Our crew was the most productive of the 18 teams in the department. Our plant was the most productive of the 20-odd other plants across the country and world. That remained true regardless of who happened to occupy the CEO seat. Top executives came and went, but our results stayed the same.
But that wasn’t true when certain managers came and went.
Take Steve, our supervisor. He didn’t waste time trying to control things he didn’t need to control. He didn’t need to drive our performance; fueled by hating to lose even more than wanting to win, we were naturally competitive. He didn’t need to encourage innovation or creativity; we already constantly searched for ways to improve efficiency. He didn’t have to think about employee development; we excelled at training junior members of our crew, if only because they also served as our vacation relief.
Instead, he focused on controlling things we were not able to control. Work-in-progress availability. Job sequencing. Supplies, parts, and consumables. Not to go all metaphorical, but he spent his time smoothing paths and eliminating roadblocks we could not.
Then Steve moved on, Rudy became our supervisor, and our performance slowly fell apart.
Impact of new manager’s leadership style
The same was true on a broader level. We saw a lot of Dennis, our department manager. We liked him, if only because, as a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found, “mere exposure” has weak effects on familiarity but strong effects on attraction and similarity. A major factor in likability is frequent, consistent – and if not consistent, at least predictable – presence. All of which is a fancy way of saying, especially where leaders are concerned, “The more often I see you, the more I will like you.”
We didn’t know what Dennis did as our department manager, though, and that didn’t matter — whatever he did (or didn’t do) seemed to work. But when he retired, we became all too aware of what the new manager did. Transformational leadership programme. New training systems. New interdepartmental process flows. He put his stamp on everything.
And our performance, as a team and a department, steadily declined.
I know what you might be thinking: an individual leader, especially a lower- to mid-level leader in a plant with more than 1,000 employees and a company with over 40,000 employees, can’t make that much of a difference.
Except they can.
A 14-year study of automobile manufacturing plants found that replacing a bottom-quartile (think “poor”) plant manager with a top quartile (think “great”) plant manager decreases the time required to build a car by approximately 30 percent. (Interestingly, plant-specific tenure has a dramatic effect, further proof that promoting from within is almost always the way to go. A Joblist study showed that nearly 70 percent of respondents prefer to be managed by a seasoned company vet who “climbed the ranks” rather than an external hire, even if that person brings “proven talent” to the role.)
But wait, there’s more: a paper published in Strategic Management Journal found that managers in the video game industry can account for more than 20 percent of the variation in game revenue, a greater degree of influence than any other role. A study published in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal found startups that middle managers are one-third more likely to develop product innovations.
And the kicker: a study published in The Leadership Quarterly found that replacing a manager at the bottom 10 percent with one in the top 10 percent lowers turnover and reduces overall cost by 5 percent. Employees often quit — especially the people you can least afford to lose, since the best employees always have choices — because of their managers, no matter how wonderful the company’s C-Suite might be.
Etisalat CEO Hatem Dowidar may be a visionary leader, but he has little impact on the level of service provided by employees at a particular store. General Motors CEO Mary Barra may be an extremely effective leader, but she has little impact on the average line crew’s productivity. The same, to a lesser extent, is true for that store’s regional manager or that line crew’s plant manager.
The farther removed you are from the person doing a particular job — no matter how outstanding your leadership skills — the less impact your leadership has on that person, especially where their productivity is concerned.
So be as thorough, thoughtful, and deliberate as possible when you make hiring decisions. But be even more deliberate about how you mentor, coach, and develop the people you put into leadership positions. Step in quickly to provide guidance when a leader is struggling, and step in even more quickly when a leader is ineffective or worse, toxic.
Those two things will make the biggest difference in how well your employees do their jobs and how they feel about coming to work every day. Because happy usually leads to productive.
And vice versa.
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