How ready are your managers to face new challenges they’ve never faced before?
This is a just-in-time world. Everything we do anymore needs to be done yesterday. To compound the complexity, managers who are often promoted into their positions as a result of technical expertise or experience, must now manage and motivate a diverse team. Managing a team requires a significantly different mindset and set of skills than managing your own performance or a project.
The result of this increased complexity and expanded managerial roles has been a growing class of mediocre managers. For many managers, doing the job the way the job has always been done is the only way they know how to do it. They have no spare time to learn and no experience in dealing with many of the challenges confronting them. They handle difficult decisions and people issues the same way they always did – with old solutions or avoidance.
This forces the difficult questions that senior managers dread:
- How ready are you as the leader to make necessary personnel changes to ensure the long-term stability and strength of your organization?
- Where do you draw the line between “giving an employee time to improve” and “procrastinating the inevitable”?
- When is “this isn’t the right time” a justifiable excuse to retain employees who won’t or can’t meet their responsibilities?
If you are not prepared to answer these questions nor act now, how effective a leader are you?
The rules for engagement have changed. Memorize and enforce these four conditions when evaluating the performance of your employees.
- There is never a good time to terminate an employee. It’s either not a good time for you or a good time for the employee.
- Job requirements have changed. Years of experience haven’t prepared many employees to meet today’s on-the-job challenges.
- Many employees just don’t have the abilities and motivation to do today’s jobs. Some can be trained, coached, and developed. Some can’t. Organizations cannot afford to train, coach, develop and retain employees who are miscast for the job.
- There is no GOOD reason, just lots of excuses, for retaining an employee who can’t meet the changing demands and priorities of today’s job that they were hired to do. Paying less for less talent lowers cost, it doesn’t improve productivity.