Managing Leadership^®

We’ve heard all the jokes about how people and their spouses (or even their pets) start to look and act like each other. Have you noticed something like this happening at work, as well? Is your company culture really just a cookie cutter? Or, is the managerial climate such that people start mimicking their bosses as a way to get ahead? Why is that?

For a fascinating and enjoyable must-read discussion of this surprisingly under-noted subject, please click over to Jared Sandberg‘s WSJ column, Cubicle Culture, entitled The Stepford Staff. For our purposes, here, I only want to comment briefly on the following explanation Jared offers for this behavior:

. . . what’s alike in both manager and staffers is a cluelessness about the ingredients for success. In other words, if you’re not sure what propelled someone to the executive suite, you might as well also dump carbs, lease a Lexus and pretend to listen, too, just in case any of those things had something to do with it.”

Now, we’ve talked a good bit here about how difficult it is for managers to find discretionary time to work on their proper managerial tasks. Moreover, we’ve noted as well that, given how really limited and difficult to protect that time is, managers should use it effectively by focusing on making real progress during it with one critical task in turn.

Otherwise, it can seem like nothing whatever is getting done – and you can even feel not quite sure what should be done, at all. Sort of like the environment Jared refers to above. The one that becomes a copy machine, churning out at best ill-disciplined, and at worst clueless, managers who really don’t know how to succeed themselves, much less how to teach their juniors to do so.

Let’s assume here, though, that you do know what you’re doing personally, and how to keep locked in on your most vital landmark in the midst of the daily storm of activity at work, and how to make progress toward it until you overtake it and can shift to the next one.

But maybe you’re not quite sure how to train your staff. All the stuff you read on the topic seems so complex and delicately inter-related that you’re afraid a single mistake will bring the whole effort down like a house of cards. So, combine that with all the other demands on you, and you never quite get started with a comprehensive staff development program. And, before you know it, the copy machine starts churning out fun-house mirror-images of yourself.

Well, if that’s your problem, then never mind the all-or-nothing approach. Use the same one you employ with your own productivity. Take a single issue you are dealing with, or that you want a staff member to become competent with. Assign it, and expect your junior to pursue it with the same discipline and focus you invest in your own vital issue. Supervise for that.

Then, do it again. Press and push. With things like this the most important time spent is always on framing the problem. That is, you don’t want to just grab any issue that floats by and make it your single-minded focus of the day, only to find out it was a waste of time. You want to spend part of your time making sure you use the rest of it as meaningfully and effectively as possible. Do the same with this.

Don’t keep your juniors guessing. Teach them, one task at a time, what really does make for success, by giving them the opportunity to practice it with the same discipline and focus that you use. As you and they gain experience with this, you will naturally develop the training relationship in mutually and organizationally advantageous ways, and learn to apply lessons learned with one staff members for the benefit of another.

Let them know what about you to copy. And, only one copy (or plate) at a time.

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