Random Thoughts from Judd

What Makes A Good Manager?

I spend a lot of time thinking about leadership, but not so much thinking about management. Probably because the idea of management scares me. I mean, leadership is warm and fuzzy, like curling up in front of the fireplace with hot cocoa and a teddy bear. Visioning, coaching, seeing the best in people and inspiring them to contribute their gifts to a great cause and, as a group, to create something magnificent and greater than the sum of them, something that stands the test of time and advertises how brilliant and lovely humanity is....Ahhhhh. Sign me up.

But management? Ho-ho. Different animal. It's gritty. Dirty. Scary. You gotta tell people what they need to do. Then (and this worse for some), you gotta hold them to it. And you got people above you telling YOU what to do: storm heavily defended forts, piss off the wrong people, violate your common sense, and just generally do things you wouldn't do at your most insane. Yes, you parachute through the fluffy, sunlit clouds of leadership down into the dirty muck of ground combat. Where results are what matter, not vision. Where the battlefield of daily business dictates its own brand of dirty trench politics.

Let's face it: in the clouds, everybody's a winner. On the ground, though, there are winners and there are losers, and even the winners sometimes go home feeling scarred and battle-weary, wondering what point it will all have when they're laying on their bed with nothing between them and death's door but the bland hiss of a respirator.

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating. Surely a good manager has a healthy dose of leadership at his or her core, a generally sunny and well-considered influence that informs and enlightens the sometimes harsher realities of balance sheets and production results, accountability, resource management, and competition.

You know, popular culture likes to speculate on the variety of passive and aggressive natures that might charactize the extraterrestrials who will one day visit Earth. We forget that WE are extraterrestrials: Our trash pollutes Earth's orbit and threatens the skylanes; we've got scrap metal scattered across the plains of moons and planets. At least one of our machines has passed beyond the outer rim of the solar system, while another has parachuted into the gaseous storms of Jupiter. Two of our robots have invaded Mars, hunting for water and life. And a few of us have already strolled across the Moon, with more on the way. Have we asked ourselves what kind of extraterrestrials we are, or will be? And do we dare?

Ahem. But back to Planet Earth. I've known all kinds of managers, but what kind of manager am I going to be? How will I know what to do? How does a good manager behave? Naturally, I reflect on the managers I've had; some were good, others were bad. This is very useful data. And I think about how I like to be treated in general by someone I work for.

I've documented some of my reflections below, in hopes that it will help me form the internal compass of management integrity I will need as I parachute through my clouds of optimistic visioning into the sometimes rough-and-tumble world of the daily business.

I certainly haven't completed or refined the list, but some particular qualities and habits come to mind, listed in no particular order:

Competence
Competence means a couple things to me: knowing what you're talking about, and being able to articulate yourself clearly; being well-informed, both about your discipline and your environment; being generally capable at the skills of your profession and at management in general. It doesn't mean being smarter than your people, or knowing everything they know. But you have to have enough of a handle on their business to make intelligent decisions with the information, skills, and issues they present to you.

Consistency
You can't lean on a person if you don't know where they stand. And you can't know where they stand if they keep moving around. I am NOT saying that a manager shouldn't change his mind. As the mystic and philosopher J. Krishnamurti once said, "Only a closed mind doesn't change." But you have to be clear about your overall direction, your expectations of your staff, and your feedback to them. And then you have to stick to it. And you must have spent enough time thinking about these things that well-considered convictions underpin them, protecting the overall health and integrity of the house during the occasional buffeting storm.

Communication
This means keeping people informed about what's going on, and why. Giving them clear and straight answers. Being clear about your expectations, and providing feedback on how they're doing. Yes, this must include telling people when they're not meeting the mark. Former GE CEO, Jack Welch, has a great chapter in his latest book, "Winning", on the importance of candor and honest feedback in an organization. He gives a lot of good reasons why it's the RIGHT thing to do, not just for the organization, but for the person as well.

Challenge
Challenge means giving people opportunities to grow, to shine, to stretch, to screw up, to play. In short, helping people to grow, and to help them identify and stay in that state of flow so eloquently described by Csikszentmihalyi, that place where things are not so hard they're frustrating, and not so easy they're boring. Also, I think Challenge not only means giving people vocational challenges, but personal challenges as well: challenging people to be their best, to develop and show up with the best part of themselves. Challenge a person to demand more of themselves. To trust themselves more. To risk more than they like. To reflect more than they like. To commit more than they like. Not just for the organization's sake, but for the person's own sake. Perhaps a manager's credo could be: Leave them better off than you found them.

Of course, knowing your people well enough to challenge them, vocationally and personally, requires the next quality, Commitment.

Commitment
Obviously there's a manager's routine commitment to the organization and the hot projects and all the rest of it. But more importantly, there's the commitment to the people he or she is managing, which means taking good care of them, keeping faith in them when they make mistakes, defending them from others who would harm them or their credibility, advertising their skills and acts of distinction. It also means listening carefully and actively to them, and it means trusting them when you know they have done their best.

Circular
And lest we forget, a good manager must practice all of these on him- or herself. Staying competent and informed, being consistent with one's own expectations and feedback, communicating effectively with oneself, challenging oneself, and committed to oneself -- that is, allowing mistakes, standing by oneself, and determined to do the best that he or she can.

Conclusion
No, that's not a management quality. Well, ok, maybe it is. Knowing how to bring something to a productive end, wrap something up and say it's done. Like this article. :-)

Anyway, these are my random thoughts. What do YOU think? Leave a comment.

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