Very very true! If I got to my boss and say, “I screwed up,” she either fixes it, helps me fix it, or at least tells me how to fix it. She has this crazy idea that everybody makes mistakes and the important thing is to fix them, not assign blame.
How many people with concerns need to be taken into account depends on the size of the team. Also, learn to recognize your Cassandras: sometimes the whole team sees the problem, but only one person has the balls to mention it.
This strategy will save your company oodles of money, since most of your employees will leave on their own, not needing severance pay. Even better, they will be the highly paid ones, saving even more, and they will also likely be the ones having all those annoying new ideas which makes your life difficult.
One boss I worked for had 15 reports when I started. Only one of the original ones was left when I left 15 months later.
One more thing. If someone reporting to you is not busy by some miracle, see what kind of training/long term project he/she can do. If everyone is busy, more likely, when you assign something new to someone explicitly say which of their jobs gets bumped by the new assignment. If you don’t do it, they will pick something, and you may not like what they choose. DO NOT EVER say “Work smarter not harder.”
In my opinion, the thing that separates management from line work is dealing with people. You need to be able to recognize people, socialize with people, understand people, sense the moods of people, and handle people appropriately. Dealing out praise and criticism is just the beginning.
This is why I will never ever be a manager. I’d rather crawl across broken glass. I have trouble recognizing people and remembering them.
That’s fine as long as it’s getting the job done. You need to make sure nobody’s playing workplace lawyer - “You didn’t tell me I had to file those reports, you just asked me if I would. And I figured that meant it was my choice if I did it or not so I decided not to.” This kind of game will undermine your authority and will lower office morale when employees see other employees getting away with not working.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t kill yourself the first six months, and don’t feel like you need to ‘fix the world in a day’. You probably have all sorts of really neat ideas and suggestions - don’t try to do everything at once. Tackle one large problem at a time.
Always let everyone know what’s expected. Be clear on instructions, and confirm as many times as needed. Meet everyone once a quarter or so for coffee etc. just to chat etc. If you have regular appraisals/reviews, do an informal meeting half-way between regular appraisals and help them meet or exceed their targets.
Take the blame for the team when they make a mistake, and give them the credit when they do good. I have to admit tho, that approach can really backfire if your bosses are jerks…
I was sort of half kidding. But it is certainly a legitimate management practice to get rid of at least the most vocal malcontents. If they are that unhappy, they probably aren’t doing a great job anyway and they really should look for something that is a better fit.
You should spend less time worrying about being a “jerk” boss and worry about being an effective boss. Bosses who try to be everyone’s friends often are the biggest jerks. They evaluate their staff on how well they like them instead of how well they are performing their job.
I absolutely agree with you about the problem of friendship. I think most people who are effective get over that the first time they have to correct a friend or even give a less than stellar performance review.
As far as malcontents, I tried to use the MAS*H management technique - the superstar performer can be as malcontented as he wants to be, as long as he performs and doesn’t keep others from performing. You do want to give enough information so if they are mad at something for the wrong reason, they can get over it. But I managed in places which did not encourage conformity, so my experience might be skewed.
The worst problem I ever had was a big conflict between someone in my group and someone in another group - especially because most of the problem came from the person in my group. Those things are nasty, and I don’t have any good solutions to them.
Wow, lots of advice but we don’t even know what Lumpy does! (Or at least, I don’t.) In my opinion, management style needs to be suited to the industry/department/relative importance of the employees. My boss has only one employee – me. He doesn’t tell me what to do. I work for everyone else in the company. If he tried to get in my way, he’d get bowled over. Y’all are working in some pretty pristine straight-arrow workplaces, I think. Where I work, it’s chaotic; lines of command are blurred by capability, seniority, loyalty, romance, blind ambition, wealth, personal hygiene and psycopathy. In some respects, bosses are tolerated, and they know it; a word or two from a seriously disgruntled senior programmer can get a boss out on his ass in the street. How not to be a jerk boss where I work? Christ, it changes from one department to the next. One department needs serious kick-assery to make the salesmen do their job, another needs to baby the prima donna programmers along. There’s no magic formula. All of the typical motherhood statements about praise and fairness are good as far as they go, but the devil’s in the details.