Creativity at Work: A Free Introduction to the 7 Work Traits
The creativity trait measures a person’s need for inventiveness and original ideas. Creativity (CR) is the trait which tells us why some people enjoy experimenting,…
Management Mistakes to Avoid in 2025
Promoting people out of the area in which they excel.
Consider a highly effective accountant. Someone who is able to process invoices and other financial documents error free and very quickly. Despite being the member of the accounting team who completes their responsibilities the quickest, they are also the team member who produces the fewest errors. They are far and away the most talented member of the accounting team, and to ensure that they stay with your organization as long as possible, you decide to reward them. Not with increased compensation, a bonus, or paid time off, but with a promotion to Accounting Manager.
Suddenly, the performance of the accounting team begins to decline. Why would this occur when the most talented person is in charge? Because the person who previously was the source of the team’s high performance is no longer responsible for that work. They are responsible for the people doing the work. They are responsible for ensuring that the people doing the work are properly motivated, have access to the right software and equipment, and for coordinating those efforts. This role requires a completely different skillset than the one in which they were talented. By promoting a talented technical worker to a management role, you’ve effectively gotten rid of your top performer, and hired a poor performing manager.
When looking to reward and retain top performers, consider whether a different reward structure might be more motivating than a change in roles.
Getting distracted by the wrong things at interview.
When hiring for a particular role, our stated intention is to place the best person for the job in that role. Unlike identifying the tallest person in a group, there is no single measuring stick that can quantify the best person for the job with perfect accuracy. Instead, we look at a variety of different imperfect measuring sticks and come to a more holistic conclusion about suitability to the role: resumes, experience, education, references, assessments, and of course, interviews.
While one of the most salient elements of the recruitment process, job interviews are known to be poor predictors of job performance
A variety of factors contribute to the poor reliability of interviews. Unconscious biases towards certain demographics in certain roles can lead to unintentional discrimination. Confirmation bias – the tendency to only look for evidence that supports existing beliefs – can cause an interviewer to give an overly generous assessment of a candidate who shares their alma mater or favorite sports team.
One factor that I don’t think gets talked about enough is affinity bias, or what I like to call the “charismatic candidate effect.” In short, if an interviewer enjoys their time interacting with a candidate, that candidate is more likely to be hired than an otherwise equivalent candidate who seems anxious or uncomfortable.
As a result, job interviews – particularly unstructured interviews – tend to be biased to favor highly sociable, extroverted candidates who are good at making other people like them. This may not be a problem if affability is part of the role, such as in sales or customer service. When job interviews favor charismatic candidates for highly analytical, detail-oriented roles that involve a lot of alone time and individualized work however, this bias can lead to hiring someone poorly suited to the job, as their natural desire for interaction conflicts with the role requirements.
While not completely immune to biases, structured behavioural interviews can help reduce the amount of role irrelevant information taken into account.
Delegating management down.
A common refrain in management is that the best teams essentially manage themselves with minimal input from their superiors. Your role as a people manager is to ensure that your direct reports have the resources, opportunity, and ability to get the job done, on time, and under budget.
When a skilled manager is able to create the culture and conditions that allow these goals to be met with minimal input, that manager has also put themself in the desirable position where they have a high-prestige, low-stress job. Many unskilled managers that I’ve encountered in my life recognize that this is a desirable state of affairs, but seem to confuse cause and effect in terms of how this culture comes to be.
Rather than creating a self-managing team and a culture of accountability through careful hiring, coaching, staffing, etc., bad managers seem to simply demand that these conditions already exist.
Consider a manager in a brick-and-mortar business such as a restaurant. When a frontline worker calls out sick, this manager tells them they need to find coverage for their shift before their scheduled start time. When the employee is unable to find coverage and still intends to recuperate as stated, the manager is now down a body for dinner service that evening, so they need to personally pick up the slack.
To ensure this doesn’t happen again, the manager cuts the employee’s hours, giving them fewer opportunities to disappoint, and a greater motivation to value the few hours that they do get. In turn, the employee eventually resigns for a new job. The manager thinks to himself “good riddance,” and begins looking for a replacement.
The role needs to be filled somewhat urgently, as they do not have enough bodies to cover all working hours. As a result, they rush through the recruitment process and hire someone who consistently creates tension with other employees. This new sense of hostility leads to further resignations, the manager concludes “this is just a high turnover business, nothing can be done,” and the perpetual cycle of putting out fires with gasoline continues.
While the manager in this scenario likely thinks they have a disloyal, inconsiderate staff, the root of their problem is their unwillingness to take responsibility for the performance of their team and instead delegate their own responsibilities down.
As people managers, our job is to create and maintain effective teams. In a vacuum, when a team is not effective, it’s easy to recognize that the most likely source of the problem is whoever put the team together. When evaluating our own teams, however, it is sometimes challenging to take accountability, and we end up playing the blame game.
But being a people manager is about more than just holding individuals accountable for their performance, it’s about creating the conditions that allow and encourage people to do their best. When you do that, management becomes less about holding individuals accountable, and more about ensuring that these desirable conditions persist.I’m reminded of the following quote:
“When you don’t pay your mortgage, you have a problem. When nobody pays their mortgage, the bank has a problem.”
Indeed, we can apply this same logic to management, or really any hierarchical structure:
“When a direct report is underperforming, they need to be held accountable. When all direct reports are underperforming, you need to be held accountable.”
Looking for more structured behavioural interview resources? Click here to explore!
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