Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Do as I do: When the manager shows up fully

He was different. He was the best I had ever come across. He was the very first manager I worked under in corporate Ghana, and he had such a lasting effect on me. The thing about Mr. Odonkor was that he commanded respect without being loud. In fact, you could even describe him as being the quiet type. So how did he manage to get a branch full of boisterous young men working with all our might? In my estimation, it was because he was always, visibly, fully there.

He came to work early, many times, earlier than most of the other staff. He knew the names of every customer who came in regularly. When the queue built up and the pressure rose, he did not retreat to his office. He walked the floor. He asked questions. He solved problems. And when he asked us to give exceptional service, nobody needed to be persuaded, because we had spent every working day watching him do exactly that.

I do not recall the metrics by which the branches were assessed during the period, but I believe by almost every measure, the Accra branch would have been among the best-performing. Customer satisfaction was consistently high. Staff turnover was unusually low.

And the commitment to service quality that characterised that branch was not something that had been mandated from a head office memo or reinforced through a performance management system. It had been, for want of a better word, caught. We had absorbed it from Mr. Patrick Odonkor, simply by watching him live it, day after day.

What I observed in my branch—and what I have since observed in the best service operations I have ever encountered—now has a rigorous academic foundation. A study published in the December 2025 edition of the Journal of Service Theory and Practice has precisely examined this phenomenon: the way in which the behaviour of the manager shapes the commitment of the frontline employee to service quality. And its findings make a compelling case that the most powerful driver of a service team’s performance is not its training programme or its incentive structure. It is the conduct of the person at the top of the immediate hierarchy.

The study, titled The Effects of Managerial Job Engagement and Behavioural Integrity on Employee Commitment to Service Quality, draws on social influence theory. This theory is concerned with how people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours are shaped by their social environment. Within this framework, the study focuses on two specific mechanisms: social identification and internalisation.

Social Identification is the process by which an employee begins to see themselves as part of the same group as their manager, to adopt the manager’s values and standards as their own, because they identify with the person modelling them. Internalisation goes further still: it is the process by which the employee takes those values and standards inside, makes them genuinely their own, and acts on them not because the manager is watching but because they have become part of who the employee is. Both of these processes, the research shows, are activated by specific manager behaviours—and both have measurable consequences for employee commitment to service quality.

The first behaviour the study examines is managerial job engagement—the degree to which the manager is visibly, genuinely invested in their own work. Not engaged in the sense of appearing busy or filling their calendar, but engaged in the deeper sense of bringing real energy, real attention, and real care to what they do.

The research found that when employees perceive their manager as genuinely engaged, their own commitment to service quality rises significantly. The logic of this is almost elegantly simple: engaged managers model the standard. They demonstrate, through their own behaviour, what it looks like to care about the work. And employees, who are social creatures before they are professional ones, respond to that demonstration. They raise their own standards to meet the one they see being lived in front of them.

The second behaviour is managerial behavioural integrity — the alignment between what the manager says and what the manager does. This is, in many respects, the more fundamental of the two. A manager who preaches customer focus but treats their own team with indifference. A manager who demands punctuality but arrives late. A manager who talks about going the extra mile but leaves at the earliest opportunity. These incongruences are noticed.

They are noticed quickly, they are talked about quietly, and they erode—systematically and sometimes irreversibly—the employee’s willingness to commit to standards that the person setting them does not appear to hold themselves to. The research confirms what frontline employees have always known: you cannot ask for what you are not willing to give.

As a matter of fact, the study introduces two further factors that either strengthen or weaken the relationship between managerial job engagement and employee commitment to service quality. The first is job autonomy—the degree to which frontline employees are given genuine freedom to make decisions and exercise judgement in their work.

The research found that employees with higher job autonomy are better able to translate their manager’s engagement into their own commitment to service quality. This makes intuitive sense. An employee who is trusted to act independently has the space to absorb and apply the standards they observe in their manager.

An employee who is micromanaged, whose every action is prescribed and monitored, has no such space. The standard is imposed rather than internalised, and an imposed standard is always more fragile than an internalised one.

The second moderating factor is bi-communication—the quality of two-way communication between manager and employee. Not the one-directional transmission of instructions and expectations, but the genuine exchange in which employees are heard as well as directed, questioned as well as informed, and given a voice in the conversation about how the work is done.

The study found that strong bi-communication amplifies the positive effect of managerial job engagement on employee commitment to service quality. A manager who is engaged and who listens creates conditions in which employees do not merely follow but genuinely commit.

I have realised that these two moderating factors—autonomy and two-way communication—are not simply management best practices that happen to interact with managerial engagement. They are the conditions under which the social influence processes that the research describes can fully operate. Social identification and internalisation do not happen in environments of control and silence. They happen in environments where the employee is respected enough to be trusted and valued enough to be heard.

The manager whose engagement inspires their team is, almost always, also the manager who gives their team room to breathe and a genuine voice in the work. Anyone who worked under Mr. Odonkor recalls that he referred to every single staff member as “Manager”. That was a masterstroke. Interestingly, I only realised this when I got into top management myself and thereafter, consulting. Nothing was more inspiring than for your manager to call you “Manager.”

One can only imagine the number of service businesses that have invested heavily in frontline training while paying insufficient attention to the behaviour of the managers those frontline employees report to every day. The most sophisticated service training programme in the world will struggle to produce genuine commitment in a team whose manager is visibly disengaged, whose words and actions point in different directions, and whose communication style runs in one direction only. The training deposits standards into the employee. The manager’s daily behaviour either reinforces or erodes them. And in the long run, the daily behaviour always wins.

The practical implications of this research are as clear as they are demanding. Businesses that are serious about frontline service quality need to be equally serious about the quality of the managers leading their frontline teams—not only their technical competence and their operational knowledge, but their engagement, their integrity, their willingness to communicate genuinely, and their instinct to trust the people in their care. These are not personality traits that can be assumed to be present. They are behaviours that need to be identified, cultivated, and held to account.

The American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou observed that people will forget what you said, forget what you did, but will never forget how you made them feel. For the service manager, there is a professional corollary to this wisdom: your team will forget the performance targets you set and the training sessions you ran, but they will never forget how you showed up. They will never forget whether you were genuinely there, whether you meant what you said, and whether you treated the work with the same seriousness you asked of them.

Mr. Patrick Odonkor retired some years ago. But the team he built outlasted his departure by many years. The leadership he modelled for us is still with us. That, in the end, is the true measure of leaders whose engagement was real: the standards do not leave when they do. They have, by then, become someone else’s own.

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