Introducing MX — Management Experience™
Before looking into Management Experience™, let’s recall 5 familiar terms:
UX — User Experience
User Experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency.
Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, and creators when creating and refining products because negative user experience can diminish the use of the product and, therefore, any desired positive impacts.
DX — Developer Experience
Developer Experience (DX) is a user experience from a developer’s point of view. It is defined by the tools, processes, and software that a developer uses when interacting with a product or system while in the process of production of another one, such as in software development.
DX has had increased attention paid to it, especially in businesses who primarily offer software as a service to other businesses where ease of use is a key differentiator in the market.
“Improving DevEx is not about catering to pampered, lazy developers” ( opslevel)
CX — Customer Experience
Customer Experience (CX) is the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral customer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages.
Different dimensions of customer experience include senses, emotions, feelings, perceptions, cognitive evaluations, involvement, memories, as well as spiritual components, and behavioral intentions. The pre-consumption anticipation experience can be described as the amount of pleasure or displeasure received from savoring future events, while the remembered experience is related to a recollection of memories about previous events and experiences of a product or service.
EX — Employee Experience
Employee Experience (EX) is how employees feel about everything they encounter throughout their employee journey.
From the time they apply for a job until well after they leave an employer, the entirety of their material and relational interactions shape their perception of the organization.
LX — Learning Experience
Learning Experience Design is a way of creating human-centered and goal-oriented learning experiences that allow the learner to achieve the desired learning outcome.
Now let’s look at a new term:
MX — Management Experience™
Management Experience (MX) is how employees experience everything they encounter from their manager against the 4 main managerial principles for getting results and retention:
- Know your direct report — trust and rapport
- Talk a lot about performance — improved future behavior
- Grow your direct report — new applicable skills
- Push work down — bigger responsibilities for the manager and business continuity
These 4 principles are the heart of the management philosophy of Manager Tools. Actually calling it a philosophy is doing it an injustice — the principles are a result of decades of testing and optimizing what works in practice in the real world in many countries, cultures, industries and company sizes, which is way more valid than sampling in a laboratory.
This also means that the employees need not know about these principles, and not surprisingly, results and retention were better when managers knew and applied the principles.
It’s important to emphasize the prerequisite of ethical management, meaning, a manager that has the benefit of the organization in mind and behaves accordingly. With an unethical manager that is either violating the company values, lying, cheating or humiliating, portraying a poor management experience to begin with, results and retention are likely to be low, and there is no point talking about the principles.
The experience is reflected in the behaviors, communication, practices, processes, professional and personal growth when interacting with the manager, and similarly to UX, DX, CX, EX and LX, there is a subjective component.
The employee and the manager might have different values and ways of communicating, but crucially, it’s not about how much the employee likes their manager or agrees with their decisions or style. The manager’s goal is not to make the direct report happy.
The difference between MX and EX
The Management Experience (MX) is a subset of the Employee Experience (EX).
EX: The employee experiences the company’s industry, purpose, vision, mission, culture, values, policies, structure, communication, compensation, location and colleagues to name a few.
The employee may disagree with or dislike some of these experiences and that is what is known as the organizational tax: to accomplish great things, humans collaborate, and as a result, each individual sacrifices something. For example, it’s decided which email and chat software is used, when salary is paid and what security measures are in place. As long as the employee is part of the organization, they pay this “tax”. If they don’t want to pay it any longer, they leave.
MX: Even though the manager is an employee as well, in many cases, to the employee, their manager is the organization. The manager may not decide the industry, purpose and even compensation, but the manager has great influence, ideally positive:
- builds trust with the direct report
- improves the performance
- coaches and helps up-skilling
- interprets the company goals for the team
- connects work with company values and strategy
- celebrates success and contributions
- decides who the immediate colleagues are
- recommends compensation and promotion
- creates sub-culture and expectations
- has own style and communication preferences
- assigns, supports and supervises tasks
- explains the rationale of decisions
What Management Experience is not
It’s worth repeating that the manager’s goal is not to be liked by their direct reports or become their friend (though being friendly is definitely appreciated).
It’s not about making it a happy and fun environment (though it can be).
In the majority of cases, it’s not that happy employees are more productive, but rather productive employees are happier.
An effective manager does the hard right, not the easy wrong.
The manager is expected to operate for the benefit of the organization, and they can make unpopular decisions, like putting a direct report in PIP or demoting. While the direct report might feel very emotional about it, it still doesn’t make for a bad management experience, because this performance management is in accordance with the 4 main principles. If it comes as a complete surprise, that would be a negative experience because it violates “talking a lot about performance”.
Allowing a low performer to continue their way while making others work harder as a result, not giving feedback, and even giving bonuses and promoting — is a bad management experience because it violates the “talking a lot about performance” principle and “growing their direct report” principle.
You can read more about it in the Predictably Irrational Manager.
MX is also fair, but that doesn’t mean equal.
Different individuals have different ideas about what fair is. Management is not supposed to be fair in the sense that everyone does or gets the same.
For example, a manager who receives a budget for raises would act counterproductively if they distributed the budget evenly because high performers learn that there is no recognition for excellent outcomes, and low performers learn they don’t need to improve. You may argue it “should not” be this way, but this is reality.
Another example — expecting an employee who started taking care of their sick spouse to contribute the same as an employee in a more-or-less ordinary life situation, because they are both equal team members might be unfair.
Management Experience drives success
It is no wonder that employees exhibit higher performance when they respect and trust the manager professionally and personally, and believe that they act with the benefit of the organization at heart, not for personal gains. They feel cared for, are supported, given clear goals, grown, challenged and recognized — again in accordance with the 4 main principles.
As repeated by Manager Tools, the manager’s job is results and retention as a balancing act:
Having only results — people leave and others don’t want to work for such a manager, which incurs turnover costs, eventual lower results, loss of knowledge and negative reputation.
Having only retention, a.k.a a likable but ineffective manager, brings little value to the organization, which defeats the purpose of the team’s existence. This is not a social club and we get no participation trophy. The results pay the salaries of the team.
Results and retention can also go very well hand in hand, for example, a manager giving a lot of positive and negative feedback drives results and keeps the direct reports retained as they see their meaningful contributions, own growth, and are not abandoned. If you ask 100 people if they’d like more feedback from their manager or less, probably 95 would say they want more. Wouldn’t you want?
Results and retention are simple to measure:
Results, which are external to the organization, may be sales, revenue, goals, OKRs, and whatever else is deemed important, and thus, are also regularly measured.
Retention is the number of employees who remain divided by the number of employees.
If it’s that simple, why should we bother measuring anything else?
Because they are lagging indicators, meaning, we see the outcome after a long time, e.g. an employee that leaves after a few months due to lack of feedback and growth. This leaves us very little time to make changes if any at all.
What we can measure is the managerial output and signals that are leading indicators, that is, giving us an idea of what is likely to happen. Let’s look at some examples.
Positive Management Experience examples
I have written in the past about some managerial anti-patterns.
Now let’s briefly look at some positive examples of management experience, together with common anti-patterns and possible ways to measure the experience.
You may notice that they are implementations of the 4 principles.
Interviewing and making an offer
Examples: asking questions that are related to the actual job as well as behavioral questions to better evaluate culture fit.
Honestly answering the candidate’s questions and making an offer that reflects the value they would bring.
Anti-patterns: lying to the candidate to “close” them, offering the lowest compensation possible.
MX measurements: offer acceptance rate, number of employees who choose to continue after 3–6 months, number of employees the manager wants to continue after 3–6 months.
Onboarding
Examples: keeping in touch with the new-joiner until their start date, followed by a detailed enough onboarding about the people, expectations, goals, values, ways of working, the business and the culture. This takes several months.
Anti-patterns: meeting the new joiner only on their first day or a few days later, no clear onboarding plan, letting them find the way without guidance.
MX measurements: number of new-joiners who did not show up on their first day, time to value (meaningful contribution), time to set up, number of easily avoidable mistakes they’d done, number of violations of the ways of working and values, negative feedbacks about the onboarding process.
Examples: building trust and rapport, knowing the direct report, showing care for the person. Understanding their personal and work situations, aspirations and motivation.
Anti-patterns: monthly 1:1, not having 1:1s, canceling them frequently, not bringing and topics, making it a status update meeting or taking up all the time.
MX measurements: number of weekly 1:1s, knowing the children's names of the direct reports, time distribution in 1:1 meetings between the manager and the direct report.
Examples: the manager’s duty to give frequent, timely, positive and negative feedback to encourage more or less of a certain behavior (hard/soft skills and work products).
Anti-patterns: not sharing any feedback, surprising with new feedback in the annual performance review, sharing an empty performance review, ignoring performance management, expecting direct reports to improve on their own.
MX measurements: number of positive feedbacks, number of negative feedbacks, how many of the specific behaviors did improve, number of surprises for the direct report in the annual performance review.
Examples: growing the employee, setting goals and individual development plans, allowing them to improve necessary skills and bring more value in their current role and next possible role.
Anti-patterns: expecting the employee to know what to improve without being told and do it on their own after work.
MX measurements: number of repeated discussions about the need to improve a specific behavior, the success rate of development plans, number of contributions in a new area.
Delegation
Examples: giving the employee a new responsibility or task that the manager used to do, to free up the manager’s time for bigger things, skilling up the direct report and increasing business continuity.
Anti-patterns: micro-management (telling what, when and how to do, fixing their work, telling them they cannot be trusted), under-management/absentee management (“fire and forget” of tasks without check-ins and feedback), expecting high quality on first attempts.
MX measurements: number of new responsibilities for the manager, number of new responsibilities for the direct report, constant increase in the quality level of the delegated tasks.
Communication
Examples: sharing information that can be shared and explaining its meaning, transparency about decisions, realigning on goals, values, purpose, the “why”. Understanding that people have different personalities, not a one-size-fits-all, using DiSC for effective communication.
Anti-patterns: assuming direct reports know, hoarding information, saying something only once, not getting buy-in, passing information without translation of its meaning to the team.
MX measurements: number of times an employee claims they never heard about something, number of misunderstandings, number of times working on non-priority.
Psychological safety
Examples: encouraging asking questions, admitting and sharing mistakes for knowledge sharing and improved performance. This is a major ingredient of teamwork.
Anti-patterns: bullying or insulting to drive results, being angry at questions, bad news and mistakes, redoing the work of others without explaining.
MX measurements: number of mistakes shared, number of mistakes or almost-incidents not shared, number of questions, number of private questions after everyone reported they understood everything, number of negative reactions to questions and ideas.
Setting an example
Examples: behaving as they expect from others — with work products, behaviors and values, like being on time, telling the truth, not yelling.
Anti-patterns: having an excuse for why it’s appropriate for them to behave differently from what they require.
MX measurements: number of excuses for violating, number of complaints about violating, number of people mimicking the desired behaviors.
Promotions
Examples: promoting direct reports at the right time for the right role, based on the value they brought, their achievements, culture fit and evidence they can do the next role successfully.
Anti-patterns: promoting because the direct report thinks they deserve, promoting to improve statistics, meaningless titles like from VP to SVP without any change in responsibility, budget or direct reports, promoting as a response to a threat to leave.
MX measurements: number of promotion recommendations accepted by higher management, number of rejected recommendations, number of surprised people hearing about others’ promotion.
Why “Experience”
If we measure against the 4 main principles, how does the term “experience” fit in? After all, experience implies subjectivity.
Let’s use the UX, DX, CX, EX and LX aforementioned definitions as analogies and replace with “management”:
- Improving user management experience is important… because negative user management experience can diminish… any desired positive impacts
- DX MX… a key differentiator in the market
- … the amount of pleasure or displeasure… memories about previous events and experiences of a product or service the manager
- From the time they apply for a job until well after they leave an employer, the entirety of their interactions shape their perception of the organization manager
- LX MX is a way of creating human-centered and goal-oriented… experiences that allow the learner to achieve the desired… outcome.
The manager has a tremendous influence on the well-being of the employee, as some say: “Your manager has more impact on your mental health than your therapist or doctor”, and “People join organizations, but leave managers”.
It may very well be the case, that the manager has acted in one style or another in accordance with all 4 principles, but the direct report doesn’t see the value and benefit or has different expectations, like being friends with the manager or refusing to grow, which probably leads to voluntary or involuntary departure. In such cases the management experience is also positive because it caught the mismatch and made the right choice for the organization, and probably for the employee as well, to find a place that fits better.
Retention and motivation
Some organizations believe that they can have great results without managerial work and keep retention relying on high pay or titles. Extrinsic motivation is usually short-lived.
There are many reasons people stay with a company that do not depend on the manager, but are part of the broader EX.
For example:
- They need a visa
- High pay
- The company looks good on their resume
- They identify with the purpose of the company
- They wish to obtain specific desired skills
- Flexible working hours
- Proximity to home or working from home
When extrinsic motivation no longer plays a role, or another company offers a bit more of that extrinsic motivation, people might leave, and this is partly why tenures in tech companies are short.
As Daniel Pink taught us in his book Drive, there are hygiene factors and motivation.
Hygiene factors are the things that if are present will not increase motivation, but if missing will demotivate. For example, a too-low salary. A high salary has a limited shelf-life after getting used to it.
Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is long lasting and is composed of 3 things: autonomy, mastery and purpose. When the company offers those, employees stay for long.
Even though they highly depend on the individual manager’s interpretation, perhaps you can think how the 4 principles address them.
The benefits
There is plenty of research about the cost of turnover, disengaged employees and loss of productivity and creativity, like gallup‘s.
Managing effectively — sustainably getting results and retention is hard and constant work. It doesn’t happen by itself without intent and doesn’t happen once a year in the performance review.
Moreover, the positive Management Experience will also be noticed by your manager, as you deliver results and exhibit retention. We could definitely say that your manager is also an “experiencee” of your MX and reaps its benefits.
With this hard work, which is teachable and repeatable, the manager can be a differentiator in the market and in the organization and demonstrate higher performance of their team in the form of results and retention.
Maybe even leave a legacy behind them.
