Sunday March 15, 2009 Will the real Manager please stand up?
Traditionally management focused on numbers and people. Modern management puts people in the epicenter and value their integrity more than their intelligence and energy. As Warren Buffet says, if you hire somebody without integrity you really want somebody dumb and lazy. Henry Ford once exclaimed "Whenever I ask for hand a brain also comes attached". That is basically us. The best performers are people who know enough and care enough to manage themselves.How do you manage such people that are high-performing individual-contributors? When people become managers, they realize the fact that they are almost taken hostages by the system and people. This is because management creates performance 'through' others. And when there is little cooperation from people, management achieves little or nothing. Joan Magretta in her book 'What Management Is' exclaims that for knowledge workers, who, by definition, know more about their jobs than their bosses do, supervision is a very special kind of hell.
GE's Jack Welch when speaking to his executives once said "Look around you: There are five fewer managers than there were last year. One was fired for the numbers, four were fired for values". What values were Welch talking about? - The shared belief that constitutes the organizational culture. A good manager is the one who imbibes these values into their people. It doesn't matter whether they are mediocre or highly skilled, whether they have high energy or silently achieving targets. What matters and what people like Welch, Packard, Dell, and Ford never believed is that a 'real' manager knows that performance of the group depends on the contributors that are stubbornly individual and each of whom needs to feel valued.
( Mar 15 2009, 01:15:24 AM PDT ) Permalink