“I continue to be a little puzzled about why so many managers do such a poor job,” says Julian Birkinshaw, a professor at London Business School and the author of “Reinventing Management: Smarter Choices for Getting Work Done.”
In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Birkinshaw states, “We have known what ‘good management’ looks like for decades, and enormous sums have been spent on programs to help managers manage better. And yet the problem endures: In a recent survey I conducted, less than a quarter of respondents would encourage others to work for their manager.”
Rather than continue to load managers down with things they should be doing, Birkinshaw suggests conjuring up what bad management looks like and running — or managing — in the other direction. He adapts his bad managerial habits to the list of seven deadly sins.
“Of course, a bit of artistic license is necessary to adapt words like ‘greed’ and ‘lust’ to corporate life, but on the whole I think they work pretty well,” Birkinshaw says.
Greedy bosses pursues wealth, status and growth to get noticed.
Lust is also about vanity projects — investments or acquisitions that make no rational sense, but play to the manager’s desires.
Wrath doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation. We see this at all levels in the hierarchy. Birkinshaw says his first boss would turn bright red and start shaking before he yelled at some poor soul for failing to debug a piece of software properly.
Gluttony in the business world is where a manager puts too much on his proverbial plate. He needs to get involved in all decisions, he needs to be continuously updated, he never rests. One common result is that decision-making gets stuck.
Pride quickly tips over into hubris — an overestimation of your own abilities.
Envy manifests itself most clearly when a manager takes credit for the achievements of others. But envy also rears its head in less obvious ways: when a manager chooses not to promote a rising star for fear of showing up his own limitations; or when he keeps important information to himself rather than sharing it with his team.
Sloth is workplace apathy — the managers who fall prey to sloth are simply not doing their job. They are inattentive, they don’t communicate effectively, and they have no interest in their team’s needs. Instead, they focus on their own comforts and quite often, on personal interests outside of the workplace. We have all seen glimpses of sloth in the workplace: the boss who takes long lunch-breaks but is “too busy” to sit down with us. The cost of sloth can be very high when management fails to make necessary strategic adjustments when the business is in crisis.
Birkinshaw challenges managers to do their own self-assessment to determine which of these sins they are most prone to. Better yet, ask your team to rate you as a one-off exercise or as part of a broader 360-degree assessment process.
“The most challenging part is acting on the information you receive,” he says. “But the advantage of this approach, compared to other similar exercises, is that at least we can now put a label on what you are trying to avoid.”
