Does your boss talk "at" you or to you?

In our e-newsletter, An AHA! Moment, we’ve been talking about the conversations managers have with their employees, and offering tips for making these conversations more effective.

Every time we work with another group of managers, we find similar issues – regardless of the level of management, or of the years of management experience. In working with thousands of managers over the past thirty years, we’ve found that managers generally tend to talk at employees instead of engaging with them. Managers seem to believe that managing people consists of telling them what is expected, telling them where they’re on track or off track, and telling them what they need to do to meet targets. Employees are expected to “get it,” and produce the desired results. If they don’t produce, it must be because they didn’t listen.

Even those managers who believe they are engaging employees with questions tend to rely on leading, closed questions (“Do you think if you try this approach you can meet your targets?”), to which employees can simply smile and nod agreement.

Our data show that neither of those approaches is effective in producing high levels of performance, innovation, quality, or commitment. Without an engaging two-way conversation guided by open-ended questions, there is no way managers can know what their employees are thinking, their rationale for doing what they do, their understanding of the job expectations, and most importantly, what commitment they are willing to make.

Why is it that managers talk at employees instead of engaging them with questions that cause employees to think for themselves, reflect and take a new perspective, and make their own commitments? We’ve considered a range of answers to that question. One answer is that people get promoted into management because they’re good problem solvers – they know how to fix things. So as managers, they assume their job is to tell people what the problem is, what’s causing it, and how to fix it. Another possibility is that the people who are their models for management conversations – their own bosses – do the same thing. (Remember, we said we’ve seen this consistently at all levels.)

One intriguing possible explanation has its roots in the industrial revolution, when large business organizations grew up and began to separate management from labor in significant ways. This functional structure also separated thinking (management) from doing (labor). So over the last century we’ve built a culture that fosters the belief only the “suits” know how to think and make decisions, and even though the workplace has changed dramatically in that time, we’re mentally stuck in our understanding of what successful managing is all about.

We’d love to hear from you on this. Click on COMMENTS below and sound off!