When A Manager is Uninterested in People Management
I often write and talk about how to be a better people manager, but one topic I’ve repeatedly encountered is people who have a manager who’s uninterested in being a people manager. How do you get your manager interested in managing—let alone being a better manager?
In my experience, someone’s interest and ability at being a people manager breaks down into three categories:
Why are they a people manager?
What drives their personal success & compensation?
What is the company culture around people management?
How you can address—or not—their lack of people management desire directly relates to the interplay of these categories. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post an article focused on each of those criteria, but let’s start with a seemingly basic question.
What is People Management?
You might think this has an obvious answer—it’s oversight of people to make sure they do what needs doing. That is a factually correct statement. But it’s wrong.
People managers are force multipliers. They are coaches.
They make the sum of the team greater than the sum of the parts of the team. They help people see beyond the thing they’re doing today to the thing the group, the division or the company is doing—today, tomorrow and next year. They tie the parts together and help others identify those strings so that everyone works together towards a common goal. They nurture skill sets and position others for success.
People managers aren’t nannies and they aren’t study hall monitors.
In a professional environment, you should not hire or continue to employ people who require constant supervision. Someone who requires a study hall monitor looking over their shoulder isn’t worth keeping: you cannot provide perfect oversight. If you can’t trust them, you can’t trust them. No amount of people management will fix that deficiency. This is especially true for remote and hybrid employees: if you cannot trust someone in the office, you absolutely cannot trust them at home.
The inverse is also true: someone who wants to constantly monitor their team’s activity and output is inherently unsuitable for people management. We call them micromanagers, and they undermine their team and drive people from a company.
A people manager isn’t a project manager—they can also be that, but as a people manager, that’s not the point. The team should know what do to and who’s doing what. A quick stand up meeting—5-15 minutes tops—should deal with unexpected adjustments.
If a people manager is acting like a nanny, you’ve either hired the wrong people or the wrong manager.
Example 1: Hiring the Wrong People
You have a manager and five team members under them, working a combined 240 hours/week. Three team members are fine acting on their own and do a good job. One is new and requires some training (this is fine). One requires extra oversight to ensure they’re working and accomplishing their normal tasks. History shows that, when left to their own, tasks are missed or only completed late in the workweek to ensure “on paper” compliance—meaning, they can say they did the work, even if they did it poorly and in a haphazard manner.
Is each team member contributing to the team? Would the team be better off with or without the person who requires constant oversight?
I’d argue it’s a case of addition by subtraction: the team will be better off without that person.
Does the team actually have 240 hours of work each week, or are others spending 5-10 hours each week checking that the weakest team member because they don’t trust their output? Would that new hire even be necessary?
How much time does the manager spend overseeing the weakest team member? Could they spend that time another way? (Yes, yes, they could.)
How much does team morale suffer? If a lackluster slacker is allowed to remain and drag down the team’s quality, you better believe it drags down the team’s morale and pride in doing a good job.
Laziness is infectious. If the new team member sees the person who slacks off and requires monitoring as a role model, well, now there are two people who require constant vigilance. Are the good performers going to stick around and accept re-checking the work of two other people? Unlikely.
The person who requires constant supervision eats up the manager’s time and, in my experience, makes the manager dislike people management. Put into hours, the manager is spending probably:
1.5 hours/week on the good employees, (one-on-one’s, meetings, etc.) (total: 4.5 hours)
1.5 hours/week on team management (team meetings, etc.)
16 hours on their own work
8 hours training/on-boarding the new person
10 hours monitoring, checking, and managing the immature employee
You can immediately see the breakout in attention and focus: the manager spends 25% of their time on the one poor employee to the detriment of the team.
Example 2: Hiring the Wrong Manager
You have a manager and five team members under them, working a combined 240 hours/week. Four have been there for years and have a track record of success. One is a new hire replacing a recently departed long-time employee.
Performance on the team has been steadily dropping. The four tenured employees are producing less and, when questioned, the manager called out the need for increased monitoring. Team members complete work later and the manager keeps finding issues in the deliverables, requiring re-work. This means the manager’s work is also suffering—they’re spending their time monitoring the team, not doing their own work! But the manager assures you; they have it under control and they’re monitoring everything the team is doing!
Digging in to the team dynamic, it is immediately clear that micromanagement is the issue. The manager stopped letting people work the way they work and began enforcing strict monitoring policies, even requiring the team to remain on a Teams call with camera’s on while working remotely.
The manager is the issue. The behavior needs to be corrected—though it may be too late.
Removing independence from tenured, effective employees is a recipe for turnover. If the output is good and it meets all security and safety requirements, let people work how they want to work!
How much work is the manager doing? If they spend all their time telling others how they’re doing a poor job or how they would do it (better/faster/differently) then not only is the manager not working, they’re actively eating hours from the team.
Team morale is tanking. No one enjoys being micromanaged—especially tenured employees who have shown they can be effective. Get ready for turnover.
Turnover is infectious.
Again, put into hours, we see a shift in where the hours are going, but an overall similar result:
1.5 hours/week on the tenured employees, (one-on-one’s, meetings, etc.) (total: 4.5 hours)
1.5 hours/week on team management (team meetings, etc.)
10 hours of their own work
8 hours training/on-boarding the new person
16 hours monitoring and micromanaging
The manager is dragging down the team and making them worse because they believe the team needs constant oversight. They’re spending 40% of their time micromanaging the team, producing worse results, driving turnover and contributing less!
What’s the Why?
Both scenarios are based on actual situations. The challenge is in identifying the cause of the issue. The Why. Most micromanagers do not believe themselves to be micromanagers. Most employees who require constant oversight chafe at the idea that anyone needs to look over their shoulder. So what’s the why of an under-performing team? The people? The manager? Both?
(It’s probably both).
In the next few posts, I’ll focus on the manager as manager deficiencies are often overlooked, excused or actively ignored. It’s easier to blame employees and individual team members than it is a bad manager. There is easy data—Employee X did/did not do ABC. The narrative likely starts with the bad manager — Employee X on my team is a problem and here’s why. The manager is almost always senior to the individual employee, which means they often have more experience and tenure.
Management is hard — it is! — and it’s rarely well rewarded — it isn’t — but until we both understand and value it, nothing will change.