Many managers ask their employees questions that open up thinking to problems, challenges, new ideas, and improvements. Unfortunately, some managers use these questions only to fulfill a social function of appearing interested--much in the way of asking "how are you?" to a stranger--than they are to actually applying that information to change the way we work.
According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, *phatic* is an adjective "denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions. Utterances such as hello, how are you? and nice morning, isn't it? are phatic."
In a business context, there are similar expressions and behaviour that often serve only to purport an appearance of engaged management.
Consider the following questions in a business context:
1. What problems are you currently experiencing?
2. What issues do you see arising from this approach?
3. How would you really like this to work?
Now consider what happens when you tell the truth:
1. Acknowledgement followed by inaction.
2. Dispute or rationalization of the issue you raised.
3. Disagreement with your approach without being informed of additional constraints.
Thus, the original questions become more social conventions, things that have to be asked to keep appearances, as opposed to being asked with genuine concern.
An employee is experiencing a recurring problem in doing her work (e.g. missing information required to complete a task without delay). A manager stops by to ask how things are going. She tells the manager about the issue she's experiencing the work, and the manager responds that he'll look into the problem. The employee hears nothing for many weeks. At a certain point, the manager comes back to the employee to express concerns regarding her performance.
A staff member inherits a project to launch a new product or service. Based on direction from his managers, he starts to try to get the right people on board and make progress on the launch. Just before a regular status update, he realizes that the working team is missing a critical decision-making authority to move the project forward. During that update, he expresses his concerns to his manager about the current approach, the value of engaging another stakeholder to get positive results from the current approach, and the need to consider other options if that's not possible. The manager tells the staff member that (a) its just a reality of the business, (b) expecting that kind of authority is over-complicating the solution, and (c) just get it done.
There's pressure on management to engage employees more directly without adequate training & support in how to do so. We're living in a time when many managers are expected to delegate more, be more open to how work is done, and connect more with their employees on an emotional level.
If educated on management at all, many people are educated in Taylorist/industrial models of management. They often don't have other examples of how to stay engaged and helping their employees address real issues. Many university curricula don't teach people how to manage, and in the workplace, many people are promoted for doing a specific job well, not for their ability to manage issues.
There's also a lack of open management accountability to handle process-related problems. If you report something up, but your manager is not openly held to dealing with it, it's easy for issues to slip. Some issues are harder to accomplish, because they need greater influence to deal with it than they presently have; thus issues become easily ignored or forgotten rather than dealt with directly.
Some of this also comes from lack of insight to the true impact of the problem on product/service delivery. Related to accountability, if the manager doesn't understand what the true impact of the problem on the organization's capability, its easier to dismiss it as a problem with the employee as opposed to that of the system in which they're working. Without a systems perspective, how can a manager know what the problem really means and its importance to solve it?
Finally, we see a lot of overburden on managers to fight fires instead of improving. Many managers are rewarded for doing a job that no one else could in order to get results and save the day. Raising an issue can just be fodder for a later success.
Create standard work for managers and leaders to do. Make their work visible and have managers be accountable on a daily basis for solving problems. Silence is regarded as non-compliance; after all, how many workplaces are trouble free?
This is a really thoughtfully fleshed out barrier. I wonder if another pathway (beyond your suggestion of standardization and individual training) is to tackle the root of the problem in our overly layered, hierarchical organizations. You see less of this in organizations that have broken down the hierarchy (and to large extent banished bureaucracy) by pushing work, decisionmaking, accountability, and (crucially), access to information and rewards downtown the team level. Think Whole Foods teams within teams approach or WL Gore's approach to keeping the organization small even as it grows.
It's easy to point to examples, of course, harder to eradicate the "phatic" management you describe! Woul love to hear more from you and the MIX community on how to tackle this one.
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The suggestion to "make their work visible" resonates with my experience. Implementing some sort of visibility of their efforts, whether it be in brief presentation, summary reports, or as simple as a mindmap or flow chart, leads to increased understanding of the problem, a potential self-evident solution, and over time, a more confident manager with increased job satisfaction. This in turn should lead to more openness to engage in assisting employees with their obstacles.
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