Not pushing the team too hard – a fine balance that can be easy to miss – Part 3 ..

This is a series of posts that I am writing about the dynamics of a team, and how it came to be that we started getting push back from the team about pushing them too hard, which lead to a series of introspective discussions (Pushing the team too hard) about whether we had gone too far, and what should be the next steps. In the previous post, I started writing about how the team was being pushed to be more aggressive, and this in turn was causing additional risk to projects that the team was taking up.
In this post, I will be talking about the problems that an aggressive manager was inadvertently causing to the team. Morale of the people involved is a big deal for teams that are supposed to be highly productive, and the organization needs to continue doing efforts that would make sure nothing is happening that would reduce the morale of team members. However, this can get problematic when you have a manager who can put a lot of pressure on team members to the extent that this would reduce morale and make them feel down and out.
As part of the efforts to improve the productivity of the team and make it a top performing team, the organization brought in a new manager who was reputed to turn around teams. The manager was a high energy person, and you could see that fairly fast into his introduction into the role. He would monitor implementation of projects, directly moving among the team members and had a good idea about team members who were effectively shirking work. This tactic worked pretty effectively, since it also encouraged the various team managers to monitor the performance of their team to a greater extent and ensure that anybody shirking or not working as much as required was spoken to and provided feedback.
However, there is a fine transition between being aggressive and starting to cause frustration in the team members. When people believe that they are working at a good pace and feel proud of what they have accomplished, they seek to hear good words; but when you have a person who can be aggressive, it can turn out pretty good in terms of driving the team (but this happens when the team members believe that the overall manager is actually a great driver and visionary and then neglect or ignore his hard driving efforts). However, if the team members start to feel that the manager is actually not appreciative of their work when they have put in some great effort, it can be very bad for morale.
In our case, this is what was starting to happen. The manager would push people to get work done fast, and for some time, those team members who liked doing great work were very impressed. However, when they could see that the manager was all about push, and more push, and it was hard to actually hear some words of praise from the manager, there started a wave of people expressing issues or feeling hurt after the interaction with the boss. What made it worse was that the team members would share their own stories, and this made the issue of morale even more difficult; and of course, since the team was performing at a high level, the manager was seen as a success story.
However, after this much analysis, and after the HR Department also got involved, the management prepared an exit path for the manager and decided to bring in another manager who was passionate, but who had also got a reputation for appreciating good work.

Continued in the next part …