Are You A Joe Friday Leader?

Posted on March 29, 2012

Joe Friday, as portrayed by Jack Webb, was a no nonsense “just the facts” kind of man. In a recent article by Toni Bowers for TechRepublic, the topic is this style of management. Bowers looked at a survey done by DDI which was interested in such things as, “how leaders are promoting innovation (and how they aren’t), what really happened to great ideas, and the perception gaps between employees and leaders in leaders’ behaviors.”

The gaps between employee perception and leader perception on such issues as the leader’s – openness to unique ideas and opinions, guiding employees to pursue ideas autonomously and willingness to challenge current perspectives – ranged from 29% to the mid 30%.

“In general, leaders were confident in their skills across the board, but ’employees felt there wasn’t really room to challenge the status quo,’ according to Rich Wellins, Senior Vice President of DDI.”

The takeaway here is about good communication with employees to help them make better suggestions and help them understand why their ideas don’t get used.  In true transformational leadership, employees are given the opportunity to fail (and learn from it), but this is not always practical when funding is tight and deadlines are looming.  In lieu of actually putting things into practice, make time to talk through the process and help them (and perhaps you also) find the fail points.  Perhaps, with a bit of redesign, they might be able to make it work after all.

Please see TechRepublic for the full article.