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How to Manage Overqualified Employees

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How to Manage Overqualified Employees Some employees are overeducated and overqualified—or think they are—for the jobs they are doing.

Such employees will find their roles not demanding enough to keep them occupied. They may not feel fully engaged in those tasks and responsibilities that they judge “beneath” them.

Toffee-nosed employees can create team tension. They can develop negative attitudes, such as a sense of entitlement about their skills (remember the FedEx “Even an MBA Can Do It” advert?) or resentment through boredom. That frustration and disillusion can ripple out and bring everyone else in the team down.

Here are two guidelines for managing overqualified employees:

  1. To keep overqualified employees engaged, allow more autonomy, and assign them more creative assignments. Delegate longer-term projects or have them collaborate with other teams within the company. Though, be mindful that this may create even more resentment in the team towards the perceived overqualified employees. Discuss with the team why some people have been chosen for those special assignments.
  2. Work together with the human resources staff and help the overqualified employees chart out individualized paths for climbing the corporate ladder and reach their potential. Find ways to help them acquire new skills and get exposure to other parts of the organization. Coach them to apply for roles that possibly do not yet warrant their experience and expertise. Expand their leadership capacity by assigning training and mentoring responsibilities.

Idea for Impact: Nurturing and keeping overqualified employees can create a strong foundation for tomorrow’s management team.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  2. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees
  3. How to Promote Employees
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers

Lessons from Drucker: Manage People, Not Things

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One of Peter Drucker’s big ideas was the notion of management as a “liberal art.” In The New Realities (1950,) Drucker argued that effective managers need a wide-ranging knowledge on subjects as varied as psychology, science—even religion.

Management is a liberal art—“liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it deals with practice and application.

Lessons from Drucker: Management is a Liberal Art Management deals with people, their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a humanity. So does its concern with, and impact on, social structure and the community. Indeed… management is deeply involved in spiritual concerns—the nature of man, good and evil.

Managers draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and on history, on the physical sciences and on ethics.

Idea for Impact: Management has become more about numbers and processes than about people

Manage people, not things.

A wise manager is a well-rounded one—somebody who understands and can leverage, in Drucker’s words, “the nature of man.”

Understand your employees. Understand how they think and act. Know what makes them tick—what drives them, what motivates them, what their aspirations are. Acquaint yourself to different approaches to management based on different sets of values. Individualize your management approach.

Use this understanding to create a productive work environment—that’s your foremost responsibility as a manager.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Hire People Who Are Smarter Than You Are
  2. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  3. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  4. Four Telltale Signs of an Unhappy Employee
  5. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around

Leaders Need to Be Strong and Avoid Instilling Fear

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Fear is many a leader’s dirty little secret. He can use it when he’s either unwilling or unable to persuade his team to work together to achieve a specific goal.

Sure, fear gets results. However, it does so at a great cost.

Fear can be enormously helpful for spurring change, particularly during periods of acute threat. But fear can backfire under certain circumstances, especially when creativity is necessary. Using fear and intimidation as a motivator only shuts down people’s brains.

Leaders Need to Be Strong and Avoid Instilling Fear People don’t always think and act rationally when they’re afraid. Fear and anxiety make it more difficult to have their energy and enthusiasm to keep going.

A leader needs to be strong without instilling fear. Often all a leader can do to motivate people is to foster a workplace wherein people feel safe bringing themselves to work.

People can contribute, be creative, and be motivated internally. There’s no need to watch them like a hawk, micromanage excessively, track every move they make, question every decision, or enact rules that make people feel constrained and under surveillance.

Idea for Impact: Steer clear of a tyrannical management style. Use feedback and coaching to be considerate and encouraging whenever you can be, and tough when you must be.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Difference between Coaching and Feedback
  2. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  3. 20 Reasons People Don’t Change
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. How to Manage Smart, Powerful Leaders // Book Summary of Jeswald Salacuse’s ‘Leading Leaders’

Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You—and What to Do About it

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If you have trouble getting employees to trust you, perhaps one—or more—of the following reasons are to blame:

  • You don’t model what you say.
  • You make promises you can’t keep.
  • You guard and selectively disclose information.
  • You don’t allow your employees to exercise their judgment.
  • You ask for input from your employees and ignore them.
  • You seek to monitor everything—including time spent on social media.
  • You tend to shift the blame.
  • You avoid giving credit where credit is due.
  • You ignore workplace concerns and problems until they become more significant problems.
  • You have double standards (employees tend to be especially very alert to this.)

Why Your Employees Don't Trust You---and What to Do About it Management scholars have suggested that trustworthiness entails three attributes: competence to perform tasks reliably (your ability,) having benign intentions (your benevolence,) and acting consistently with sound ethical principles such as fairmindedness, sincerity, and honesty (your integrity.) If you can exhibit these three attributes credibly and dependably, all will trust you. Get any of these three attributes wrong, and your standing will suffer.

Here are a few actions you can take to rebuild trust within your organization:

  • Communicate openly. Listen. Value everyone’s opinions equally. Involve employees in decision-making. Be as transparent as possible.
  • Empower employees. Encourage them to use their best judgment to identify and solve problems. Don’t be unnecessarily rigid with enforcing rules.
  • Make everyone accountable. Take responsibility. Invite and listen to feedback. Communicate expectations. Invest in commitments.

Idea for Impact: Trust is reshaped—strengthened or undermined—in every encounter

If your employees don’t trust you, then they won’t do what you need them to, and they won’t stick around long.

Trust is a consequence of your actions, not merely an intention or message. Trust is truly behavioral; it is complicated and fragile. Trust must be hard-fought, hard-earned, and hard-won every day, through actions, not words.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Five Signs of Excessive Confidence
  2. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity
  3. Successful People Earn Trust Using These Ten Cs
  4. 20 Reasons People Don’t Change
  5. Don’t Lead a Dysfunctional Team

How to Improve Your Career Prospects During the COVID-19 Crisis

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Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the world into despondency and uncertainty, it’s easy to worry about your career prospects, feel risk-averse, and become inert.

However, if you could look beyond the short-term challenges, now’s a good time to take on new skills, tend to your network, and accelerate your long-term career prospects.

Here’s how to take a bit of initiative and think creatively about your career during the current lockdown.

  1. Reflect upon your goals for your life and career. Think clearly through the steps you must take to realize your aspirations.
  2. State clearly your aims. If you want to earn more or get a better responsibility, speak to your boss about what it’ll take to secure a promotion.
  3. Seek specific feedback, but don’t just reflect on the past. Asking for feedback puts you—not your boss—in the driver’s seat. Ask lots of questions and decide what you could do to make a positive change.
  4. Redefine your goals at work. Identify worthwhile measures of success. Agree on targets that stretch but don’t strain.
  5. Work with your boss to find gaps in your experience. Find projects where you could develop and use those skills.
  6. How to Improve Your Career Prospects During the COVID-19 Crisis Don’t try to do everything. Prioritize. Ask yourself, “Where do my strengths lie?” Focusing on one or two areas could help you isolate and sharpen the necessary skills to move up.
  7. Seek out new opportunities. Be alert to points of diminishing returns on learning new skills.
  8. Take the lead on a project that others don’t find particularly interesting (see Theo Epstein’s 20 Percent Rule.) You could not only learn by way of broader experiences and gain confidence but also become more visible to management and situate yourself for a promotion.
  9. Offer to share responsibility. Take an interest in your colleagues’ work. You could win over grateful allies and open up new opportunities within your company.
  10. Reevaluate what’s essential. To the extent possible, divest yourself of the boring, time-wasting, frivolous, and worthless—anything that doesn’t “move the ball down the field.”
  11. Pursue side projects. Cultivating knowledge and trying out new skills during your free time is a definite path to career reinvention.
  12. Seek out mentors. Make the right contacts. Bear in mind, those who influence decisions may not necessarily be the ones at the top.
  13. Begin actively networking. It’s never late to put together a range of experts whose knowledge and experience you could tap into.

Idea for Impact: Mulling over how to improve yourself and enhance your career is a great shelter-in-place project. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once declared, “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. There Isn’t a Shortcut to the Top
  2. What’s Behind Your Desire to Job-Hunt and Jump Ship?
  3. A Little Known, but Powerful Technique to Fast Track Your Career: Theo Epstein’s 20 Percent Rule
  4. Before Jumping Ship, Consider This
  5. Four Telltale Signs of an Unhappy Employee

A Guide to Your First Management Role // Book Summary of Julie Zhuo’s ‘The Making of a Manager’

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First-time managers are often unprepared for—even unaware of—the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager. This is particularly true at fledging startups that don’t have bonafide HR departments to guide their novice managers nor can afford management coaches. Besides, it takes a new boss a year or two to learn the basics and become comfortable in his/her new role.

Julie Zhuo, Vice President of Product Design at Facebook When Facebook was small enough and “the entire company could fit into a backyard party,” 25-year old product designer Julie Zhuo was asked to become a manager. Zhuo had started at Facebook as its first intern and then gone full-time. Having no prior managerial experience, she acted how she thought managers were supposed to act and made many mistakes. In due course, she found joy in the role, expanded her skill set, and evolved to become Facebook’s VP of product design.

In The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You (2019,) Zhuo has chronicled her experiences from ramping-up into management and getting to know herself better. It’s the book she wishes had been there for the novice manager that she was.

Zhuo offers many hard-earned insights that only time in the trenches can reveal:

  • Operate from first principles. “Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.”
  • Not everyone is cut out for a managerial responsibility. “Being a manager is a highly personal journey, and if you don’t have a good handle on yourself, you won’t have a good handle on how to best support your team.”
  • Let go of your old “individual contributor” role and make the shift to being the boss. Don’t spend time trying to do the work. Invest your time in coaching, supporting, and developing employees. Don’t run interference between them.
  • Discover your decision-making proclivities. Map out your strengths and weaknesses. “Great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses.”
  • Realize that the source of your power as a manager is everything but formal authority. Respect trumps popularity.
  • Don’t manage everyone in the same way. Learn to appreciate how distinctive each individual is in what he/she wants from work and what animates him/her to work well.
  • Trust is a critical ingredient in relationships. “Invest time and effort into creating and maintaining trusting relationships where people feel they can share their mistakes, challenges, and fears with you.”

'The Making of a Manager' by Julie Zhuo (ISBN 0735219567) Zhuo offers practical—if basic, but sufficient—advice for setting a vision, assessing the culture, delegating problems, giving feedback, aligning expectations, setting priorities, establishing a network of allies and confidants, hiring cleverly, and other responsibilities of leading a team. She delves into many difficult circumstances she’s encountered, e.g., handling previously-peers-now-employees whom she passed over for a promotion.

Recommendation: The Making of a Manager is an excellent primer for novice managers. It offers an insightful, practical, and relevant playbook for making the transition from being an outstanding individual contributor to becoming a good manager of others.

Complement with Andy Grove’s High Output Management (1983,) Loren Belker et al.’s The First-Time Manager (2012,) and Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days (2013.)

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Advice for the First-Time Manager: Whom Should You Invest Your Time With?
  2. You Too Can (and Must) Become Effective // Summary of Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive
  3. A Fast-Food Approach to Management // Book Summary of Blanchard & Johnson’s ‘The One Minute Manager’
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. Management by Walking Around the Frontlines [Lessons from ‘The HP Way’]

Don’t One-up Others’ Ideas

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A manager who has the tendency to put his oar in his employees’ ideas ends up killing their ownership of ideas. This diminishes their motivation and performance.

When employees feel disrespected or unappreciated, survival instincts will kick in—employees turn inward and stop participating fully in their teams. It will only erode their commitment and led to poor results.

People Tend to Reject Ideas Offered by Others in Favor of Their Own

'What Got You Here Wont Get You There' by Marshall Goldsmith (ISBN 1401301304) In the bestselling What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007,) the celebrated leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith describes this behavior as the tendency to “add too much value.”

If you’re inclined to get wrapped up in adding your two cents and improving the quality of an idea a little, you may devalue an employee’s commitment to execute the idea:

Imagine an energetic, enthusiastic employee comes into your office with an idea. She excitedly shares the idea with you. You think it’s a great idea. Instead of saying, “Great idea!” you say, “That’s a nice idea. Why don’t you add this to it?” What does this do? It deflates her enthusiasm; it dampers her commitment. While the quality of the idea may go up 5 percent, her commitment to execute it may go down 50 percent. That’s because it’s no longer her idea, it’s now your idea.

Don't One-up Others' Ideas

Effective Coaching is Helping Others Discover Insights

Focus on helping others discover insights—not by solving the problem for them, but by helping them improve how they’re thinking about the problem.

  • If you have an idea that the other must hear, don’t tell them immediately. Use Socratic questioning to tease the idea out of them.
  • Examine how you hand out ideas. Resist the temptation to add your advice. Before you propose an idea, pause and ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”
  • Avoid declarative statements such as “you should …” or “I think … .”
  • The higher up you go in an organization, the more your suggestions become interpreted as orders.
  • Don’t marginalize the concerns of your team members in the interest of moving your ideas forward. Ignoring employees’ inputs can send a message to the entire team that you’re not actually looking for their creative ideas, but that you’ve got your own agenda and just want them to rubberstamp it.
  • Get your team involved early. People are more motivated to do the things they have to do if they are part of the planning and strategy.

Idea for Impact: Improve your team performance by encouraging better thinking, not by handing out advice.

Don’t give unsolicited advice. Don’t make team decisions to which you—but nobody else—is committed. Learn to persuade others to see things your way by tapping into their talents, passions, and abilities.

Remember, being an effective manager is not about winning yourself; it’s about making other people winners.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Advice for the First-Time Manager: Whom Should You Invest Your Time With?
  2. The Difference between Coaching and Feedback
  3. How to Conquer Cynicism at Your Workplace
  4. 20 Reasons People Don’t Change
  5. Don’t Lead a Dysfunctional Team

Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

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Firing is About an Underlying Commitment to Retaining Great People

The former General Electric leader Jack Welch earned the moniker “Neutron Jack” for sacking some 100,000 employees in the early years of his tenure as chief executive. Welch defended the dismissals by emphasizing that it would have been far more heartless to keep those employees and lay them off later when they had little chance of reinventing their careers. The dismissals were part of his deliberate efforts to establish a corporate culture that emphasized honest feedback and where only the “A players” got to stay.

Many Fired Employees Feel Surprised That the Axe Didn’t Fall Sooner

Fire Fast---It's Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees Managers know that ending a bad fit sooner is better than doing it later. Firing a bad employee is often better for both the employee leaving and the employees remaining.

Then again, many managers hesitate because firing is awfully difficult. No one likes to fire people. Looking an employee straight in the eye and telling he’ll no longer have a job is one of the harshest things a manager will ever have to do.

Besides, some managers are so uncomfortable with conflict that they are unwilling to deal directly and honestly with a problem employee, not to mention of confronting the risk of a wrongful termination claim.

If an Employee is Not Working out for You, Fire Fast

By holding on to a bad employee, you are really doing a disservice to the employee. Forcing a person to be something he’s are not, and giving him the same corrective feedback—week after week and quarter after quarter—is neither sustainable nor considerate. Trying to keep the employee in the wrong role prevents his personal and professional evolution.

  • Give the employee a chance to turn the situation around—people can change.
  • Try to find him an appropriate role within your company. Recall the old Zen poem,

    Faults and delusions
    Are not to be got rid of
    Just blindly.
    Look at the astringent persimmons!
    They turn into the sweet dried ones.

    However, if the employee is a truly bad fit, reassigning him just shifts the problem to a different part of the company.

  • If your efforts to remediate a bad employee haven’t worked out, cut your losses and fire him promptly. Help the employee move on to a job or a company where the fit is much better.

Idea for Impact: It is much worse to retain someone who is not suited for his job than it is to fire him. Help him find a new role quickly and land on his feet.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  2. How to Promote Employees
  3. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers

Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?

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Akio Morita, the visionary co-founder of Sony, liked to tell a story about recognizing opportunities and shaping them into business concepts.

Two shoe salesmen … find themselves in a rustic backward part of Africa. The first salesman wires back to his head office: “There is no prospect of sales. Natives do not wear shoes!” The other salesman wires: “No one wears shoes here. We can dominate the market. Send all possible stock.”

Morita, along with his co-founder Masaru Ibuka, was a genius at creating consumer products for which no obvious demand existed, and then generating demand for them. Sony’s hits included such iconic products as a hand-held transistor radio, the Walkman portable audio cassette player, the Diskman portable compact disk player, and the Betamax videocassette recorder.

Products Lost in Translation

As the following case studies will illustrate, many companies haven’t had Sony’s luck in launching products that can stir up demand.

In each case in point, deeply ingrained cultural attitudes affected how consumers failed to embrace products introduced into their respective markets.

Case Study #1: Nestlé’s Paloma Iced Tea in India

Marketing and Product Introduction Failure: Nestle's Paloma Iced Tea in India When Swiss packaged food-multinational Nestlé introduced Paloma iced tea in India in the ’80s, Nestlé’s market assessment was that the Indian beverage market was ready for an iced tea variety.

Sure thing, folks in India love tea. They consume it multiple times a day. However, they must have it hot—even in the heat of the summer. Street-side tea vendors are a familiar sight in India. Huddled around the chaiwalas are patrons sipping hot tea and relishing a savory samosa or a saccharine jalebi.

It’s no wonder, then, that, despite all the marketing efforts, Paloma turned out to be a debacle. Nestlé withdrew the product within a year.

Case Study #2: Kellogg’s Cornflakes in India

The American packaged foods multinational Kellogg’s failed in its initial introduction of cornflakes into the Indian market in the mid ’90s. Kellogg’s quickly realized that its products were alien to Indians’ consumption habits—accustomed to traditional hot, spicy, and heavy grub, the Indians felt hungry after eating a bowl of sweet cornflakes for breakfast. In addition, they poured hot milk over cornflakes rendering them soggy and less appetizing.

Case Study #3: Oreo Cookies in China

Marketing and Product Introduction Case Study: Oreo Green-tea Ice Cream Cookies in China When Kraft Foods, launched Oreo in China in 1996, America’s best-loved sandwich cookie didn’t fare very well. Executives in Kraft’s Chicago headquarters expected to just drop the American cookie into the Chinese market and watch it fly off shelves.

Chinese consumers found that Oreos were too sweet. The ritual of twisting open Oreo cookies, licking the cream inside, and then dunking it in milk before enjoying them was considered a “strangely American habit.”

Not until Kraft’s local Chinese leaders developed a local concept—a wafer format in subtler flavors such as green-tea ice cream—did Oreo become popular.

Idea for Impact: Your expertise may not translate in unfamiliar and foreign markets

In marketing, if success is all about understanding the consumers, you must be grounded in the reality of their lives to be able to understand their priorities.

  • Don’t assume that what makes a product successful in one market will be a winning formula in other markets as well.
  • Make products resonate with local cultures by contextualizing the products and tailoring them for local preferences.
  • Use small-scale testing to make sure your product can sway buyers.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Serendipity and Entrepreneurship in the Invention of Corn Flakes
  2. Find out What Your Customers Want and Give it to Them
  3. The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage
  4. Clever Marketing Exploits the Anchoring Bias
  5. Turning a Minus Into a Plus … Constraints are Catalysts for Innovation

How to Hire People Who Are Smarter Than You Are

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Apple’s Steve Jobs frequently pointed to the risk of a “bozo explosion,” which is what happens within a company that makes the mistake of hiring B-grade managers early on. As the company expands, these bozos—Jobs’s label for well-meaning, but less-competent managers—tend to emerge through the ranks and run important divisions of the company.

When bozos hire other people, they prefer to hire bozos. As entrepreneur (and bonafide Steve Jobs’s coattail-rider) Guy Kawasaki explains, “B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players.” Lo and behold, entire divisions are soon swarming with hordes of bozos.

How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion

How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion

The heuristic “hire people smarter than you” is obvious enough, but, every so often, smart people can be a terrible fit within your team.

In this Startup School 2013 interview with venture capitalist Paul Graham, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offers a better heuristic to hiring and keeping smart people who aren’t jerks and can get things done:

What’s the right heuristic for determining if someone is really good? Over time, what I figured out was that the only actual way to let someone analyze whether someone was really good was if they would work for that person. I don’t think that needs to recurse too many levels down in the organization but I basically think that’s a really good heuristic. I believe that. If you look at my management team today if we were in an alternate universe and I hadn’t started the company it would be an honor to work for any of these people. I think if you build a company that has those kind of values, rather than just saying ‘oh I want to hire the best person I can find’ or whatever, if you hold yourself to that standard then I think you’ll build a pretty strong company.

Idea for Impact: Mediocre managers often feel threatened by employees who seem more intelligent than they are, and could potentially pinch their jobs. In contrast, a wise manager knows that she reveals well on her own ability to discover and nurture talent.

  • As with advertising tycoon David Ogilvy’s Russian nesting dolls metaphor for building “a company of giants,” insist that managers hire folks who are better than themselves. For example, a product manager should hire a designer who is better at design than the manager is, not worse.
  • Insist that each interviewer ask themselves of job candidates, “Would I want to work for this person?”
  • Remember, the best don’t come cheap.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. David Ogilvy on Russian Nesting Dolls and Building a Company of Giants
  2. Advice for the First-Time Manager: Whom Should You Invest Your Time With?
  3. A Fast-Food Approach to Management // Book Summary of Blanchard & Johnson’s ‘The One Minute Manager’
  4. How to Make Wise People Decisions
  5. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
Here’s a prayer to help you deal with annoying people. Learn from the Stoics!