I have a manager in my team who is very diligent and technically excellent at his job but really lacks people skills. I suspect possible neurodivergence but I have no evidence for this.
I can see his strengths (of which there are many) and I believe that his intentions are good, but he lacks the ability to anticipate how people are going to react to certain things and he doesn't seem to understand that you tend to get more done through building good will and positive relationships than you do through emphasising hierarchical structures and adopting an unnecessarily punitive approach. For example, he will always want to go down a formal disciplinary route for the most minor of issues, with very good employees, whereas I tend to think that such issues can generally be effectively resolved more informally. Of course, there are times when formal disciplinary processes are appropriate, but to my mind, these should be used sparingly and saved for those occasions when they're really needed. His natural instinct is also to try and control everything and micromanage, whereas I believe in giving people a reasonable degree of autonomy over their work, within the boundaries of clear guidelines and expectations. I know this probably frustrates him.
If I coach this manager through situations in a lot of detail before he deals with a tricky conversation, he can usually do an ok job. However, when he acts on his own initiative, we frequently end up in situations where I have to pick up the pieces after he has caused unnecessary upset. I have had lots of conversations with him about this, and the upshot of this is that he now tends to check with me before doing anything that might be controversial.
This is progress, as I'd rather discuss things with him first rather than go down the route of damage limitation after the event, but it does take up quite a bit of my time, not least because he generally likes to argue the case (very politely) for what he wants to do and I have to spend a lot of time explaining on each occasion why I don't want to follow his proposed course of action. He is clearly convinced of his rightness on every occasion, but to be fair, after a bit of pushing, he does always accept my decision without complaint. I guess I had just hoped that he would learn more over time and get a sense as to when a more formal response was warranted and when it was OTT, but that doesn't seem to have happened. His instincts are the same as they ever were.
I realised after another protracted discussion today that he actually just thinks that I'm fundamentally wrong in my approach, and he believes that a very formal, distant, hierarchical approach to management is actually "best practice". He is accepting my decisions because I'm his boss, but he is convinced that I'm wrong and that I'm being too soft. For what it's worth, I know that he thinks that my other managers are too soft as well. From my perspective, we just have a fairly positive work culture with good staff who don't usually take the piss, so there is generally no need for a draconian approach. In fact, that would be counterproductive.
Part of me thinks that this is just a fundamental clash of values and that this manager will never really fit into the culture of our team. The other part of me thinks that this is a well-meaning, hardworking member of staff with a massive blind spot, and I really want to help him understand that managers generally achieve much more by building good relationships with staff and by leveraging those relationships to sort out any minor issues informally. I know that he is ambitious, and failing to understand this will really hold him back.
I have already sent him on some training but I think he found it a bit woolly and he sort of missed the point. I do know from a previous issue that he does sometimes respond well to academic research and I wondered if anyone could potentially recommend any articles or books that might help him to understand that this isn't about being soft on people, it's about understanding how to create a positive working environment that brings out the very best in them. Unfortunately it isn't possible to put him in a role where he has no line management responsibility, otherwise I'd have done that already.
If anyone has any suggestions of things that I could ask him to read, they would be gratefully received. Or any other suggestions on how I could potentially help him to see that there might be value in a different approach? Or should I just give up, accept that he's never going to get it, and determine whether his position is sustainable with his current level of understanding?
TIA