🔒How To: See value in negative role models

My first manager spoiled me. He looked out for me, pushed me to succeed and left me alone. He made it a point to constructively correct bad behavior, and was always there with public praise for a job done well.

My next manager was horrendous. I don't mean like what you read about in Bad Manager Monthly, I mean the stuff that's not published anywhere because no one would believe it. He pitted employees against each other, forbade his group to even eat lunch with other groups, and rewrote the book on micromanagement.

Without realizing it at the time, I'd received a fantastic, completely unintended, set of lessons. I'd learned at least a dozen things to not do as a manager. Let me illustrate the two most important ones.

The first lesson was that one should never treat employees as if they all have the same set of skills, same level of intelligence, same motivation triggers, etc., and never assume they're exactly like you.

Let's say that you have two employees who both graduated from the same university with the same GPA. While one could see these people were similar, it would be an assumption fraught with danger. What motivates them? Is it money, projects, career mobility? How do they envision their career path? Do they want to run the company or just contribute? The answers to these critical questions can't be assumed. They can only be determined by asking the employees, point blank.

The second lesson I learned was that no one wants to under-perform. Nobody arrives at their job thinking, “I can't wait to mess up and get in trouble.” If the employee performs poorly for an extended period of time, quite probably it's because the manager never constructively said to the employee, “You're under-performing. We both know it. Let's fix it.”

I can speak to under-performance as both an employee and a manager. Under Mr. Horrendous, I did very poorly. I wasn't given any constructive feedback, no direction, just criticism. But I owe thanks to him for my departure, because I moved on to my next job where I've been for 23 years.

Three years after leaving, I became a manager. One of my first employees was dramatically under-performing and in danger of being let go. I liked him and felt I could help, so I decided to do something about it.

His personal life was a disaster and quite likely the root of his sub-par performance. I wanted to tell him that he needed to clean up his home life to get his career in shape, but our HR representative advised against it. Still, I couldn't get over the fact that there was no logical reason not to try. So I devised a simple plan, a discussion outside the company's walls. We took a walk “off-campus” and had lunch. In very constructive terms, I told him my observations as a friend, not a manager, and he actively agreed. I told him the consequences of continued poor performance very clearly. He understood. I got through to him.

To this day, more than 20 years later, he's still with the company as a perennial high performer.

All it took was a 10-minute walk, a sandwich and a short conversation. This was something I'd learned, first hand, by experiencing the opposite of what I'd just done to help. Empathy and concern work better than disdain and disinterest.

These lessons became the basis for my people management successes. Trust me when I say that I haven't forgotten from whence those lessons came. They were born of a negative role model, though one to whom I am eternally grateful, for without his inexplicably bad management practices I may never have become who I am today — a manager still in touch with many former employees, all of whom are successful and happy.

Rob Levine is a software manager with two decades experience at Oracle, most recently as senior development manager. He is also a member of the Association for Consulting Expertise, or ACE. He can be reached at rolevine@gmail.com