What's stopping your managers from being effective

In this excerpt from his white paper – Are Your Managers Effective? – Dwight Mihalicz explains why accountability and effective delegation are so crucial to good leadership.

What is really going on inside organisations that makes it so difficult for managers to be effective in their jobs? Effective Managers™ and the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa partnered to fill this void in the management sciences literature. The research focus was to understand and, more importantly, identify those dynamics that impact on managers being effective in their work. As a result, we hoped to help CEOs and managing partners understand how they can improve productivity in their organisations.

We realised from a review of the literature that a variety of factors are at play that obstruct manager effectiveness. For our research purposes, we identified the key dimension: accountability. In an organisational context, accountability is “an obligation for which one can be held to account for one’s results and actions by a specified other”. The phrase specified other is important. To be accountable, there must be someone else involved to hold the manager to account. Thus, a self-held belief cannot be accountability, but is rather a responsibility. The research was conducted during 2013. Data was gathered from managers in eight organisations of varying sizes in a cross-section of sectors.

The results
We asked managers to report what percentage of their time was spent doing work that they were hired to do. They were also asked to estimate the amount of time they spent doing administrative work that could be delegated to an administrative support person, if such a person were to be available. Finally, they were asked to estimate the amount of time they spent on value-added work; that is, work that only they, in their position, with their capability, can do.

This combination of ineffective use of time and delegable administrative support work totals 45.6 per cent of managers’ time, leaving 54.4 per cent for effective use of time.

The value-added work totals 54.9 per cent of managers’ time. This would include work on personal objectives and time managing subordinates.

The results shown approach the issue from two different perspectives, but with the same results: managers spend almost half of their time on work they should not be doing:

• reading emails they should not have to read
  • attending meetings they should not have to attend
  • engaging in conflict with co-workers from other departments
  • doing administrative work that should be delegated
  • and so on.
  So what can be done about it?

The findings
The most significant finding is that Accountability is very highly correlated with manager effectiveness. Accountability is at the heart of managerial leadership. It is important that employees have a clear understanding of what they are being held accountable for and how their outcomes will contribute to the success of their organisation. If they are not aware of this, how do they determine what their most value-added work should be, and where they should focus their efforts? When they need to make decisions, how can they be assured that they are making decisions that are consistent with what their managers would want?

Accountability actually has two dimensions. Both need to be understood in order to positively impact manager effectiveness. First, what is the clarity of the accountability and authority that has been delegated to managers? For instance, if I am a manager, am I clear about not only what my manager is holding me accountable for, but also the authority I have for doing my work?
We call this the Clarity of Accountability dimension. As an organisational measure, this means thinking about how well the organisation can translate accountability for output from the strategic plan, through the CEO or managing partner, down to each individual manager in the organisation. This measure correlates highly with a managers’ perceived self-effectiveness.

The second dimension of accountability is Felt Accountability. This concept has been written about in management sciences literature. It refers to the degree to which an individual feels he or she is accountable. It could be related to being accountable to a manager for work, or it could be other things that are not real accountabilities, but feel like accountabilities. Examples of Felt Accountability include:

• relationships with customers
  • relationships with peers
  • project work
  • self-held beliefs.

In all of these examples, these are not real accountabilities because managers are not held to account by a specified other that has the authority to hold them to account. Nevertheless, they can be quite distracting if the managers of managers do not take them into account when setting the context for doing work. Felt Accountability, interestingly, scores much higher than Clarity of Accountability.

This reinforces the perspective that people care about their work and want to do well. The question is not whether managers feel accountable. They do. The question is whether they feel accountable for the right things. This is the manager’s job – to be clear about those things for which they will hold their subordinates to account.

Dwight Mihalicz is the president of Effective Managers™, a leading management consultancy based in Canada specialising in the improvement of productivity and effectiveness of managers. He is the co-researcher of the white paper Are Your Managers Effective? Dwight has more than 40 years’ experience helping organisations achieve greater productivity, efficiency and performance. He serves as the Director of the Dean’s Advisory Board at the Telfer School of Management and Director of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Global and Community Engagement in Canada. You can email him at dwight@effectivemanagers.com.

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