Managing in the Age of Uncertainty
Engagement or Alignment?
Engagement is not what millennials and gen-z care about.
Billions of dollars were wasted over the past two decades as a generation of boomer managers tried to use “engagement” software to connect with younger employees.
Everyone who reads this newsletter knows I love Cisco, and what I learned there. But Cisco was one of thousands of companies that came to believe engagement software could replace the actual act of managing people. I’ll never forget my last boss at Cisco telling me to stop meeting with my team in-person — and, instead, to “check in” with them using software.
Engagement software completely missed the point about what millennials and gen-z want from a manager: they are looking for career and growth advancement opportunities on your team.
Millennials and gen-z expect today’s managers to clearly connect the dots between the roles on a team and how those roles advance a career. It’s why job role alignment is so important to being a successful manager today. The best people are smart. They know your success and their success are intertwined. People want to clearly see how their job role on the team aligns to the work you are accountable for — the work you care about.
This issue of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty is focused on what alignment means to the next generation as one of the Six Drivers of Consistency from my research into the future of managing. As you read about alignment, think about your team. Can your people clearly see the way their job responsibilities map to your priorities, goals and metrics? Do your people have a direct line of sight to your dashboard? Are you using employee engagement software instead of meeting directly with people?
Why Alignment Matters to People
Your people are betting a job role aligned to the work you are accountable for will be rewarded and recognized — if they exceed expectations. It’s as simple as that. Just as your success is tied to your people, vice versa is true. That’s why the best people crave job roles that can be directly measured on your dashboard. They know if you are recognized it increases the likelihood of them getting recognized.
That’s why people want to be able to “hold” their responsibilities in their hands and see their box of responsibilities on your dashboard. Any job role on your team that does not have direct line of sight to your priorities, goals, and metrics is out of alignment.
Here is what drives the best people crazy: when a team is out of alignment, they know it’s hard for a manager to make decisions based on actual performance. In today’s world of efficiency and AI, managers are busier than ever with more to do with fewer resources. Trade-off decisions are common. As managers, we wish we could give everyone a raise and promotion, but we can’t and shouldn’t reward under-performers.
Alignment is part of the process of consistency to take emotion out of decision making: by making it clear about which jobs hit it out of the park on your dashboard and who deserves recognition as a result. That’s what millennials and gen-z care about.
What Expectations People Have for a Manager
Boomer managers struggled with job role alignment. The idea of aligning a job role to responsibilities, including the way success is measured for people, is harder than it sounds. For example, consider the language you use to run your organization. What words do you use to run your business or team? How do you distinguish, a priority from a program? What is an initiative and how does it differ from a project?
The key is to be unambiguous about what work matters most and what results get recognized and rewarded. Not all work on your dashboard is created equal. As team manager, it’s up to you to prioritize what results matter. At the highest level, be clear about what you value on the dashboard. For example, are you focused on operational excellence or innovation?
Speaking a common operational language will drive consistency around the way you communicate your priorities, and how those priorities translate into specific goals and metrics. If your company doesn’t have a common approach to communicating goals, like OKRs (Objective, Key Results) or VSEM (Vision, Strategy, Execution, Metrics), then you should adopt one.
Speaking a common operational language is the secret sauce of alignment. It eliminates grays zones and ambiguities in the way a job role aligns to work that matters to you.
Job role alignment also accomplishes something important for you: optimizing your team for execution by making sure everyone is playing their position. Your best people don’t want to be confused with their peers; they want to out-perform them. Having a clear understanding of who is playing what position is exactly what your people want.
How It Helps Connect Career Dots in the Age of Uncertainty
In an ideal world, everyone on your team should be able to communicate — with facts — about the way their role directly supports what you are accountable for. When people have direct-line-of-sight to what makes you successful and what you care about, confidence in their ability to be successful only grows (as does the effort they put in).
Confidence in you as a manager is what matters. You want to have a reputation for getting things done for people. The best managers don’t want to let their people down. Having said that, sometimes the marketplace or the company can let even a great manager down by forcing them to make unexpected trade-off choices — like putting raises on hold or limiting promotions.
To help you get ready for any trade-off conversations, here are four questions to consider. Spend time thinking about where you stand with these questions. You have to be absolutely consistent on them if you want to make job role alignment work:
If two members of the same team have similar performance, how do you make choices?
What other decision-makers participate in rewards and recognition?
What else do you consider important to success that is difficult to measure with data?
If you work in a larger organization with span of control guidelines, how do you handle promotions?
Manager Thought of the Week
“Employee engagement is ‘upside-down.’”
Ok, I’m quoting myself, but only to point you to a blog I wrote with that headline. The blog summarizes what went wrong with the engagement software boondoggle.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about using technology to get work done. I just don’t think it can replace managing people, even in the AI era. What makes managing so hard is the fact that everyone on the team is an individual, with their own individual set of behaviors. My message: get out there and get to know the team.
In Summary: Principles of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty
I left Cisco to answer this question with research and evidence: What does the manager of the future look like? What are millennials and gen-z seeking in a manager? Which behaviors, tactics, skills or processes matter? What’s it going to take to attract and keep the best people over the next decade?
Based on this research, the core philosophy of this newsletter is rooted in one idea: successful managers in this moment in time, for this generation of talent, need to be “career dot-connectors.” The next-gen doesn’t expect to spend their entire career on your team — that’s an idea boomers grew up with. A job on your team is like a chapter in a career story to the current generation. If you want the best people on your team, you have to connect the dots between roles on the team and the career opportunities of the people working on the team.
What is the“Age of Uncertainty”? If the industrial age was about taking predictable steps up the ladder, the age of uncertainty is about finding or discovering the path of a career without any predictable steps, without an obvious ladder — it’s why being a career dot-connector will differentiate you as a manager.
How to be a Great Manager in the Age of Uncertainty: Be a Career Dot Connector is available on Amazon.
What kind of manager are you? Take my free self-assessment and learn about yourself.