Manager-Employee Relationship and Performance

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Other than our families, we spend more time and focus more energy interacting with our managers than any other single individual person in our daily lives. This degree of intimacy between the manager and employee creates a relationship that closely resembles that of other relationships in our lives and like those other relationships contains a degree of trust. This relationship, between the manager and the employee forms one of the essential bases for employee job performance.

While a well-written job description may tell managers and employees the what, when, how, and even where the work is done, it is the manager that creates the performance environment of the job. It is within this performance environment that the employee has to perform their duties and to the expected level. As with any other relationship, to be successful, the trust relationship must be a two-way bond between the manager and the employee. Moreover, it is within this performance environment that trust between the manager and employee must exist if both are to achieve their mutual performance goals.

The Manager-Employee Relationship is not a zero-sum game, rather it is highly probable that all parties can and often do win in their efforts to reach their mutual goals. The degree of the “win” for each party may not always be 100%, thus it is possible for one party to win 75% and the other 50% of their respective goals. While those goals may be different for each party involved, nethertheless, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider the situation of a Call Center Manager and a Customer Service Representative; we assume that both have the common goal to remain employed. Beyond that initial assumption, the manager’s goal may be to demonstrate their managerial effectiveness, achieve a higher degree of responsibility, and thus a promotion. Whereas the CSR may wish to handle efficiently the day’s calls, get to their evening undergraduate class, graduate, and pursue a teaching career.

Within the Manager-Employee Relationship, trust is one of several catalysts that promote employee performance. The Call Center Manager cannot and should not monitor every call taken by the CSR’s under their supervision, that action would not be an effective use of the manager’s time. Nevertheless, the manager has to monitor enough calls to reach a trust level with each individual CSR. Our manager may not have a choice in how many calls to monitor, since that decision is often established by the organization for all CSR teams. However, very quickly, our manager will learn which CSR’s are performing and which are not, thus building a degree of trust or not in the CSR’s performance. Here, trust is another word for reliability.

Since we have declared that trust, i.e., reliability, is a two-way relationship feature, our CSR will quickly learn to trust their manager or not. As with the manager, the CSR’s trust is earned through their day-to-day interactions with their immediate manager. In the same way that our manager monitors the actions of the CSR’s, the CSR’s are observing how our manager interacts with our future teacher and their fellow CSR’s. If our manger deals fairly with our CSR’s, even on disciplinary issues, trust will be built between the manager and individual CSR’s. This increases the likilhood that individual CSR performance will reach or even exceed the desired levels. As will all relationships, ongoing maintenance of trust is vital to the continued achievement of our manager’s and CSR’s mutual goals.