Four Popular – but Really Bad – Ways to Manage Your Most Valuable Employees 

I’ve written many times before about how just about everything the experts recommend for boosting employee morale and productivity doesn’t work when it comes to executives and creative workers. In fact, most of the time, these practices only make things worse.

I will go into each of them in detail at some future point. (If you’re especially interested in any of the following, let me know and I’ll make sure to write about it.) But for the moment, I thought I should put them down briefly, in case you happen to be paying someone in your HR department to do any of it.

1. Making compensation entirely non-discretionary. In my early days as a manager of hundreds of people, I fell in love with compensation schemes that were automatic. Except for a few categories (line workers and certain kinds of salespeople), these were always problematic and required intervention by me to straighten out the problems. Later, I learned that my eagerness to adopt automatic rewards and salary increase schedules was motivated by my desire not to do what a manager must do: have many sometimes difficult conversations with all direct subordinates.

2. Being there for your employees’ personal problems. Being the boss is similar in several ways to being a parent. The most important: As a boss, your job is to boss. You can’t be a good boss and a good friend at the same time. Taking on that role may make you feel good temporarily. But you will end up causing yourself all sorts of awkward and unnecessary problems and causing your friend/employee to be angry with you.

3. Playing close attention to your employees’ work quality. If your job includes teaching your employees the initial ropes, take your time and do it properly. And as soon as that’s done, tell them that, from then on, it will be up to them to do their job well, to solve the problems they encounter, and to come to you with questions only when they have figured out a few possible solutions. To get the best out of anyone in a working/ creative environment, you have to make them responsible for doing their jobs by using their own intelligence and ingenuity. If you continue to hover, you will reduce your employees to mechanical devices and yourself to a line manager that can never move up in the ranks.

4. Employee-of-the-Year Awards. This may be the dumbest idea ever. I’ve encountered it several times in my career. And in every case, it turned out to be a disaster. I am confounded by what kind of idiot came up with this idea and what kind of idiot bosses thought/ think it’s a good one! It’s not hard to figure out what’s wrong with it: You make one good employee happy and dozens of equally good employees angry and possibly looking to work elsewhere.