Essential qualities Managers’ wish to enhance and the role of AI. Second of two articles.

Links to articles about choosing the best employees and managers can be found at the end of the article.

This article, second in the series, looks at the survey results of The Marker and Afeka -the Academic College of Engineering, conducted recently and published by Yarden Ben Gal Hirschorn.

This is the second time the survey is conducted during the Swords of Iron war. The aim of the survey was to rate the “soft” essential qualities Israeli managers look for in potential employees, in face of the constant changes inside and outside the Israeli market.

The first article identified the essential qualities managers look for when recruiting new team members. It also revealed the gaps between what managers think they require and the way they act. This article discusses the essential qualities managers wish to improve and enhance in themselves, in comparison to the qualities they look for in potential employees.

Last week I met a CEO who experienced difficulties listening to his employees and allowing them free thinking, a difficulty which characterizes young and old CEOs alike.

I also met a CEO who declared that “listening to employees, encouraging their involvement, independence and initiation” was one of his major goals. Among the biggest opponents to this goal were his partners and his family members who held high managerial positions in the company. He had to act wisely to overcome their objections.

Essential qualities managers wish to enhance in themselves

In part one of the series, we looked at the qualities managers were looking for in potential employees. Let’s look at the qualities they wish to enhance in themselves.

Two sample groups were composed for the survey: A group of 150 Hi-Tech managers and a group of 150 general industries managers.

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The chart above reveals similar ratings of both groups, but there are some interesting differences:

Managers of the general industries group rated “creative thinking” higher than managers in the High-tech group. Is that because High-tech managers feel they have enough of that quality?
High-tech managers, on the other hand, rated “motivation” as an important quality to enhance. Why?
Managers of the general industries group rated the soft qualities: “proactivity”, “emotional intelligence”, “self-learning” and “ability to work in multi-disciplinary teams” higher than the managers in the Hi-Tech group. The reasons for that are not clear. However, since the survey was done on two different types of managers and since it used a small sample of 150 High-Tech and 150 general industries managers, we can assume that the gaps are coincidental. In other words, the gaps are not attributed to the different groups but to the random choice of participants.

It would be more interesting to compare between what managers look for in potential employees and what they seek to improve in themselves.

A comparison between qualities managers look for in potential employees and the ones they wish to enhance in themselves - High-Tech managers

The table below compares between the level of importance High-Tech managers rated for themselves vs their rating for potential employees.

1 is the highest rate, 10 the lowest

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The table above presents ratings of managers in the same group, and it is therefore interesting.

For themselves, managers rated “Ability to operate with AI” the most important quality. For the employees, the quality was not mentioned at all. However, because managers rated qualities from a given list and not a list they composed themselves, this finding is probably related to the way the survey was conducted.
“Critical thinking” is a quality High-tech managers rated highly to develop in themselves, 2nd place, but they rated it 9th for potential employees. This is a strange finding because, if High-Tech managers do not recruit employees with critical thinking, how will the company grow? How will it advance if employees have no abilities to identify core failures?
A similar gap is found in the quality “Ability to work independently”. For managers it was rated 12th but for employees it was rated 1st. This is a surprising gap but no less surprising is the gap between expecting employees to work independently ( rated 1st ) but not expecting then to think critically (rated 9th ). How can independent work be expected from employees with low ability to think critically?
Other gaps are found in the following soft qualities: “Self- learning” , rated 3rd for employees, vs 11th for managers and “Ability to work in multidisciplinary teams”, rated 4th for employees vs 13th for managers.

Summary

First glance reveals a difference between the way managers regard themselves and the way they regard the employees.

In my understanding, managers who value themselves more than they value employees, and managers who belittle employee’s involvement, make a mistake, more so in the High-Tech industry. Every employee, especially in the High-tech industry, can start his own company or become a manager of another company.

Most of the High-tech employees are young people of generation Y or Z. They are creative and enterprising. They have high technical abilities and high aspirations. Many of them dream of a start- up of their own.

I would like to remind my readers that the company’s competitive edge are the employees. Only managers who can engage the employees to the company’s goals will succeed.

I am not sure this survey truly represents managers in the High-Tech industry, but if managers do not connect the employees, they will have many problems.

A comparison between qualities managers look for in potential employees vs the ones they wish to enhance in themselves - General industries managers

The table below compares between the level of importance general industry managers rated for themselves vs their rating for potential employees.

1 is the highest rate, 10 the lowest

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Here again, the comparison is between different ratings of the same group and therefore is interesting.

For the general industries managers, as for the Hi-Tech managers, the most important quality to enhance in themselves is “Ability to operate with AI”, a quality that was not mentioned for employees. Again, it has to do with the choices presented in the survey and not the participants.
“Critical thinking” is an important quality for general industry managers to enhance in themselves (rated 3rd ) but not in employees. Once again, we see managers who fear criticism but rate it highly important for themselves. The question is how will the company grow? What major failures can employees identify without the ability to think critically?
A big difference in rating is found in “Motivation”. Managers valued employees’ motivation 1st but their own only 9th . They may believe their motivation is high anyway and therefore needs no high rating.
Three qualities managers rated high for themselves but low for potential employees. “Ability to work independently” 13th for managers 2nd for employees, “Self- learning” 12th for managers but 5th for employees and “Ability to work in multidisciplinary teams” 11th for managers and 4th for employees.

Summary

Here, similarly to the High-Tech table above, the difference between how managers see themselves and how they regard the employees is revealed.

I recently had a conversation with a CEO of a factory in the traditional heavy industry. He was telling me about an employee who had been working for the company for many years performing a manual job under bad conditions of heat and noise. The CEO said that the employee was not committed to the company’s goals and was not motivated to work well. However, added the CEO, once the employee left the premise at the end of a day’s work, he changed to an enthusiastic computer wizard who knew how to solve every problem.

The way managers regard their employees determines how much the employees invest in the company. Managers will find it difficult to engage employees to the company’s goals if they value them lower than they value themselves.

Summary and recommendations

This article, like the first one in the series, relates to the survey results of The Marker and Afeka -the Academic College of Engineering Tel Aviv.

One of the survey drawbacks is that it asks the participants to rate essential qualities from a prepared list. However, surveys which allow participants to list the qualities before rating are difficult to conduct. We must therefore suffice with this survey.

This article, second in the series of two, focuses on the differences between essential qualities managers wish to enhance in themselves and the qualities they look for when recruiting new employees. The findings point to a problematic approach of managers.

Individually, managers express different opinions when asked to rate the qualities, but as a group, the findings are clear. However, there is no difference between managers and employees. For example, a person may have become a manager of a business only because he had inherited it from his family. At the same time, an immigrant employee might have held high managerial positions in his home country, but now, due to language and cultural difficulties, is prevented from becoming a manager.

For whatever reason, managers that feel superior to employees will not be able to connect and engage the employees to the company’s goals.

Remember, your employees provide the cutting edge of your business when they are committed to the company’s goals.