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Self-Starters Can Make Terrible Managers

Guest post by: Jessica Ollenburg

Article Overview: There is nothing less common than sense. Self-motivated people are a minority. Self-motivated people find it quite challenging and unnatural to motivate others. While the correct training can turn some self-starters into top leaders, barriers and pitfalls need avoidance.

Self-Starters Can Make Terrible Managers

Self-starters rarely understand those who are not self-starters, and most available employees are not self-starters. This lack of understanding creates a barrier to audience adaptation and leadership problem solving. Until we learn otherwise, we tend to believe others think and behave as we do. Without specific leadership training, self-starters lack necessary frame of reference and are often less than successful engaging and guiding the performance of others.

Employers tend to promote top performers, usually self-starters, to leadership roles. Upon doing so, we fail to recognize that we are often promoting for the wrong reasons. A self-starter with the right leadership training can lead by example. A self-starter may be more proactive in the leadership education process and gain more. A self-starter unwilling or improperly trained in leadership, will most likely fail. Leadership is lifelong education, requiring regular revisits to the basics. Without ability to understand and adapt to those unlike us, we stunt company growth and can only hire a small percentage of the available applicant pool. It is for this reason that major market employers can rarely be highly selective in hiring, even in times of high unemployment.

Leadership is not a natural progression but rather a distinct, precise and often trainable subset. Coaching is something many self-starters have no interest in. “Why should I coddle you, when no one coddled me?” Coaching should never be coddling but rather a transfer of information, measurable success benchmarks, regular performance feedback and precisely communicated and delivered rewards and consequences. Assuming the talent acquisition process is doing its job, coaching is that which makes success an employee choice.

To be a self-starter is to be intrinsically motivated, motivated from within, believing that hard work and/or successful results lead to positive outcomes. Those not intrinsically motivated can often pinpoint the catalyst to their new extrinsic motivation and can successfully understand and relate to others also not intrinsically motivated. We know that extrinsic motivation is volatile, affected by the employer. Motivation is, in its simplest terms, a reason. We know most people are not intrinsically motivated. This is validated through decades of results, employee research in the hundreds of thousands, and pinpointed findings in the AskHRS.com surveys.

Self-starters can make great managers, provided they are willing and precisely trained in audience adaptation and effective coaching principles. Those who make good employees because of someone else’s effective coaching should also be considered for coaching opportunities. Understanding what transformed you to improved performance is a valuable toolset applicable to transforming others! Those who were “transformed” can be highly influential and motivational success stories for others. If you are reading this, you are most likely already a self-starter.

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Article Tags: adaptation, applicant pool, benchmarks, catalyst, employee choice, frame of reference, leadership education, leadership roles, leadership training, lifelong education, measurable success, natural progression, performance feedback, rewards and consequences, self starter, self starters, subset, talent acquisition, top performers, unemployment



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