Oct 28, 2013 | Blog

Don’t Let Untrained Managers Loose On Good Teams

Optimize Your Talent Strategy

I have spent a good bit of my career learning about and working with teams. I've learned about how to build effective teams, how to improve team performance, how to hire replacement members into a team, how to manage individual performance in a team environment, and how, in some cases, teams diminish performance.

 

Along the way, it has been interesting to see how different managers approach the whole concept of team and how some have been able to leverage teams to great results while others have taken perfectly good teams and ruined them by not understanding them in the first place.

 

I blame diversity. Managerial diversity.         

 

Each year new books are written, new philosophies adopted, new managers are appointed and new theories tested. Managers come in to their jobs prepared to show how they are the best manager ever. And why shouldn't they think that? After all, each of us has benefitted by the collective wisdom of those before us, right?

 

Well, maybe. That assumes two things:

 

1. That those before us had collective wisdom to impart weren't repeating mistakes of previous managers and

 

2. That we truly learn from our mistakes and don’t push our own agendas and hypotheses.

 

Here are things I have seen managers do that take the potential multiplier of team performance and turn it into a net loss.

 

  • Insist on team building exercises or experiences based on the manager's favorite pastime. Everybody loves bowling, right?
  • Involve the team in a survey process intended to unearth each member's strengths and focus instead on the weaknesses that need to be fixed.
  • Hire people with strong technical skills to help transfer the skills to others. Afterwards recognize that those same people might be good at technology but bad at training.
  • In the name of accountability, hold the team hostage to find out who was responsible for the accidental equipment damage, fostering fear and animosity in the team.
  • Assign individual accountabilities because they don't believe in the team accountability principle, thus allowing the entry of the "not my job" cancer that kills any team.

 

If your organization is built on the need for effective teams, then you know how to assess your managers for their ability to effectively lead.

 

An engineer by training, Tim Gardner worked his way in HR when he realized the real optimization of manufacturing processes came from how the employees were managed. Currently the Director of Organizational Effectiveness for Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Tim has spent the majority of his career working with the creation and improvement of work teams, both hourly and professional. Tim is a member of the HR Bloggers Network, and his blog, The HR Introvert, looks at his HR work from the perspective of a non-traditional HR Pro. You can connect with him via LinkedIn and Twitter.