More Feet, Less Seat

At some time you may have seen one of those Black Forest Weather Houses where  a little woman comes out of the house when the weather is sunny and dry while a little man comes out to indicate rain.

A lot of managers are like the little man: the only time they come out of their offices is to deliver bad news, to give negative feedback or to dump a problem in someone's lap. The result of this is that their employees begin to associate their presence with pain and their absence with relief. ( Or to mix metaphors, perhaps they are like a groundhog, emerging from their burrow only long enough to announce six more weeks of winter.)

My theory is that managers need more feet time and less seat time. By this I mean that instead of spending so much time sitting isolated in their offices ("seat time") they should spend more time walking around catching up with their employees, listening to what they have to say, seeing what issues are emerging and what niggling sources of dissatisfaction are causing problems ("feet time").

In other words they need to humanise their workplace so that the people who work for them see them not as a source of pain but as a human being who takes an interest in them and who removes barriers to them doing their jobs well. In other words, as someone on the same side.

But this should be not taken as a 'technique' to be applied to employees as a way to manipulate them into feeling better and thus becoming more productive. This just creates its own problems. Years ago, a book was published called The One Minute Manager which basically taught managers to 'condition' their employees to perform better. In response to this followed The 59 Second Employee: How to Stay One Second Ahead of Your One Minute Manager. The application of 'techniques' is often transparent to workers no matter how clever managers might think they are being, so there ends up being an arms race between 'techniques' and defences against 'techniques' which just wastes energy and creativity that could be better focused on the work itself. Plus it leads to increasing cynicism.

Richard Farson points out in is Management of the Absurd that applying techniques to people results in the erosion of respect for the very people to whom to techniques are applied; how can a manager respect someone that they have managed to fool with their technique?

Farson says:

It is the ability to meet each situation armed not with a battery of techniques but with openness that permits a genuine response....If we genuinely respect our colleagues and employees, those feelings will be communicated without the need for artifice or technique. And they will be reciprocated.

But this means taking the time to see the person in front of you rather than the function on an org chart.

Managers need to be in for the long haul rather than the quick fix. And part of being in it for the long haul is getting out there and mixing with the workers and keeping it real. More feet, less seat.