73%: Communication skills

13%: Decision-making skills

14%: Other

Many of those who responded said that a lot of problems could be solved if their managers had better communication skills — with their employees, their bosses, other managers and HR.

A practical skill-booster: One HR manager said her firm had found a way to give managers “practice” at communicating. The company hooked up with a local vocational school that wanted to give its students experience at interviewing for their first jobs.

So the company agreed that new managers would hold simulated interviews with the students — giving students and managers the experience of interviewing without the risk of making a mistake. The HR manager observes those interviews and gives the manager feedback that can be used in actual interviews and other communication situations.

You’ve probably mentioned it to managers a hundred times: When there’s a problem with an employee, make sure we have good documentation to back up any discipline. Employment law attorney Penelope Phillips explains a few hints that will make documentation better than “good.”

Phillips says the clues lie in several court cases she’s seen and how the right words have meant the difference between a win for the manager and a big cash settlement for an employee with a complaint. She says solid documentation relies on three pieces that every manager should understand. Here’s how they’re broken down:

1. Timing. Even good documentation can hurt your cause if too much time elapses between the incident and the date of the documentation. Two reasons:

• In the employee’s mind, the connection between the incident and the documentation becomes fuzzy. When that happens, employees start to believe they’re being treated unfairly.
• If an employee does decide to file a lawsuit over the incident, a judge might perceive that the supervisor was relying on a dim memory of old events.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule about timing, but the longer it’s put off, the greater the risk to the employer. All the better if the documentation is dated the same day as the incident.

2. Accuracy. Getting the story straight in writing is as much about what’s not said as what’s said.

Yes, managers should follow the reporter’s creed of The Five W’s – who, what, when, where, why – when putting together documentation. But most mistakes occur in the “why” stage.

Reason: too much “editorializing” about events. Examples:

• “Bob showed up late because he was drunk.” That leaves the documentation open to questions such as, “How do you know? Did you take his alcohol-blood level?”
• “You have a bad attitude about deadlines.” How do you define that? Better to describe a measurable behavior: “You failed to meet three important deadlines.”
• “I may not approve of your lifestyle, but that has no bearing on this problem.” Then why mention it? If circumstances are unrelated, there’s no need to bring them up.
• “You sexually harassed Carol three times.” That’s a legal conclusion made only by judges and juries. More accurate: “Carol complained three times that you spoke to her or touched her in a way she thought was inappropriate.”

3. Desired results. The point of any discipline and accompanying documentation is to change behavior. That desired change is another key to good documentation.

What’s a common mistake in this area? Consider, as an example, the situation of the employee who’s habitually late for work. Some supervisors in that instance will write “must be on time for 90 consecutive days” as an acceptable change in behavior.

So, what ends up happening? On the 91st day, the employee shows up late and says, “Hey, I followed the rules of your documentation.” And a judge will most likely agree.

Best bet: Establish a standard for long-term behavior and set out the next disciplinary step for any violation of that standard: “If you’re late again, we will consider suspending you without pay for a period to be determined.”

His story:

Two questions we always asked when we promoted someone to a supervisory job:

1. Can we get them to understand the big picture and how the supervisor fits into it?

2. Will they be able to relate that to the people they supervise?

Being honest with ourselves, we realized we couldn’t always answer yes to both. No matter how well we trained people in the traditional ways, some people got it, and some didn’t.

We needed to make sure everyone got it – and wanted to accomplish the task without paying big money to outside trainers.

What’s important
To solve the riddle, we asked ourselves. What do managers need to understand best to succeed in the job? The answer came when we also asked: What do we as a company need to understand best to succeed?

The answer to both was the same: customers’ thinking. If you don’t understand what customers think and want, you’re doomed.

So, with that in mind, we added a step to our new-supervisor training: customer support.

That’s right. We put new managers in the trenches, training our customers and responding to their questions and complaints.

That way, the new supervisor finds out right away what’s important to the people who are most important for our business – the consumers. The managers also get to hear face-to-face complaints and suggestions they can act on back at the job.

Providing them with that background has given them the tools they need to be effective, enthusiastic supervisors. And since we started that part of the training program, our success rates with new managers has skyrocketed.

(Spencer Kupferman, HR VP, Raleigh, NC)

Too many times, people get placed in managerial jobs for all the wrong reasons, and they make all the wrong moves. Funny thing is, most of those who don’t succeed at managing gave off all the signals that they wouldn’t work out, but no one was listening.

Conversely, the people who will be good managers and leaders often send clear signals that they’re ready to take over, according to HR consultant Larry Johnson. If you want a good manager here’s what you should be looking for: 

They’re not perfectionists. Good managers expect good performance, but they recognize that people will make mistakes. What’s important to potential leaders is that people gave their best, not that they were perfect.

Perfectionists, on the other hand, can’t tolerate others’ mistakes. The result is that the perfectionists’ department tends to be a turnover machine. 

They’re positive. Your next great manager should be the person who sees the good in every situation. That doesn’t mean you’re looking for a Pollyanna who doesn’t recognize problems, but you don’t want someone who only recognizes problems. 

They seek feedback. Workers who wrap themselves in self-satisfied cocoons tend to fail as managers. And on the few occasions where they stumble across feedback, they tend to be defensive about it and discourage further feedback. 

Someone who’s going to make a good manager is always encouraging others to provide feedback. That’s important because managers usually don’t get enough feedback from workers who are reluctant to oppose the boss. A good boss needs to be practiced in the art of soliciting feedback. 

They’re rarely misunderstood. Communicating involves a lot of factors: tone, choice of words, body language. If they’re not packaged correctly, people miss the meaning or, worse, are offended. 

You probably know which people in your organization always seem to get their message across loud and clear. They have leadership potential. 

They’re good listeners. When’s the last time you heard someone say, “My boss listens to me too much”? Listeners are leaders. 

Someone who continually interrupts others or who can’t wait to tell others about “the next great idea” will have problems as a boss. 

They’re flexible. If Joan is a good manager, it’s probably because she’s able to adjust to people and situations. If Joe is a bad manager, it’s probably because he expects people and situations to adjust to him.

Managers have to deal with lots of people and lots of situations. Being able to change gears and approaches, according the people and the situation, spells success as a manager.

Picking on bosses is always fun, but let’s give them a fair shake and list their pet peeves about employees.

Here’s the list from a survey conducted by CNNMoney.com:

1. “I feel ill … on Fridays … at the end of the year.” Managers said, yes, they disliked sick-leave abuse, but what they hated more was the idea that employees think the boss doesn’t notice when sick days tie in with a weekend or come at the end of a year when employees get into a “use or lose” situation. 

2. “Wristwatches are s-o-o-o-o 20^th century.” More and more often, managers say, employees don’t seem to understand the concept of being on time – whether it’s about getting to work in the morning, lunch or deadlines. Although, the bosses add, most of those same employees don’t seem to have a problem with the concept of “quitting time.”

3. “Let me introduce you to your new workmates – soap and water.” What can you say about employees who smell bad? Well, managers said they (a) hated the idea and (b) hated worse the idea of having to inform someone of that fact. 

4. “Hey, I like the ‘My Sharona’ ringtone as much as the next person, but …”  Continually ringing cell phones, and employees who continually answer them, drive managers crazy. Truth is, they drive everyone crazy. 

5. “I can never remember: Did Moses build the ark or take a bite out of the apple?”  Employees who can’t keep facts and details straight, and who often mislead bosses because of it, are doomed to careers that sink faster than the Queen Mary. Or was it the Enola Gay? Whatever.

6. “The sun’s shining – I’ll probably get sunburned.”  People who always see negative in any situation are toxic to managers. You know the type: They look at a full moon and wonder what the dark side is like. 

7. “Who needs eBay? I have my job.”  There are unsubstantiated reports of managers’ heads exploding after reading the 15th all-employees e-mail selling Girl Scout cookies, reduced-price tickets to pro wrestling and “hardly driven” used cars.

Being the victim of a workplace bully is serious business. Courts recognize that, and so should employers, since the damages paid for bullying incidents have run into six figures.

Clinical psychologist Joni Johnston recommends that you ask four key questions when you’re interviewing someone who might be slotted for a supervisory job:

What’s your management philosophy?

Tell me about a time when you had to deal with an employee who didn’t follow orders. What did you do?

If you had an employee with personal problems, how would you deal with that situation?

Give me an example of a time when you were angry with a co-worker. What did you do?

There’s no one answer that will scream, “He’s a bully!” But if the answer to any of the questions sets off an alarm in your head, trust your instincts. You’re probably dealing with someone who has tendencies to bully others.

First, let’s look at the cold statistics.

At the end of 2006, Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas surveyed 3,000 mid-level managers who had changed employers that year across a wide variety of industries.

The results: 92%  said they ended up with equivalent or better salaries, benefits, and titles. That’s the highest percentage in the 10 years the company has been doing the survey.

So the answer to the original question is a resounding “yes!” Well, maybe not.

The magic 5%

The company also pointed out that 2006 and 2007 were years of low unemployment – mostly under the magic 5% figure that economists use as the dividing line between a labor shortage and a labor excess. What’s more, the unemployment rate among people with four-year college degrees was a tiny 1.9% in 2007. So the real answer is: supply and demand. Job-hopping usually pays off when unemployment is low, and the better educated the hopper is, the better the chance that hopping will pay off.

In fact, the survey shows a correlation between low unemployment and signing bonuses and fat raises for those who make the leap from one company to another.

As part of an ongoing series, we’ll have practicing HR managers present real problems they faced and how they solved them.

We have a lot of info in HR: turnover rates, absentee rates, pay rates, how long it takes to fill various positions, etc. Realizing that, our CEO suggested that we circulate an “HR Data Report” to our managers.

The theory, of course, was that the more information they had, the better. Nice theory, but we realized in informal conversations that our managers weren’t reading the report. Again, in informal conversations, I asked them why.

The common answer: “I don’t need to know at least half the stuff that’s in the report.”

Tell us what you want

We could have twisted their arms or attempted to convince them that there was valuable info buried in there. Instead, though, we asked each one: OK, tell us which pieces of info in the report are important to you.

Everyone had a slightly different answer. So we customized each manager’s report to show only the info he or she wanted. Yes, it was a little bit more work for us, but our IT person helped by showing us how to arrange the information easily.

Now, managers stop me in the hallway and discuss the information in the report and how they use it. So the report is no longer “just another piece of paper.”

(Kim McCauley, HR manager, Boston Beer Co., Boston)

When asked the question of why they’re not doing a good job, many managers have a stock reply: “It’s HR’s fault.”

You’ve probably seen it all before.

A supervisor in your organization avoids confronting employees who are slackers, or lets squabbles fester to the point that they threaten the morale and productivity of the group. Maybe you have supervisors who take the nonconfrontational-avoidance approach to the point of hardly ever leaving their offices.

They’re just bad managers, right? Could be. But when the Wall Street Journal surveyed some supervisors who used what could be called “blind-eye management,” a number of them said they behaved that way because they didn’t want to “cause headaches for HR.”

Let’s look at an example of what they mean.

‘Let’s forget it’

Suzie Supervisor walks into the office of the Harry the HR manager and says, “Fred Worker is lazy and has a bad attitude. I’m ready to come down on him hard.”

Harry lets out a sigh. Maybe he complains a little about all the other problems he’s dealing with. He asks Suzie if maybe part of the problem is in the way she deals with Fred. And if Fred is a minority, Harry lowers his voice and warns that firing Fred – or maybe even punishing him – could turn into an administrative and legal nightmare.

Result: Suzie says, “OK, let’s forget it.” She heads back to her office with the firm resolve to let slacker Fred do what he darn well pleases. In an extreme case, Suzie eventually begs out of her supervisor job, and Harry thinks, “She wasn’t a good fit anyway.”

Doing the right thing

All right, so maybe the example is a little dramatic. Most of us want to do the right thing and encourage others to do the right thing. We don’t intentionally push people into becoming bad managers.

But it’s worth listening to managers and taking an approach that makes them feel as if they’re partners with HR, not enemies:

– Give managers their legal and practical options. You may get someone who says, “I want to fire him now!” You know that’s not always do-able, for a lot of reasons, and you should explain why and what the alternative is.

But it’s worth listening to managers and taking an approach that makes them feel as if they’re partners with HR, not enemies:

– Give managers their legal and practical options. You may get someone who says, “I want to fire him now!” You know that’s not always do-able, for a lot of reasons, and you should explain why and what the alternative is.
– Give managers the positives and negatives – and there are always positives and negatives — of any taking action with a problem employee. That places you in a complementary role, without taking over the decision-making role.

– If the manager takes in your advice and makes a decision to action, offer your support and ask if there’s anything you can do to make the process go as smooth as possible.

Some managers are always going to blame somebody else for their inability to deal with problems and problem employees. That’s a given, and it’s partly human nature.

What you’re trying to accomplish is to make sure you’ve done what you need to do to help managers, without discouraging them or making it appear you’re taking over or encouraging them to shirk their responsibilities.

As part of an ongoing series, we’ll have practicing HR managers present real problems they faced and how they solved them.

Despite our solid training program for new managers, they still made some glaring mistakes in crucial supervisor situations.

For instance, they might ask the wrong questions during an interview with a candidate or make a legally iffy remark during a performance review. We had done the training, so what more could we do?

We decided to do periodic refresher training, which was time-consuming and unpopular among the managers. But we had to do what we had to do. Still, they made more mistakes. What now?

One subject for 20 minutes

We had one more trick up our sleeve. We called it just-in-time management training. Here’s how it worked.

Whenever a manager was getting ready to do a typical supervisory task, such as
a performance review or a candidate interview, we scheduled a 20-minute training session with the manager, covering only that task.

That way, we were able to focus on the task at hand and do it in quick, concentrated bites. Our managers were a lot more receptive to that than to the old-style catch-all refresher training. And we nearly eliminated the mistakes that had been so common before.

(Marilyn Weixel, VP, Association of Group Insurance Administrators, Carpinteria, CA)