The Secrets of Skippers

Bosses who run the company from their desks may be good
coordinators--but they're bad leaders. A good boss interacts directly
with employees, giving them constant feedback, both positive and
negative.

The key word is monitoring, says psychologist Judith Komaki, Ph.D.,
of New York City's Baruch College who's been studying leadership skills
for years. Effective leaders monitor employees' work conscientiously and
evaluate it upon completion. The majority of bosses don't do enough of
either, though they pass judgment a lot more than they monitor.

Employees don't hate It when bosses breathe down their necks,
Komaki insists. Rather, most workers feel ignored by their supervisors;
they crave attention, praise, guidance, even criticism--anything which
lets them know how they are performing in their bosses' eyes.

"A major complaint of employees is that bosses make judgments
without adequate Information about what the employees are doing," Komaki
says. Bosses tend to pay a lot of attention to people who think quickly
on their feet and don't take the appropriate time out to gauge employee
accomplishments carefully.

Komaki is the first to pinpoint the significance of monitoring and
communicating, because her studies focus on leaders' ability to maintain
high-quality worker output. Most others focus on the ability to motivate
people to do good work. She has looked at theater, bank, newspaper, and
insurance managers, and, most recently, sailboat skippers.

Regardless of setting, managers average five percent of their time
communicating consequences (evaluating), and less time monitoring.
Skippers and theater managers monitor the most--a great deal is visibly
at stake--insurance managers the least. When superiors rated all bosses
and managers below them according to their leadership skills, the most
highly rated managers were the ones who monitored their employees most
consistently.

"Bosses often think that they spend much more time overseeing
workers than they actually do," Komaki says. "They overestimate what they
think is important and underestimate what they don't think is
important."