Do companies feel the pain of not having emotional commitment from their managers? Yes, they feel the pain. Ask any company at any time about its top ten chronic challenges. Manager performance will always appear on the list—finding managers, keeping them, paying them, training them, and motivating them.
Missed deadlines, lack of innovation, fluctuating product quality, and legal liability are all part of the high cost of low management commitment. That’s when they stay. When sales managers leave, they take great customers with them; when engineering managers leave, they take great ideas with them; when charismatic managers leave, they take great people with them. How many companies can say this problem doesn’t matter? How many companies can say they’ve put this chronic challenge behind them?
Why, then, has such an obvious problem not been mated with the resources and resolve to fix it? After all, the best companies are used to facing complex problems with no apparent solution in sight. When beset with a crisis, they marshal every resource, review every methodology, import and apply the best advice, focus obsessively on innovative solutions—and solve the problem.
