. It will be hard for your people to call complex models and abstract theories to mind when they are under pressure – and when they are under pressure is precisely when they’ll need to use what they’ve learned from the course they’re attending.

For any manager it bears relevance to their principal objectives for success. Every session had content that I could relate to my everyday working environment and equipped me with the tools to improve myself and my team between each session.
Jane Bradshaw, Gould Alloys

3. Insist on a structure which demands that delegates implement what they are learning back in the workplace, and supports them in doing so. The best structure for this is a day a month. That way delegates can experiment in modifying their approach, create results, report their progress back to their group, and build their understanding over five or six months, rather than attending a three day event and then not implementing half of it and forgetting the rest.

Anyone in management, no matter what level of experience they have, will learn from this course. This is not a course where you go away feeling inspired but then never apply what you’ve learned. The course forces you and supports you in developing your skills.
Sophie Davies, Victim Support

4. Ensure that the programme is run by people who are expert in developing the leadership and management capabilities of others, rather than experts from your particular industry, who may have little to impart other than a dressed up version of their autobiography.

A 6 month Mitchell Phoenix management programme that, frankly, changed my life. It broadened my outlook and since completing it my enthusiasm soared and the techniques he showed us to deal with difficult or sensitive management challenges have been invaluable to me, and of course my business.
Ian Ford, Watts Group

Finally, if you are looking to develop not only a group of individuals, but the whole culture of your organisation, choose a development initiative which is robust enough to scale up to produce an organisation-wide effect.

The Governing Change training course has equipped our managers with the necessary tools to manage their teams and achieve a high level of success. It enables all of us to take a consistent approach when managing our people
Andy Howitt, Regional Director, Aalco

And of course, treat any tangential approach with caution. A programme which seeks to achieve improvements in the business environment through participation in an unrelated activity, such as outward-bound sessions or actor’s trust games, is unlikely to create lasting results.

Having been on numerous training courses I have no hesitation in recommending the Mitchell Phoenix Course as the best yet. There is no management-speak or pointless exercises - instead the course is tailored to each and every delegate due to the focus on practical results and making improvements in your workplace.

Mark Lowe, Midwich Ltd


Can You See the Business Opportunities?

As economic conditions improve, it will be those managers and organisations which can see the opportunities which will flourish. And what we see is a function of how we think.

We normally imagine that things work the other way round: that we see, and on the basis of the evidence in front of us, we alter our thinking. But without a certain level of understanding, we cannot interpret the evidence we are looking at. It is tempting to think that Galileo looked through his telescope and saw the evidence for the Earth orbiting the Sun. In fact, if he had not had the benefit of Copernicus’ theories which argued that that this was so, Galileo might have looked through his telescope and not understood what he was seeing. In other words, Copernicus thought it, then Galileo proved it – not the other way around.

What do most senior managers think? They think that they have been in management, and been successful at it, for long enough that they don’t need any further input to sharpen their thinking. Or they think that there is no-one out there who can develop their understanding in such a way that when they look at their business again, they see it with fresh eyes.

With most senior managers thinking this way, this in itself is an opportunity to gain an advantage. Where can you find a programme which will develop senior managers’ thinking, and create results as a consequence? Mitchell Phoenix have been developing the leadership and management capabilities of senior managers for over twenty years, opening their eyes to new possibilities:

Puts a completely new perspective on managing. A truly inspirational course.
Paul Skipton, Aalco

The course has allowed me to look at myself and others in a differing way and will allow both my own and others’ potential to be fulfilled.
Robert Hillman, Watts International

The course is excellent in opening your mind to managing your business, people, targets, time, etc and is invaluable in everyday use. I would recommend this to anyone who would like to develop as a manager and personally.
Paul Temple, Aalco

How equipped are you to see the opportunities – both internal and external - which will arise over the next period? How sharp is your thinking? Can you see
the way forward?

When Vision does not Equal Reality, Innovate

Mitchell Phoenix believe that organisations should Govern Change, which means anticipating and responding actively and flexibly to the changing circumstances in which businesses operate. In doing so, companies create an advantageous, profitable future for themselves. Blind adherence to past processes and procedures, failure to ask searching questions about our business and the environment in which it exists, and unwillingness to really listen to those around us are all factors which can prevent us from Governing Change successfully.

In Innovation and Entrepreneurship Peter Drucker explores a number of situations where there was an incongruity between business’s vision of reality – of what they thought was happening – and the actual reality which was unfolding around them. In the following three examples, Drucker shows how certain businesses identified gaps between their vision and the true reality, and then responded creatively to effectively Govern Change.

1. Incongruity Between Reality and Assumptions About It

When erroneous assumptions are made about reality, businesspeople are not concentrating their efforts on areas which will generate results. Those who see the true reality may also see the opportunity to innovate.

For example, in the early 1950s ocean freighters were thought to be dying. They were a slow, high cost method of transport. Why was this? The shipping industry had made an incorrect assumption – they had focused their efforts on reducing the cost of running fully loaded freighters at sea, by developing smaller, faster ships which ran on less fuel and required fewer crew. But the reality was that as a piece of capital equipment a ship is most expensive when it is not working, and ships were spending significant periods of time queuing at ports waiting to load or unload. This time spent queuing was the main reason why freighters were deemed to be so slow and expensive.

So instead of focusing on reducing the already low cost of running a fully loaded ship at sea, it was decided to uncouple loading from stowing, and container and roll-on, roll-off ships were born. Queuing time at ports was reduced, and freighters became more profitable. Crucially, the techniques for doing this were already in use in the railroad and trucking industries; they simply had to be applied to shipping.

2. Incongruity Between Perceived and Actual Customer Values and Expectations

No customer is as immersed in or committed to the product as the supplier, and therefore often what the customer buys is not what the supplier thinks the customer is buying.

Drucker argues that the prime motivation of those who work in the large financial institutions on Wall Street is to get rich, and that they therefore assume that this is the prime motivation of all their customers. He then charts the rise of a securities firm which appealed not to customers who wanted to become rich, but to customers who wanted to protect their money. These customers included local professionals, small businesspeople and substantial farmers. The firm’s strategy was based on protecting its clients’ money, and because of this only one eighth of its business was stock exchange business.

Drucker goes on to underline the power of those who see a mismatch between what suppliers think customers want and what they actually want:

“The big Wall Street houses cannot even imagine such customers [who want to protect their money rather than get rich] exist because they defy everything the houses believe in and hold true.”

If your competition cannot even imagine your customers exist, it will be difficult for them to steal your market share.

3. Incongruity Between the Rhythm or Logic of a Process

A manufacturer of lawn care products had a similar catalogue to its competitors, composed of fertilisers, pesticides and the like. All the competition promised ‘scientific’ products which had been extensively tested and would make your lawn look fantastic. Precise instructions were given on how much of each product should be applied to your lawn, depending on soil conditions and the desired effect.

Customers bought the products because of the promised benefits, and were receptive to the idea that each fertiliser had been scientifically developed to deliver those benefits. But when it came to actually applying the products, the logic of the process fell down. Customers found it difficult to be as scientific as they felt they should be in putting the correct amounts onto their lawns. Then one particular manufacturer produced a ‘Spreader’. This was a lightweight wheelbarrow with adjustable holes which would deliver exactly the right amount of product as the customer walked over the lawn. The ‘Spreader’ boosted sales significantly.


What can we learn from Drucker’s examples? Asking open questions about the environment in which we operate, listening, and remaining open to new ideas and approaches will all help us to capitalise on situations where the vision of what is happening around us does not match the reality. How close is the relationship between your vision of what is happening in your business environment and the reality? Which of your past processes and procedures are holding your organisation back? What can you change tomorrow in order to take advantage?