Lisa Haneberg on standards for managers, including:

Managers ought to have the courage to make tough decisions and solve difficult problems.

I agree, but consider this story. During a meeting to discuss our strategic plan, one of my colleagues asked, “What’s the biggest problem for managers around here?”

Before any of us could respond, he went to the whiteboard and wrote his answer:

C R U C I F I X I O N

He was right.

Lisa correctly focuses her attention on middle managers, but if we’ve learned anything from Enron it’s that a company’s culture can require heroic efforts from employees to simply do the right thing. And the cultural environment, while impacted by middle managers and employees, is really determined at the top.

Standards are good. We need them for managers and we really need them for leaders.

I’ve been searching for an article written by Jim Collins in the April 1999 issue of Inc. Magazine. The title was “When good managers manage too much.” What grabbed my attention was the tease on the cover, “How to know when you’ve hired the wrong person,” and the subtitle should have been, “And what to do about it!” The answer is, you get rid of them

Today, I came across an interesting entry on Don Blohowiak’s Leadership Now blog:

“What are the most pressing problems facing your business today?” That’s a question my good friend Michael Hudson, Ph.D., put to managers in a wide variety of businesses across the USA.

“Surprisingly,” Michael writes, “the most frequent answer is not recruiting or retaining people. It is, in fact, the exact opposite: How to get rid of the people who don’t belong.”

Blohowiak cites Hudson’s plan for “making sure you have the right people on the bus.” It’s a good approach, but very difficult to implement anywhere, especially in public enterprises. I wonder how Hudson and Blohowiak think about evaluating your team members for performance and values?