Interview: "The onus of motivation lies with the boss"

What's a shrink like him doing authoring books on creating better workplaces? Mapping mindspaces, that's what. The Gallup Organisation's Curt Coffman, who heads the company's Workplace Management Practice, is the 1990s' face of an initiative that has spanned 25 years, 400 companies, and 80,000 managers. In Mumbai to conduct a workshop on workplace-development, Coffman met with BT's R. Chandrashekar. Excerpts from a rule-breaking interview:

THE PERSON

Curt W. Coffman, Senior Vice-President & Senior Consultant, The Gallup Organisation

NAME: Curt W. Coffman
AGE: 43 years
DESIGNATION: Senior Vice-President & Senior Consultant, The Gallup Organisation
EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Biology, University of Nebraska, Kearney, 1979; Master in Conselling Psychology and Clinical Psychology, University of Nebraska, 1981
WORK EXPERIENCE: Programme Counsellor, Adolescent Treatment Programme, Lincon General Hospital, 1981-84; Executive Associate, SRI Gallup Research Corp., 1984-86; Senior Vice-President and Senior Consultant, and Global Practice Leader, Workplace Management Practice, The Gallup Organisation, Princeton, 1988...
HOBBY: Reading
BT INTERVIEWED HIM: Because he knows what makes workplaces tick\

Q. Curt, you've spent a good part of the last 16 years studying workplaces, some of it with Marcus Buckingham. The essence of your findings, as described in your book, First, Break All The Rules, as well as the survey conducted by The Gallup Organisation seem to be Gallup's Q-12 dimensions (See Break All The HRules, BT, August 22, 1999), which characterise a good workplace. Tell us, what makes a good workplace a great one?

A. I have found that the onus of building a great workplace, where an employee finds joy and fulfilment in work, rests with the person to whom he directly reports. Your immediate boss is the critical factor in the whole process of personal motivation. Everything else is secondary--the quality of top management, the culture of the organisation, the company's vision, its brand equity, its reputation for the reliability of its products None of these factors matters as much as the quality of the interaction between an employee and his immediate superior. The only thing that affects the motivation level of an employee is the empathy of his immediate supervisor. Period.

The Gallup Organisation's survey also discovered that every employee forms his opinion about the organisation on the basis of the treatment meted out to him by his immediate manager rather than the policies or the procedures of the company. It's not that employee-focused initiatives are unimportant. It's just that your immediate superior is more important. She defines and pervades your work environment. If she sets clear expectations, knows you, trusts you, and invests in you, you can forgive the company for its lack of a profit-sharing programme. But if your relationship with your manager is fractured, no amount of in-chair massaging or company-sponsored dog-walking will persuade you to stay and perform. It is better to work for a great manager in an old-fashioned company than for a terrible manager in a company offering an enlightened, employee-focused culture.

The tenure of a person and his productivity are a function of the quality of the relationship with the immediate manager. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that one of the major conclusions of our survey is that most people join great companies, but leave bad managers.

Do great managers focus on all aspects of the Q-12? Or only on some of them?

Our survey found that great managers concentrate only on dimensions 1 to 6, or the first 6 questions. That is where they focus their time, energy, and attention. The key to building a strong, vibrant workplace is in meeting employee needs at the individual level. What happens in most companies is quite the opposite. Managers tend to focus higher up: on mission statements, multi-skilling, and self-directed work teams. Of course, such action-plans help employees feel that they belong. Change initiatives, like TQM and BPR, are well-conceived. Many of them are, often, well-executed too. But many such initiatives fail. Because they ignore the basics. They aim too high, too fast. No wonder disillusionment sets in quickly.

Organisations where managers pursue transformation initiatives like reengineering without spending time on the basics can never become great workplaces for current and future employees. Look at it this way: if an employee does not know what is expected of him as an individual, can you honestly expect him to get excited about playing on a team? If an employee feels he is in the wrong role, can you motivate him by telling him how important his ideas are to the company's change-efforts? If he does not know what his manager thinks of him as an individual, can you challenge him to become part of the new learning organisation? It just doesn't work.

Obviously, every manager has a role to play in making his/her organisation a great workplace. How would you define this role?

It is 4-fold: select a person. Set expectations. Motivate. And develop the person. A manager might have all the vision, charisma, and intelligence in the world but, if he cannot perform these activities well, he will never excel as a manager. He will never help build a great workplace. A manager should reach out to each of his subordinates, and release their unique potential by converting their individual talents into individual performance. A talent has no use if it is not linked to a role where it can be put to use. Each person's talent is unique. That is why every great manager plays his role one employee at a time.

Great managers recognise that each person is motivated differently, has a unique way of thinking, and a unique style of relating to others. They know there is a limit to how much they can mould someone. They don't bemoan the differences; they capitalise on them. They try to help each person become more of what he already is. They do not believe, as most self-help experts tell us, that every individual has unlimited potential and that, in order to realise her full potential, she should identify her weaknesses and fix them.

Conventional wisdom says that everybody can be anybody he wants to be if he works for it. This pre-supposes that every individual has the same innate potential for greatness. Great managers believe in just the opposite: that each individual is uniquely talented, expressing herself through unique goals, unique capabilities, and unique accomplishments. That is why great managers do not help people fix their weaknesses. Instead, they focus on their strengths.

Does that not go against the prevalent belief that managers should help people overcome their inadequacies and learn new skills?

Our survey found that great managers differentiate between skills, knowledge, and talents--the 3 elements of a person's performance. It is because managers do not distinguish between them that you find square pegs in round holes in organisations. Skills are the how-to of a role; knowledge is what you need to know to perform that role. Both can be transferred from one person to another; they can be taught. But their limitation is that they are situation-specific. Faced with an unanticipated scenario, both lose their bearings.

However, the power of talent is that it is transferable from situation to situation. Given the right stimulus, it responds spontaneously. For instance, if you have a talent for competitiveness, any kind of contest stimulates you. If you have the talent for empathy, every emotion speaks to you. If you have the talent for articulation, no matter what the subject, you will state your case plainly and persuasively. But the limitation is that it cannot be taught. Great managers recognise that there is no point in wasting time teaching something that is fundamentally unteachable.

Does that make talent a precious thing bestowed by nature on special people? No, say all the great managers we interviewed. Talent, according to them, is a recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behaviour that can be productively applied. A person's talent is, quite simply, the behaviour that he finds himself exhibiting. Every role, performed well, requires certain recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour. Great accountants have talent. Great truck-drivers have talent. Since excellence is impossible without talent, the key to excellent performance is in finding the match between one's talent and one's role.

Great managers do not teach people talent. Their job is to help people earn the accolade, `talented,' by matching their talent to the role. To do this well, they need to pay close attention to the subtle but significant differences between roles.

Great managers believe there is a range in every role. While experience, knowledge, skills, will-power, and brain-power affect performance, only the presence of the right talent--recurring patterns of behaviour that fit the role--can explain why, other factors being equal, some people excel in their roles, and others struggle. Selecting for talent is a manager's primary role. If she fails to find people with the talent she needs, everything else she does to help them grow will be as wasted as sunshine on a barren ground.

Accepted. But how do employees recognise a good manager? Or, for that matter, a bad one?

Great managers are a minority. Few employees are lucky enough to work with great managers. The 12 dimensions (the Q-12) are a good starting-point. But you should watch for these signals. Is your manager too busy to talk to you about your performance and your goals? Is he forcing you to do things his way? Does he constantly ask you questions about how you are doing, intruding into your territory? Does he consistently ignore you, distrust you, take credit for your work, or blame you for his mistakes? If the answer is yes, no matter how much you enjoy the job, look for another.

It is strange that the ability to manage teams is not one of the characteristics of a great manager. Isn't this contrary to the spirit of most change-initiatives, which are built around the power of teams?

There is nothing contradictory about that. Teams are a great organisational mechanism. They help institutionalise the process of change, and enhance the power of the individual. But it is important to get a grip, first, on what drives an individual. This should be done before you form a team. An individual may have all the skills and knowledge, but does he have the talent? And does the talent have a bearing on what the team seeks to achieve? Even when they begin well, teams fail because they do not address this vital issue right at the beginning.

Can managers use techniques like satisfaction surveys to find out what is wrong with their people-processes?

It all boils down to whether you have the right kind of parameters to measure satisfaction-levels. We interviewed many Fortune-500 companies as part of our survey. Of these, 80 per cent conduct Employee Satisfaction Surveys. And they do it every year, or every 2 years. Over 60 per cent of these companies told us that the satisfaction-levels among their employees were worse after the surveys. The reason: there was no clarity of purpose.

Instead of focusing on a few critical issues, the companies tried to measure everything. The procedure was elaborate, comprising nearly 150 questions. Each company followed its own method so that there was no possibility for comparisons. The surveys were isolated events, unconnected to the other performance-measurement systems in the company for which managers were held accountable. There was little sharing of the findings with the employees.

However, the main reason the surveys made the environment worse was that they said, loud and clear, that the management was out of touch with the grassroot realities and was, thus, trying to bridge the gap. Strangely enough, it reinforced a we-and-they attitude in these firms.

You say that a talent is of no use if it isn't linked to a particular role where it can be put to use. But how do you identify an employee's talent?

The best way to identify a person's talent is to allow him to reveal himself through the choices he makes. This is tricky. It takes time. That is why great managers do not treat a talent interview as part of the routine selection-process; they view it as standalone. Every employee faces hundreds of situations every day, and he could respond to each in a number of ways. What the interviewer should look for are 2 things.

One is consistency: how consistently does the candidate respond to the stimuli. That is the basis of a person's talent. The second is spontaneity. Every great manager knows that spontaneity is most predictive of a person's future behaviour. It is important to make the questions open-ended so that the candidate has an opportunity to make choices and exercise different options. Interviewing for talent is a matter of practice.

Conventional wisdom tells you that a person's success on one rung of the ladder will have a direct bearing on his success on the next. There are two assumptions underlying this belief: past success guarantees superior performance in future roles; and promotions are the best way to motivate people. Both assumptions are wrong. What is important is the fit between a person's talent and his task. That is what great managers try to find.

Consider, for example, career-paths in the infotech industry. You start off as a programmer, where your task is to write codes. The talent required here is problem-solving, an ability to rearrange the pieces of a puzzle, and ensure that the pieces, when assembled, synchronise perfectly. This talent is unique. Suppose you promote a programmer to a systems analyst. The talent you need here is different. You should be able to visualise missing pictures, imagining the contours of the pieces that are absent altogether. It is entirely possible for an individual to possess both talents. But, if you are good at problem-solving, it does not automatically follow that you are also good at integrating.

That's why great managers ascertain the talent that is specific to each job, and find the fit between task and talent. Before they promote a person, they identify the talents needed in that role--and promote him only if there is a fit. That is how great managers help build great workplaces.