Measuring supervisor communication
Ongoing measurement of the effectiveness of manager communication is an important element of any program to support and improve skills and competencies in this area. Here, Angela Sinickas explains how to use absolute and relative measurement techniques to gather specific feedback on all leaders, starting with the CEO.
If supervisors are expected to communicate well and frequently in your organization, using surveys to measure their current effectiveness can be helpful – not only to the supervisors and their own employees, but also to your training department in order to help them develop priorities and agendas.
Surveys of managers’ communication competence can be even more useful when a group of employees complete the questionnaire regarding their own managers by name, so the results are specific to an individual’s training needs, yet the overall results can be combined for an organizational assessment.
Starting at the top
This process works best if it begins at the top, with the executive staff first assessing the CEO, who feeds back to the respondents what he or she learned from the results. Then these executives ’ direct reports complete the surveys about the executives, who, in turn, positively feed back the results to their staff.
When the assessment cascades downward, each new group of evaluators feels safe in being candid and in having their own direct reports evaluate them, because they’ve already experienced the benefits of providing this type of feedback to their own bosses in a safe environment.
An absolute evaluation lets you know how good “good” is and how bad “bad” is.
Key measurement decisions
There are two key measurement decisions to make if you want to measure supervisory communication effectiveness:
1) Will the evaluation be absolute or relative?
An absolute evaluation lets you know how good “good” is and how bad “bad” is – and how much different measures improve after corrections have been made. Using a relative evaluation, respondents rank-order the skills from most to least effectively demonstrated by their managers. So, if 10 skills are listed, even a strong communicator will have one skill ranked at the bottom, one at the top, and eight in the middle. Similarly, an ineffective communicator will receive a top ranking for some aspect of communication skills. The relative evaluation is safer when each manager is identified individually – it’s disturbing enough to encourage change, yet not threatening enough to prevent employees from filling out the forms.
2) Will supervisors and managers be asked to evaluate themselves as well as be evaluated by their subordinates?
Comparing the results of how managers think they communicate, with how their subordinates rate them, often highlights very interesting and surprising discrepancies.
Figures One, Two and Three (NAME) provide examples of the difference in how you would structure a questionnaire asking for either absolute or relative evaluations.
Analysing the research
At one company, we identified during individual interviews a list of 33 communication skills that managers said were most important. Although these skills could have been collapsed into fewer related skill categories, the skills the managers themselves suggested had their own precision and strength. Plus, their commitment to the evaluation and training process increased when they saw all their input used verbatim on the subsequent skills assessment form.
At another company, the quality improvement manager believed that employees could treat customers well only if they were being treated with respect by their own managers. To assess how well managers were managing, from their employees’ perspective, we developed a 14-question managerial evaluation on several aspects of supervisory skills –including five communication behaviors – as part of the quality-improvement process. We identified the critical 14 managerial behaviors for this client based on employee focus-group discussions.
Each employee was able to fill out an evaluation form anonymously on any individual manager above him or her.
Each employee was able to fill out an evaluation form anonymously on any individual manager above him or her, up through the vice president level, by the manager ’s name, as long as they had had repeated direct contact together.
The field employees were resurveyed every six months on all 14 questions, and their management group’s compensation was based partly on improving their scores. During the first year this approach was used, two dramatic things happened. Most supervisors began treating their employees more like human beings. The most blatant occurrences of yelling, swearing and berating performance in public, certainly stopped immediately. A few other supervisors who felt unable to change their management styles – and didn’t like the reduced compensation they were facing – left the company, making room for more enlightened replacements.
The best part of their departure was that most of these destructive managers started working for my client’s competitors.
Figure One: Absolute evaluation
Figure Two: Relative Evaluation
Figure Three: Relative managerial evaluation by subordinate and self
Have your say
How effective are your organization's managers at communicating with employees? Are you measuring this? If so how? Share your thoughts with us.
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