Changing manager behaviour August 2010. Occasional Paper Vol. 3 No. 7 Derek Mowbray
Why is behaviour so important? The role of the manager is to get the job done. Normally, this involves asking someone else to do the job. Persuading someone else to do something they might otherwise not wish to do is complex. It involves being sure that other people are capable of doing the job; delegation and implied trust that others can do the job; and the ability not to act in ways that disengage others from doing the job. Persuading someone to do something involves addressing the other person s interests, and applying characteristics and behaviours associated strongly with persuasion. The characteristics that help to hook someone else into being persuaded include attentiveness, trustworthiness, wisdom, intelligence with humour, passion, giving clear direction with committed ambition, being able to create and dissolve tension, addressing individual needs and having the capacity to nurture others. Often, this takes time; it may take longer than anticipated. In these circumstances communication and persuasive behaviours become tied into other features which are intended to short circuit the time taken to persuade, such as referencing job expectations, job descriptions, policies, procedures, and invoking these through impersonal means such as email, telephone calls or written instructions. If these processes don t achieve the desired effect, persuasion gives way to exercising power over others through adverse behaviours such as threats, bullying, intimidation and general nastiness delivered directly and indirectly using rumour, briefings and humiliation. Successful managers, on the other hand, find time to persuade others to do something they might otherwise not wish to do. These managers understand the need for personal interaction that assists in fulfilling personal interests and ambitions, in the expectation that others will reciprocate by helping the manager achieve her aspirations. If the manager can use various techniques of reinforcement during interaction, such as praise and positive feedback, the impact of the interaction on the other person will be stronger. The key is in understanding that behaviour produces both positive and negative responses. If manager behaviour produces a negative response the respondent is likely to disengage with the manager, as a means of limiting psychological distress (a self protection and survival response). Other reactions occur. In such a situation the respondent is unlikely to remain committed to the manager, unlikely to trust the manager, and the psychological contract between the employee and the manager may fracture. Managers dance precariously on a fault line between achieving a positive or negative response, and even the most polished managers find themselves wondering why a negative response sometimes occurs. If manager behaviour produces a negative response, this has a direct impact on wellbeing, performance and productivity. The psychological distress that manager behaviour may create will divert the concentration of the respondent away from focusing on work to thoughts of personal survival. If the respondent already suffers a degree of psychological distress he or she may not hear what the manager is requesting, and will ask for a repeat possibly causing the manager to show irritation or worse, or, if too frightened, will simply disengage and fail to complete the request.
Presenteeism is one of the major scourges of any business or service. It is the phenomenon where employees and employers turn up for work whilst feeling unwell. Some of the ill health will be physical, and often cannot be avoided. A significant proportion, however, is due to psychological distress. Psychological distress lasts longer than many physical illnesses, and its lingering effect is more costly as a result. Presenteeism is estimated to cost 1.5 times the total costs of sickness absence and staff turnover combined. Presenteeism attributable to psychological distress must, therefore, be the main target for eradication by managers, as addressing presenteeism will also contribute significantly to the reduction of sickness absence and staff turnover and will help to improve wellbeing, performance and productivity. Failed interaction between managers and employees is a prime reason for presenteeism attributable to psychological distress. Sometimes, these failed interactions arise during events such as mergers or times of economic threat, and managers often blame these events for causing psychological distress when, in fact, it is their inability to behave appropriately during these events, and manage the events effectively, that is the main cause. The third level threats are consequences of failed interactions. They impact on individuals in different ways and to different degrees of intensity, dependent on individual levels of resilience. However, all the items at this level will have some kind of impact, and positive interactions with others will have a substantial mitigating effect on the level of psychological distress being experienced.
Steps towards changing behaviour The focus for manager behaviour is illustrated in the XABC formula below. We respond to events, millions of them each day. For the most part we respond to events in a sub conscious way because we have experienced them before, and previous successes in responding effectively will reinforce the approaches to dealing with similar events in the present and future. Events and our responses are heavily influenced by context. For example, in a team where the members know each other well, are committed to each other and trust each other, a member who is rude to another member may be interpreted as indicating banter or something fairly light hearted. The rudeness may be dealt with in a reciprocally light hearted manner, and the incident (event) may pass without any effect on performance. In a team where people may not know each other, a similar event of rudeness may be treated as a threat. It s not uncommon for such an event to be taken seriously and the perpetrator referred to a third party (for example the Human Resources department) for some kind of sanction to be applied. The effect in this case will be other team members being diverted away from concentrating on their work and performance will dip.
Step 1 what are the behaviours that managers should aim to embed within themselves? The Manager s Code 1 sets out a suitable framework of behaviours that focus on three areas managing the organisation, managing people and managing the business or service. The significance of managing the organisation is that the behaviour adopted by managers is heavily influenced by the cultural context within which the manager manages. Managers can create the appropriate context themselves, so are influential in building and sustaining a cultural context that influences positive behaviours on a daily basis. The steps to be taken in building and sustaining a Positive Work Culture are set out in Mowbray (2009) 2 Step 2 changing attitudes Most behaviours are the manifestation of individual attitudes, beliefs, values, emotions and thoughts. Changing behaviour, therefore, is about re thinking attitudes and beliefs. The first step in this process is to encourage managers to adopt a flexible and adaptable approach to their attitudes about people and work, and to abandon any stereotypical ideas about manager behaviours. The main focus for change is the attitude individuals have towards others. As everyone is motivated by self interest, the approach is to encourage managers to understand that their self interest is better served and is more effective if they can identify the self interest in others and address and support that self interest. In the majority of situations, this approach provokes a reciprocal behaviour in that others will feed the manager s self interest. The behaviour that encourages this approach is attentiveness. Others describe this as mindfulness, although this has a wider interpretation than being only focused on others it has the interpretation of being aware of everything around the individual. Attentiveness can be taught, and there are several techniques to be employed in encouraging managers to be attentive to others. Through the process of attentiveness, individual managers will build their interest in others, and will develop an attitude of openness towards other people s self interest, motivations, beliefs, values, emotions and thoughts. This assists the manager in her behaviour towards others only if the manager abandons any judgment that is self generated, or judgement that is a false attribution of others. Step 3 reinforcement Learning theory assists us with understanding how an idea can become embedded into the consciousness of individuals. The triple loop learning process is one where an idea is reinforced at least twice by activities designed to embed the idea within an individual. Reinforcement occurs in many ways. It can occur through dialogue, but the most effective way is through some kind of action. Relating reinforcement to attentiveness requires a manager to experiment with different ways of being attentive to others and reflecting on the power of the approach in feeding the manager s self interest. Clearly, for a manager to change behaviour, there is a need to trust the process, and trust the people that are being managed. There is more to be gained in implicitly trusting everyone than in the process of building trust. The assumption that everyone is trustworthy is an essential aspect of developing flexibility and adaptability in individuals, and it is better to assume everyone is to be trusted than to 1 The Manager s Code linking wellbeing and performance. MAS 2010. 22 A Positive Work Culture essential for wellbeing and performance at work Mowbray, Derek. MAS.Occasional Paper Vol. 2 No. 5 Nov. 2009.
wait until trust is demonstrated. In starting out trusting everyone, the manager is a long way along the path towards creating commitment and engagement between employees and the manager. Step 4 adopting the assertive message There may be a danger that managers feel disempowered by adopting positive behaviours towards others. This is not the case. To ensure this is not the case, managers may need to learn to adopt the assertive message. Assertiveness is the ability to clearly state what the manager wants without causing any psychological distress. The focus of the assertive message is on stating clearly the personal message, taking account of understanding the person that is being addressed. Under no circumstances should the assertive message contain any judgment about the other person. It is all about the manager s personal feelings, observations and expectations, and not about the other person. Demonstrating to ability to deliver the assertive message, and reflecting on the impact of the approach, will provide confidence to the manager that employees respond well to messages that are clear and carry no threat of psychological distress. Conclusion There is everything to be gained from manager s behaviour that persuades others to do things they might otherwise not do without causing psychological distress. This has the effect of building trust and commitment which leads to emotional engagement between the employee and the manager. This, in turn, aids concentration on work, and results in improved performance and productivity through the elimination of presenteeism. The behaviours that manager s need to adopt are first level behaviours the behaviours adopted in interaction, compared to second level behaviours which are general description of behaviours. For example, it is often suggested that managers should be seen or talk to their staff. These are second level descriptions and are too blunt to convey the behaviours that persuade others. Being seen, for example, may provoke fear or cause employees to be diverted from their work to ask questions of the manager, possibly leading to manager overload. Talking to staff is an inadequate description of the behaviours that managers should display when talking to staff some managers may cause psychological distress because of their detailed behaviour when talking to staff. Learning to behave effectively is to learn how to interact with others in ways that produces a positive result in favour of mutual self interest without diverting attention away from the task in hand. The basics of the behaviours needed can be taught can be described, but it takes individuals to experiment themselves using behaviours they feel comfortable in applying and which produce a positive reinforcement achieved when successfully persuading others to do things they might otherwise not wish to do. MAS provides training in manager behaviours that produce commitment, trust and emotional engagement leading to improved wellbeing, performance and productivity. The approaches available include awareness workshops and cognitive coaching. For more details please email derek.mowbray@mas.org.uk and see for further details.