Capable Managers Make a Difference Forum

Vancouver, B.C.

The Pacific Management Community presented a management forum in Vancouver B.C. on May 13 and 14, 2003. The forum sold out in just one day and there were 105 managers on the waitlist. Held at the state of the art Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, over 150 managers were in attendance. The speaker line up was very impressive and the overall evaluations showed that 98% of participants rated the forum as either good or excellent.

Bob Chartier spoke on Organizational Learning, delivered a workshop on "Leading From The Middle," and facilitated a "Talk Show" on horizontal issues. Paul Lefebvre delivered workshops on "Leadership Coaching." Paul Glover, a Regional Director from Health Canada provided a national perspective. Keynote speakers included Dr. James Reese who spoke on "Success Without Stress," and Dr. Linda Duxbury delivered a presentation on "Capable Managers - The Scarcest Resource." Both received standing ovations for their inspiring, humorous and insightful presentations. Marilyn Hay closed the forum with a "Survival Kit for Managers."

The following are highlights from the forum speakers. Thanks to Edward Peck, from INAC for his conference notes.

Paul Glover, Regional Director, Health Canada
The National Perspective

Paul, currently leading his departments' initiative on workplace health and human resources development, began by talking about the significant impact "HR" modernization is going to have on the management community. Workload in this community is a huge issue - one only has to look at the results of the public service survey that points out how many individuals stay well beyond their normal hours of work. Paul went on to say that this is a very serious problem and is not sustainable. When managers work long hours it sends an absolutely wrong message to their employees. Managers need to lead by example in this area. HR modernization should make some significant changes in this area.

Paul felt that these same managers needed focus to create an environment that simplifies tasks and allows individuals to challenge processes. He asked the workshop participants to consider a series of important questions:

• What am I modeling?
• What am I doing to take care of myself?
• What am I doing to support my staff?
• What am I doing about the culture or environment I work in?

He went on to discuss many other issues around renewal, and the need to address the large percentage of individuals who will be leaving the service in the next few years through retirement. "We will need to do something both about our image as employers and the quality of our work environment if we are going to attract the individuals we need," he said.

Dr. James T Reese - "Success without Stress"

Dr. Reese is an American expert on preventing violence, coping with change and stress management. He can be found presenting to fortune 500 companies, testifying on stress before the US Congress or lecturing to President George Bush's Council. 

Dr. Reese began his talk on stress by suggesting that success does not come in "can'ts!" He elaborated on this by suggesting that the greatest leaders in the world are all servants and the question everyone in the room needs to ask of themselves is "who have you served today?" Work is a way of serving and if you are serving others you will need to ask yourself, would I want to work for me? Managers need to think about how they can "increase the value of you to the end user of you." In other words "it is not how much you make but how much your serve that is important."

The next element of addressing stress is one of balance and Dr. Reese suggested that "too often we are whispering what is most important in life into the ears of the dead." We need to make sure that we pay attention to all areas of our life the spiritual; the familial; the personal and the occupational; nutritional; physical; and emotional. Success then is not in your job but in your ability to balance all areas of your life. He suggested that one in four individuals at work are either depressed or under severe stress and unable to balance their lives. His advice for gaining better balance is to look at anger as something that will kill you if you indulge in it; he spoke of a number of studies that indicate angry people live shorter lives. When he gets angry at something his first question to himself is "is this the hill I want to die on?" He went on to talk about how competition can contribute to anger and suggested that real competition is not with others but with yourself. This kind of competition rarely results in anger.

Goals were also important to a balanced life and knowing where you are going. He suggested that "if you don't know where you are going then you are already there." Dr Reese said that it is very curious that we know our history and spend the time to prepare our wills but often forget to set goals for ourselves. He suggested that goals are really dreams with deadlines and that it is "not your salary that makes you rich but what you do with your salary." He spent a great deal of time talking about how important it is to honour those who love you, and to take the time now to be with them.

His closing advice was "take the time to think; spend time gathering information; stay focused and don't be distracted by others plans; create paths don't always follow the trail; motivate those around you; and remember that success requires responsible behaviour."

"Manage your resources but lead your people."

Dr. Linda Duxbury - Capable Managers the Scarcest Resource

Linda Duxbury has done extensive research on the Public Service and work life balance and has received the Public Service Citation from the Association of Public Service Executives for her work on supportive work environments.

Dr. Duxbury began her address by suggesting that the clerical ranks of the civil service at one time was the worst place to work, and through hard work this is being turned around. Unfortunately the worst place to work now is in the field of Management. In this field the average workweek is 51 hours and over the month they take home an additional four more days of unpaid overtime. Unfortunately most of the operational issues dominate this time, leaving very little time for people issues.

In her studies they have discovered that there are three types of manager's: supportive managers, unsupportive managers; and mixed managers (the later move back and forth between the first two types).

The characteristics of supportive managers are as follows:

• give positive feedback;
• are good listeners;
• respect their employees;
• focus on output not hours;
• are consistent in their behaviour; and
• coach or mentor those that report to them.

The most difficult manager to work for is the mixed manager (49% of our public service managers) these are often the individuals who:

• do not have the training in the soft skills;
• are not rewarded for being supportive;
• frequently concentrate on the operations side of their work;
• micro-manage;
• lust for power; and

are highly likely to use prescription drugs or alcohol or sick leave to cope with their situation.

The good news is that mixed managers can be transformed to supportive managers, minimizing the impact of the 10% of managers that are unsupportive. She characterized this group as jerks but ones who are consistent about being jerks.

To illustrate the problem Linda cited a psychotherapist who discovered that many of the problem employees that were being referred to him were quite normal. In looking into the phenomena he discovered that it was the people doing the referring that were sick. In other words, she said you literally had to be schizophrenic to be a manager sometimes.

How have we come to create a large number of mixed managers? Linda suggested that the current system seems to reward this behaviour and punish managers who build supportive environments. This means that managers are being discouraged from focusing on people skills such as negotiations or team building. Even if this became the focus there would still be trouble because managers are generally not getting trained and if they do get training it is never consistent. Linda when on to suggest that the skills that managers need most are negotiation skills, project management skills, communications skills (both the communication of positive and negative information) and planning skills. The only way that to encourage these skills in managers is to link managerial advancement to cultural support, appropriate hours of work, etc.

She went on to suggest that managers no longer believe that the culture will change for the better. There have been too many failed attempts in the last 10 years as illustrated by the example of the enormous amount of energy consumed in the failed UCS initiative. Therefore incremental change is no longer going to work and there is no choice but to use transformational change to modify the current unsustainable culture of the public service. Change will have to be top down to ensure it is properly resourced and to do this both charismatic leaders and instrumental leaders will be needed. The former energizes and motivates people and the later knows how to move people towards their goals. This change will also have to be sustained over time as she points out that 70% of people are passive resistors. So the current habit of rotating Deputy Ministers and other leaders every few years will not facilitate such a change, as most individuals will just wait for the next changing of the guard.

Marilyn Hay - Survival Kit for Managers

Marilyn is a Learning Associate from the Canadian Centre for Management Development. Marilyn has been the Director General for HRDC in Manitoba, with the La Releve Task Force, the Privy Council Office, and the Treasury Board.

Marilyn like many of the other presenters emphasized the need to keep your eyes on the end game and stay focused while making sure that you also have some fun. The question she posed to the group was "what are you doing to make yourself and the organization healthier, full of life, and grace?" Using voting technology of the Wosk Centre a number of questions were asked of the group. One of the questions that caused everyone to pause for a moment was "do you know what is expected of you at work." A very large majority of managers in the room did not know what the expectations were.

Marilyn went on to talk about that fact that we should not be spending our time "wishing ourselves to be voted of the island." One needs to make sure that you go out there and do those things that you want to do and not wait until tomorrow. She asked us all to then write down one big thing we could do that would make things better. Then she asked us to step forward into the future and experience what it would be like one when we had done this thing. From this perspective she then asked us to look back and see the steps that got us there. She commented on the process by saying that it was easier to look backward than forward, when you look forward you tend to see the barriers rather than what needs to be done.

Marilyn said that we need to make sure our commitments are clear in all areas of our life, and that too often we are also our own worst critic. We need to be good to ourselves and proud of what we do every single day.

Talk Show - Bob Chartier

On the second day in the afternoon Bob hosted a talk show with Bill Gardner from HRDC, Pablo Carpay from Veterans Affairs, Barbara Fulton from CCRA, and John Watson from INAC. The topic under discussion was Horizontal Issue Management.

Through this discussion the group looked at a number of cross-jurisdictional issues to examine what was truly a horizontal issue. Two examples used to illustrate that true horizontal issues made a real different, the "pace" program on the border and the homelessness program. In both these cases considerable thinking outside the box was necessary to ensure that the intergovernmental issues were addressed and everyone could buy into the process. The key characteristic in these two examples was that the organizations had to intertwine their operations.

One of the key elements to overcoming the barriers that exist in horizontal initiatives is the building of trust. The building of trust, John Watson went on to say, is usually a result of putting aside your preconceived ideas of what others issues might be and truly listening.

For more information on the Capable Managers Forum, visit the PMCC web site at: http://pcsfo.gc.ca/app/commit.cfm?commit=MIDMGR