Out with the Old and in with the New Model of Court Management: The Engaging Manager and Leader

 This is the first of a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees of a court who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work.

In Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager, authors Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist, lament that while both the science of management and  how people today work, live, and want to experience their lives has advanced, the practice of management has been stuck in time for more than 30 years. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees  did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astounding 70% of this  success. No other factor even came close.

Six Biggest Changes Organizations Should Make

From Paycheck to Purpose.  Material benefits such as compensation do not capture employee motivation, loyalty, connect personal interest and work, and inspire an employee to exert discretionary effort in their service to the organization. Employees reveal their engagement by arriving to work early, contributing constructive ideas in meetings, and volunteering for projects that help  to achieve the mission of the court. Especially for employees younger than 35, their work must have purpose and meaning, a mission. Compensation, of course, is still important; it must be fair, but it is no longer the primary motivation. The primary motivator has switched from paycheck to purpose and meaning. Sixty-eight percent of American workers reported that they would be willing to take a pay cut to work at a job that would allow them to  apply personal interests in their workplace.

Satisfaction to Development. Employees are not just after job satisfaction; they want development and personal growth.

Bosses to Coaches. The old management style of command and control – ordering employees to do things and controlling them by punishment if they fail – no longer gets results. Engaged employees want managers, supervisors, and team leaders who value them as individuals and employees, who help them to understand, to appreciate, and to value the organization, and who inspire them and help them build their strengths.  Gallup’s research suggests that employees expect managers to coach them primarily based on their strengths.

Annual Evaluations to Ongoing Conversations. How we communicate today is continuous and current – email, texting, tweeting, Skype, Zoom, and so on. Most of us today, not just employees under 35, are accustomed to constant communication and feedback, and this dramatically affects our workplace. Annual reviews and evaluations have never worked. According to Gallup’s research employees who receive daily feedback from their managers are three times more likely to be engaged than those who receive feedback once a year or less.

Weaknesses to Strengths. When a coworker asks us to review something, he/she has written or presented, we tend to look for mistakes or areas for improvement. We are hard-wired to critique others, to correct their weaknesses. But, as Gallup’s Clifton and Harter point out, while we may be hard-wired to give criticism, we clearly are not hard-wired to receive it. This science-based insight suggests why an emphasis on strengths is required to develop and inspire employee engagement.  In his 1966 book, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, the renowned management scholar Peter Drucker, who is widely regarded as the world’s most famous management consultant, asserted that a manager’s main job is to make employees’ strengths productive and their weaknesses irrelevant. Gallup research shows that weaknesses never develop into strengths, while strengths develop infinitely. That does not mean that managers should ignore weakness, but rather minimize them and maximize strengths.

Job to Life. As we discussed earlier, the average person spends more than half of his/her life at work. Employees are asking, “Does this court value my strengths and my contributions?” “Does it give me the chance to do what I do best every day?” For them, it’s not just a job – it’s their life.

Kindness and Empathy Make Good Business Sense

Sara Sabin, an entrepreneur, and transformational coach became a convert to the employee engagement model of management as she moved from the corporate world to founding start-ups. Writing in the March 11, 2021 Fast Company, she confessed that before her move that she did not associate kindness and empathy with getting ahead in business. Her belief was that kindness was not a valued “soft” skill and “authoritarian leadership” led to success. “I thought that this type of a leader was the best person to lead a growing team: someone who told people what to do (because they knew best), someone that shouted, when expectations weren’t met, someone who was uncooperative and aggressive, and someone who pushed and hustled,” she writes. She now sees employee engagement as good for business enabling innovation and promoting trust and loyalty.

How does this important finding based on rigorous science make it into today’s practice of court administration? How do we ensure that it does not fade into obscurity as other science-based management methods have (e.g., total quality management, the Deming Management Method, and open-book management)? As I write in a forthcoming article in The Court Administrator, a publication of the International Association for Court Administration, the problem is that no matter how much today’s workplace has changed, and no matter how much the science of management has advanced, the old model  of the “boss” as the successful  manager practicing command and control method has endured.

 Barriers to Change

Although supported by solid research, and although the concept of employee engagement is based in common sense – as an employee it seems self-evident that we are going to be more engaged with an organization that we feel is empathetic and, conversely, less engaged when we are browbeaten by bosses and fearful of making mistakes or, worse, losing our jobs -- the old management model of the -command and control boss is entrenched and resistant to change. The first barrier is cultural, specifically, the language used to describe the old and new models. In my teachings of court employee engagement around the world, I found that many judges and court administrators tend to describe autocratic managers in favorable terms such as “tough,” “strong,” and “decisive.” On the other hand, the measurement and management of human resources, in general, and surveying opinions of employee engagement is seen as “touchy feely,” “soft,” “subjective,” “squishy,“ and “not clear cut.” While this should not deter courts from developing employee engagement initiatives, it should lower expectations. The paradigm shift (a concept identified by the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn who I studied in graduate school) from the old to the new model of management anchored in employee engagement will require a change of management culture before an introduction and full-scale use of the tools introduced by Clifton and Harter of Gallup.

The next post in this series will focus on the measurement and management of court employee engagement.

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