Predator or Shepherd?

In the world of human kindness,
where are your managerial skills?

By W. Owen Thornton

An email joke crossed my desktop here at the human kindness project the other day and the manager in the joke was portrayed as a lion.  A number of mental leaps (sorry) came to my mind and it made me think that many managers in this world are like lions: they have a predator mentality.  Think about what predators do to live.  They hunt prey.  Predators look for the sick or the young or the unaware to make a mistake and when the predator feels he/she can sneak up closely enough to kill their prey … they pounce.
 

Managers act like predators when all they do is look for someone to make a mistake so that they can pounce on that mistake.  One understands this sentiment on one level because a manager doesn’t want a mistake to become part of the method of operation.  But when people only wait for others to make mistakes in this manner predators make employees scared rabbits who continually look over their shoulder for fear of being caught doing something wrong.  This strategy sends the wrong message to employees.  Predator managers might think having employees afraid of the “pouncing manager” keeps employees on their toes, but what this management strategy does is slow down productivity because employees are not free to try new ways of doing things that may periodically fail or that may periodically succeed in making the company more successful.

Predator managers who are great at looking for failures spend most of their time doing just that, which means that when something good does happen, it gets overlooked: so the employees are duly punished when making mistakes and they are not rewarded for doing things right.  When you think about it, using my analogy, it makes sense:  when a lion needs to spend all her time seeking prey, there’s both very little time to do anything else and the skill-set required to notice good effort is void.  In addition some managers still mistakenly believe that when employees do something right, the reward is the paycheck.  So, good things are rewarded automatically and dispassionately via the paycheck.  There’s never an immediate pat on the back or any spoken praise (and meaningful praise should be specific and immediate).  Why anyone still believes that the paycheck is enough to motivate employees alone is nearly impossible to fathom.  Surveys indicate that a pay raise only motivates people for about one to two pay cycles and after that, they’re just doing that which they “get paid for!”  Gallup surveys repeatedly demonstrate that engaged employees are happier and more productive … and “engagement” does NOT mean treating people like scared rabbits.

Be a Shepherd

Instead of being a predator, managers should be shepherds.  They should lead the staff to good grazing land, show them the territory, let them explore new avenues for revenue and production upgrades, and give them some open terrain with which to be creative.  A shepherd has a crook with them at all times, and can hopefully pull back a lost employee before he/she gets too close to doing something harmful to themselves or the company.  In other words some risks should be allowed, but others are not.  An independent budget to try new things should only be as large as the manager is comfortable losing should the employee make a mistake.  And should something bad lurk in the rocks or the darkness, the good manager is also there with their shepherd’s crook to whack the incoming danger away from their employees.  When a mistake is made – even via the best intentions – a good manager roles up their sleeves first and digs in, in order to help so that the problem dissolves and something can be learned by the employee.  In this way, employees feel protected by their manager … they know they can take some risks to better the company and they also know that their boss won’t let them stray too far afield which means they cannot make a catastrophic or “fireable” mistake.

In general I sympathize with predator manager syndrome.  To some extent, it isn’t a horrific way to manage.  The problem with it is when it becomes the only way to manage people.  If we could turn the predator managing style into one the aspect that protects people who are “engaged” in their positions this strategy could be incorporated into the shepherding managing method.  People need to feel appreciated and as I’ve stated here, the paycheck is not the only motivator.  It is not even the number one motivator.  Interim words of praise or notes in their employee files are winning strategies to allow good employees become even better ones.  The shepherd managing approach will build and keep good people and in a time of an employee shortage, the advantages to this strategy and the benefits it provides should be clear. 

Remember: when there is a predator in the long grass, everyone suffers.

Cheers and … be kind to one another out there, eh!

Owen