Taking Care of Middle Manager Bounce Off

How many times have the management consultants been 'in' and after leaving, have left little or no trace of their passing?

Despite massive investment there is no discernable performance improvement, the retention figures still look as if we are running a call centre and our safety record is second to everyone.

Why is it that what seemed a logical and progressive implementation model failed to have any lasting impact on our business?

Could it have anything to do with 'Middle Manager Bounce Off'?

'Middle Manager Bounce Off' is a little understood phenomenon that appears most frequently in the wake of a management initiative or a consultant driven implementation.

'Middle Manager Bounce Off' is the name that has been given to the unwillingness of middle management to pursue or implement change.

The impetus for change is generally driven by the corporate decision makers in response to stakeholder pressure. The decision to change is made at this level and is then transmitted down the chain of command to the shop floor.

At every level the need for change is retransmitted to the next level down, who in their turn retransmit.

In each case this has the same effect.

Each individual experiences an aversion to implementing the change. This aversion is not driven because the change is wrong or because it will not have the desired effect. It is simply because the person being directed to implement the change does not like being told what to do. This resistance is not necessarily even conscious and may not even involve a negative reaction, just a failure to act positively.

In a social situation we understand this aversion and will seldom deliberately create a situation whose outcome is to tell someone else what to do.

There will always be the exception but it is generally understood that it is more effective to ask for something than it is to order someone to give it.

In a domestic situation, if a husband decided that he never wanted his wife to iron his shirts, all he has to do is catch her when she is doing the ironing, and order her to iron his shirt.

Instinctively we cringe at this scenario because we know how the wife will react. Not only has the husband made it almost physically impossible for his wife to iron his shirts, we know that even if she did iron them there is a very good chance that he will end up with an iron shaped burn on his shirt, which did not necessarily occur by accident.

This scenario is not a comment on the husband and wife relationship. It is a comment on the fact that the wife is a human being and that human beings always react the same way to being told what to do.

At work we are not allowed the same extreme reaction that the wife produces but we still feel the same resistance to being told what to do. The resistance manifests itself in ways that may not be directly attributed to the order. Late orders, broken machines, poor timekeeping, poor safety performance, bad treatment of the customers. After all, when we are at work we have to appear to be doing what we are told.

The alternative to telling people what to do is thought to be 'Asking' for something. This is a valid alternative in a social situation where there is a real choice.

If the husband asked for his shirt to be ironed we would all defend the right of the wife to tell him to go and iron it himself.

At work there is seldom a choice other than 'Do what I want or get your coat'. We are often asked to do things that sound like a question but the reality is that in the work situation we seldom have a choice.

This dynamic means that at work, even if a question is asked, the effect is just the same as if an order has been issued, because of the lack of choice that asking the question provides.

The manager faces this resistance when he retransmits the initiative or change to the workforce and, without necessarily realising it, he is also building up his own resistance to the change. He may pay lip service to it but will have a great deal of difficulty giving any enthusiasm to something that he has been told to do.

Is it any wonder that as soon as the corporate foot is taken off the gas pedal the initiative or change disappears without a murmur?

We do appear to be having trouble with 'Middle Manager Bounce Off'.

There is however a third solution to the problem of the ironed shirt. We have seen the perfectly natural reaction when the wife is ordered to iron the shirt and we have seen the possibility of being told to go and do it yourself when the wife is asked.

What however would happen if she were allowed to care about the result?

If she cared about the way her husband looked then there would always be an ironed shirt. She would take pride in the way he looked. She would make sure that there was always a shirt ready,

What if she found that a button had come off?

The shirt would go straight into the mending basket and a new button would be sewn on before it was returned to the wardrobe, because she cared.

In the same way if the husband cared about his car it would always be clean, it would be maintained and he would look after it, because he cared

This idea of allowing people to care for what they do sounds like the right thing to do but at first glance it does not seem to have a place in a business conversation. We want to be talking about percentages and changes to the bottom line, big numbers with real values. That is the sort of conversation that businessmen have, not talking about caring.

But wait a minute, caring does have a value, we can place an almost exact value on the caring that we give our cars.

After two years our new car still has a finite value, depending on the vehicle it could be £10,000 or £12,000. This is the residual value of our car that we can realise by selling it, or we can hold on to the car and use it reliably for another 10 years, it is our choice.

After those same two years a hire car has zero residual value. Nobody will buy a car that they know has been driven for the last 2 years by people who don't care for it. With no market for ex hire cars they are scrapped after two years.

This makes the financial value of the care we give to our own car equal to the residual value of the car.

Now we have a number that makes caring start to look very cost effective. If £10,000 or £12,000 is the value of us taking care of a car, what then is the potential that can be realised at work by allowing people to start caring about what they do at work?

If our middle manager were allowed to care about what he did, if he were allowed to care instead of being told, how much more effective could he be?

If the workforce were allowed to care about what they do, how much more effective would they be?

If they were allowed to care there would be no resistance to the change just an understanding of what was required to achieve corporate goals and an innate desire to get there.

'Middle Manager Bounce Off' ceases to be an issue because the defensive shield that goes up to cause 'Bounce off' is only deployed when he is told what to do.

Changing the way that people feel about their work, to allow them to care, is a complicated business but can be summed up with a few general rules.

First we have to stop doing the things that prevent people from caring.

The biggest stopper is telling people what to do.

Second we have to start to do the things that will help people to start caring.

Give them support, give them recognition for their efforts and start to value them for their experience and individuality.

These sound like small things but their cumulative effect is enormous.

The change in performance that occurs when people are allowed to start caring is huge but that is not the whole story. If we care about what we do we become proud of what we do. And if we are proud we are unlikely to want to change our job. This has a huge effect on retention and recruitment.

If we take care of what we do then there are no boundaries to that care. We take care of the whole workplace proactively, maintaining and attending to safety standards at the same time, for no other reason except that we care.

Care also has no time limits. If nothing happens to make us cease caring then that care will continue unabated making any change sustainable in the long term.

For all of these reasons we deserve to understand how we can create the conditions to allow people to care for their work. How to allow them to become proud of what they do so that they can start to enjoy themselves at work while they become even more effective producers of profit.

It is almost a heresy to suggest that such a thing is possible but we know that it has been done before and we will almost all be able to recall instances in which a workforce has excelled because it cared about the product.

Caring about our work is not a new concept. In the past it has been called ownership and we have been under the mistaken impression that ownership is a commodity that we can give to people and then profit from the results of their ownership.

Ownership is the way we feel about something that allows us to care. It is the way we feel about what we do and our attitudes and behaviour towards what we do.

Ownership is most certainly not a commodity and cannot therefore be given to anyone. I can give someone a car but I cannot give them ownership. That is something that only the recipient can do for himself. If the car is the wrong colour, has too few doors or the wrong size of engine, then the recipient will not take ownership of it.

If however we are allowed to make all of our own choices about the colour of the car and the model and the engine then those choices will be our choices and will therefore be the correct ones for us. Having been allowed to make them we will then also be able to take ownership.

It is still the same car but because we have been allowed to make our own choices we are able to take ownership.

We have come a long way from Henry Ford who told us that we could have any colour as long as it was black. The car companies now realise that the customer has to be allowed to make choices. If the customers cannot make choices then they cannot take ownership and therefore will not buy the car.

What we can do in the workplace is to create the conditions to allow others to care, to be proud of what they do, to allow them to take ownership.

We have to start to allow the workforce to make choices about their environment and the way they deliver goods or services.

To do this the managers' role changes from one of managing, to one of support.

Perhaps the real problem is that Managers were ever called Managers.

If they had been called Supporters in the first place we might never have heard of 'Middle Manager Bounce Off'.

Peter Hunter's career started on a nautical theme. After leaving school he spent six years as a navigating officer in the Merchant Navy working within a strict hierarchy. It was not until he joined the Royal Navy in 1988 that he began to realize how valuable people really were when they were allowed to be. Peter studied for his master's degree at Cranfield Institute of Technology before going to Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth as an Instructor Office in the Royal Navy. He rose to become Head of Department at the RN Strategic Systems School, Faslane where he further developed the concept that "management is a two way thing". After 8 years with other consultancies Peter formed his own company on the West Coast of Scotland. Hunter Business Consultancy associates are now based all over the United Kingdom and are expanding into Europe. Peter is the Author of the book "Breaking the Mould".

http://www.breakingthemould.co.uk

and at

http://www.hunter-consultants.co.uk.

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