Likeability as a Factor in Managerial Success

Introduction: The Likeability Problem in the Workplace

A 2007 survey in which 90,000 employees from around the world were interviewed revealed that only 20% of those questioned were attempting to perform to their utmost abilities in the workforce. The remaining 80% were reported to be disengaged (Bhargava). What was the cause of such overwhelmingly lackluster workplace attitudes? A number of researchers have identified the root cause in a failure of leadership to personally interact with — and form bonds of human sympathy toward — subordinates (Bhargava; Pink; Holmes). Indeed, Daniel Pink has shown in his best-selling work Drive that leaders who demonstrate likeability in the workplace actually achieve a higher success rate in motivating teams over the long run. Likeable managers establish workplace cultures that provide a necessary foundation for attracting, developing, and retaining autonomous, masterful, and purpose-driven employees. This paper examines how likeability functions as a factor in management and how it can be effectively utilized to overcome employee disengagement.

Defining Managerial Likeability

Likeability has been defined in many different ways. Daniel Pink describes it as an outward demonstration of trust between two people, maintained by a mutual sense of authenticity and transparency. Bhargava, on the other hand, describes likeability as a recipe composed of empathy, sympathy, charity, and the "ability to offer value" (108). Managerial likeability in the workplace, then, is more than simple good-natured friendliness; it is a kind of intellectual and emotional bond that brings two or more people together through a shared feeling of oneness, togetherness, openness, camaraderie, and common mission. Underlying the "friendly" aspect of likeability is the awareness of being part of a shared task whose goal is clear, recognized, desirable, and attainable.

Furthermore, successful management has been defined in terms that invoke the concept of likeability. Luthans asserts that success in management is not a result of engaging in "the same day-to-day activities as effective managers" but rather in those activities designed to "find the way to get ahead… to be friendly… both inside and outside the firm… [to] find a common interest [among all]… and interact with them on that level" (130). This view is echoed by Chet Holmes, author of the best-selling The Ultimate Sales Machine. Holmes insists that successful managers are as concerned about the people surrounding them as they are about making progress, exceeding the status quo, and driving sales, morale, and growth. Success is built on forging relationships, and relationships are built on likeability as defined above.

Communication Flows and the Role of Transparency

To show the degree to which likeability is a factor in managerial success, it is instructive to examine what happens when that factor is absent. Michael Lewis illustrated the loss of one fundamental aspect of likeability — authenticity — when he recounted the global economic crisis of 2007–8 in his book The Big Short. Lewis noted that a mentality of "false conviction" pervaded several Wall Street firms, where managers' goals were detached from reality (114). The allurement of easy money through the selling of bundles of bad debts to unsuspecting buyers triggered a massive backlash when people began to realize that the risk of purchasing these debts far outweighed the reward. The conviction that managers communicated to subordinates turned overnight into fear and helplessness, as thousands of employees were laid off — employees who had "bought into" the false convictions of their leaders. Had their managers been more authentic in their approach, they might have recognized the terrible risk associated with these bad debts before eagerly buying and selling them.

One reason managerial likeability is lost is poor communication between managers and subordinates. Tourish and Hargie show in their research that, to guard against the sort of "false convictions" that enabled the 2007–8 economic crisis, managers should conduct a communication audit (133). A communication audit allows managers to understand how communication flows within the workplace — whether it moves in a one-way, top-down direction, or in a two-way, reciprocal flow. Their research indicates that communication in most workplace environments remains merely one-way, which may help explain why 80% of employees feel disconnected. According to Tourish and Hargie, communication is "still regarded as something that managers do to their subordinates; they drop information like depth charges on to those employees submerged in the organizational ocean but make it very clear that they do not expect to receive any feedback torpedoes in return" (132).

Tourish and Hargie make clear that one-way communication is undesirable on many levels. First, it means that information travels only in one direction — typically from top to bottom — leaving subordinates unable to readily send information back to their superiors. Such a one-way street risks producing an uninformed management team, one that fails to understand how its subordinates are handling or applying the directives handed down to them. Tourish and Hargie argue that a more likeable approach is a two-way communication channel, through which subordinates can relay necessary information upward when needed. This approach is more likeable because it rests on the principle of transparency: access routes are open and available, and employees can be confident that sharing information is possible, acceptable, and encouraged. When such a two-way channel is missing, the workplace climate can quickly sour.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is the point that Bhargava makes — along with Weaver, Elkind, McLean, Lewis, Holmes, and many others: to understand likeability, one must have a sense of universal goodness, which can be applied in many different ways depending on particular contexts. However, that likeability must be authentic. It cannot be full of "false conviction" or rooted in a likeable deviance of the Iago variety. It must be grounded in ideas and actions that strive toward the common good, as Iacocca showed at Ford and as Bhargava's research has confirmed. Likeability is other-centered, not self-centered. Managers who are driven merely by a need to be personally liked are missing the point entirely: the point is not about them, but about others. What can they do for others? That is the question that motivated even Jobs and Ellison — two deeply unlikeable men — who nonetheless had very likeable ideas.

Reflective Memo

Through this research project, a number of lessons emerged. As a writer, conveying ideas and making a sustained argument requires a nuanced approach, such as that provided by the Rogerian model of argumentation. This model proved effective: it allowed for the establishment of a thesis, made room for possible rebuttals, and ultimately arrived at a kind of compromise resolution — as reflected in the paper's conclusion, which ends with the example of two apparently unlikeable leader-managers who can nonetheless be viewed as likeable in a meaningful sense.

As a scholar, the research process confirmed that the more broadly one reads, the more fully one grasps a subject. Approaching this topic required wide reading — from works such as Likeonomics and scholarly journal articles to journalistic works such as Lewis's The Big Short and Elkind and McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room. Each source shed new light and offered a fresh perspective, and the aim was to bring all of these elements together into a unified, original approach to understanding why likeability is a factor in successful management.

Finally, as a thinker and reader, this project reinforced that one cannot fully know what to think without having read as broadly as possible. Digesting and understanding what one reads, however, requires a considered perspective — and what this process made clear is that adopting a sound perspective is as important as collecting data. Perspective, like likeability, ultimately depends on a universal notion of rightness. Grasping that universal notion is, it seems, what is ultimately at stake in all things.

Works Cited

Avolio, B.J., Walumbwa, F.O., Weber, T.J. "Leadership: Current Theories, Research, and Future Directions." Annual Review of Psychology, 60 (2009): 421–29. Print.

Bhargava, Rohit. Likeonomics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Print.

Elkind, Peter; McLean, Bethany. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print.

Holmes, Chet. The Ultimate Sales Machine. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.

Kass, H. "Whistleblowers and the Ethics of Stewardship: A Comment on Truelson." Dialogue 8.3 (1986): 36–45. Print.

Lewis, Michael. The Big Short. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011. Print.

Luthans, F. "Successful vs. Effective Real Managers." Academy of Management Executive 2.2 (1988): 127–132. Print.

Pink, Daniel. Drive. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011. Print.

Tourish, D., Hargie, O. "Communication Audits: Building World Class Communication Systems." Handbook of Corporate Communication and Public Relations. UK: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Print.