Episode 870 - You Gave Them the Job. Did You Give Them a Chance?

0:04 Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and goal achieving. This is the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast with your host, Paul Falavolito. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode 870. I want to start today with a question that might make some senior leaders a little uncomfortable. When was the last time you examined everything you expect your managers to accomplish and asked yourself whether you've actually equipped them to succeed?

0:44 Think about that for a minute because organizations are really good at handing people responsibility. We promote somebody into management and suddenly they're responsible for staffing, scheduling, employee performance, customer complaints, budgets. productivity, training, conflict, safety, documentation, meetings, emails, policies, projects, and whatever emergency gets dropped on their desk at 445 on a Friday afternoon. And then six months later, somebody sitting around a conference table says, I'm not sure of their management material. Huh? Or maybe we handed somebody a steering wheel and forgot to give them a map. This happens everywhere. We take a great employee, and promote them because they were great at their previous job. Your best

1:35 salesperson becomes the sales manager. Your strongest nurse becomes the charge nurse. Your best paramedic becomes the supervisor. Your best technician becomes the department manager. Your best hotel employee becomes the front desk manager. Congratulations. Here's your new title. Here's your new office. Here are 14 problems nobody told you about.

1:57 Good luck. And then leadership. starts measuring their performance. Why isn't turnover improving? Why are people calling off? Why isn't this project finished? Why are employees complaining? Why aren't you coaching your people? Why didn't you document that? Why didn't you communicate this? Why are you spending so much overtime?

2:18 Why didn't you know about that problem? And those may all be legitimate questions. There's another question that needs to come first. What did we give this manager to make them successful? And I'm talking about more than a leadership seminar. Training matters. I believe in leadership education. I've built a huge part of my career around the idea that leaders need continuous development because leadership isn't something you learn once and then magically know forever. My own seven-minute leadership philosophy is built around consistent, focused development that leaders can actually apply.

2:58 But equipping managers goes much deeper than training. A manager needs clarity. What exactly do you expect from them? Not some corporate job description written by somebody who hasn't worked inside that department in eight years. What does winning look like on a Tuesday at 2.30 in the afternoon? What decisions can they make without asking permission? What requires approval?

3:24 How much can they spend? What authority do they have when an employee refuses to follow a standard? What metrics matter? What should they be looking at every day? When everything becomes a priority, managers start guessing, and guessing creates inconsistency. So I want you to imagine something. Tomorrow morning, walk into one of your manager's offices and place an empty backpack on their desk. And then every time you mention something they're responsible for, put something in the backpack. Scheduling, put something in. Payroll, put something in. Employee development, customer service, compliance, recruiting, discipline, inventory, meetings, reports, quality improvement, safety, budgets, new initiatives, technology, employee morale, keep

4:11 filling the backpack. Eventually, that bag is going to get pretty heavy. Now here's the leadership question. What are you taking out? Because organizations have a habit of adding responsibility without removing responsibility. New initiative, give it to the managers. New software, managers will handle implementation. New policy, managers will explain it. New reporting requirement, managers can do that. Employee engagement is down, managers need to fix it. Customer satisfaction is slipping. Talk. to the managers. We keep putting rocks in the backpack and then wonder why the person carrying it is slowing down. Sometimes your manager doesn't have a performance problem. They have a capacity problem. And those require

5:06 very different leadership responses. I also want you to examine authority. This is a big one. Never give somebody responsibility for an outcome that while withholding the authority necessary to influence that outcome. That's organizational insanity. You tell a manager, you're responsible for your team. Okay, can they address poor performance?

5:32 Can they change a broken process? Can they adjust staffing? Can they recognize high performance? Can they make operational decisions? Can they hold somebody accountable? Or does every meaningful decision require approval from three people above them? Because that's not empowerment. That's a manager acting as a human suggestion box. They're collecting problems and sending them upstairs. And eventually, employees figure this out. They stop seeing the manager as a leader because they know the manager can't actually do anything. And that's damaging. And here's another area that we don't talk about enough. Time. We tell managers we want them coaching employees. Great. When?

6:22 We want one-on-one meetings. When? We want employee development. When? We want them walking the floor and talking with their people. When? Because if their entire day is packed with administrative work, emails, reports, staffing issues, meetings, approvals, and operational fires... Leadership becomes the thing they're supposed to squeeze in whenever they have five minutes, and then we criticize them for not spending enough time with their team. You cannot tell managers that people are their highest priority while designing a job that gives them no time for people. Your systems reveal your actual priorities.

7:04 So Here's an exercise I want every executive, business owner, department head, and senior leader listening today to try. Take one management position inside your organization. Write down everything that person is expected to accomplish. Everything. And then beside each responsibility, ask, have we trained them for this? Do they have the authority to do this? Do they have the tools to do this? Do they realistically have the time to do this?

7:35 Do they know what successful performance looks like? And here's where things might get uncomfortable. For every no, don't blame the manager. Circle it. Because you may have found a leadership problem one level higher. I've talked about developing managers before, including the idea that developing managers should be treated... like a long-term process rather than a quick promotion and a title change. This episode takes that idea one step further.

8:07 Leadership development isn't only about making managers better. It's about building an environment where better management is actually possible. There's a difference. You can send somebody to every leadership class in America. You can give them books. You can send them podcasts. You can hire coaches. You can put inspirational quotes on the wall. If they don't have clarity, authority, resources, support, and enough capacity to execute the job, eventually the system wins.

8:40 And when that happens, senior leadership has to resist one of the easiest explanations in business. We need better managers. Maybe you do. You might also need to become better at supporting the managers you already have. That's the audit. Look at your struggling manager and ask, is this person failing the system, or is the system failing this person?

9:05 Sometimes the answer will absolutely be the manager. They've been trained. They've been coached. They've been given resources. Expectations are clear. Authority exists. Support is available, and they're still not performing. Now you have an accountability issue. Address it. But you owe people... the opportunity to succeed before you hold them accountable for failing. That's leadership. And there is one more piece to this. Talk to your managers. Ask them, what is making your job unnecessarily difficult right now? And then listen.

9:41 Don't defend the system. Don't explain why something has always been done that way. Don't immediately solve anything. Just listen. You may discover that a report nobody reads takes four hours every week. You may discover two departments are asking for the same information in different formats. You may discover your managers spend half their day seeking approvals for decisions they could easily make themselves. You may discover that your leadership team has created 10 priorities and somehow expects managers to treat every one of them like number one. That conversation could expose more about your organization than another expensive employee engagement survey ever will. So this week, don't evaluate

10:30 your managers first. Evaluate what you've built around them. Look at the expectations, look at the workload, look at the authority, look at the tools, and look at the time. And then ask one uncomfortable question. If I had this job tomorrow, have we created an environment where I could actually succeed?

10:53 Because before you decide that somebody is incapable of carrying the load, you better take a good look at what you've been putting in their backpack. This has been the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast, and I thank you for listening.