The Good Manager
Copyright 2011 by Paul Wallis
Smashwords edition
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Who do you think you are?
Respect is a verb
Business intelligence networks
Ad hoc networks
Fraudproofing
Careerists and sycophants
From the bottom to the top
THE GOOD MANAGER
This book isn’t about euphemisms. Management culture is a joke, and a bad one. It’s overloaded with brain dead rituals, blue sky bullshit, and driveling idiots making a career out of being driveling idiots.
Anyone staying on the big management cruise liner will find that it’s already sunk, and that learning how to do your own swimming is a very good idea. The present management culture has a shelf life of exactly the time it takes to replace it with something more cost effective.
Given the present culture, that could be the time it takes to find a canary that can wear a tie and chair meetings where absolutely nothing is ever achieved. The present version of management culture is an endangered species, and with good reason.
The Good Manager really is a class act.
Not a parrot, not a simple minded option-fondler, and not a conceited, middle aged, middle class slut with a high opinion of himself.
That’s also why nobody’s being held up as an example in this book, because every loser and his Executive Gerbil would instantly dogmatize the ideas, and fossilize the examples, which is another besetting sin of management culture. Any living culture is fluid, and dogmatism achieves the exact opposite.
We’ve already had enough examples of the Peter Principle, Parkinson’s Law and How We All Misread Victor Kiam. Analyzing success and failure only goes so far, and nobody needs another book agreeing with everybody else. Making a career out of mediocrity may be profitable, but it’s still mediocrity.
This is about managers with actual talent, actual ideas, and real objectivity.
Sorry.
Nor is there any obvious need for more fawning books about “success stories”. The successful people didn’t hang around waiting to be successful by someone else’s benchmarks. Talented people don’t need much more than a general direction, not a road map with Diners of Interest and Motels of Renown.
The hallmark of great managers is originality. They’re not just managers, they’re the business engine and the power plant, and the think tank.
They’re also not psychotic tyrants. Tantrums are for babies and jerks. The tyrant is usually an obsessive idiot, and tyrants don’t last too long.
The Good Manager is a real person, not a collection of vegetative collegiate exercises, infantile personality and lousy acting.
The individuality is a primary force, and it moves whole mountain ranges, when it feels like it. Far from being overawed by the status and talent of others, the individualism often sets the standards.
There is no inferiority complex, no deep psychic flaw which somehow gets resolved by being CEO of a global corporation.
The Good Manager is a real top dog, and a talented one, not something from Rent a Cliché.
(Exactly where the cookie cutter management role came from, I don’t know, probably media imagery, but it should go to hell, and soon.)
If you hire the Good Manager, you’re looking for the kind of talent that nobody else quite understands, which achieves things nobody else considered possible, if they even thought of them.
If you’re not looking for that, and you hire it, you’re going to get it. Good Managers are always at the front of the front, and they’re already looking at problems other people don’t even know exist yet. Experts ask them for advice, at least half the time.
Like the Virtuous Man of Chinese philosophy, The Good Manager has style, but not oppressively so. This is a civilized person. There’s no need to play status games or pecking order rituals, which are considered, rightly, to be pointless and demeaning, as well as chronic wastes of time.
The defining characteristic is intelligence. The Good Manager may or may not have a PhD, but in five minutes you’ll be well aware there’d be no great difficulty getting one if required. So read on, and you’ll at least find an interesting person.
Chapter 1.
Who do you think you are?
Every manager knows the feeling. All of a sudden, it’s all yours. Every mistake, every screw up, every nitpicking second of it. The phone seems to be surgically grafted to your ear. Thinking has suddenly become a luxury.
This can destroy managers, personally and physically. All you need is a badly planned management system, and it’s practically automatic. Stress fractures come in psychological forms, too, so the transition from passable human being to nervous blob is quite thorough. Problems ooze into each other, one wound making another worse.
Unless you’re on the top of the heap, you’re getting all this from above and below, and usually sideways as well. You can’t just send things back down from Olympus. You’re naturally wary of delegating upwards, even when it’s the right thing to do. Throwing things out the window has occurred to you, but you’d need a receipt.
The result of all this is that you don’t even get time to be yourself.
You remember you.
You’re the one who did the degree, did the hard work to get here, and now you’re wondering where you’ve gone.
That is one of the major problems, and you’re so busy you haven’t noticed.
Now- See where the rot sets in. Your skills and abilities are what got you that job, and they’re not even getting a chance to be used. Everything is reactive, and that’s not the way it should be. Your instincts will have told you this, but may have been drowned out in the crisis about getting a new water cooler.
Either you run a job, or it runs you, and most management jobs are capable of running you straight into the ground, usually in a coffin.
Management is about having the initiative. It hits the switches and makes things operational.
The machine doesn’t work properly because of all this reactive bull you’re seeing. If everything is allowed to sidetrack movement, that’s exactly what it will do. Endless digressions mean endless delays.
To hell with that.
Phase One:
Delegate a fixer for the office stuff, someone you know won’t screw around getting things done.
Get all the correspondence set up so you can have it out of your hair on a 24 hour turnaround basis. Make sure your secretary or PA knows that timeframe, and there won’t be a problem.
Kill off any bureaucratic processes. There’s nothing mystic about audit trails. Turn them into a pro forma, so that everyone knows what’s supposed to happen, and they don’t have to spend days finding out what information is required, or where it’s supposed to go. If someone’s made a career out of creating more bureaucracy, get them out of that position.
Get rid of KPIs, and the generation of statistical garbage that doesn’t affect the bottom line. You don’t need performance stats, you need accurate, un-falsifiable, proof of performance and that comes from supervisors. Numbers don’t mean quality, and never have.
Meetings should be purely functional, with a real need, particularly if the participants are managers. The practice of management meetings “on principle” should be a criminal offense. They’re expensive, and while meeting, managers aren’t managing. That creates a time lag. It also often means they have to play catch up with their work, because surprise, surprise, the world didn’t end during the meeting, and twenty different things have blown up, literally or figuratively, during that wasted time.
Make absolutely sure you’re not contactable when you need time to work. The only people who should be able to interrupt are those with a credible and productive need to interrupt.
Time management is inseparable from effective management and must be realistic. Never set impossible deadlines, and never trap yourself with a full time schedule where you can’t scratch yourself for a month. Above all, never schedule yourself out of any possibility of doing your own work. Always try and leave an hour or so in morning and/or afternoon. You’ll need a breather, anyway, but you’ll also be glad you’re not overcommitted when important things happen.
Other people’s time is valuable, too, and that has to be recognized, and be seen to be recognized. Don’t insult someone with a patronizing donation of 15 minutes of your time. What are you going to learn in 15 minutes? If you need to talk to someone, make it productive. You don’t need to create unnecessary relationship issues, either.
Staff matters can also be delegated to a reliable listener. HR can usually do that for you. You need to know real problems, but you don’t need to micromanage to the point of acting as a de facto confessional. You also need to be properly briefed, so set up a legally trustworthy mechanism. Make it clear that you’re paying attention, and your staff will be onside. Any legitimate grievance must get the right treatment, quickly.
Always make sure you’re operating your staff management properly, and with justice. You’re not their enemy, and they need to see proof of that before you can get a good working team. Talented people will not tolerate anything less, and they’re essential to your management.
These are standard operating procedures for Good Managers. Everything is actually under control, because it’s been set up that way. They can find time when they need it, and their work won’t suffer.
They’re also quality controls. You’ll notice that the common element is things are being done, and done properly. The various random elements of the job are no longer running things. Nothing gets done without proper scrutiny, so the checks and balances are working properly.
There are known methodologies, and your staff know how you want to handle things, which is almost as important as knowing what they need to do. That is absolutely basic to management, at any level.
OK, how are you getting on with the job, now?
Phase Two:
What do you want to achieve?
Can you do things your way, now you’ve got all that crap sorted out?
Do you have the resources you need, without disrupting the work?
Good Managers are full of ideas and innovations. To get any of those operational, Phase One is the real bottom line. Phase Two is about setting up the machinery for taking the initiative. It’s a strategic motif.
When a new idea is being developed the need is for results, but not at the expense of the business. New ideas need testing, and therefore need talent drawn from the business, so the economics of that process have to make sense.
Say you’re developing a new sales package. That needs costing, and it needs to be modeled. Above all, it needs to be checked out as a working proposition from top to bottom. The Good Manager has the whole project costed and resources available before even mentioning the idea.
As you can see, this is where another form of Time Management is useful. Managing other people’s time for them can be picky, but with the system you’ve set up, it’s now feasible. You’ve got your assembly line going, everything works cohesively, people know what’s supposed to happen, so you can remove a few every now and then for extra projects and adding some value to your management. There’s almost no disruption, and less if you give people plenty of notice.
This, believe it or not, is practical careerism as practiced by talented people. Good Managers are good organizers, and that’s why they can get so much more done. They could build the pyramids in their lunch break.
What’s in it for the people you’re borrowing from other work? Just a whole new page in their resume, and professional experience they couldn’t get otherwise. You also, not at all accidentally, create a working group for your next ten or twenty ideas.