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Culture Shift: Debunking the Myth of Management Style
June 09, 2008
Some managers are known for their confrontational style. It's just the way they are. There's not much anybody can really do about it, right? Wrong!
By Paul Levesque
The old myth about "management style" has been around almost as long as managers have. According to the myth, managers are somehow "programmed"—as if at the DNA level—to treat their workers and peers a certain way. When managers consistently blow their tops, tear strips off their employees and throw tantrums of seismic proportions, well, what can you do? That's just the way they're built. That's their "style." Gotta learn to live with it, right? Baloney.
Bad Management Behavior: Necessary Evil or Cultural Infection?
Tolerating this sort of behavior is the worst possible reaction because it perpetuates the problem. It allows destructive management behavior to become ingrained in the corporate culture as a kind of "necessary evil." It gives all managers carte blanche to treat employees and co-workers any way they choose, so long as they're achieving acceptable bottom-line results. And if some of these managers do achieve some short-term successes despite their unpleasant ways, younger or less-experienced managers may conclude it was because of those odious means and feel an urge to try similar approaches themselves.
This is how the cultural infection spreads. By the time everyone realizes the culture has completely derailed and made long-term success virtually impossible, no one knows where or how to begin getting the organization back on track.
It's time to put an end to this myth about "style." Managers are not magically pre-programmed with an unchangeable style. They find themselves in a given environment, confronted with specific challenges or problems and they respond in whatever way they believe will produce the desired result most quickly. In my experience, negative "management styles" almost always indicate a business without well-defined corporate values—or with values that everyone is content to ignore and forget.
The Hidden Value of Values
Ask any senior managers why it's important to have well-defined organizational values and they'll typically say something about some non-negotiable standards of conduct to guide the entire operation. That's a very good reason for values to exist, even though it sounds a bit abstract, a little ideological and somewhat removed from the nuts-and-bolts day-to-day operation of a real-world business.
Values are actually a shortcut to making any business more culture savvy. They spell out—in very clear and concrete terms—what the culture of the organization stands for. Even more importantly, values convey (by how often the senior leadership team refers to them) that protecting and strengthening the culture is absolutely vital to the long-term health of the business. Thinking of values as no more than "general guidelines for conduct" is too limiting. The more effective way to look at them is as a snapshot of "our corporate culture in a nutshell."
But how do values relate to management style? Inappropriate management behavior is usually driven by a personal need to succeed. It's always been difficult to correct inappropriate behavior on some abstract "because I say so and I'm the boss" basis. The task of behavior correction becomes much easier when the transgression is in clear violation of established values everyone is familiar with. When the definition of "success" is changed to include "in full compliance with our values" (really changed, to the point where fabulous financial results that violated the values would be treated as a shameful failure), then the behaviors associated with achieving success will usually change accordingly The basic laws of survival kick in: in cultural environments, as in global ones, those who operate within a changing climate must adapt—or perish.
Do not resign yourself to forever having to tolerate bad management behavior because it's some deeply-rooted "style thing." That's a phony problem. The real problem—the one you can do something about right now—is the lack of a value system that clearly makes certain kinds of management behavior unacceptable. Negative behavior patterns may be a recurring habit, but people have demonstrated an amazing capacity to break their own bad habits. All that’s required is a strong enough motivation to do so.
In defining your cultural values, and making those values central to your collective definition of success, you'll be establishing the kind of culture that can motivate managers—and everyone else—to change their behavior. Their reward for doing so is a satisfying sense of personal accomplishment that simply could not be achieved any other way.
Culture Shift Opportunity: Define three or four organizational values that best reflect what you'd like your culture to stand for. Then help your problem managers experience successes that fully comply with those values…and watch their "unchangeable negative management style" magically become a thing of the past.
 Editor's Note: Want a simple test to confirm if your existing corporate values are defining and supporting your culture effectively? Not sure how to go about defining a solid set of values from scratch? Try putting your team through the powerful (and fun) "Values Exercise" Incentive online columnist Paul Levesque describes in this week's podcast at www.incentivemag.com/cultureshift.
We want to hear your feedback on "Culture Shift" columns! Send comments to stacy.straczynski@nielsen.com to let us know what topics you'd like discussed in upcoming episodes of the "Culture Shift."
INCENTIVE online "Culture Shift" columnist Paul Levesque is the author of five books, including "Customer Service Made Easy" and "Motivation," both from Entrepreneur Press. He's a seminar leader and public speaker with two decades' experience as an international business consultant specializing in the connection between employee motivation and customer satisfaction.
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