“…every effort will be made to create an institutional climate that values and supports the healthy and productive exchange of ideas, beliefs, and practices in a manner that treats everyone with respect, courtesy, and appreciation and where a diverse population can live and work in an atmosphere of tolerance and respect for the rights and dignity of each individual.”

Excerpt from the PSU
Professional Standards of Conduct

In Brief …
To See Ourselves as Others See Us
(Published by Society for Human Resource Management and reprinted in part with permission.)

A 2006 survey by a staffing firm found that most managers think pretty highly of their management skills. Fully 92 percent of those surveyed said they are excellent or good bosses. But when you ask their direct reports, you get a different story: Only 67 percent of employees surveyed gave their managers a good rating, and 10 percent said their bosses do a poor job. Given that only about 25 percent of employees are given the opportunity to formally review their managers’ performance—and 73 percent of that group say they believe their feedback is taken seriously—it may not be surprising that most bosses are clueless about what employees really think of their management skills.

Robert Morgan, chief operating officer at Hudson Talent Management, says performance reviews don’t provide a complete picture of a manager’s performance if there is no input from employees. “Not only are 360-degree reviews a good opportunity to assess an employee’s capabilities as a manager, but they also let workers know that their opinions are valued, regardless of where they sit in the organization,” he says.

Although none of the managers surveyed said they are doing a poor job, plenty of them did admit that they could use some help, with 26 percent claiming they receive inadequate training for their managerial responsibilities.

The survey, conducted for professional staffing and talent management company Hudson by research firm Rasmussen Reports LLC, also asked workers to speculate on what would happen if their boss left the company. Although 41 percent of respondents said it was very or somewhat likely that they would be offered the newly available job, only 54 percent of those employees actually wanted it. That figure jumped to 65 percent among those making more than $75,000 annually. Current managers were more interested in moving into their former boss’s job than non-managers—62 percent vs. 46 percent. However, older employees—ages 50 to 64—were less interested in management than those in their 30s—47 percent vs. 61 percent.

The Trick to Managing Diverse Work Teams

“ One of the most interesting recent findings in the area of work-team performance is that the mere presence of diversity you can see, such as a person’s race or gender, actually cues a team in that there are likely to be differences of opinion. That cuing turns out to enhance the team’s ability to handle conflict, because members expect it and are not surprised when it surfaces,” writes Stanford professor Margaret Neale in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2005, written with coauthor Cornell professor Elizabeth Mannix.

A more homogeneous team won’t handle conflict as well because the team doesn’t expect it, according to Neale. “The assumption is that people who look like us think like us,” she writes, “but that’s usually not the case.”

Overall, group conflict can help teams be more innovative—as long as it’s the right kind of conflict. The secret lies in managing diversity well. A good manager will encourage intellectual conflict, debate and controversy, researchers say, but will discourage personality conflict. Another area in which conflict “will generally destroy a team,” Neale warns, is the area of goals and values. “Managers simply must get team members to be in agreement about what the task is and the values that drive its pursuit.”