Recently, there have been a number of articles in Middle Eastern publications highlighting the importance of team building for companies in the United Arab Emirates and other GCC countries. Facilitated team building can make a significant contribution to corporate performance. Team building is relatively new in GCC countries. This is the perfect opportunity to emulate best practices and learn from the mistakes of companies in other countries.
Even the most experienced managers, supervisors, or executives forget about the Law of Unintended Consequences, which says that for every change or action, there are both positive consequences (which, obviously the manager wants), and negative unintended consequences (which the manager doesn’t want). Learn more about this common and often catastrophic situation.
Mary is the head of a realty/real estate company. She decides to create a contest, where the real estate agent that sells the most property (in dollars), will receive a ten thousand dollar bonus. Makes sense. Motivation. Incentive.
Performance appraisals are probably the most misused, and goofed-up management tool in existence. Starting from misunderstanding the whole point of appraisals, right on through to use of poor communication with employees, managers make a fairly consistent set of mistakes about employee reviews , and performance appraisals. Here’s some of them in the fourth in our series of common managerial mistakes.
Since there are a fair number of errors made by managers in the performance appraisal and employee review process, we’ll approach this set in brief point form. Stay tuned since we’ll be dealing with a few more performance appraisal errors in a future article in this series. Until then here’s the first five.
It’s not surprising that managers try to improve productivity and employee effectiveness by exhorting staff to “try harder”, or to make more of an effort in their jobs. It’s a natural human tendency to assume that the simple act of trying harder will result in better results, but more times than not, the assumption is incorrect.
Learn more about this common managerial mistake, its pitfalls, and what to do about it
In our often Western dominated organizational thinking, we attribute a lot of employee success (and our own success) to “trying harder”, or “working harder”. This assumption about the relationship of effort to effectiveness is often incorrect, since there are many more powerful forced that influence results.
Managers often get caught up in the idea that “if only employees would try harder, or work harder, we’d get far better results”. Caught in this incorrect assumption, they rely on exhortation of employees to improve productivity. It doesn’t usually work, and it can end up backfiring.
Managers, influenced by the “employee empowerment” buzz of the late ’90′s sometimes place too much emphasis on insisting that ALL employees exercise more power, discretion and decision-making in their jobs. The result can be the appearance of indecisiveness on the part of managers, and a desire, on the part of employees, to be “left alone” to do their jobs within a more limited scope. Learn how to avoid this common error on employee empowerment.
As a result of the encouragement of management gurus in the late 1990′s empowerment became a state of affairs of value in and of itself. While having employees capable and willing to make decisions and act on their own is a good situation, some managers have taken the concept too far.
Often, the only path to career advancement involves promotion to a higher level in the organization — to a supervisory, managerial, or executive position. However, not everyone is suited to, or understands that being promoted to such a position means that one automatically is expected to lead those that are “underneath” in the hierarchy.
It’s not uncommon for people to accept such a promotion, without understanding the leadership responsibilities, or without a willingness to carry them out.