Who's Bossing the Bosses?
If the most important factor affecting staff engagement is the quality of a person's manager, companies must get better at managing the managers, says HR guru Andrew O'Keeffe
August 5, 2009 — Most organizations are in sweat denial. It's like a cosy club where the power players agree to turn a blind eye and fiddle around the edges. Middle managers protect their managers. Top leaders don't know what's going on down below.
According to a Corporate Leadership Council study, the single most important factor affecting staff engagement is the quality of a person's manager, and another study found that 80 percent of people who resign from their jobs do so because they can't stand their boss. A Gallup poll revealed recently that nearly 25 percent of all employees in the U.S. would fire their boss if given the chance.
Yet according to former IBM human resources executive Andrew O'Keeffe, most organizations avoid fixing the biggest internal restraint on their business — lifting the capability of their managers and holding the managers to account for their people responsibilities.
O'Keeffe is author of the new novel, "The Boss
While at IBM and as a senior human resources executive at such organizations as Optus, Sinclair Knight Merz and Hewitt Associates, O'Keeffe says that he worked closely with a range of bosses. While writing The Boss, O'Keeffe talked to a large number of people. Almost everyone, he says, had their own boss story to tell, and people always told their stories with emotion — anger, frustration, hurt, despair, amazement, joy and humor. Some of those stories provided content for his book.
"There is a light bulb that needs to be turned on to overcome a fundamental blind spot," said O'Keeffe, who today is a human resources consultant. "We don't realize, or don't acknowledge, that the relationship people have with their boss is emotional. We have attended to the issue of management as though it is rational — it's not. It's emotional. When you ask people about their boss, as I have done, you get an instant emotional reaction — good or bad. I rarely received a neutral response."
So why a novel? "The reason I wrote The Boss
O'Keeffe believes that companies can systematically lift the quality of managers in their organizations and reduce the negative emotional response and sapping of staff energy by following five simple rules.
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