Silence is Not Golden: The People Side of Profitability
By Phillip G. Perkins, President and CEO, ACUMEN Corporation

It is a basic assumption of mine that all of us who run service firms are routinely looking for ways to better serve our clients and get the most productivity possible out of our professional teams. Satisfying the needs of our clients as well as our employees/associates can sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive goals, but in reality there is a very clear link. And part of the answer in our quest to deliver more value lies in how we articulate certain fundamental needs and goals inside our firms.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to study management theory on a university level will remember Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow, a behavioral scientist, pointed out in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality that, while our lower-level needs for such things as nourishment, safety and love (which he called "deficiency needs") must be satisfied first, our highest-level and, in many ways, most important need is to "self actualize" ... to be the best we can be in our daily endeavors. And, believe me, during my management career I've had just as many people come into my office and tell me that they are unhappy because they don't feel they're making enough of a contribution as I have had those who are complaining about their salary or not being appreciated. It's fundamental to our humanity to want to achieve and be a part of something important or at least challenging. Could there be anything more important to the success of our companies than developing an ever expanding community of satisfied clients?

The degree to which we can help our employees and associates self actualize and bring more value to our clients is heavily dependent on open, two way communication. Sometimes a disconnect between manager and employee is anything but obvious. I recently had the opportunity to have lunch with a young professional man who worked at a client firm. He had earned a business degree and his CPA, was articulate and ambitious. He also clearly had a tremendous will to do meaningful work, deliver value and be recognized for his contribution. During the course of our conversation he shared with me that his greatest source of frustration was being "micromanaged." His manager would, on occasion, tell him exactly how to do something and exactly when to do it. In his mind, the manager should realize that he would have executed the task properly and in the right time frame without being told. He confided that the micromanagement made him feel that he was not respected and his manager's technique sometimes triggered self-doubt.

As far as I could determine, he and his manager worked well together on a day-to-day basis, but this one issue was eating at the young man and eroding his job satisfaction. In the Maslow hierarchy his need for esteem was not being satisfied and therefore he felt inhibited in his quest for self-actualization.

My immediate reaction was to ask whether he had shared his concerns with his manager. He said no, he hadn't. When I asked him why, he said he really didn't know why. I pointed out to my young friend that no manager can know with certainty how to impart directives or instructions or even praise unless and until the employee realizes that they have a responsibility to "manage up." Managing up means providing your manager with as much information as possible about how to maximize your productivity and, at the same time, meet your career and human needs.

In this case I knew the young man's manager and respected her as caring, concerned and humanistic in her approach. Yet the young man felt a fundamental disconnect in the way in which his manager passed along assignments. In situations such as this both parties are responsible for defining the playing field and discussing the rules of the game ... and with some frequency. Many times an employee feels that his or her manager "should know me well enough" or should make the first move to improve communications, but the manager is also human and may be just as unsure of to how open the channel. Both parties must be active caretakers of the relationship.

It is clear that the responsibility to create an environment where employees and associates are encouraged communicate in this way with managers rests with the managers themselves. But the payoff can be significant. Consider the following.

In their 1997 book, The Service Profit Chain, Harvard professors James Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger introduced a unique way of looking at the relationship between customers and employees and how that impacts our corporate mission and, ultimately, profit.

Borrowing from their phraseology, the service profit chain "establishes relationships between profitability; customer loyalty; and employee satisfaction, loyalty, and productivity."

As defined by the authors, the links in the chain (which they cast as propositions) are as follows: