Act Like a Manager

     It’s not public relations exactly, although it’s closely allied. It’s the manner and behavior we instantly associate with The Boss.

     The boss is the person whose directives are to be followed (and, sometimes, the one to be blamed for whatever is disagreeable in our workplace.) 

     “PR” has become something of a familiar cliché in modern America. We toss it out as a verbal sneer at anything we consider phony and hollow in the utterances of prominent people. Too bad, because real PR is an important and valuable element in our public discourse. It’s how we extend the value of good things by telling people about them.

     True, that telling can be exaggerated, distorted or false, but most of what we see and hear in such promotion is reasonably honest and true. Also, our critical thinking skills enable us to sort out the value from the trash – when we exercise our duty to do so.

     So, back to the workplace. You have an opinion of your boss as a manager, the person ultimately responsible for the results of your group's work.

     However, the manager is not solely responsible. In a healthy organization, each of us must carry a share of that responsibility. It is extremely important, vitally important, that the individual and the manager understand and practice their roles in this form of partnership.

     The manager must be personally clear on what the organization is to accomplish and how it is to function . . . and must share with each staff member an equally clear picture of how that person fits. And, of course, what that means for the actions and behavior of that person.

      Each of us staff people must also be clear -- within ourselves and with others -- on the actions and behavior that fulfill our obligations in the organization.

     “Being clear” is an abstract expression for a complex set of communication actions that involve talking, listening, watching and demonstrating for the purpose of equipping the staff member to do certain things, and convincing that staff member to do those things correctly and dependably. If I were to see a video clip of myself on the job, would I see myself doing those things?

     It is incumbent on both parties to set up and conduct the process with the minimally necessary amount of continuing contact between the two. Collaboration and communication are essential, but too much of either wastes the valuable resource of individual contribution.

     The manager sets the tone and carries the major weight. The manager walks and talks with confidence in the relationship of mutual respect and defined responsibility. Just look and listen, and you can tell.

     The manager acts like a manager.

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 SEE ALSO: Management Power, Management Behavior      http://jimmillikenproject.blogspot.com/2018/04/management-power-management-behavior.html

The Essential Contrarian

      If you don’t have a contrarian in your group, go find one.

     Contrarians are those people who  doubt everything, question beyond reason, keep pushing for more explanation. They stretch out discussion when you just want to get some damn thing done.

     The contrary spectrum runs from skepticism to all-out opposition. Wherever the bothersome person is on the spectrum, responding with anger or dismissal – which is really tempting – is the wrong way to go. And don’t ignore it – some staff members will be listening, and you should be, too.

     Contrarians aren’t always just plain negative, but sometimes they really are. When that is so, they need to go find work elsewhere.

      Mature managers know how to handle the entire range. They understand the importance of listening before acting, seeking to understand what drives a person’s beliefs. Sometimes complainers benefit from explanation, sometimes they just need a respectful listener.

  

Everybody's Got a Manager

     Danny Amendola just moved from a consistently winning team to an occasional also-ran, and he couldn’t be happier.

     Amendola was a star performer on a New England Patriots football team that won the league championship two years ago and made it to the Super Bowl again last year. Now he has just gone to the Miami Dolphins, winless in their three trips to the playoffs in the past decade.

      Amendola is a poster boy for the saying, “People don’t leave organizations – they leave managers.”

     This week, the Associated Press quoted him gushing about his new coach, Adam Gase:

     “It’s almost like Coach Gase is one of the guys, one of the boys and you wanna fight hard for your boys. Back in New England it’s almost like you got a principal and a principal’s office . . . you know, in a good way and in a bad way, too.”

Management Power, Management Behavior

      
“You can’t run this place by committee.”

     That was the corporate president, responding to a division manager.

     The manager, one month into his first job at this level, had just described how he had directed the department heads to prepare for him “blue sky” budget proposals. The idea was to include in early budget planning a look to the future – what the department manager envisioned as investments for growth over the succeeding few years.

     The president was not persuaded by the idea. He preferred a more-decisive, less-shared approach. The new division manager lost the job a few months later, returned to his previous position as a supervisor and soon left the company.

     A successor, more in the authoritative mold of the president, lasted a year before being flat-out fired. His peremptory style had resulted in unionization of every unit in the division.

Patience, Tolerance & Management

     Promotion to management can be tough – on everybody, but particularly on the person honored by the elevation.

     Exceptions are when the new manager has had actual management training before moving up, or has benefited from the gift of competent mentorship. If the mentoring continues after the promotion, the value is multiplied.

     The great majority of entrants into management aren’t so lucky. They arrive unprepared in this strange new place, and some of them never really recover. Look around you. How many of the managers you encounter actually perform the work well?

     In case your ability to evaluate managers has been dulled by years of exposure to the general run of the practice, let’s step back and freshen our perspective.

     To clarify: in most situations, the manager is NOT supposed to be the most accomplished worker bee in the place. Your widget-making days are over now.

     The responsibilities of managers vary limitlessly, so we’ll start with the universal basics: What is a manager supposed to do?

How to Choose Failure

 

   When is failure a choice?

     Quite often, as a matter of fact. It’s a major default option when success is not consciously chosen. Take a good look at projects of your experience.

     We choose success when we specify a clear outcome, make it a firm intention, talk about what it means – then support it with practical planning and execution.

     Choosing failure is an easy slide in the other direction. We may not realize we are guaranteeing some measure of failure when we decide or agree to accomplish something . . . and then don’t immediately press the “Start” button.

     When we really mean it, we act in two stages right after we decide:

First, establishing the project outcome and basic agreements with key                     

     stakeholders

Then, executing with solid organization and relationship building,

     You start with the finish, invoking the second of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People:

“Begin with the end in mind.”

         Regarding execution, management guru Peter Drucker said:

b

“Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it   

       is at best a good intention.”

There ARE No "Soft" Skills

     Have you ever fired someone?

     How did it go? Looking forward to doing it again soon?

     Well, it’s a “soft” skill. Must be easy, right?

      I never found it so. However much the person deserved to be terminated, it was a painful thing to do.

     In some cases, I felt I had a tougher time with it than the dismissee did. That was when the news came unexpectedly to that person (Oh, you thought I didn’t mean all that corrective counseling? All those warnings?).

      The person could rise self-righteously on a gusher of anger and defensiveness, at least temporarily. You can bet that pretty much all his/her associates would tut-tut sympathetically, including those who had been hounding the boss for months to do the deed.

     Not the same situation for the manager. If you were doing your job right, you had been patient and tolerant, but firm. You made sure the requirements were clear. You responded appropriately to variances and transgressions.

'You're Not a Manager'

     My old friend Tom was once appointed acting general manager of a division of his company. The president told him he was the only candidate for the permanent appointment, and the job was his to lose.

     He lost it.

     So Tom went back to his previous job as a department head, realizing he’d missed some important elements in the opportunity but unsure as to quite what they were.  

     He left the company a few months later when the new guy turned out to be a terrible boss – ignorant, interfering and autocratic. Most of the other department heads were gone before Tom.

     It took a while longer, but the new general manager was flat-out fired.

     You don’t get to go back, though. Tom apparently wasn’t considered again; they never contacted him, and someone else was appointed.

DIY Job Satisfaction

Calm, empathetic and endlessly patient

 
    You can have a lot of fun when your job is to make something or do something all by yourself, or maybe with a competent, compatible partner. If it’s not just you, it’s just the two of you.

     Either way, you get to put your hands, and your attention, right on the work. You earn the joy of personal accomplishment; you can contribute mightily to the quality of your own result. It’s right out there, with no mistake – you’re the one who did it.

     It’s hard to duplicate the level of satisfaction you feel. But that’s not all.

     When you make it your business to turn out quality results, other people notice. You earn admiration, and you build an enviable reputation.

     In management, not so much. When you’re a manager, you operate in a different universe. Management’s job is to equip and help the people who make things and do things.

When the Buck Never Stops

 
  “I never put anything in writing,” the boss said.

     That simple admission said volumes about his view of his job and his responsibility.

     He confided it as a revelation straight out of the secret handbook known only to the highest level of management and leadership.

     I saw it as something of the opposite: A refuge for weak people, a selfish risk avoidance strategy and a loophole to escape blame. Don’t believe everyone else in that organization didn’t know that about the top guy, even without sharing his secret.

     When the buck has no place to stop, a major group activity is to keep passing it on.

Managing the Project People Resource

    I watched as a group of managers regaled themselves with tales of the laziness and incompetence of their employes. Their own employes, their workforce.

     It reminded me of a supervisor of nine specialists who said the job would be perfect if only he didn’t have to put up with the people. He was topflight at the work himself, but he couldn’t turn out that quality at 10 times the quantity. He needed those people and they needed him, but he didn’t see it that way.

     Such attitudes are not at all rare, and that’s too bad. They devalue one of the most important underlying realities of management, especially project management: Nothing happens without the people.

     Software engineering guru Watts Humphrey wrote that the work of technical managers is 90 percent people and 10 percent technology – but they spend most of their time on the technical management. It’s a lot less hassle that way.

     It’s also far less effective. The truth is that the human resource is the catalytic factor – the dynamic resource that makes possible the productive employment of all the others. Your equipment, materials, facilities and your very processes don’t do a thing until activated by your people.

Projects & Other Problems

     We’re whitewater rafting on the Upper Penobscot. You are having the time of your life. I’m not.

     I don’t know how fast we’re moving as we nosedive five or six feet at a time, then slam headlong into 10-foot walls of water. But it’s pretty fast. Still, I have a fraction of a second before each collision to ask myself: “Are there really people who think this is fun?”

     Of course there are such people. You’re one of them, and I’m of the opposite persuasion. Two people; same time, same place, same circumstance. I have a problem and you don’t.

     Or do you?

     Problems aren’t quite optional, but they most definitely are subjective. What’s happening in the external reality isn’t a problem. The existence and extent of any problem are determined by how that occurrence is perceived, and how the perceiver responds emotionally.

     In short, it’s all in your mind. And mine. For managers, that’s the nut of the challenge.

Doers & Managers

     My boss physically pushed me out of the way in his hurry to intervene.

     The copier wasn’t working for me as he passed by, so he was going to make my copy himself. When he couldn’t do it either, he walked off.

     So, not only did he involve himself – uninvited – in a task he didn’t know how to do, he also demeaned a staff member (me), and himself. Sort of a cartoon illustration of how not to manage.

     Actually, operating a complex and unfamiliar piece of equipment wasn’t a specialty of mine. Never had been and still isn’t. The one at hand that morning required simple code information I had no reason to know or use when the proper staff people were around.

     That wasn’t the only time I stepped out of my role and didn’t do well in a matter involving that same boss. In the second situation, he threatened to take over the function personally. Utterly inappropriate to his station in the organization.

How to Avoid Avoidance

     “I never listen to the readers. All they ever do is (complain).”
     I heard that comment from an editor back when I was in the news business; it’s been a handy start to conversations about customer service ever since.
     In a broader context, it shines the light on a deadlier failure, that of management, in the corrosive practice of ignoring/avoiding problems.

     I got the “benefit” of a double whammy in this regard once. I was working for a man who insisted on keeping decision-making in his own hands, which made his say-so a requirement for any staff response to whatever might come up.
    One morning he didn’t even pause as I attempted to get an answer to a rather minor matter that, if neglected, was capable of disproportionately messing up our day. “I’m going to a meeting,” he said as he walked away.
     He brushed aside both my interruption and the original issue. Any old decision probably would have made it go away; instead, the staff was tangled up for a couple of hours.

     How much of that “management” does it take to destroy productivity and drive away quality employes? And the editor who ignored his readers? The damage from stonewalling your end users that way can be unknowable, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be considerable.

     You can understand how that sort of thing comes about. It’s no fun when things are painfully not the way they’re supposed to be. Avoiding the discomfort is a perfectly human reaction.
     But it’s not management.

Me and My Personality

Is personality unchanged and unchangeable?

 

“I Yam What I Yam.” -- Popeye

     “He wanted me to change my personality.”

     That’s what the young woman told staff members after a counseling session. It was the first and last conversation in what had been projected as a series of talks to help her learn management.
     I had been asked to speak with her because, as newly appointed editor of a small weekly newspaper, she had inaugurated her “reign” by summoning the staff members, one by one, to appear before her and her second-in-command to explain why they should keep their jobs.
     Some of those people had been reporting that town for years. They had been fellow staff members with her in her brief history at the paper. They knew her.
     They would have considered this spectacle hilarious if their personal livelihoods hadn’t been at stake. 
     In this particular example, the central figure came from a prominent family that had just sold the paper to a regional organization.  

How to Live with the Rules

     I quit my bank of 20 years last summer. Back in the Nineties, it had been a homegrown institution – friendly, flexible and helpful. In its 2015 incarnation, it was expensive, rigid and harsh.
     The local founder died a few years after I signed up, and the bank was bought by one of those big-and-getting-bigger regional players. Such folks often don’t have time or patience for friendly, flexible and helpful.
     There are Rules, you know. Services used to be free, and there might be an informative or explanatory phone call as there were changes. Now, an unwanted and unhelpful monthly “account analysis” costs eight dollars. These are things you learn about as new charges pile up on the statement.
     If you slip, however inadvertently, the predator pounces.
     My final straw, a couple of years after it became apparent the relationship was over, came with hundreds of dollars in penalties. I mistakenly paid an insurance bill twice: once by paper check and once by phone. When I found out, I stopped payment on the check. 
    Then the fun began. Before it was over, penalties totaled several hundred dollars.  
 

Bad Meetings Don't Kill Projects . . . They're Just There for the Wakes

     I ran nothing but lousy meetings before I got into project management, and quite a few after I should have known better.
     Meetings too often are where good ideas go to die, or get loaded down with impediments. That’s a shame, because good meetings provide value that is so essential to organizations.
     Human beings cannot collaborate without meetings, gatherings with a purpose. Meetings work best face to face. When that is not possible, there is some value in virtual gatherings such as teleconferencing and online sharing.
     Meetings do not work well when they are poorly planned and poorly managed, which is most of the time. Serious organizational meeting malfunction is more prevalent than it should be – more prevalent, in my experience, than good meetings are.
     Actually, while awful meetings are so obviously a waste of time, money and talent, they are more symptom than cause. As projects go awry, poor meeting management is always in the mix somewhere.

Projects, Processes & Professionalism

     I’ve been at this project management stuff for less than 30 years, so I probably don’t qualify as an expert. Still, I have built up a few working hypotheses and dark suspicions:
     1. Most people who hold the title “project manager” are not real project managers, and most activities called “projects” are not real projects.
    2.  Nearly all people who manage real projects do not carry the title “project manager,” and many of them – maybe most – don’t even know they’re managing projects.
    3.  Most appointments of true project managers do not result from job postings, which is a good thing because most job postings essentially say “Superman Wanted,” and have very little to do with what the job is really about.
    4. The most fundamental trait of real project managers (designated or not) is that they can’t bring themselves to turn their backs on problems, no matter how hairy and scary the problems might be.
     5. Projects, real projects, require original thinking, flexible leadership, courage, persistence, integrity and strong skills of communication, collaboration and persuasion. And other strengths.
     6. There is one important skill set that most good project managers are lousy at.

Management by Just Showing Up

     “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.”
     That was Woody Allen, demonstrating in just a few words how deeply meaningful a comedic quickie can be.

     “I don’t know anything about music. In my line, you don’t have to.”

     That was Elvis Presley, displaying wisdom we might not have expected from a guy who swiveled his hips like that.

     "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
     And Peter Drucker had a way of blowing up our comfortable suppositions in ways we can't disagree with.

     If all of us project managers were to follow those dictates, we’d be much better prepared to do our jobs well.

Nothing Soft about Project Skills

    We call them “hard” skills because they have recognizable shape and the appearance of substance.
     By the hard skills standard, thirty years on the job earns you a presumption of competence at whatever the specialty is. BA, MBA, PCE, PMP, licenses and certificates. They all open gates because we take them as proof the holder is good at stuff.
     Now we can place that person, and make assumptions about how much he or she matters.
     While the tangible proofs of professional ability often are the objects of intense personal pride, they also have the aura of objectivity as you present yourself to the world. They are the currency of value in the competency marketplace.
     But “soft” skills, conversely, are private and local, not easy to specify on the resume: “Excellent communicator – strong team worker – known as problem solver. . . .”
     You talking about yourself? Yuck. Doesn’t work, not at all.