Be More Competitive with Self-Management: How Talent management Can Create Dependency and Poor Performance Long-term

There is an important distinction between self- management and manger-dependent management. Most organizations have a manager-dependent environment. This is when the manager must provide feedback to employees in order to create improved performance.

A manager-dependent environment encourages employees wait to receive ideas for improvement from their managers before making any significant changes in performance. This type of environment creates more fear and less innovation. Self-Management increases employee engagement. Employees create their own feedback mechanisms and can act autonomously. This accelerates the decisions and therefore accelerates the ability to adapt to changes.

When my daughter Emily was 12, one morning she missed her school bus. She was very upset and came downstairs to my office crying, “Dad, I missed the bus. Can you take me to school?” Of course I agreed but then asked her a question, “what do you need to do to catch the bus on your own from now on?’ She looked at me in a thoroughly confused manner. At that moment I was not sure she could think of an idea.

When she arrived home that afternoon she said, “Dad, I thought about what you asked. If you buy me a timer I will set it 5 minutes before the bus arrives and if it goes off I will know I only have 5 minutes left. I can then easily catch the bus.”

I told her that sounded great. I also asked her what else she could do to be prepared in the morning. She said she would set her books out by the front door right before bed time. For the next 2-1/2 years she used this method and always caught the bus on time. She self-managed her ability to catch the bus by creating and following her own process.

To become more highly competitive organizations must ask employees to make more decisions on their own. A new book about the virtues of talent management has just been published. It reinforces the Jack Welch management methods. Welch insisted on providing frequent honest feedback with complete candor. In my experience managers don't have that kind of time to provide frequent feedback. They don’t have time to constantly be observing the employees. My point is managers should instead rely more on employee, trust them more, and facilitate them creating their own answers to their own problems just as my daughter was able to identify a way to catch her bus.

In order for employees to figure out ways to manage and measure their own performance, a leader needs to recognize that the existence of an authoritative structure, an authoritative policy like performance evaluations, and a management orthodoxy like talent management all work together to sustain a dysfunctional environment that prevents self-management from flourishing.

Effective managers should stop employees when they ask questions that perpetuate manager-dependency. Instead managers need to be courageous and trust that employees can create their own solutions. This requires courage because performance may suffer in the short run but the payoff in the long-term is worth it.

A leader’s first responsibility is to create an environment of autonomy. Talent management means a ranking of employees, rewarding the top performers and “yanking out” the poorer performers. This policy and practice creates unnecessary competition minimizing the opportunity for innovation.

Courageous leaders allow people to make decisions within the proper context. A leader can clarify the vision and the purpose of the organization. Then by clarifying the strategic initiatives a leader can allow employees to create their own goals and objective. These goals can be aligned with the strategic initiatives to move the organization closer to that mission and vision. The autonomy is created and with autonomy comes choice. With choice comes engagement. With engagement comes performance. Self-management must replace manager-dependent management.