From the Ask Tom Mailbag –
Question:
Hey Tom, I want your opinion on something…Why do the wrong people end up in management/leadership positions? What are the first three reasons that come to mind?
Response:
While it’s fun to poke at dysfunction, especially in managerial positions (just read Dilbert, my favorite), there are shining examples of high performing managers in most organizations. But there are a few stinky ones out there.
Next-in-line – Most teams will eventually lose their manager, either to a promotion, to another company or to trout fishing in Montana. In many cases, that team will end up with the next-in-line. This person may have been a competent assistant, been on the team the longest or simply showed up for work early on the wrong day. Poof – you’re a manager.
Mis-selection – Companies recruiting from the outside often make a poor hiring decision. For the most part, they have no clue about what it takes to be an effective manager. Clueless, they fumble through a stack of resumes, ask the wrong questions during interviews and end up with an empty suit. Poof – you’re a manager.
Skill-set – Many people are perfectly capable to be effective in a managerial role, but have never been trained in specific skills. Being a manager has a great deal to do with “who” you are, yet there are several leadership skills (yes, trainable skills) that must be learned and practiced. Most companies don’t have internal capabilities to teach or coach those skills. Poof – you’re a manager. Good luck.
I think that most people have the skills to manage but problems begin with what they are expected to manage. If someone is a planner and is used to looking out into the future, then the may not be good at managing in the “now”. Someone who is juggler may be better at handling the everyday issues that crop up in business but be terrible planners. The key is to determine what a person’s strength is. One of the questions I think that is important to ask is “what was your favorite job and why was it your favorite job?” Then spend some time talking about that job. What did they like about it. What were their responsibilities? Was it a job that required planning or was it a job that was “crisis management”? Was it a job that had variety that allowed the person to learn something about a lot of stuff or was it a job were a person could focus and work in a niche. Try and find out what made the person happy in that job and you can usually find a match for what you believe the job requires. I find when you talk to someone you find that there are a few types of managers:
The Planners”: people who will look at a project and analyze it many differet ways so they can try and game out every detail. This is great for starting a project but may not be the best when things go wrong and the juggling starts. Some famous general use to say “Plan never survive contact with the enemy.” Some people can switch the planning switch over to juggling and some can’t.
The Jugglers”: These are people who may not be good at planning but when things go wrong, they are at their best. They shift and adapt resources. They jump into the problems and try and fix them. They make deals to get problems solved short term and eventually long term.
The Micromanagers: These are usually perfectionists who will look at every detail of a plan or deliverable and tweak and tweak until it’s perfect in their eyes. In the process, they work themselves and their subordinates pretty hard to get everything perfect in the alloted time frames.
The 90-percenters: These are people who can get jobs 90% done but have a hard time wrapping up the last 10%. They get a lot of work done but they are unsure how to finish a job by putting the final touches on it.
The Artists: Similar to micromanagers but the are into making their product a work of art. I use to program years and years ago and I had a manager that collected Japanese lunch boxes. If you have ever seen one of these, they are pretty incredible looking. They are bamboo boxes that are hand-painted with a particular scene or color scheme that represented the restaurant that prepared the lunch for the office worker. My programming manager wanted all the code that was written to look like a Japanese lunch box. Simple, beautiful, with as few lines of code as possible. The problem was that we all didn’t have the same aesthitic sense that he did so everything was unworthy. This created a lot of problems for our team if we were working against a tight deadline. The manager ended up having to re-write a lot of code and thus made a lot of the other programmers a bit angry.
There are more. The Supreme Technologist turned manager (legendary at their craft but not really suited to be a manager, can’t stay out of the details because of their thirst to learn). The Pontificator: someone who spouts the right buzz words but doesn’t really understand their meaning.
The big thing is to have a mixture of people who can work together and cover someone else’s weak points. Management’s job is to find the strengths and weaknesses and “cook” them together so they draw out the good things about each. One of the best things that managers can do is to avoid silos and build manager teams. Find strengths that work together so that they can work together. Get people to be open about their weaknesses and collaborate with people who have opposing strengths.
Those are my thoughts. Hope they were worth reading.
I think the one thing that gets overlooked by hiring management and is deeply resented by the employees who get the new manager is that new managers are rarely ever trained in what their employees actually do. They’re tossed in to immediately manage, but they don’t know what they’re managing. Who could possibly live up to expectations when they don’t even know what their employees are doing? It causes a ripple effect, lowering morale. When management is being hired, a training period needs to be set aside for the new manager to LEARN WHAT THEY’RE MANAGING. They need to learn employees and their tasks. Only then can a new manager be effective.
Managerial Roles
Manager’s job is not a simple one but a complex one. Many factors of the environment have affect on the performance or working of the organization. Managers play the major and vital role to control the affect of these factors.
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