On Management

[cjsmith]

Many thanks to akienm for permission to link to his recent entry about managing people.

He brings up four things a good manager should do: connect, listen, respect, appreciate [his team members].

Reading that, I realize that my favoritest manager in my patchwork career is the guy who did three: Listen, Respect, and Appreciate. (Perhaps he's my favoritest simply because I have not yet worked for someone who has done all four.) If that man were not now deceased, I would go try to work for him again, no matter what the product or corporate atmosphere.

I wish My Division In The Company That Shall Not Be Named had kept... or had ever had, frankly... a handful of managers who did all of these. Rumor has it that it had, last week, one such. (I don't know for sure because I didn't work for this person.) Now it has zero.

Comments

[gs.livejournal.com]

connect, listen, respect, appreciate

These would be good in any relationship...managerial or otherwise.

c

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Good point.

Most of my manager/employee (er, I should say manager/contractor) relationships have included one or two of: listen, respect, appreciate. I'm not actually sure whether I need the connection part in the workplace, although perhaps I would perform better if I had it.

Most of my romantic relationships have had the connection, and very few have had much of the other three. Interesting division of labor, there. Hmm. Perhaps this means I will want another job soon. It fills a need.

Re:

[gs.livejournal.com]

I agree that connection seems less important in a work relationship (although I'm not sure how Akien was defining it).

[few] of my romantic relationships...have had much of the other three.

Ow. I think my feeling of connection is limited by the degree I feel listened to, respected, and appreciated. I hope your trend improves.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I can feel connection if I'm listenING, respectING, appreciatING. Granted, it's best if it goes both ways.

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

These would be good in any relationship...managerial or otherwise.

Yep. There is really very little difference between relationships at work, and relationships out of work. They take the same skills, and even have similar rewards. My first stint at managing other people was at the same time I was first dealing with being a mom (I am stepmom to a girl who came to live with us when she was 10 years old)--the two activities are REMARKABLY the same.

[akienm.livejournal.com]

The Company That Shall Not Be Named did have one, me. But there is another piece of the job that I was then less good at. One of the main goals of any for profit company is to make money. A manager's job is to facilitate that. Having a staff that can perform well is about serving that goal. Given that, it is in the manager's best interest to develop good relationship skills.

The QA team when I was manager there was a mixed bag. Some really good people, and a bunch of less good people. My fault. I picked them. I still haven't quite gotten the knack of always picking the right people to hire, but I now understand the job of a manager, and do it well. I also understand how poorly some of the high level managers at The Company That Shall Not Be Named understood these things. They got good work not because they understood relationships, only because the staff did such a good job of screening folks, and picking the right ones.

I have good relationship skills, and have yet to have a regular employee voluntarily leave a position that reported to me.