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| Dr. Gordy Curphy President, Curphy Consulting Corp. |
How do you Lead those you Perceive as Uncommitted?
Start by Looking in the Mirror
Gordy Curphy, PhD
Curphy Consulting Corporation
How one leads those perceived to be uncommitted is a critically important question. Unfortunately the knee-jerk responses to this question from people in charge are often something like: “these people are losers”, “they just don’t get it”, or “some of my employees came directly from the Island of the Misfit Toys.” Although there may be some truth to these assessments, they are essentially variations of blaming the victim. Adopting this attitude effectively absolves the people in charge from taking any responsibility for changing uncommitted followers and developing a deeper understanding of why employees become uncommitted (Argyris, 1991). The purpose of this article is to help readers understand three factors relevant to follower commitment and what they can do get followers reengaged.
The Fundamental Attribution Error
The fundamental attribution error (Millerand and Ross, 1975) comes from social psychology and describes people’s biases when assigning causation to success and failure. Essentially people are biased to credit personal factors for their own successes and blame situational factors or luck for their own failures. Precisely the opposite is true when assigning causality to others; people are more likely to ascribe luck or situational factors to others’ successes and personal factors for others’ failures. This means that if people in charge believe uncommitted followers are failures (and they do) then they are much more likely to attribute character flaws, upbringing, or ethnicity rather than situational factors as the underlying reasons for followers’ low commitment levels. This is unfortunate, as situational factors often play a predominant role in employee commitment and engagement.
The Freedom to Flee and the Fundamental Attribution Error
There are three critical situational factors affecting follower commitment, and these include the freedom to flee (Hogan, 2007) managerial incompetence (Hughes, Ginnett, and Curphy, 2011), and an organization’s performance management system. Hogan (2007) maintains that leadership only matters when followers have some choice to stay or leave an employer. If followers have no option but to more or less work at gunpoint, then leaders’ efforts to build teams or get followers to exert extra effort will fall far short of expectations. And “working at gunpoint” may be much more prevalent than commonly believed. For example, the United States military has an all-volunteer force, and once people sign up they cannot leave until their tours of duty have been completed. They have no say in when and where they go, how often they go, how long they are gone, what they do, and who they work for or with during their entire tour of duty. At this point some military units have been to Iraq or Afghanistan a half dozen times. Given this lack of choice and the number of tours endured it is hardly surprising that some soldiers lack commitment.
The working at gunpoint analogy is not unique to the military. Given an unemployment rate hovering around nine percent, underwater mortgages, non-compete contracts, and a health care system that severely limits mobility, many private sector workers have little real choice in jobs and employers. And with no relief in sight with respect to the economy, the housing market, or serious health care reform, those who are employed feel lucky just to have a job. People with limited occupational freedom may not like the situation and will probably do as they are told, but compliance is a lot different than commitment.
Managerial Incompetence and the Fundamental Attribution Error
The second major situational factor at play with follower commitment levels is managerial incompetence. Although there are some distinctions between leadership and management, both essentially involve building cohesive, goal-oriented teams and getting results (Hughes, Ginnett, and Curphy, 2011; Hogan, 2011). Effective leaders and managers are those who can consistently do both; incompetent managers are those who cannot build teams and/or get results. Research shows the base rate of managerial incompetence may range between 50-75 percent (Hughes, Ginnett, and Curphy, 2011; Hogan, 2007). Readers might think that this estimate is far too high, but if they counted the total number of people they had worked for in the past and identified those of this group they would willingly work for again then this estimate may not be far from the truth. And this ratio of willingly work for/total number of bosses seems to be fairly consistent across both the public and private sectors—most people feel that only a minority of military and civilian leaders are actually any good at it. Research and personal experience suggest that most people in positions of authority are not very good at building teams that actually win.
Performance Management Systems and the Fundamental Attribution Error
A final situational factor affecting followers’ commitment levels concerns an organization’s performance management system. Most performance management systems consist of two major components: how things get done (i.e., competencies) and what gets accomplished (i.e., results). In many cases flaws in these two components perpetuate the managerial incompetence problem described earlier. To better understand these flaws it is necessary to take a hard look at why people in the public and private sector get promoted. Does an organization’s performance management system promote people because they have demonstrated an ability to build teams that beat the competition or because they never get into trouble and do everything they can to please their bosses? The group with the best information about a leader’s team building competencies are direct reports, yet they are rarely asked for their inputs. And the results obtained is often of little help in differentiating effective from incompetent managers. This is because the vast majority of metrics found in most organizations are variations of navel-gazing, in that they are nothing more than comparisons against past performance. A team may have generated five percent more revenues or reduced costs by 20 percent from the year before, but the lack of external benchmarks makes it difficult to determine whether these results are any better than those achieved by other teams. It is not hard to see why followers become disenfranchised when the pathway to their boss’ career success is being a dutiful suck up who focuses on obtaining results that do not really matter.
How to Turn Around Uncommitted Followers
Managerial incompetence, a lack of occupational choice, and poor performance management systems are in and of themselves enough to drive followers to compliance rather than commitment. But when a revolving door of bad bosses is combined with an inability to flee then committed followers may actually be more the exception than the rule. And there is quite a bit of evidence to show that employee commitment levels are at all time lows. Employee satisfaction and engagement levels as measured by organizational surveys are lower than ever before (Aon Consulting, 2011) and the military has to offer ever greater incentives to get soldiers to re-enlist (Associated Press, 2007; Army Times, 2009). These results speak volumes about the pervasiveness of the uncommitted employee problem.
No doubt there are some followers who remain uncommitted no matter who is in charge and how much freedom they have to leave. But this group is likely a small minority—most people come to work to succeed. So what can people in charge do to change the situational factors affecting follower commitment? Perhaps the first and most important step is to look into the mirror. Far too many people in positions of authority believe they are leadership legends in their own minds but are seen as charismatically challenged in the eyes of others. Shrinking the gap between self and others’ perceptions and improving those skills needed to build teams and get results are vital for people wanting to create committed followers. Yet getting accurate feedback about one’s strengths and shortcomings is not as easy as it may seem. It is relatively easy to administer 360-degree feedback surveys, but the accuracy of these ratings, particularly when direct reports have limited occupational choice, can be suspect (Curphy, 1991). Direct reports are likely to provide glowing ratings when the sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads, and more often than not bosses pull punches and peers can be too far removed from a ratee’s day-to-day work behaviors to have much confidence in the accuracy of their ratings. The end result is that most leaders may think they are doing a good job, have “data” to back up this belief, yet still be in charge of a sizable number of uncommitted followers.
Those in positions of authority who are truly interested in getting some unadulterated feedback about their leadership effectiveness should go through a comprehensive managerial assessment process (Hughes, Ginnett, and Curphy, 2008). This process typically consists of a structured interview, mental abilities tests, personality and work values inventories, various work simulations, and 360-degree feedback. These particular components assess many of the leading causes of managerial incompetence and provide participants with a more accurate and comprehensive picture of their ability to build teams and get things done through others.
Because most employees want to win and tend to rebel against a lack of choice, there are several other things leaders can do to improve follower commitment levels. One of these involves setting and being held accountable for team goals that are benchmarked against comparable teams. Given the abundance of information that is available through the Internet it is possible to find benchmarking data for just about every goal imaginable. Working with direct reports to set team goals and benchmarks, create strategies and tactics to achieve these goals, and conduct periodic reviews of goal progress are fundamental but often overlooked steps in teaching teams how to win. These actions also provide direct reports with some degree of choice, and whenever possible leaders need to provide direct reports with latitude to make the decisions needed to get tasks accomplished. As George S. Patton once said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.“
In conclusion, it is entirely possible to create teams of loyal and committed direct reports. But to do so people in positions of authority need to avoid blaming the victim and instead give serious thought to how their own behaviors, a lack of choice, and faulty performance management systems contribute to the creation of uncommitted followers. Many of the actions needed to create engaged employees are directly under leader’s control; whether he or she chooses to do anything about it is another matter.
References
Aon Hewitt. (2011). Trends in Global Employee Engagement. Chicago, IL: Author.
Argyris, C. (1991). “Teaching Smart People How to Learn.” Harvard Business Review. Reprint Number 91301.
Curphy, G.J. (1991). “Some Closing Remarks about the Use of Self- and Other-Ratings of Personality and Behaviors.” In M.D. Dunnette (Chair), Multi-rater Assessment Systems: What We’ve Learned. 99th American Psychological Association Convention, San Francisco, CA.
Hogan, R.T. (2007). Personality and the Fate of Organizations. Mahawh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hogan, R.T. (2011). Leadership 101: A Brief Interview with Dr. Robert Hogan. Tulsa, OK: Hogan Assessment Systems.
Hughes, R.L., Ginnett, R.C., & Curphy, G.J. (2011). Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience (7th ed.). Burr Ridge, IL: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
Hughes, R.L., Ginnett, R.C., & Curphy, G.J. (2008). Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience (6th ed.). Burr Ridge, IL: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
Millerand, D.T. & Ross, M. (1975) “Self-Serving Biases in the Attribution of Causality: Fact or Fiction?” Psychological Bulletin, 82, pp. 213-225.
1 comment:
Something about blaming the victim rings true to me.
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