CHAPTER 5

“Bring Me My Shoes”

Communicating Without Alienating

I was a new employee, not yet a manager myself, just starting to learn the ways of the business world. Cathy, another new employee, a bright young lady who was becoming a good friend, was sitting in the cubicle next to mine. It was early on a Monday morning and the corporate air had the pleasant productive smell of hot coffee. Then Cathy’s phone rang. Taylor, Cathy’s manager, was calling from another wing of our sprawling headquarters.

I couldn’t hear all of the conversation but I could hear enough. I heard Taylor barking, “Bring me my shoes!” and sounding rather ferocious. She was speaking so loudly Cathy was holding the phone a bit away from her ear. Evidently Taylor, who kept a formidable shoe collection in the closet in her office, was in another part of the compound and needed a new pair of shoes—fast!—for a major Monday morning meeting.

Cathy was flustered. She was new to the job, and both the physical layout of the headquarters and the details of the shoe collection were large and confusing. I could hear more random growling over the phone about the specifics of the shoe request, and then Cathy hung up. I felt bad I couldn’t help her, but I too was new and could hardly find my own way around, barely able to locate my car at day’s end in our massive parking lot. Shaking her head, a forlorn-looking Cathy hurriedly left to search for the right shoes.

Predictably, the working relationship between Cathy and Taylor didn’t last long. Within a few months Cathy left the company, tired of being barked at and asked to perform outlandish tricks well outside the scope of any reasonable job description.

—

I never knew a good manager who wasn’t a good communicator. Like integrity it’s a foundational management quality. Lacking it, you’ll always be a trout swimming upstream—meaning managing others will always be a struggle.

Many Type B’s are by nature open communicators, and this attribute serves them well in a management role. So much of productive management is dependent on meaningful, effective communication. It determines how assignments are made, how feedback is given, and how rewards and punishments are administered. It’s the daily fabric of manager-employee life, and it’s a core management skill at which Type B’s excel. Type A’s are more uneven in this regard. While some are truly exceptional (indeed, they can spellbind an audience of thousands with their public communication skills in addition to being highly articulate in “one on ones”), others may have little time or patience for this skill. As we saw in Chapter 3 on motivating and demotivating, with Donna, the small business owner, an intense, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later communication style easily leads to unwanted, unintended consequences.

But an even more pervasive, problematic management communication issue was once pointed out to me by a Human Resources colleague.

We were attending an in-house management seminar on employee engagement. At the time the company we both worked for had lower employee engagement scores than it would have liked, and the scores were trending in a negative direction. During a break, the HR executive and I were discussing some of the challenges of management. “Well, you don’t have to worry too much,” she said to me. “You’re a good manager.” Her comment surprised me. Actually, I felt management was difficult. At that stage of my career I was still learning to deal more directly with conflict and employees’ performance-related issues, and didn’t feel at all competent at it. “Why do you say that?” I asked—not fishing for a compliment so much as curious to understand what she considered the elements of good management. To this day, decades later, I still remember her five-word answer.

“You talk to your people,” she said.

When I asked her what exactly she meant by that, she added, “I’ve seen how you relate to them—you communicate with them, you have some idea what’s going on with them.”

“You mean a lot of managers don’t?” I asked.

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

—

Years later I now have more context for that conversation, and more appreciation of it. Open, honest communication of course is the foundation for all good relationships—be it a friendship, a marriage, or the relationship between manager and employee. Ideally, managers need to take the time to get to know their employees—a need that has become increasingly challenging with remote management situations.

Employees respond best when they’re treated in a predictable not capricious manner. They then know what to expect. I never at all minded working for a tough, demanding manager so long as I felt the manager was fair and consistent. Problems arise when a manager’s actions fluctuate wildly—encouraging and supportive one day but distant and irritable the next. On the other side of the consistency coin, I can’t put it simpler than this: Erratic management behavior alienates. It makes people nervous. Employees don’t want to deal with it. They want a steady manager they can count on. How often are employees disturbed by bosses who run unaccountably hot and cold? Inconsistent managerial behavior leaves employees uncertain, disengaged, afraid of losing their jobs, and prone to act defensively. And if people are spending much of their time acting defensively, it’s a safe bet they won’t be doing their best work.

Ultimately, when it comes to communication, it matters less whether a manager is loud or soft-spoken, forceful or reserved, Type A or Type B, so long as the manager is credible, trustworthy, and treats an employee with respect.

—

Returning now to our unfortunate Shoe Mission that opened this chapter, it was also only much later that I began to think more about the broader implications of that morning. This was impulsive Type A management at its most needlessly destructive. It also brings up broader questions regarding the treatment of subordinates, in terms of the normal pattern of interactions between manager and employee. How is communication routinely handled and authority exercised? Is a manager autocratic and bullying, or considerate and patient? Erratic and impulsive, or consistent and fair? Does a relationship motivate or demoralize?

No less formidable a figure of authority than General Douglas MacArthur, a highly respected U.S. general in the Pacific theater in World War II, has provided perspective on some of these matters.* Among his “Principles of Leadership,” seventeen bulleted points (shown in their entirety in the Appendix), are two basic questions that even today remind me of the Shoe Mission:

• Do I heckle my subordinates or strengthen and encourage them?
• Do I act in such a way as to make my subordinates want to follow me?

One thing I know for certain is how Cathy would have answered those questions about her own management. Unfortunately, she didn’t stay around long enough for anyone to get the chance to ask her.

“The Dying Art of In-Person Communication”

Honesty questions of the day: How often do you send an email or text to someone to avoid in-person communication? How often do you call someone after hours or before hours so you can leave a message and avoid a real live conversation? I know I did these things when I was in business. Though hopefully not too often. With the multitude of ever-growing social media technologies at our disposal, there’s a danger that good old-fashioned in-person talking to someone may become a lost art. That would be very bad news. Following are clear business benefits of direct as opposed to indirect communication:

It’s a dialogue, not a monologue—A true exchange of thoughts, not a verbal one-way street.

It offers the opportunity for nuanced messages—Far beyond the constraints of a three-minute voicemail or even the lengthiest of texts.

Problems can be openly discussed and resolved—This of course may involve conflict (and, worse still, unpleasantness!), but it’s also the way meaningful collaborative solutions are reached.

When I was a manager, I literally found it physically hard to sit still in one place for a long time. This often led to my using the well-documented practice of “management by walking around,” a therapeutic way of relieving for me some of the tedium of bureaucracy. As a consequence of wandering, I found myself talking to my employees. I got to know them better because of it. I got to hear about their families, their kids’ sports, their aging parents, their dentist appointments, their cats, their dogs, their hopes and dreams and frustrations on the job and off.

It was good, it was helpful. I may have wasted some of their time—no doubt I did—but it gave me added context to understand how well, or not, my employees were doing their jobs. It can do the same for you.

Management Insight

Open communication is a fundamental skill at which Type B managers excel. Communication that is impulsive and capricious can easily demotivate, while communication that is consistent and thoughtful fosters employee trust.