Most CEOs honestly don’t care about employees or take an interest in human resources.  Since CEOs don’t care, they put little to no pressure on their HR departments to get their cultures right, which allows HR to unwittingly implement all kinds of development and succession strategies that don’t work.  ~Jim Clifton, Gallup Chairman and CEO

I’ll continue where I left off last week with Gallup’s research, State of the American Manager.  They say that “when hiring managers, most organizations focus on previous non-managerial success or tenure.  Although these factors are important, they are secondary to talent.”

I’ve seen this happen many times.  People are promoted into managerial or leadership positions because they have been at the organization longer than anyone else and/or they were successful in their previous position.  Neither of those are good predictors for success as a manager or a leader.

Part of the problem is that in typical hierarchical structures in order for someone to receive a pay increase, they must move up the hierarchy and that usual means into a management or leadership position.  While they are being recognized for their previous success, they may be promoted into a position where they are not set up to succeed, but to fail.

Here’s a scenario I experienced firsthand.  A college was searching for its next president and the board decided to look internally.  They offered the position to their best (most published and well-liked by students) professor.  He had no leadership or management experience, but had been teaching at the college for decades.  His tenure as president was short-lived and he soon returned to the classroom.  He was a talented professor but he wasn’t a talented leader.

I’ve worked with a number of counseling/mental health organizations where the best therapist has been promoted into a management position.  They too fail at managing and somehow everyone is surprised?!

I’m going to repeat one of Gallup’s most staggering findings.  “Organizations fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the manager job a whopping 82% of the time.”

What if the most talented sales manager is actually the person with the lowest sales?  What if the person with the most talent to be a manager in a counseling organization is actually the poorest counselor?  What if the most talented individual to be the next principal at a school is not the best teacher?  Can we shift our paradigm for how we think about moving (note that I intentionally did not use the word promoting) people into management and leadership positions?

Maybe this is where organizational leaders could take a lesson from the world of professional sports.  How many head coaches were one of the best players on their college athletic team?  Were they ever even professional athletes?  Are head coaches’ salaries higher than their star athletes?  Maybe it’s because they “select and promote” athletes and coaches based upon talent.  And they reward (compensate) the talent that most directly enables the team to succeed (win), which isn’t necessarily the head coach.

Can leaders make the shift and begin to recognize talent, rethink hierarchies, and promote individuals into positions where they can not only succeed, but thrive?

Managements is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet.  ~Henry Mintzberg

A recently released report by Gallup, State of the American Manager, is an in-depth look at what characterizes great managers based on over four decades of extensive talent research.  It’s a study of 2.5 million manager-led teams that measures the engagement of 27 million employees.

First, to clarify, Gallup defines a “manager” as someone who is responsible for leading a team toward common objectives.  This individual takes the direction set forth by the organization’s leadership and makes it actionable at the local level.

Gallup found that great managers have the following talents:

• They MOTIVATE every single employee to take action and engage employees with a compelling mission and vision.
• They have the ASSERTIVENESS to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
• They make DECISIONS based on productivity, not politics.
• They create a culture of clear ACCOUNTABILITY.
• They build RELATIONSHIPS that create trust, open dialogue and full transparency.

I think this connects directly back to the quote by Mintzberg.  “Management is above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet.”

I’ve recently done a number of corporate training sessions using the DiSC profile, which is one of a number of behavioral profiles.  I’ll over-generalize the four basic behavioral types to make my point.

• Dominance: people who are fast-paced and task-oriented—assertive, make productive decisions
• Influence: people who are fast-paced and people-oriented—motivators
• Steadiness: people who are moderate-paced and people-oriented—relationship builders
• Conscientiousness: people who are moderate-paced and task-oriented—accountable, make productive decisions

Many times, I’ve seen leaders in organizations try to stereotype managers into one single behavioral type, frequently into the dominance type.  Gallup’s research clearly contradicts that perspective.  The best managers are those who have learned to adapt their style and develop a more holistic approach to managing people.  In other words, it’s where art, science and craft meet; where dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness converge.

Maybe that’s one reason why so few managers succeed in their role.  According to Gallup’s research, organizations fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for manager roles 82% of the time.  There are other reasons this occurs so frequently… my blogs over the next several weeks will reveal more of this research.

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.  ~Frederick Buechner

This quote was going through my mind when I recently watched the movie Woman in Gold.  I’ll explain what I mean while being careful not to require a spoiler alert.  The movie is based on the true story of the late Maria Altmann, an elderly Jewish refugee, living in Los Angeles. Maria, together with her young lawyer and family friend, Randy Schoenberg, fought the government of Austria for almost a decade to reclaim Gustav Klimt’s iconic painting of her aunt which was confiscated from her family by the Nazis in Vienna just prior to World War II.

Prior to helping Maria, Randy’s law firm was failing; some would say he wasn’t succeeding as an attorney.  But there was a pivotal point in his career, and his life.  He traveled to Austria with Maria to meet with the government.  During that first trip he visited the Holocaust Memorial and saw, firsthand, the names of his grandparents engraved in stone along with others who lost their lives.  That moment tugged (hard) at emotions, so deep it appeared to reach all the way to his core.  For Randy, it was the place where his deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger met.

I’ll insert my own interpretation of Buechner’s definition of gladness and suggest that it’s where we feel most passionate.  If we feel a tremendous sense of passion about what we do, that usually translates into a sense of fulfillment or gladness.

I think this is also a distinguishing transitional point for people who become leaders.  I believe that we all have these moments in our lives, but the people who act upon these moments and allow themselves to be transformed by them, are the leaders we all desire to follow.

We choose not to act on these moments for a variety of reasons.  Some might not act on them out of fear of failure, for others it’s insecurity, for some it’s an unwillingness to give up something, etc.  For Randy, it was a huge risk, a battle many believed was impossible to win.  But the transformation of who he became as a result of acting upon that moment is inspirational, to say the least.

Another Buechner quote hints at the transformation for Randy Schoenberg.  “Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin.  It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”

As leaders, can we say that our compassion is so intense that we believe we can never really experience peace and joy until there is peace and joy finally for others too?  Maybe that’s the place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.