Management Secrets by Mary Elston

If your boss has you feeling excruciatingly ready for the weekend it must be Friday. If you’re bracing yourself for another stressful work week it must be Monday. If this isn’t your reality — wonderful — if it is, major bummer. As managers, providing great guidance and support for your team and making them feel appreciated and valued allows these work stress extremes to be avoided most of the time. What about the executive leaders and managers who aren’t so great? That’s what we’re exploring in my current Management Secrets blog series — a January 2012 article by Eric Jackson at Forbes: “The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.” The article covered research conducted in 2004 by Sydney Finkelstein, Steve Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Last time around we covered bad habits one and two – leaders who think they dominate their environment, and leaders who cannot delineate boundaries between personal and corporate interests. Read the details in my blog entry immediately below this one. With this blog installment we’ll look at a few more.

Habit #3: They think they have all the answers Here’s the image of executive competence that we’ve seen admired throughout history: a dynamic leader making dozens of quick decisions, dealing with multiple crises, and taking only seconds to size up the situation and provide a solution. Big problem with this picture – it’s a total fake. Crisp and decisive leaders tend to move so quickly they don’t grasp the ramifications of fast decisions. Worse, these leaders often have huge egos which won’t let them learn new answers. These leaders who know it all shut down other points of view and often make a series of bad decisions that take the company down the tubes.

Warning Sign for #3: A leader without followers — the executive or manager who has no team members who are allowed to follow him is hogging the glory and all the decision making – bad formula. Side note – at the management level the person with this habit often refuses to recognize his team’s accomplishments in front of upper management – they hog all the glory and keep their team from having any visibility with leadership. This charade can only last so long before their true lack of skill comes out –or worse – they’re being protected by someone higher up and they hang on for years.

Habit #4: They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind themCEOs who think their job is to instill belief in their vision also think it’s their job to get everyone to buy into it. If you don’t rally to the cause you’re considered to be against it. Hesitant managers have a choice: Get with the plan or get out. This approach is unnecessary and destructive. CEOs don’t need to have everyone unanimously endorse their vision, in fact, eliminating contrasting points of view cuts them off from seeing problems and correcting them. Eventually those executives being stifled decide to leave and no one is left to warn the CEO when disaster is in hovering in the wings.

Warning Sign for #4: Executive departures Side note – at the management level, departures can take the form of leaving the company or moving to other departments to get away from destructive leaders — from another perspective, employees who seek other jobs to get away from bad managers are sending the same message. If you’re a manager with this kind of negative track record, stop and think about what you’re doing to your team.

Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company imageYou know these CEOs: high-profile executives, constantly in the public eye. The problem is that amid all the media frenzy these leaders’ management efforts become shallow and ineffective. Instead of actually accomplishing things, they often settle for the appearance of accomplishing things. When CEOs are obsessed with their image, they have little time for operational details. As a final negative twist, when CEOs make the company’s image their top priority, they run the risk of using financial-reporting practices to promote that image. In their eyes, everything that the company does is public relations.

Warning Sign of #5: Blatant attention-seeking Side note – for a manager, the same dangers are apparent; managers constantly seeking attention are simply doing a lousy job being a manager and may be faking results, eventually it bites them in the back end.

When have you worked in an environment where leaders or managers exhibited habits 3, 4, or 5? How did you deal with it? As a manager, have you ever fallen into these negative behavior habits? Or better yet, risen above them? Drop me a line and let me know your experiences, good and bad, with these challenging, potentially stress-packed issues. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks with the final two habits in this blog series. Till then, take care.

How about a little conversation with a stress chaser? I hosted dinner for my extended family a few weeks ago. As usual, it was a great evening full of laughter, new and old stories and playful verbal jabbing. After dinner we strayed into a round of updates on how everyone was doing at work, a discussion which included a familiar factor: stress. With a wide range of industries and employers represented around the table, it was fascinating to hear a rich sampling of “bad boss” tales. We’ve all been there and we all longed for when the bad boss would move on to something else.

Not long after hosting that dinner I came across a January 2012 article by Eric Jackson at Forbes: “The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.” The article covered research conducted in 2004 by Sydney Finkelstein, Steve Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In a number of ways, the professor’s study resonated nicely with the job stress conversation mentioned above which, in turn, made me want to share Finkelstein’s research in this latest Management Secrets blog series. Finkelstein examined what was done by over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – to become complete failures. As you read this list, consider how these seven nasty habits look at the executive C-level and how they look at the next management level down as well.

Unsuccessful Executive Habit # 1: They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environmentThis first habit appears to be the most insidious, since it seems to be highly desirable. Shouldn’t a company dominate its business environment in order to shape the future of its markets? Yes, but there’s a big catch. Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail to recognize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances. They greatly overestimate the extent to which they control events and greatly underestimate the role of chance in their success.

To coin a phrase – they start believing their own press releases. Or put another way, their ego starts writing checks their body can’t cash. These CEOs suffer from an illusion of personal grandeur: Like certain movie directors, they see themselves as God-like creators of their companies. As far as they’re concerned, everyone else in the company is there to execute their personal vision for the organization. Samsung’s CEO Kun-Hee Lee was so successful with electronics he believed he could repeat his success with cars. He invested $5 billion in a saturated market with no business case. Why? He loved cars, had dreamed of being in the auto business and just assumed that’s all he needed. Wrong assumption.

Warning Sign for #1: A lack of respect – Side Note – at the management level, these managers may see themselves as dominating and having sovereign control of their team, humility is in short supply, ego is often profuse, as is lack of respect for the skills their employees bring to the table.

Habit #2: They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interestsLike the first habit, this one seems innocent enough, perhaps even beneficial. But “don’t worry” said the spider to the fly. We want business leaders to be completely committed to their companies, with their interests aligned with those of the company. Turns out after digging deeper it was found that failed executives weren’t identifying too little with the company, but rather too much. Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as their personal offspring — extensions of themselves. With that, a “private empire” mentality was locked in.

CEOs with this outlook often use their companies to carry out personal ambitions. The most slippery slope of all for these leaders is to use corporate funds for personal reasons. CEOs with an impressive track record may come to feel they’ve made so much money for the company that the expenditures they make on themselves, even if extravagant, are trivial by comparison. This twisted reasoning was one of the factors that shaped the behavior of Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco and was exhibited in both his pride in his company and his personal extravagance. This is why he could sound so sincere making speeches about ethics while unethically using corporate funds for personal purposes. Being the CEO of a sizable corporation is the closest thing to being king of your own country, and that’s a dangerous title to assume.

Warning Sign for #2: A question of character – Side Note – at the management level, is it all about how things benefit the manager with no concern for the team? The manager who isn’t regularly concerned with his team’s welfare and will throw them under the bus if needed, falls closely in line with Habit Number 2, “character missing.”

Can you take the first two unsuccessful traits above and recall finding these traits in a manager you have worked for in the past — or worse – a manager YOU may have been? Think it over … drop me a line and let me know what answers you come up with. I’ll see you in a couple weeks with another Management Secrets blog installment and a few more bad habits to chew on.

“Hang onto your seat, you’re in for a rough ride!” This isn’t something you want to hear as you’re taxiing down the runway for a long flight or overhear the boss saying as you head into a four hour meeting. No matter how cool you are under pressure most of us react to moments like this in only one way: stress. Now shift your thinking to how you handle market stress as a manager. That’s our focus in my current blog series … managing economic stress and three typical reactions – freeze, freak or fight. Are you cool under tough market pressure or do you go to the other extreme when stress is staring you in the face? With my first blog entry a couple weeks ago we looked at the “freeze” response and how freezing in your tracks and doing nothing in a tough market can be good and bad. Check out my blog installment right below this one for the details.

Today we’re moving on to the second stress response: freak. This is a good stress reaction when you’re running away from a tornado or burning building. Smart move. Freaking out – similar to the stress reaction of “flight” — is not the recommended stress response however when managing your business or group. If you’re a freaked out manager you may be a victim of a natural disaster, you’ve been disconnected too long, had too much caffeine or you’re in over your head. If there is a good side to freaking out it is recognizing the need to make decisions which could save your business. Freaking out usually catapults you into reactionary decision making — good or bad –such as drastic changes in your product and service mix, downsizing employees and space, or even bankruptcy. Whether freaking out is a good stress reaction is all about timing. How long had negative conditions been brewing before you reached a key managerial conclusion? You already know why freaking out is a bad stress reaction when it comes to management tactics. If you had been consistently managing your flanks you likely wouldn’t be freaked out in the first place.

Have you previously managed your way through difficult market conditions by freaking out? Don’t get sucked into this often detrimental reaction to stress. Stay on top of your management responsibilities by communicating with your team and regularly taking the pulse of where you are — successes, failures, revenue, costs, trends, projections, strategies for staying ahead of the curve and more. Looking the other way now and freaking out later isn’t going to make your market stress magically disappear but you’d be surprised how many managers think it will.

It you don’t freeze or freak when confronted with stress in the market place, how do you manage your way through it? More than likely you “fight” – our third stress response option. We’ll dive into the “fight” alternative in my next installment. Until then – feeling stressed? Make a note as to how you are managing your stressful situation or drop me a line with your story. It’s great to hear from you. See you in a couple of weeks.*

*excerpted in part and reprinted from Mary Elston management column with permission from Soundings Publications, LLC.