Krauthammer Observatory: issue 2, 2008 - Full report* / Full executive summary*

Are you a manager of others –a project, a small team, a division, an entire organisation?
Are you seeking to
- better manage yourself?
- better evaluate the performance of your manager?
- detect and express your needs in a concrete and constructive way?
If you are an HR professional, are you tempted by the notion of reinstalling commonsense into management and leadership development?

This report gives you the focus, the concrete guidelines, and the data, to make changes where it matters.

Topline conclusions

Trust and harmony are apparently resistant to failings in managerial performance.
Employee development and performance measures are disappointing employees and companies are losing replicable management information.
Managers are overcautious in admitting responsibility for mistakes, and in involving employees in solving dilemmas or problems. They are missing opportunities to convert receivers into co-creators and ambassadors .
Employees seek context and visibility
Warning signals regarding ethics – many managers fail to secure conformity to ethical standards. And employees doubt that a direct confrontation of their manager would be encouraged in the case of malpractice.
Employees seek more face-to-face contact, as an over-reliance on e-mail and the telephone emerges.

Findings in brief

Part one – the dashboard

The gaps between what people want and get are highly significant.
Employees get the behaviour they seek from their managers only around half of the time
Around one in ten managers is behaving in a way that could even damage performance.
Most alarming; in securing ethical standards, 31% of managers fail to either reward conformity – or to punish deviation.

Part two – the business climate

Despite failings in managerial performance, around 70% of employees have high levels of trust in their manager, or have a harmonious relationship with him or her.
Compared with 2007, we see little change in people’s perceptions about business pressure, and trust and harmony in employee-manager relations.
All are scoring relatively encouragingly.
42% of people are feeling pretty comfortable with business pressure (39% feel neutral).
And around 70% have very high trust in their manager and a very harmonious relationship with him or her.
The rest are either feeling neutral, (around 20%) or actively disgruntled (8% report a conflictual relationship with their manager, 14% report active distrust).
Neutrality can also imply vulnerability in the face of negative influence. Or put more brightly, room for gains and remedial action.

Krauthammer Observatory: issue 2, 2008 - Full report* / Full executive summary*

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