Managers Part XVIII - Leverage

When I first wrote this series in 2018 I realized that I had titled this post, but never wrote it. Since I initially numbered it 15 and subsequently numbered another post as 15, I called it 15a. Well, in the reposts, I did it again and didn't insert it after XV! I'm going to insert it now and call it Part XVIII and renumber subsequent articles accordingly. 

What is leverage? Basically it's the ability that you have as a manager to influence your employees. It's how you get them to do things. It's also the amount of work that you can accomplish by convincing multiple employees to do things in quantities that you could not do if working by yourself. Let's look at the how first.

Way back in Part II - Sources of Power I discussed the sources of power that a manager had. "Authority" would probably be a better word, instead of power. They are:

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence other due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

The blunt instrument, the source of authority that usually goes unsaid, but is a huge part of #3—the ability to influence others through punishment—is always in any manager's tool box. 

Most amateur managers know that they have the power to fire their employees. This is the most basic, crude and rudimentary leverage that you have. Most employees understand this instinctively and will follow a manager's direction, even when they don't want to, they disagree with it, or they just think it's stupid, because they know that refusal to obey the boss's will can result in an opportunity to find a new job. The problem with this, from a manager's point of view, is that even though you will get compliance, you won't get enthusiasm and you certainly won't get independent action or innovation. 

To refer back to an another article in this series, Part X, you will have employees forever stuck at Levels 1 and 2. Some managers are satisfied with this, and are happy with just basic, mindless obedience. They'll never get their people to Level 3, let alone 4 or 5, and may have to settle for Level 1 (Wait until being told before doing anything).

I got my real-life lesson in leverage when I was an Assistant Store Manager. I had been schooled in the wisdom of the Five Levels, of monkeys and left- and right-leaning trapezoids, but hadn't really learned how to properly leverage my employees. As an Assistant Store Manager, I had a lot of responsibility. I often describe the unofficial job description as "All the stuff that doesn't fall into anyone else's job responsibility". All that responsibility, however, didn't come with any matching authority, not any official authority anyway. I threw my weight around, waved my title in people's faces, (Source of Power #1) but no one was impressed. I wasn't making any serious attempt to gain leverage by winning these people over, and I lacked the foundational piece of leverage: the ability to fire someone, and everyone knew it. (I also lacked #2, Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.; and #4 Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills and #5, Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire; I was squandering due to my heavy-handed approach). 

I hadn't made an effort to convince people to do what I wanted them to do, and they knew I had no real authority (my Store Manager at the time was a "nice guy" who undermined me quite often, so I had no reflected authority from his support). It was after a few incidents where run-ins with employees that resulted in a reprimand from my boss that I began to employ the lessons that I had learned years before and little by little began to gain leverage, not from blunt force, but from precision use of tried and tested management techniques. I have to admit that I was given a new lease on management life when my nice guy boss was replaced by a guy who more of a bull in a China shop than I was. This enabled me to start fresh and stop my attempt to bludgeon people into obedience.

I remember an episode of Happy Days, where Fonzi was attempting to school Ritchie on how to be a tough guy. Fonzi was showing him how he, Fonzi, never actually had to fight because people were afraid of him. Ritchie tried to apply these lessons, but he was perplexed that no one was afraid of him. This caused Fonzi to amend his lessons with the observation that he (Ritchie) would have had to actually been in a fight and won for people to think he was a tough guy. It's similar to this in the management world. In order for employees to believe that you will fire them if necessary, you have to actually fire someone when necessary. 

Later on in this series I address the changes that took place post Covid. Managers' unwillingness to hold employees to company standards, including firing bad employees has had many repercussions. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX