I’m dealing with a problem at work and I noticed something about my manager that I really like. Whenever you inform her of a problem, she tells you exactly what to do.
Those of you that have managers who don’t do this know how truly remarkable this is. There’s no flipping the problem right back at you so that they can cover their ass. No need for you to do a circus dance while asking the question, where you try to ask the question and answer it at the same time so that your lame duck boss can approve it.
All I have to do now is send an email that says “X happened” and I’ll get a response, “do Y and Z. Thanks for letting me know.”
This doesn’t even take away my autonomy, since I can always suggest my own solutions if I feel like it, but I’m never obligated to.
The best manager I ever had something to the effect of (and I have to paraphrase because it’s been roughly 15 years and a ton of life changes since then);
My job is to help you do your job.
Mostly by getting out of your way and letting you do it.
And by providing you with the training, tools and resources you need.
Sometimes it is by getting someone else out of your way.
Sometimes by protecting you from other managers.
Sometimes by taking a bullet for you so that you don’t have to.
Sometimes by keeping you focused and on track, or by nudging you in the right direction.
And hopefully rarely, by providing discipline when you’re doing something wrong.
When I have been a supervisor, I have told my people very directly that a good part of my job is to stop the flow of shit in either direction. To stop their petty bullshit from reaching the ears of higher management, who will then have to do something about it beyond what they get from me; and to try to mitigate the arbitrary bullshit that flows down from management and prevent it from destroying morale or distracting us from the real job we have to do.
Well, Chimera just stole my post. That is exactly what the best managers I’ve had did, and what I did my best to do as a manager. Workers do the work, managers should enable the work and prevent higher level managers from screwing up the work.
I don’t know where the OP works, but where I have worked a manager telling exactly what to do would result in a rush for the doors. Good managers hire people smarter than they are. They can help, given their experience, and they can give someone the big picture of how what they are doing helps the company and what should be done first when there is too much on the plate. But if I could tell someone exactly what to do, I’d write some code to do it.
“If you want things done your way, you have to do them yourself. If you give them to someone else to do, they will do it differently. Making the requirements and guidelines clear is your job; if things don’t come out as you wanted because you left something out, apologize and clarify. If they do it within the frame you gave them and it works, your job is to accept it.”
“Only because someone works for you ain’t no reason to forget your manners. Always say please and thank you, and mean it.” Voyager, I’ve had jobs where the dumb dude was the one who only spoke two languages, but snags still happen. A boss who either knows the solution to that particular snag (and when we’re talking about things like “computer errors”, a given error is likely to have one given solution) or knows who will is worth his house’s weight in gold.
If we were talking about normal situations where the boss was micromanaging you, I’d agree. Few things drive me crazier than micromanagement. In the situation the OP laid out, however, we’re talking about a problem that you, as the worker, have brought to the manager’s attention. If you already know how to deal with it and don’t need him to tell you what to do, why would you waste everyone’s time bothering him with it? Well, you wouldn’t, so in this sort of situation a manager telling you exactly how to fix something doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
In addition to Chimera’s excellent list, a good manager treats you like a competent professional who has something to add to the place, not a potentially defective cog in the glorious machine of their work. A good manger gives a shit about work conditions and how they affect employee morale and works to improve both, rather than assuming that if morale is low it’s because every single employee has a bad attitude. And above all else, a good manager actually follows through on promises and incentives.
You know how some people are bound and determined to make you look bad?
I’ve been lucky enough to have had a few managers who were bound and determined to make me look good.
It makes them look better to have a successful staff and certainly motivated me to do better work and try and make them look good in return. Win-win all around.
I don’t think I was clear on the type of problem I meant. If someone asked what form to use, or what the error was in this line of code, that would get a simple and straight answer. How to go about solving a problem, though, would get broad guidelines, not a solution. The class I went to in preparation for getting promoted said that doing the job was one of the biggest new manager’s flaws, since they could almost certainly do it better than their new reports. I tried to work really hard to not shoot out answers which is my proclivity - I probably failed a lot, but I tried.
It is kind of like moderating an argument at a meeting. It is very tempting to save time by giving the answer, but the process is sometimes very valuable, so long as the discussion is productive.
Odd. I’ve been to many performance reviews, and a manager who did this would have caught hell from his manager. “What, you can’t hire competent people? You can’t manage people to do a good job?” Especially true if the other managers know someone’s performance.
I always got high marks for my management ability, but it didn’t start out that way.
I recall the first performace/peer review I got as a manager. It was horrible. I was so mad. Then I said, “Mark you’re just upset 'cause you got your feelings hurt.”
When I looked at it, I divided it into two stacks. Legit complaints and those that were BS. The first thing I did was call a meeting of my staff and superiors and assure them I would address all the legit complaints
THEN
I called a second meeting to address the BS. This was the real key. You can’t let people who do nothing but bitch ruin it for everyone else. If a complaint has no basis it MUST be addressed and stopped. Otherwise it’s poison that spreads.
I also showed my staff I was not only managing them, but I was one of them.
One of the best moments of my life is when I quit to take a better job. The H/R director called me in and she said “Mark, every last one of your staff has come in and complained to me that I was letting you quit. And they were MAD, I couldn’t stop you.”
The thing is bad filters down. If you have unhappy employees, you have bad managers and it starts at top and filters down.
Of course in today’s economy, business are really taking advantage of their employees and treating them awful. Working so many temp jobs, I can’t tell you the number of times, I hear, “Just do it or that temp there will be doing your job full time from now on.”
No consideration. I think when the economy gets back to normal we will see massive number of people shift jobs, once they start to open up.
Miz Pullin (who has risen to Senior VP in her organization) says that: “Managers work for the people above them; Leaders work for the people below them.” Her take is that you have to be a little of both, but a good boss tries to maximize the latter.
I was sort of half joking, but it seems like many of the managers I have worked with do that, whether intentionally or not. Like they find shit just to bitch about.
A lor of it depends on the culture of the company. I like taking more of a team approach. I’m the coach. The project lead or most senior staff is the quarterback. The rest of the team each has their own positions and roles. But none of these roles are so rigid that anyone can’t step in and help someone else as needed (even me…I don’t mind rolling up my expensive cufflinked shirtsleaves).
I’ve worked at another place that was very hierarchial. Managers do not do staff work. Directors don’t manage projects directly. Lots of status reports and proposals for projects that never get approved.
Typically you have to be a LOT of both IMHO. In my experience, unfortunately, being good at the latter does not always equate to the former. What ends up happening is that a lot of otherwise good managers get browbeat into becoming kissasses and beurocrats in order to keep their job.
I’m watching this thread with great interest, as I’m still a pretty newbie manager, only two months of real experience. I’m trying very hard not to be a power tripper while at the same time not taking on too much of a personal burden.
The thing I’ve internalized so far is that a manager represents the employees to higher management and represents higher management to the employees. Obviously a decent manager isn’t just a middleman, but someone who works to turn concerns and complaints into something constructive. That, and let the employees do their jobs without micromanaging too much.
Is performance review done with a requirement that a certain number of employees be marked down as Unsatisfactory, no matter what? I’ve been in a place like that, and there the other managers would likely be pleased at this behavior, since it protects their people. (In this case no manager was like that, and the fickle finger of fate pointed to someone not in my group.)
The tricky part comes when upper management wants you to broadcast a message which is total nonsense. If you do this enthusiastically, anyone in your group with any brains will consider you a nitwit. If you laugh at the message, you are not a team player.
There are a few ways of handling this. One is to try to find some nuggets of wisdom in the message, and tell your group what the real point is. You can broadcast the message deadpan, and honestly say you don’t get it. Or you can ask for comments and agree to send comments and questions up - understanding you are unlikely to get an answer.
That’s easy. You start by saying “Mr. Boss has told me to advise you that…”
Whenever I gave orders as a middleman that I knew were bullshit I would always let the employee know that this was the way upper management wants things done. Period. If you have a better solution talk to them.
1> This is what they say. I don’t have to like it and neither do you, but this what they expect and we’re stuck with it. You can bitch all you like to me, but I can’t change it. Just do it and live with it until they figure it out and change the policy.
2> “They very clearly told us to light our clients on fire and that cannot be right, so for now we obviously won’t be doing that. If anyone calls you on the fact that our clients are not being burned to death before their eyes, please direct them to me. I expect this is either a very bad typo, or someone has gone off the deep end and will be removed from the building in short order. But remember, this is on MY head, and I’m ‘awaiting clarification’. So please follow MY instructions on this and refer any angry executives to me.”
3> My 3rd shift guys in a 24 hour truck gate who had approximately 60 minutes of work spread over an 8 hour shift had their coffee pot taken away and were told they could no longer surf the internet on the job. We got them the coffee pot back through a combination of threats and promises that we would no longer write people up for sleeping on the job, then I instructed everyone of my people on how to erase all signs that they had been surfing. History, Cookies, the whole 9 yards. Then we told the company boss to allow US to deal with people he caught surfing, which amounted to writing them up, having him sign it, then filing the form under a pile of paperwork and throwing it away later rather than putting it through (Ie, they were never written up except for show).
Pretty much. Basically it’s a ranking. All the managers sit in a room and rank all the associates and senior associates. Then the directors rank us and the partners rank them.
The problem I have with this is that there is no clearly defined system or criteria for the rankings. Just some matrix of vague bullet points. Not to mention that no manager can accurately compare staff because no staff can work with every manager. It’s all arbitrary which means it all comes down to personality, attitude, relationships and whim. Essentially it’s the same process my college fraternity used to extend offers to potential candidates.
Much easier said than done but the best manager I ever had lived by the rule
“Don’t say anything negative about anyone unless you can say it to their face first.”
It seems to be human nature for people to bitch and complain about a subordinate, co-worker, or boss to anybody and everybody EXCEPT THAT PERSON.
Which is completely unproductive and fixes nothing yet everyone seems to do it.
This manager was great because you always knew where you stood with him. If he had a problem with you he addressed it with YOU. Not like some other managers I knew who would talk about you behind your back. Same thing if you tried to complain about somebody to him. He’d ask you “Did you tell that person exactly what you’re telling me? No? Why not?”
He labeled people who complained about others but were afraid to confront these people as “chicken-shit leaders”.
So before you ever talk smack about someone else again ask yourself if you could say the same thing to that persons face? If not, why not? Why haven’t you confronted them already?
Be able to do this and you will gain everyone’s respect.
I think a good manager is one who can find a balance between what the job requires, and caring about your staff. Sometimes they need to be filters, and sometimes they really need not to be.
A manager who tries to entirely mitigate whatever problems a company is having as a whole, is often a manager who is going to burn out.
I would also say feedback is an important part of the job. While noone likes to hear things they need to improve on, in my neck of the woods that is often shied away from far too much. In other areas the converse is probably more true.