“Who I am?” Ruben asked, furrowing his brow.
“Yes, who are you?” I insisted. “What is your role?”
“Well, I’m the manager,” he explained. “My role is to manage. It’s my team that actually does the work. I just manage.”
“If all you do is manage, then I have limited use for you,” I pressed. “If all you do is manage, I can get by with a supervisor. What is your work?”
“Well, when my team gets stuck, I help them get unstuck,” Ruben replied, grabbing for any kind of traction.
“And when you get your team unstuck, what do you do, to keep them from getting stuck in the same way again?”
Ruben hesitated, then thoughtfully arrived at a meaningful conclusion. “I look at what we are doing, how we are doing it, the sequence we do it in and think, is this the best way? We might create our own problems simply by the order of the steps we work in. It’s my job to think about that stuff.”
“What tools do you use to think with?” I prompted.
“I don’t know,” Ruben pondered. “I mean, sometimes, I will draw out a flow chart, so I can see things more clearly, you know, boxes and circles and arrows.”
“And when you finish that flow chart, what is that a picture of?”
“Well, it’s the system that we work in, with all the steps and relationships of those steps.”
“And so, what is your work?” I asked, again.
i don’t know but I think you’re in a senseless rhetoric and recursive loop
the fella is a manager that gets his people unstuck, analyzes the issues and draws flowcharts to document this process
what is wrong with that as a role
how about fluffy boisterous roles like ‘I enable, lead my men into positive-ROI projects that leave my customers drooling, and predict all future events with my big brain’
will that be okay with you?
Hi, Han,
Thanks for jumping in with both feet. You nailed the point of the story. It IS the role of the manager to get his team unstuck, analyze issues and draw flowcharts. Often managers get caught in the urgency of the day, without understanding they have their own work to do, analysis and flow-charting. This post follows a thread from Wednesday, where the question is posed, “Where do I start?” And I like your description of puffery. Tom Peters couldn’t have said it better.
Typical Strata III development. Systems, systems, systems. Thanks Tom.
I have also been thinking about model and utilizing tools to explore processes and relationships.
Attempting to explore substance field interactions and what forces create the action of one to another. Once the model and visual mapping have occurred then psychological inertia can be overcome and a greater view of the process can be seen.
As Tom points out with a manager their time-span for goals is longer.
Nice posts….Well interesting and useful…