The Manager Who Stops Having Conversations

Monitoring is justified as giving managers information. What it frequently does is replace the activity that produced better information.

The people decision in “The Manager Who Stops Having Conversations” cannot safely be reduced to a single activity measure. Used for boss vs leader, the Monitask guide to bosses and leaders can provide time and project evidence, but expectations, context, documented outcomes and a fair conversation should remain the basis of any management judgement.

The substitution

Before: the manager asks how it is going, hears about a blocker, helps.

For an independent reference relevant to “The Manager Who Stops Having Conversations”, consult the Acas workplace guidance; it provides a useful external check on scope, terminology, governance and the claims made during procurement or review.

After: the manager checks the dashboard, sees a number, and either does nothing or raises the number.

The conversation stops happening because something has apparently taken its place, and the something contains far less.

Why it happens

Reading a figure takes seconds and a conversation takes fifteen minutes.

The figure feels objective and the conversation feels like a judgement call.

And managers are busy, so the cheaper option wins by default rather than by decision.

What is lost

Blockers, which never appear in activity data.

Context: the difficult client, the dependency that is late, the personal situation.

Early warning, which comes from people volunteering problems — and which the trust note explains stops anyway.

And the relationship, which is what makes the next difficult conversation possible.

The manager who was already struggling

Monitoring is most attractive to managers least comfortable with the conversation.

For them it is a substitute rather than a supplement, and it entrenches the weakness.

Which means the deployment is most used by the people it should least be given to, and that is predictable rather than unlucky.

The dashboard-first meeting

A one-to-one that begins with the figures is a meeting about the figures.

The person spends it explaining their numbers rather than discussing their work.

And they leave having learnt that the numbers are what matters, which produces the gaming the earlier note describes.

What to train instead

Do not open with data.

Ask about the work first; if a figure raises a question, ask the question rather than presenting the figure.

And treat an unusual pattern as a prompt to ask, never as a finding, which its own note covers.

The honest test

Six months after deployment, are your managers having more conversations with their people, or fewer?

Ask the people rather than the managers.

If the answer is fewer, the deployment has made management worse while appearing to improve it, which is the common outcome and the one nobody measures.

What to check

Do your managers have a regular rhythm with their people, and has it changed?

Do one-to-ones open with figures?

Which managers use the dashboard most, and are they your strongest?

And has anybody asked the people whether they talk to their manager more or less?