How to Turn Around a Troubled Manager
Author: Liz Bywater, PhD
Date: November 01, 2006
When a once-successful, top-flight executive or manager loses momentum and no longer performs to potential, "Why?" and "What now?" are questions that arise.
Statistics show a full one-third of senior executives ultimately fail. Often, the failure stems from psychological blind spots, which are weaknesses that others can see all too clearly. Chances are good that you have folks like this in your organization.
Who doesn't know people with one or more of the following difficulties?
- Ineffective people skills: This manager may be abrasive, isolated or unavailable to staff. Reactions may be unpredictable, leaving others reluctant to interact.
- Lack of managerial finesse: The micromanager fails to delegate responsibility where appropriate.
- Unfulfilled promises: This manager fails to keep promises and leaves people hanging.
- Poor communication skills: Fails to communicate effectively with others in the organization.
What can be done with this valued but underperforming employee? Should he be fired or replaced with someone who exhibits more enthusiasm for the job? Not necessarily.
The costs associated with terminating a key employee can be immense. Among them: exit costs; recruiting, hiring, and restart costs; lost training and development costs; disruption; down time; lowered team morale; and even a possible lawsuit.
Doesn't it make more sense to help the underperforming manager turn around unacceptable behavior? Most folks are eager to succeed and open to receiving help to enhance job performance.
So, what does it take to turn things around? The details vary by individual, but the basic process can be applied to most.
There must be a means of assessing the problem behaviors. This means gaining insight into the way the person approaches work, interacts with others, manages the team, and communicates with his peers, supervisors and direct reports. Talk to the employee and those around him and consider business-oriented psychological evaluations. Past performance data should also be reviewed.
It's important to leave these evaluations to an expert, ideally someone outside the organization, to avoid mistrust, inappropriate interpretation and use of the data, and limited impact on the individual's behavior.
Once a clear picture of the troubled employee emerges, it's time for action. The individual must be given the opportunity to set new goals, try new ways of interacting, and discover how much more effective he can be.
Some changes will work and some won't. That's OK. The idea is to allow the employee to continue to make improvements, to assess and reassess and to make refinements where needed. Efforts at improvement must be encouraged and recognized on an ongoing basis. This encouragement can come from a boss, a peer, even a spouse.
The change process isn't easy. And there's no quick fix. People can, however, change. Given the proper tools and motivation, most people do change. So ... why terminate when you can turn around?
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