Know what’s going on. Even when you’re not around. In fact, you should especially know what’s going on when you’re not around.
When you’re dealing with your subordinates, represent your supervisors. When you’re dealing with your supervisors, represent your subordinates.
Always think about the costs of your decisions. If you’re doing a favor for one person, you’re probably going to have to ask other people to do additional work.
People will generally live up to expectations. If you treat people like they’re worthless scum, they’ll act like worthless scum. If you treat them like they’re valuable employees, they’ll act like valuable employees.
Practice good communications. Make sure you’re understanding what other people are trying to tell you. Make sure other people understand what you’re trying to tell them.
Management is thinking about the bigger picture. You can’t simply deal with the situation that’s in front of you. You have to deal with that situation and think about how that situation affects everything else in the business.
I was a manager in a government agency. All of the hiring (including my own) was done by civil service law. I never had any say on who got hired. I just had to deal with whoever I was given.
Feedback, as John said, is incredibly important. But don’t take this as saying you should only criticize - positive feedback is even more important.
Fight for your people in staff meetings. If there are opportunities for recognition, make sure deserving members of your staff get them. Lots of managers are lazy or think their people are.
This has all been said already, but I want to reinforce it.
I think there are things you can do to improve this bad situation. If any of these people do anything well, steer them to it. At least you can get something out of them.
As for John, why not start having them do weekly reports where they describe what they did and their progress. Publish them, so everyone sees, including your boss. Make this positive of course - you want to show your boss how good they are doing. If what they do is quantifiable, all the better. Even perhaps post it in the work area. Some of them may get competitive and actually try to do more. And some might pressure the slackers like John to do something. Far better peer pressure than management pressure.
Plus, you will have excellent documentation if you want to toss one of these losers out.
Effective communication is one the of most importance part of being a good
manager . Everyone has to be on the same page and know what their job it .
You have to be able to get people to work together as a team this can be hard if
there are any personality conflicts. Having a good sense of humor helps too.
Most of mine have already been mentioned. Another one: “when I delegate, I delegate!” - said by my factory manager in response to hearing that I’d been threatened with getting fired for doing a job my manager had delegated to me and refused to provide any input for, in a different way than he would have.
Sometimes, being in charge of something means doing it personally; other times, it means picking someone to do it and accepting that the way they do it will not be exactly the same one you would have chosen. So long as what they produce is within the specs they were given, they’ve done good work; if the specs were incorrect let’s fix it now and let’s make sure to give better specs next time.
In my industry lower-level managers have always been “working” managers, the criteria being that if you won’t do it yourself, don’t even think of asking someone on your team to do it. This seems to be slowly changing into management via delegation, directing, etc., which has already been discussed upthread. The best managers I’ve had have not only empowered me, but had that indefinable “thing” which made me want to work my ass off for them. They also taught me a LOT about my job, the industry, etc. There’s a lot to be said for having an “older” manager, tbh.
The worse managers I’ve had have either been wanting to be buddy-buddy with everybody or too timid to make any kind of decision. People may like them, but they don’t respect them.
Best manager I ever had said (paraphrased since it’s been a few years);
“My job is to help you do your job. Most of the time its by getting out of your way and letting you do it. Sometimes its by clearing obstacles or getting you help. Sometimes, unfortunately, through discipline, and other times by taking a bullet for you.”
Don’t let other managers attack your people. Step in front of them and insist that any issues with YOUR people go through YOU. Especially when your people are doing their jobs and someone else doesn’t like it.
Make sure your people - all of them - get to do some of the new and interesting tasks that come your way.
DO NOT divide your team into “Rock Stars” and “everyone else”. It just pisses people off, destroys morale and drives people away. Now, you might think “yeah, it drives away the people that aren’t rock stars and those are the only people I want”, but life doesn’t work that way and you’d be seriously fucking stupid to consider that a viable path.
Oh, and if your “Rock Star” is pissing people off all the time with their arrogance and jerkitude, they’re not worth it. Fix them or fire them.
Do not EVER ambush someone with an issue. Don’t meet someone at their desk at 8am (or 5pm on a Friday) to talk about an issue. First, it stresses the fuck out of them as they fear being fired, second it completely fucks their day or their weekend.
Likewise, if something was an issue and you didn’t speak to them about it at the time, you have no business putting it on their annual review. (Happened to me once, blindsided by something that had happened 6 months earlier but had never been mentioned. By my ‘worst boss ever’. I went straight to his boss, said if this had been an issue it should have been discussed at the time. He agreed and made my boss remove it from my review.)
More than one manager has said to me that every team member’s ultimate job is to make their manager “look good” to TPTB. In order to do that, every team members needs to have all the tools available to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Some members may be naturally talented in some portion of their job while others aren’t; the talented ones may not be as talented in another portion, so it’s the manager’s job to orchestrate how to utilize everyone’s strengths.
Unfortunately most potential team members hear “make the manager look good” and automatically it becomes a battle of egos. That’s when people start slacking off or half-assing stuff. They have to understand WHY it’s important to make the manager look good to TPTB. Happy manager, happy staff, you know?
Well, my last boss was a narcissist who thought our entire reason for existing was to make him look like a hero. He was known for taking personal credit for people’s work and for refusing to allow us to put our own names on papers and documentation.
So there’s ‘make your boss look good because it helps the team’, and then there’s ‘make the boss look good because he’s a narcissistic sociopath who will get quite angry if someone other than him receives recognition’.
Managing meetings has been brought up in the thread already, but needs to be emphasized. One of the best managers I ever worked for made the productivity of the team jump by quickly cutting off those in meetings who had to complain about things that couldn’t be fixed, or blather about things that didn’t affect the work. Less time sitting around complaining meant more time sitting around coding or testing or documenting.
Other vital attributes: clear expectations, clear directives, shield me from petty corporate bullshit, run interference with HR for me. I would have said ‘the usual stuff’, but unfortunately this is not always usual.
Be patient and conceal your irritation at being interrupted when an employee (especially a new employee) has questions they need answered in order to do or finish an assignment correctly. You want them to do the job right, and the fact that they’re asking indicates they want to do it right as well.
Make sure workplace bullies aren’t tolerated. Your other, more mild-mannered employees need to see that the bullies have consequences for their actions.
Treat even those on the lowest end of the totem pole with respect and understanding. That will go a long way toward having them want to work for you.
There’s a lot of good advice here, but I’ll say this- don’t micromanage. Give your people clear goals and deadlines, and then stand out of the way and empower them to do their jobs.
Also (this is my personal opinion), save the frantic crunch-time panic for projects that actually require it, not every project that threatens to run over the budgeted time. If everything’s a first-priority project, then in effect, nothing’s a first-priority project, and your employees will start treating them that way.
In conjunction with the above one, push back against your superiors if you think the timelines or budgets are unreasonable or infeasible. Your job is as much to defend your underlings as it is to extract work out of them, and fighting back when you think they’re about to get shit on is important. It’s also important to let them know that you are fighting for them.
Essentially, as a good manager, your role is to be a sort of coach to your employees in terms of actual job performance, and a sort of negotiator between them and upper management, in both directions.
The very best managers I’ve had were NOT particularly savvy in the work that us worker bees actually did, and I think a lot of that is why they were so successful- they couldn’t get down into the technical weeds and do things based on their opinions of how we were doing things technically. They pretty much had to only coach and negotiate.
I’ve had some who were good enough at the job (or, in one case, at digging into their backup files) to come up with possible solutions for things that were stumping the minions, but who at the same time were perfectly happy to step back and let us run around doing our things. So long as the results were “on time, on target and on budget”, it didn’t really matter if you’d tried each of the fifteen possible solutions - just that you’d found a correct one.
Several times I’ve been in charge of some sort of documentation for a team, or have been asked by a coworker or friend to review their writing. I’ll point out formal mistakes (depending on the situation I’ll correct them myself), factual ones and unclear stuff - but I definitely don’t expect people to have “my” writing style. If they did, they’d be me!
You work for your employees. You need to provide for them - EVERYTHING they need to do their jobs. For example if their job is cutting cloth, be sure they have good comfortable scissors to work with, good chair, lighting, and work area. Then the rest will take care of itself. The employees will do good work if you provide good tools to do their job!
Also you spend 40+ hours a week of your life at work. Might as well make that part of your life pleasant and friendly! Say HI to everyone when you go into work each morning. Smile at people. Be friendly. Makes work a MUCH more pleasant place to be for everyone (including yourself).
[As opposed to being a nasty A-Hole who everybody hates.]
This is exactly it. Too few managers are like this, and it’s sad, because they think that if a report is successful, the manager is failing somehow.
I was a manager in a call center, and several of my reports were promoted to my level and beyond. I took it as a great compliment, because I trained them, and led them to the point where they could be promoted.
I also used a “start/stop/keep” survey for my team. I asked what I wasn’t doing that I should start doing, what I was doing I should stop, and what I should keep doing.
I communicated regularly with the team, and gave constant encouragement (nothing much, just a post-it on their monitors saying, “You had the highest sales yesterday. Keep it up!” or something like that.)
It’s amazing what the smallest bit of positive feedback will do.
Then again, there is the need to be firm and discipline. The trick there is to treat your reports like adults. If you have to write someone up, keep in mind they still deserve dignity and respect. Don’t treat them like a child. If they’re honestly trying to do a good job, and still not making it, be more patient. You may still have to fire them, but treat them with honesty, dignity, and respect.
If you do that, they’ll respect you, even if they’re in trouble.
Be as specific as possible in your feedback, whether positive or corrective. One manager I had told me I needed to do a better job. I asked what I was doing wrong, and was told, “Just do better.” I said, “I’ll work on it.”
Also use the sandwich method of criticism. Start with a positive, then constructive criticism, and end with a positive. And remember to “criticize the action, not the actor.” You’re not trying to communicate the report is a bad person, but his/her behavior is what needs to change. Not the person.
Your job as a first or second tier manager essentially boils down to
SHIT MITIGATOR.
Shit is coming at you from both directions. Above and below. Your job is to deal with the shit coming at you from below and handle it efficiently and effectively so that it doesn’t become an issue for your superiors.
At the same time, people above you are going to throw shit at your people. Your job is to mitigate the stupidity/arrogance/complete fail of it and prevent it from destroying or otherwise harming your team and your people’s morale. Senior managers can be complete assholes and word things in ways that will just completely wipe out your team. Make sure the words that filter through you are much more positive and helpful in tone.
Agree with this. I’m a single working mom at the low end of the totem pole in my office, but my boss is wonderful. He’s very understanding and flexible when I need to take an extra 1/2 hour at lunch to attend a play at my child’s school, or when I need to work from home so I can stay with a sick child. He often lets us all go home early on Fridays, just for fun or so we can get week-day errands run. He’s always giving positive feedback, and is enthusiastic about letting me take classes to learn new skills, etc.
All of the above just makes me want to do a good job for him, and out of a feeling of returning the respect he pays me, I work hard to never take advantage of his scheduling flexibility. I’m going to be bummed when he retires in the next year or two.