Not every senior manager is a people manager

Davies Ndumiso Sibanda, Labour matters

One of the most difficult jobs in an organisation is when all senior managers wrongly think they are experts in people management and in the process reduce the human capital management executive to a manager who guides top management decision implementation without making any input.

Not every senior manager is a people manager. Experience has shown that most organisations’ people related problems are caused by chief executives who have no people management skills or heads of department with no people management skills.

It is very easy to tell a senior manager with no people management skills. The manager because of his lack of skills, publicly rebukes workers, insults them, humiliates them in front of others and at times threaten them with dismissal.

Statements like, “the gate is open, heads will roll, don’t say I think, thinking is not your job, you came here to work not to sleep. If you don’t want to work here pack and go, if you think you earn very little here go and look for a better employer”, become common. Such utterances are a confirmation of a manager who does not understand principles of effective people management.

On many occasions where we have been called to establish the cause of collective job action and suggest ways of minimising chances of collective job action into the future, the collective job action audits have shown that human capital specialists will have given advice which was ignored and the organisation then ran with the chief executive officer’s wrong advice or some other manager’s wrong advice.

The role of the chief executive in people management is to inspire people to meet organisation goals and get what they see as a fair exchange for their labour. Once there is a disconnect between the chief executive and the lowest graded employee in the organisation then organisation goals will not be met.

Some chief executives spend their energies assisting heads of departments to fight personal wars with workers and at times HODs compete to show the chief executive how tough they are at the same time paying a huge price in the form of loss of worker morale and productivity.

I once attended a party where we were celebrating the dismissal of our boss. It was interesting and somewhat embarrassing as attendees were fellow managers at the dismissed manager’s level and those of us in lower grades and people spoke freely about how the guy had captured the CEO and made other senior managers seek refuge within the lower grades.

Afterwards I called my team from human capital to discuss the people management lessons from the party and we discovered there were many.

When one is a senior manager, he should be firm and fair but recognise that each head of department has a role to play.

The manager should allow human capital experts to play a leading role in people management as this has great rewards.

The human capital expert knows when to push the workers, when to apologise to the workers, when to accept a lost battle with workers and many others.

One area of human capital management that should not be touched by CEOs who have not had proper training or heads of department who have not had proper training in labour relations is to sit on complex labour legislation, complex institutionary history, complex industry history, complex organisational dynamic and organisational politics requiring certain skills for one to navigate through.