Dallas Morning News
Trang 1Page 2D Tuesday, August 14, 2001 The Dallas Morning News
Managers may lack
traits staffers value
By VICTOR GODINEZ
Staff Writer
There's often a disconnect be-
tween what employees and their
bosses see as effective leadership,
and the problem is usually corpo-
rate culture, says consultant Mark
Holmes
Mr Holmes, president of Con-
Inc in Spring- field, Mo
(www.thepeo plekeeper.com), said he’s con-
than 1,000 in- terviews and fo- cus groups with corporations and their em- ployees since 1990 to determine
what some of the sources of fric-
tion and miscommunication are
between employees and manage-
ment
“When you ask those manag-
ers, ‘What do managers do on
a daily basis?’
here’s what they tell us: We su- pervise, we dele- gate, we budget, schedule, we control costs,”
Mr Holmes said
“Then the sixth one, they would
generally pitch it in the form of
‘Well, we get feedback.’ What kind
of feedback? Some would say ‘We
communicate,’ or “We correct,’ or
some would even say ‘Praise.’ ”
However, he said, when em-
ployees are asked what the most
important characteristics are in an
effective manager, the six attri-
butes most mentioned are appre-
ciation, trust, respect, fairness,
honesty and communication
“So you take a look at that list
and what you notice so quickly is
that these are primarily head skills
that managers think about, not the
heart skills,” Mr Holmes said
“Even what managers said was
needed in leadership in their com-
pany was different than what they
felt like they did every day and
what employees said ‘We really
need.’”
Mark Holmes
SMART BUSINESS
Heart and head skills Bette Price, president of con- sulting and training firm the Price Group (www.pricegroupmarket ing.com) in Addison, said most of those management/employee dis- parities are guided by the habits of the company’s top leaders
“Tf they do things that demon- strate that they do value the people
as well as the profits, then you seem to have a culture in which people feel valued and are actually
more productive,” said Ms Price,
who recently conducted inter- views with 27 chief executive offi- cers nationwide “I think we have not seen a lot of that in the last few years.”
“From our perspective, what we've so often seen is that the cul- ture is not created for that,” Mr Holmes said “In other words, it’s not employee-centered It tends to
be either product-centered, or even production-centered, or ser- vice-centered and that’s not neces- sarily employee-centered.” Some companies do get it right,
Ms Price said, citing Tricon Glob-
al Restaurants Inc chief executive officer David Novak, whose Ken- tucky-based company owns Dal- las-based Pizza Hut and the KFC and Taco Bell chains
“He’s the CEO, but he goes around and gives managers a Rub- ber Chicken Award and writes on the rubber chicken something like,
‘Thanks for doing a great job for KFC,” Ms Price said “Then he'll give them a hundred bucks If you would go to the Tricon headquar- ters, the wall is just lined with pic- tures of their people.”
Ultimately, most of the solu- tions to’ management/employee conflicts are fairly simple and in- tuitive, Mr Holmes said
“It is very common sense, and quite frankly, I make no apology for the fact that my approach to all
of this change is very common sense-based,” he said “But while it’s familiar ground, I think that’s part of the problem When things are so familiar to us and so com- mon sense, sometimes we over- look them.”