How to be “The Best Manager You Ever Had”

How to be “The Best Manager You Ever Had”

By Martin Z willing

Everyone can recognize a great manager a mile away, so why is it so hard to find one? We all remember a few that are “legends in their own mind”, but that doesn’t do it. In fact, the clue here is that the view in your mind is the only one that matters, rather than the other way around.
 

Almost every one of us in business can also remember that one special manager in their career who exemplifies the norm, who commanded our respect, and treated us like a friend, even in the toughest of personal or business crises.

I’ve asked many for the traits or attributes they saw in that person, and most will list the positive functional traits of a good manager:

• Leadership - outstanding skills in guiding team members, encouraging them towards attainment of the organization’s goals and the right decisions at the right point of time. As Drucker said "management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."


• Plan and delegate – foresight and skills to understand the relevant capabilities of employees, and then scheduling tasks and delegating to get tasks done by the employees within deadlines.


• Domain expert - complete knowledge of his field and confident about that knowledge, with the common sense to make quick productive decisions and think outside the box.


• Set clear expectations - employees should always know what is expected of them. One of the easiest ways to do this is to set deliverable milestones for each employee over a set period of time. Then review the performance vs. the roadmap or deliverable at least six months prior to a performance review and discuss ways to improve and set new goals.

• Positive recognition - when employees complete something successfully or show initiative, recognize it. Congratulate them on a job well done. Most employees are not motivated by sheer money. They need recognition even if it is not public. Good managers know that employees feed off acknowledgement that their job is being done well.


In my view, these are all “necessary” attributes, but are not “sufficient” to put you in that ‘great’ category. Most people recognize that it takes more to be ‘great,’ but the attributes are a bit more esoteric, and harder to quantify. Here are a few:


• Active listener - shows traits such as listening with feedback, an optimistic attitude, a motivating ability, and a concern for people. Listening to what is said as well as what is not said is of the utmost importance. Instrumental in the listening process is the environment. It can be most demoralizing to an employee to be speaking to a supervisor and be interrupted for a phone call. All interruptions should be avoided.

• Shows empathy - refers to the ability to "walk in another person's shoes", and to have insight into the thoughts, and, more importantly the emotional reactions of individuals faced with change. Empathy requires that you suspend judgment of another's actions or reactions, while you try to understand them, and treat them with sensitivity, respect, concern, and kindness.


• Always honest – simply put, today’s managers live in glass houses. Everything that a manager does is seen by his employees. If a manager says one thing and does another, employees see it. Managers must be honest and straightforward in words and in actions. A manager must “walk the talk.” That also means recognizing weaknesses, and admitting and learning from mistakes.


• Sense of humor - people of all ages and cultures respond to humor. The majority of people are able to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny, and see an irony. One of the most frequently cited attractions in great personal relationships is a sense of humor.

• Keep your cool - does not lose his/her cool even while facing a difficulty. He/she is able to correct the team members without emotional body language or statements. A good manager is an effective communicator and a composed individual, with a proven tolerance for ambiguity.

Whole books are written on this subject, but hopefully you get the picture. Great managers must do the technical job well – and they also must do the people job very well. Now that you understand these things, I’m not sure why it is so hard to find a great manager. I guess an even harder question I should ask is why is it so hard to be one?


Marty Zwilling, Founder & CEO, Startup Professionals, Inc.

IT: It's Not Just About Technical Skills

IT: It's Not Just About Technical Skills

by Mike Schaffner, 11.11.09, 06:00 AM EST

Why interpersonal skills may be more important now.

 

While perusing the online versions of some of the more well-know information technology journals recently, I was surprised to find one that had quite a few stories on the stupidity of users. While these stories ostensibly were presented as humor, they also represent a dark side of IT behavior: The IT guys really are the smartest guys in the room, and users are dumb and annoying.

 

A closer reading of some of the stories shows the fallacy of this: Users were having problems, and the IT person was more concerned with showing his superiority than in providing customer service. This type of stereotypical behavior has long been an impediment to IT's success and acceptance in the corporate world.

 

The good news is that this attitude among IT workers isn't nearly as prevalent as it used to be. We've made great strides in improving customer service. These stories, however, show that our job is not complete. There is more to do.

The biggest part of developing the right attitude is realizing that it isn't all about us. The IT guys really may be the smartest guys in the room, but nobody cares. It is more about what gets done than about what you know. It is more about making the team (IT and business) successful than it is about individual accolades.

Information technology has become more self service. It used to be that you had to get everything through the IT department. IT built the databases, and you could only get the data out or get it analyzed by asking IT to do it for you.

Over time, the role of IT has shifted from knowledge provider to knowledge facilitator. We no longer extract and analyze data. Instead we provide tools enabling users to do this themselves.

 

With this shift in roles, IT support must shift from doing to enabling. This means IT has to focus on understanding the user's needs and providing training and tools. It also means understanding the business in order to suggest ways to use technology that meets needs. It involves, dare I say it, empathy, a word not always associated with IT.

Being successful in this role depends on personal skills, such as:

 

--Being a good listener to learn what the user needs and a willingness to listen completely without jumping in with the answer.

--Being a good interviewer to draw information from our users.

 

--Being good at explaining and teaching.

 

These skills can be as important and perhaps more important than raw technical skills.

Accordingly we, as IT leaders, need to change our perspective. We need to work to develop these skills in our people. Technical ability alone is no longer enough. We cannot continue to hire people and do personnel evaluations based solely on technical skills. Likewise, the training we provide has to go beyond just technical training.

When we do personnel evaluation or are hiring, we should include our user community in the process. Having our users interview candidates can provide some useful feedback on how the candidate relates to people outside IT, how well they communicate, how well they listen.

Users also can provide valuable insight into just how good our customer service really is. Getting this insight is extremely important for personnel evaluations. Perhaps we should rate this just as highly as technical skills.

If we expect people to change, we also have to help them. Rather than sending people to a software conference or the latest programming class, perhaps we should send them to classes on team dynamics or finance for non-financial people.

As the role of IT has shifted over time, the skills of our people need to shift, and we as IT leaders need to be actively involved in making this happen.

 

Mike Schaffner directsinformation technology for the Valve and Measurement Group of Cameron in Houston and aims to infuse a business-based approach to IT management. He also blogs regularly at Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms, and you can follow him on Twitter at mikeschaffner.