How not to manage people

I recently had a chat with a coworker about management styles and how they can either inspire employees to work hard for their company or do the exact opposite. I'm fortunate to work for a company that many would argue inspires its work force to feel as if each person really makes a difference and desires to contribute to the company. There's a huge difference in being forced to sit at a desk for 40 hours a week and being motivated & driven to want to be there. Driving employees by fear, micromanagement, and prodding is a recipe for disaster. Making employees a part of the company and self-driven to succeed I'd argue is a path to win.

One of the things I've loved most about my job over the last 4+ years is that I've been able to travel to many fortune 500 companies & go inside their offices. I've been able to see how movie studios, car companies, technology manufacturers, banking institutions, and more are run and the dynamic inside. I've seen how their management treats the employees and the effects it has on workforces. It's been an incredible journey and I've been able to learn so much about the inner workings of other companies without having to actually work there. I've witnessed corporate cultures of great motivation and many times of complete discontent.

I'll leave specific company names aside, but talk about a few fascinating observations I've made.

One company runs like a totalitarianism. The owner founded this large company all by himself and wants his wishes and his wishes alone executed. He hires managers from the military as he feels they are trained not to question their superiors; they will blindly take orders from above and execute and will not generate "risky" innovative ideas. Well... this has resulted in a culture of fear and is one that breeds in-fighting, distrust, clawing your way to the top, and generally low morale. The founder wanted a world where only his voice mattered, and a dictatorship he has achieved.

Another company was the epitome of micromanagement. I walked into the office and it literally looked like a college computer science lab. The employees worked in an environment that looked like this:

Instead of small students at the computers, there were adult employees. Computers were smashed together even more closely, and employees looked generally quite miserable. There was practically no room to decorate and make a desk your own, no privacy, no ability to have a private conversation, no collaboration, no care for the individual, and the perfect setup for management to see what every employee worked on at any point in the day. You can bet this environment did not foster innovation or creativity but instead a desire to quit.

A third company I'll mention had the most crazy way of measuring an employee's contributions to the company: by the number of hours spent keeping your seat warm. The company didn't seem to value the actual reason why employees are hired: to produce specific results. Instead, they took every employee in the company and ranked them by the number of hours they worked per week. If the number was under 45, the employee was in the red zone. 45 - 55 was yellow. 55+ was green. I took an informal survey of a few of my peers and asked what kind of employee behavior this would encourage. The answers were all similar: surfing facebook more frequently from work, feeling disgruntled, not wanting to help the company out, and contemplating an exit strategy from the company.

Okay, enough of the depressing stuff. Not all companies are ran this poorly. I've seen some amazing management styles founded on trust, giving employees freedom to get their work done, and measuring results and not hours. It's your ship is an incredible book on effective management techniques and ways to truly motivate people to work together to achieve amazing feats. I highly recommend reading it and I promise you will learn many valuable lessons.