A good manager is worth his weight in gold...

"Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't." -Peter Drucker

Management is a tricky art.  You have to balance between being over bearing and not giving enough instruction. Finding that special medium is sometimes hard to find.  A good manager can not only keep on the top of their head what every member of the team is doing but can also be ready to answer the question of what's next.  But the most important aspect of a manager is the ability to execute a project from start to finish up to the standards expected of them.  In my short career, I have had a mix of both good and bad managers. In this post, I want to explore the issues with my previous job and my issues with the management style.

At my previous job, I was responsible for processing hundreds of different things that came into a queue each day.  The tasks generally revolved around opening an account and checking the paperwork to make sure everything was in order.  Most of the time, the job was simple, match the name and address then send the account for approval.  When we had a question, our manager told us to put it on a list and we would have a daily meeting as a team to go through any difficult cases.  The goal of us all meeting as a group was to ensure uniformity across all of our processing and learn how other difficult cases were handled so we could repeat this in the future.  All of this sounded good in theory but the execution is where it fell apart.  As opposed to using these opportunities to learn how to process more like our manager wanted, it turned into hour long meetings where our manager would make judgement calls while we sat and watched.  On many occasions, our manager would process something differently than the day before for no apparent reason and would provide us with no explanation we could use moving forward.  Since our manager not teaching us what he was looking for, we were unable to understand the decisions he made and thus when we came across this situation in the future were unable to handle it again and it made our list for the meeting.

Someone once told me that when you think about managing you should think about two concentric circles.  The inside circle is what you would do if you executed the task your self, exactly your specifications.  The outside circle is the range of possibilities of the work that someone will do if asked to execute this task for you.  Better managers are able to bring those circles closer together so the work they ask of others is as close as possible to the work that they would do themselves.  This piece my previous manager did not get.  He had raised through the ranks of the organization and became a manager more so by seniority than by talent.  While he was sharp at processing accounts, his lack management (and people) skills hurt his ability to lead a department.  Clear instructions are important but sometimes you need to empower people to make decisions to take some of the burden off management.  Not only does this help management but it also helps employee morale.  I had all but given up trying to figure out what my manager wanted towards the end of my time there because it was not worth it to try to make a decision as it would inevitably backfire when he changed his mind.  The lesson I took away from my previous job is that managers need to be able to roll up their sleeves to execute a task, but also when to back off and provide some support to their staff to do it for them.  Management is an art, but just like art its really easy to find art that sucks.