Posted on: Monday, April 14, 2003

Managers must adjust their style to fit individuals

By Jane M. Von Bergen
Philadelphia Inquirer

Michael Fineberg should have known better.

He's a business psychologist and a coach of bosses, yet he completely blew it in handling one of his employees. She got so mad she quit.

Looking back at what went wrong, "you have to start with the understanding that 'I have met the enemy and it is me,' " said Fineberg, managing partner of Delta Consultants in Wayne, Pa.

It's not easy being a boss, a manager, a supervisor or an executive. Yes, the pay is often better and so are the perks, but the work can be a complex tangle of corporate and emotional objectives.

If not handled right, many stumble, creating chaos or a depressing torpor in the workplace, experts say.

Some managers overmanage, others are disengaged. Some are workaholics who drive everyone nuts; others are narcissistic, seeing anything and everything that happens in their department as a reflection of or response to them.

And then, of course, there are the truly talented, who by listening, who by adjusting their style to fit the individuals they supervise and who by communicating clear goals and objectives, build a coherent, orderly and even joyful workplace.

"I've seen leadership at its best and worst," wrote Merrick Rosenberg, director of training and development at Team Builders Plus in Cherry Hill, N.J., a management consulting firm.

"I've seen employees who would do anything for their manager, not because they have to, but because their manager has inspired personal loyalty and organizational commitment. And I've seen employees who drive home every day wishing they had a new manager."

Business consultant Fineberg didn't think he was doing anything wrong several years ago when he telephoned a valuable assistant each day in the hospital after she had a car accident.

Instead of focusing on her health, he questioned her pointedly about when she planned to return to work. As it turned out, she was gone a week. Two months after she returned, she left the company for good, chastising Fineberg for his lack of concern for her health.

"I missed the boat," he said. "She did a good job, and I really didn't want her to leave."

At the time, he thought she might try to stay out of work to build a better case for a lawsuit, a possibility that he took as a personal affront to him and the business, fitting the profile of the narcissistic boss.

"I really angered her," he said. "When she was telling me during the exit interview, you could tell she was really insulted by it."

For him, the lesson learned was to try to treat his employees' emotions with the same sensitivity that he would apply to his clients. If he angered one of his clients, he'd lose business. "You can see the money leaving your wallet.

"You have to look at your employee as a customer of yours in a certain way," he said. "They also receive services from you. You have to tune into them. You have to nurture them. They aren't going to give you money, but they can give you extraordinary service, which can be worth a lot of money."

In the case of his assistant, he said, he should have been more attuned to her well-being and waited longer before expressing concerns about her return date.

Sometimes, waiting can make a difference.

"Take a few laps around the plant," suggested Christopher Shriver, a manager at a food-processing plant in Cape May, N.J. "That's my advice — particularly for young managers," he said. "It gives you a few minutes to cool off. You can come back with a clear head."

At the core of all management is one fundamental question:

Do employees generally want to do a good job and be productive, or do they want to get by with as little work as possible?

"That's the genesis for a lot of management decisions," La Salle University management Professor James Smither said.

In academic circles, that question is known as "Theory X vs. Theory Y," an idea promulgated in the 1950s by well-known management scholar Douglas McGregor, Smither said.

How a boss motivates workers depends significantly on which theory is adopted.

Smither said Theory X holds that workers would rather be doing anything other than working, so they must be cajoled and closely supervised to produce.

Theory Y, also known as the human relations school of management, says that workers are intrinsically motivated by a desire to be useful and productive, so supervisors need to nurture and encourage them.

Glenolden, Pa.'s Al Pachman fits squarely into the Theory Y camp. "The toughest lesson I learned was that employees want to succeed at their place of employment," Pachman, a retired manager, wrote. "They want to do the job that they were hired for, and they want their immediate supervisor to make sure that they are clear about what they are to do."

Fundamentally incapable of "Theory Y" management is a common type of toxic boss that fascinates Gayle Porter, an associate professor of management at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J. She describes these bosses as "workaholics — those inefficient control freaks that make your life miserable."

"They have a very high need to control everything," she said, and their behavior is as addictive to them as nicotine is to cigarette smokers.

They tend not to trust their employees, and their employees tend not to trust them, because they are demanding ever-higher and ever-changing standards of perfection and then chastising workers when they don't perform. The pattern creates a downward spiral of mistrust that can be highly destructive in the workplace.

"Some of them have a fear of failure," Porter said. "And the way they address it is by controlling every facet of the workplace."