Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work (for True Epub) by Bill Schaninger Bryan Hancock and Emily Field

Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work (for True Epub) by Bill Schaninger Bryan Hancock and Emily Field

Author:Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Field
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00


The reality is that defining the right goals is extremely difficult. One client we served came to realize that its employees were setting inconsistent and relatively easy performance goals. The CEO recognized that to achieve the company’s plan of bringing a dramatically higher number of products to market, goal-setting needed a significant overhaul. Employees had to set specific targets to each goal, and they also needed to have a short list of three to five goals. Gone were the days of a laundry list of goals.

To make matters even more complex, goals are often subject to change. At a biotech startup like the one where Brianna works, the market is moving so quickly that goals set at the beginning of the year may well not be relevant by the end of the year. That’s why conducting performance reviews once, twice, or even four times a year is not enough. If Zoe had been meeting weekly with Brianna, she could have stressed that the Germany campaign was now on the front burner and given Brianna incremental deadlines. And Zoe would also have realized that Brianna was having trouble prioritizing assignments and needed help with multitasking. She would most likely have understood earlier that Brianna’s living situation made it difficult for her to work from home, and that she would have preferred to come into the office more often. As it was, Brianna was left to sink or swim on her own.

Of course, most companies aren’t as fast-growing as a biotech startup. But if they’re not fast-growing, they’re probably fast-changing. Look at car rental companies. They’re switching to electric vehicles, and adjusting to a decline in business travel and a rise in leisure trips during the pandemic and now the return of business travel. Or grocery stores: More people are ordering their food online and having it delivered at the curb. Even the steel industry is changing quickly, having to keep up with the latest processing technology and adjusting to Environmental, Social, and Governance requirements. All these changes mean that the nature of the work people do changes, too. And that requires constant coaching.

It’s easier and just plain fun to coach employees who are motivated and talented. It’s tempting to avoid coaching employees who are having trouble and to abdicate dealing with them to HR.

We saw—and lamented—the effects of managerial absence when the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” came to the fore in 2022. Among a certain set of cynical workers, it became almost trendy to say you were doing only the bare minimum in your job—just enough so you wouldn’t get fired. Or, you would test how long you could get paid for sitting in your chair until you did get fired. Some question whether quiet quitting is really, as the term suggests, withdrawing from a role, or whether it is actually about boundary-setting to combat burnout and regain the work-home divide that eroded during the pandemic.

But why had these disengaged employees been allowed to reach this point in the first place?



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