MANAGE WHAT ?

Making the Business Case for People Management Skills

You have been asked to serve on a committee at your fi rm and make recommendations for cutting costs in response to a weak economy and a downturn in revenue. The very fi rst meeting is kicked off by your company president who goes around to each committee member with the goal of identifying any “untouchables”—that is, those areas that committee members feel should be off limits to cuts or at least targeted as a last resort. Unfortunately, you are seated at the immediate right of your president and he asks you to go fi rst. You take the opportunity to suggest that the fi rm should do nothing that would detract from the quality of people management you have or erode the people-oriented culture. You even quote from your long-lost organizational behavior textbook (burned in a weenie roast celebration years ago) that “ few things matter more to the success of a fi rm than the way people feel about how they are managed.” The president seems to accept this.

But the VP of Research and Technology is so angry he is about to burst a blood vessel. He rises and in an angry tone says, “With all due respect, I have to say that all this stuff about the importance of people management strikes me as nonsense. I have nothing against our management development efforts, but if you give me the same amount of money for new technology and research funding, I will turn it into far more of a benefi t for this fi rm than we will get from trying to improve our managerial performance. In fact, I have two specifi c problems: (1) I see no connection between the quality of our people management and important outcomes that relate to our “bottom line,” and (2) good people management is so fuzzy that there really is no way to determine who is doing a good job and who is not, anyway.”

The president nods. “Hmm, he may have a point.” He then looks at you and says, “I suspect you disagree. So go ahead and make a business case for me as to why we should devote signifi cant resources to building better people management and a people-oriented culture. But I don’t want any soft ‘touchy-feely’ babble. Be specifi c and use examples.”

Using OB Evidence Instead of Just Intuition

You have heard so many stories of bad managers and read so many accounts of poor decisions that you are determined to be more “evidence-based” in your own organizational career. But why are more decisions not made on good research evidence? How do you go about fi nding more evidence? Where would you fi nd such evidence, and how might you apply it to commonly faced managerial situations such as how to set appropriate goals, motivate high effort, or build strong employee commitment and a high-performance culture?

Making a Personal Improvement

You have been in your fi rst job for two years and are itching to get promoted as quickly as possible. In your last performance review, however, your boss identifi ed time management as a weakness. You have never felt that your time management was superb, but you did not know that weakness might affect your career advancement. In any case, you are now committed to improving your management of time.

However, realizing that old habits die hard and that accomplishing personal change is very diffi cult, you know you will have to do more than just “hope” to change. So how would you proceed to improve yourself? What would you do fi rst? What strategies would give you the best chance of actually improving your time management skills signifi cantly?

Describing Yourself and Your Style: Expanding Your Self-Awareness

“Tell us about yourself” is the fi rst query in your introductory meeting with the four people who will be reporting to you in your new managerial job. You naturally struggle with where to start. You have been a great individual contributor for four years, but everyone has told you that managing people is a very different responsibility. And the thing that really scares you is you have heard sarcastic joking around the fi rm about a colleague who got promoted to manager and how with that promotion the fi rm “lost its best analyst and found its worst manager.”

So what should you tell the group about yourself and how you will manage? What would be most relevant and useful? Based on your own self-assessment, what particular characteristics would you highlight? What should you be doing to know yourself even better so you can answer this question more confi dently in the future? What would it be like to be managed by you?

If you’re like most students who are new to management courses, you’re probably preparing to be totally underwhelmed and perhaps a little skeptical about what this text and course have to offer. Our experience tells us that you probably come to this course with at least one of the following concerns (or perhaps complaints). First, you may be concerned about the overall usefulness of the knowledge contained within this text. In fact, you may have heard from others that your management course will be nothing more than common sense, bloated theory, and will be essentially a “blow off.” Even if you haven’t heard such things about this course, you might feel that at the end of the day management can’t be taught. Unlike say, accounting, where there are clearly specifi ed rules and principles to follow, you may believe that management isn’t something that can be taught in a course, much less from a textbook. Second, as you look out at the decades of organizational work life ahead of you, management may seem so very unimportant compared to functional areas like fi nance, marketing, and accounting. These functions, after all, represent the major departments or units in organizations and they house critical jobs—the very jobs recruiters are posting to fi ll. Third, you may feel that your career is going to be one that is built on your technical expertise and managing others is simply not something you want to do or will ever do. As such, you might feel like this course is just one more in a long line of required educational obligations on the road to getting your degree. You are not alone if you have such concerns and we are not surprised—we face such skepticism prior to every course we teach. Indeed it was our sense that organizational behavior and management courses are undervalued by business students (at every level)—relative to the importance of those topics for success in the real world—that stoked our passion for a new kind of textbook. Specifi cally, the idea for this book was born out of three important observations we shared from our collective experience of teaching organizational behavior and management courses to college students and practicing managers.

1 Managing people is a distinct and critically important skill set. Our most infl uential business leaders have always recognized that management and people skills—not just fi nancial and technical knowledge—are critically important to the success of individuals and organizations. Yet, as we will discuss shortly, such skills often do not get the educational attention they warrant.

2 Evidence for the importance of management may be less accessible to you, but is nonetheless abundant and clear. The research evidence is overwhelmingly clear that the possession of management skills creates a competitive advantage for individuals and organizations. Although management skills appear on the surface to be relatively straightforward, the chief complaint of most senior leaders is that they can’t fi nd enough competent people-managers.

3 Most OB and management textbooks do not focus on developing the most critical management skills. Sadly, most existing books and courses on managing organizational behavior are not well suited to helping students develop and refi ne the skills they really need to become great managers. Most textbooks are accurate, informative, and descriptive but lack a decision- or action-oriented approach that allows for real skill development.

With those observations in mind, we insisted that the focus of this book be on the application of organizational behavior evidence to the skills required to be a great manager and organizational contributor. That is, we do not want you to just know and understand a book full of ideas—we want you to be able to do something with that knowledge.