This is not a fun time to be a corporate manager. Even if you aren’t worried about losing your own job, you’re probably concerned about laying people off who work for you.
You start thinking to yourself, “No one ever trained me for this. What do I say? How do I act when I have to break the news to them? Can I answer their questions? How will they react? What happens if someone ‘loses it’ during our conversation?”
Too often, a manager’s own leadership development skills are based on the behaviors of people they worked for at one time in their careers. While it may not be totally analogous to the child who grows up in a dysfunctional family and then mimics their parent’s behavior as an adult, I think you get the picture.
If this is the way some managers learn to lead, how do we fix it?
In professional sports, athletes spend thousands of hours at their craft away from the playing field. They become better at what they do through arduous training sessions, lots of repetition, studying, and just plain hard work. For every game a professional athlete plays, they practice and train 10 times longer. If we want our corporate managers to be the best at what they do, shouldn’t we be taking a page from professional athletes and invest in our managers through proper training and teaching?
Of course the answer is yes, but the reality is that when corporate budgets are cut, what is one of the first items to get the ax? You’ve got it—management and leadership training. When you take a step back and think about it rationally, the most critical time to invest in your management team is when the business is not going well. That’s the time you need your professionals to lead, manage, and be engaged with other employees. This is when you discover who the real leaders are in an organization.
We go to college and train people to become engineers, teachers, analysts, accountants and scores of other professions. We train people to be firefighters, policemen, mechanics, plumbers and other critical skilled professionals. But we forget that once we become professionals, corporations don’t spend a lot of time training us on how to manage and lead others.
We need to re-think the way we look at managers. No more jokes about the Peter Principle. No more assumptions that just because an employee did a great job in a previous position, that same person will make a great manager.
Corporate America is filled with managers who use their time inefficiently, put themselves before the people they manage, and make decisions that are solely based either on emotion or are so analytical, they fail to consider human emotions at all.
I recently read that corporations spend about $1,000 per employee each year on training management/leadership training. If that is the case, it is no wonder we are having trouble developing leaders. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to reinvest in our infrastructure. Isn’t it time to start reinvesting in our future leaders of Corporate America?
Welcome to the Empowering Employers and The Survey Says blog by F&H Solutions Group.
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I’m calling in sick to play golf
How many people work for companies that allow its employees to accrue sick leave each month, capped at a certain number of days? OK, you can put your hands down. Nearly everyone raised their hands.
Do you know anyone who has called in sick when they were perfectly healthy? Maybe they caught Spring Fever and wanted to play golf, or needed a “mental health day”.
Call me old fashioned, but I was brought up to believe that sick leave was to be used only when you were actually sick. In my book, if you call in sick when otherwise healthy, you’re being dishonest. Sick leave isn’t meant to be used so you can sleep in, get an extra day off before or after the weekend, or maybe even tack on a couple of days to a vacation.
Yes, I know the responses.
“Sick leave is a ‘use or lose it’ benefit, so if I don’t take my sick days, I will lose them when I retire or take another job.”
How about this one?
“If my employer paid me for my sick days when I left, then I wouldn’t have to take them.”
We’ve all heard someone say,
“I had a doctor’s appointment or a parent-teacher conference at school so I needed to use my sick leave because my company doesn’t give me any time off.”
While I would agree that not every employer is always willing to help an employee with taking time off for a doctor’s appointment or a parent-teacher conference, in many instances, it is possible to schedule around someone’s work schedule.
Sick leave is not an entitlement like vacation, it is an insurance policy. Employers provide the benefit so you don’t come to work sick and you get paid for staying home to get healthy.
Think of it like life insurance. Most employers provide you with basic life insurance coverage, but you wouldn’t think of using the benefit, would you? If you do use the benefit, it means you’re dead. In the case of sick leave, shouldn’t you only be using the benefit when you’re actually sick?
Not only is calling in sick when healthy wrong, misuse of sick leave can get you fired. It is also inconsiderate to other collegues. If you are a shift worker, when you are out sick, someone else is going to have to cover your shift, either through mandatory overtime or getting called in on a day off. I am betting that the person calling in sick when healthy doesn’t ever think about the inconvenience to his or her fellow employee.
At most companies, only a small percentage of people who call in sick are being dishonest. The problem is that lost time costs are enormously expensive to the employer. The most conservative estimates of lost time are that for every day someone is not at work, the costs run between 2 and 5 times someone’s pay. If that sounds extreme, think about paying the person who called in sick, the person who had to be called in from home, the overtime, the lost productivity, and the administrative burden on the employer to track the lost time.
Now, let’s say you work for a company with 10,000 employees. The average wage is $15 per hour, and 10 percent of the work force calls in sick each year. Another 20 percent take FMLA, and another 2 percent are out on workers compensation or disability. The average number of days out due to absences are 5 per year. The cost to this employer can run from $4 million to about $20 million a year.
What employee wouldn’t prefer to have at least some of that money in their pocket?
Do you know anyone who has called in sick when they were perfectly healthy? Maybe they caught Spring Fever and wanted to play golf, or needed a “mental health day”.
Call me old fashioned, but I was brought up to believe that sick leave was to be used only when you were actually sick. In my book, if you call in sick when otherwise healthy, you’re being dishonest. Sick leave isn’t meant to be used so you can sleep in, get an extra day off before or after the weekend, or maybe even tack on a couple of days to a vacation.
Yes, I know the responses.
“Sick leave is a ‘use or lose it’ benefit, so if I don’t take my sick days, I will lose them when I retire or take another job.”
How about this one?
“If my employer paid me for my sick days when I left, then I wouldn’t have to take them.”
We’ve all heard someone say,
“I had a doctor’s appointment or a parent-teacher conference at school so I needed to use my sick leave because my company doesn’t give me any time off.”
While I would agree that not every employer is always willing to help an employee with taking time off for a doctor’s appointment or a parent-teacher conference, in many instances, it is possible to schedule around someone’s work schedule.
Sick leave is not an entitlement like vacation, it is an insurance policy. Employers provide the benefit so you don’t come to work sick and you get paid for staying home to get healthy.
Think of it like life insurance. Most employers provide you with basic life insurance coverage, but you wouldn’t think of using the benefit, would you? If you do use the benefit, it means you’re dead. In the case of sick leave, shouldn’t you only be using the benefit when you’re actually sick?
Not only is calling in sick when healthy wrong, misuse of sick leave can get you fired. It is also inconsiderate to other collegues. If you are a shift worker, when you are out sick, someone else is going to have to cover your shift, either through mandatory overtime or getting called in on a day off. I am betting that the person calling in sick when healthy doesn’t ever think about the inconvenience to his or her fellow employee.
At most companies, only a small percentage of people who call in sick are being dishonest. The problem is that lost time costs are enormously expensive to the employer. The most conservative estimates of lost time are that for every day someone is not at work, the costs run between 2 and 5 times someone’s pay. If that sounds extreme, think about paying the person who called in sick, the person who had to be called in from home, the overtime, the lost productivity, and the administrative burden on the employer to track the lost time.
Now, let’s say you work for a company with 10,000 employees. The average wage is $15 per hour, and 10 percent of the work force calls in sick each year. Another 20 percent take FMLA, and another 2 percent are out on workers compensation or disability. The average number of days out due to absences are 5 per year. The cost to this employer can run from $4 million to about $20 million a year.
What employee wouldn’t prefer to have at least some of that money in their pocket?
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