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The biggest challenge managers have to face today is the disconnect between people and between people and tasks.
The corporate environment is full of distrust, people coming to work just for the money, latent conflicts that no one cares enough to resolve and an overall detachment…
The direct result for managers is that is it immensely difficult to motivate people to do more in this environment. Employees are not alert to opportunities and threats, creativity is low, problem solving is rare, team work is far from synergetic, customer service and sales all suffer and people use a very small portion of their time at work to be productive.
Indifference leads to reduced productivity and increased turnover.
Voluntary turnover is increased (with employees hopping from one organization to the other every two years or so), training time and expenses increase too, and force an inflation of money related incentives…because we don't know what else to do to motivate our people to be more productive or stay longer.
Now you can almost assume that Joe, your new brilliant employee will not stay long and that beyond his first few months in which he will still be excited about his new job his productivity will be less than 40% spending most of his time procrastinating, playing computer games, chatting online and just passing the time.
This means you as a manager can not delegate as much which then means less time devoted to strategizing and consequently less growth.
But that's not the end of it...as if that's not enough there is another face to this challenge...
The other side stems from the fact that being nice and kind isn't enough either.
If you are a director in the R&D department and you try to be kind with kindness as your only guiding tool, you will quickly come to find that Marci from accounting always tends to your requests last (probably because she’s more afraid of the responses of other directors) and that your team is not working hard enough to please you.
Research shows that when kindness works, when employees are happy and content they are at the peak of their productivity, and yet we know from experience that it doesn't work. We know that more often than not kindness does not lead to higher productivity.
It feels like being stuck with no real alternative…
It's time to question some of our most fundamental basic assumptions, think outside the box, and use some new thinking skills.
It's time for a new model, a shift in how we see reality, a truly innovative solution that works.
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