On the Job by Anita Bruzzese Why Your Team Sees You as Manipulative -- and What to Do About It

On the Job by Anita Bruzzese Why Your Team Sees You as Manipulative -- and What to Do About It In a new book, Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How you Live and Lead, author Laszlo Bocksaysthat the company wants to serve as an example of how to better treat employees and do business. Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, stresses that the key for any manager is to share information and be transparent with workers. The benefit oftransparencyis not just that people feel trustedThe other benefit is that theyll know whats going on. Theyll make better decisions and theyll create better products, he says. Two of the terms Bock mentions sharing and transparency often are used in connection with what is known as participative leadership. Under such a management style, a manager not only shares his or her thoughts with teams, but the teams share their ideas with a manager. While Google goes much further and implements other ideas, more companies are looking at participative management as a way to stir collaboration, productivity and engagement. However, new research finds that it isnt always a panacea for leaders and organizations. Specifically, a new study from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the City University of Hong Kong finds that employees dont always buy what the boss is selling. Namely, they can spot when a manager is truly committed to participative leadership and when he or she is just going through the motions. When that happens when the manager isnt engaged in the process 100% it can lead employees to have a negative assessment of the leader and see it only as a way to increase the employees workload and responsibilities with no reward, finds thestudy. It is no secret that participative leadership is a challenge for managers, and this study reinforces the message that a casual approach will not only fall short but may very well make things worse. In short, go all out or dont go at all, says Catherine K. Lam of the City University of Hong Kong. Lam recommends the go all out approach, because the study found that is the key to truly boosting a teams performance. While half-hearted participative leadership showed little or no change in worker performance, those managers who threw themselves into the process saw a jump in performance when information-sharing was high. The authors of the study recommend that companies foster effective participativeleadershipby training leaders in two-way communications with their employees, so that workers clearly understand how much they need to participate in decisions, and the positive outcomes if they do. Equally important, they stress, is that the employees understand the good participative intentions of their leaders. Experts say the best way to implement participative leadership is to do your homework and unveil it in a deliberative way. If not, your efforts will show little results, and may even damage employee morale and trust. Here are some things to think about if you believe participative management could benefit your team and your organization: Understand the goals.IT managers need to clearly state what they hope to achieve with a more participative style, but workers also need (read more here)