Great vs Rated Management

There are so many different stories these days about managers that manage to keep their jobs despite a “hate” from the employees that they supervise. Employees everywhere seem to be complaining about their bosses regularly, yet these same managers are able to keep their jobs as though they are successful in their current role. There are plenty of possible reasons that this may be the case, but arguably one of the most likely reasons is that those that oversee the managers (executives, etc.) look at the management process rather than the results, and assume that it is the employees that do not understand the manager, not the other way around.

It is here that one must the way that executives value management into question. What most businesses – both large and small – seem to fail to understand is that the management process is unimportant, provided that it leads to results. In other words, a manager can be strict, nice, kind, helpful, angry, etc. – as long as the results are there, how the person chooses to manage is irrelevant.

It is possible that companies do understand this, but that may be because they look at “results” in terms of things like productivity. When the employees the person supervises are doing well, they assume that the manager is succeeding.

But productivity is only one type of result. Arguably a more important type is going to be seen with employee satisfaction. Employees need to think highly of their managers – or at least highly enough that their overall satisfaction scores are positive.

How the person managers isn’t important. What matters is that the good employees are satisfied. The reason this is so important is because every time an employee quits, the cost of replacing them is often more or similar to the value that the employee brought.

So even if an employee is extremely productive under a manager, if they then quit because they are dissatisfied with their job, the company is going to lose all of that money they earned in productivity, all because they mistakenly believed that management’s style is right, and the employee opinion is wrong.

It is for these reasons that executives and managers need to put their egos aside and trust in the numbers. Employee satisfaction scores are more important than how someone manages, because no matter how much you like their style of management, if the employees are dissatisfied than the management style isn’t working, and therefore the manager isn’t working. Companies that learn this will have the upper edge on companies that are still stuck believing that their subjective judgments of management quality matter.