“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” — Peter Drucker
A few people have asked me about the consulting business I’m putting together, Humans At Work.
The company motto is Work is a human thing. Let’s treat each other that way. The core of the business is a training program that gives new managers a grounding in the essential skills of managing human beings.
Because Drucker is right. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have at least one horror story of a Manager From Hell — most of us have more than one. And it’s my experience that bad management happens not because people are evil or insane, but mostly because they have no idea how to be good managers. When we get our first management job, no one sits us down and tells us that the most important thing we can do to be successful is to deal well with the other humans in the building — to communicate clearly, build relationships that help everyone be more effective, share information, collaborate on decisions with the people whose work will be affected, and give people control of how they do their jobs. No one teaches us how to do these things. If we’re lucky as managers, we eventually figure out how to be better… generally at the expense of the people who work for us.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. So I’m going to see if I can do something about it.
No one can learn to be a good manager in a classroom or a seminar — like writing or cooking or sex or conversation, or any of the other really fun stuff, being good takes practice. But it’s absolutely possible to point people in the right direction and give them basic tools and skills to help them start right. That’s what I plan to do with Humans At Work.
Managing is something I do well. I’ve been thinking about these ideas for 15 years. I have the skills and the passion for passing them along. I have notions for the training, and the business model, that I think will surprise people. We’ll see. The training curriculum is nearly done at the detail level, and I plan to start building the website in the beginning of the year.
This is not something I’ll ever give up writing for. If I’m doing it right — if I manage it well (grin) — I can help other people without having to lose myself.
So that’s what’s up. And I’d love to hear from you what you think good managers do, or don’t do, and what you wish your managers had known how to do better.
Bad management is, I think, self-perpetuating. People “learn” how to be managers by watching the people who manage them, so when they do get to management positions they think that at last they can treat other people as badly as they have been treated themselves.
I think also people tend to promote others who they think are like themselves. You see this particularly in tech jobs where there are people in management positions who don’t understand the work that their subordinates do, and they choose to promote people who show contempt for the other techies rather than people who are technically competent. They’ll justify this by saying, “oh, he’s a management type, he shouldn’t be left to fester in a dead-end tech job.”
But in order to encourage good management you have to be able to measure the benefits of good management, and that can be very hard, especially in the short term.
Iâve recently been reading Marcus Buckinghamâs books about focusing on our personal strengths in the workplace (as well as in life). He gives Peter Drucker credit for possibly starting the strengths movement long ago, but Buckingham seems to have really popularized it in the last several years. I canât believe I never read this stuff before now. This concept â that one can have much greater success by focusing on improving oneâs strengths rather than working on improving oneâs weaknesses — seems obvious to me now, but for some reason it never occurred to me (in this form) before. Itâs actually kind of rocking my world right now.
I donât think that I am alone in buying into that myth; I think most people live that way despite the fact that these concepts are apparently well known by now in the corporate world. In fact he says that only 17% of people claim to put their strengths to work every day (down from 20% in 2001).
Buckingham used to work for Gallop and has lots of interesting statistics from their polls (nationally representative samples). I was surprised to read that 60% of people say that their ideal job is basically what they are doing now. 31% say a different job. I wouldâve thought most of those people in âjobsâ are miserable. âThe mass of men lead lives of quiet desperationâ and all that⦠Still, even though they might be in the right ballpark, they are often not happy or flourishing. That 17% seems to have a lot to do with it.
What do you think of Buckinghamâs ideas? Have you read any of his books? Clearly, there is a lot more to being a good manager, but these concepts seem like an integral part.
I have never worked in the corporate world, but I have âmanagedâ small crews and find a lot of these ideas are relevant in many human interactions and in small businesses as well. It all starts on the individual level anyway.
And I agree w/Cheryl about people acting out what they have seen modeled. Itâs really tough to ignore the energy in oneâs environment. I would say it travels even further up the chain to the social skills we learned from our caretakers by age 5.
It doesnât surprise me that you are interested in this topic given the way you touched on it in Solitaire. I was surprised (but pleased) to find that you made it interesting in that story. Iâm sure you have a lot to offer with this. Itâs important stuff.
My favourite Peter Drucker quote is: “Do you know why they call me a guru? Because it’s easier to spell than charlatan.”
Cheryl: I agree, we learn from what we see around us. One of my favorite concepts is that of modeling the behavior we want from other people, although of course that often means putting aside defensiveness, fear, vulnerability… not so easy to do as it is to write it down in brave cheerful words. But it’s possible, and it’s one of the basic principles of Humans At Work. Management is behavior, like so much else in life….
Re: measuring the benefits of good management — a recent Gallup survey indicates that zillions of people (24% of all U.S. employees) are unhappy specifically with their bosses, and the article goes on to estimate the cost to business of the disengagement that produces. That’s a cost of bad management as opposed to good management, but it sure seems like a good place to start in terms of justifying a better approach to management.
Jennifer: I haven’t read the Buckingham books but I’ve read a lot about them, and I agree with the idea of focusing on strength. I think it’s inevitable that we have to do things at our jobs that we’re not that great at, and that we’ll have to find ways to do those things the best we can, but that’s not the same as pounding people because they aren’t brilliant at everything. I get so tired of the schoolmaster mentality of a lot of corporate America. You’re my manager, not my mom, you know?
Where did we get this idea that we have to be good at all things, meet all challenges given to us, in order to be Good People? Clearly this is a cultural value, not just a corporate one. There’s so little room for failure, for finding our way… another thing that frustrates me.
Ian: *laughing* Just another thing to like about Drucker. Humor good, self-importance not.
Very late to this thread/post, but I saw this article and thought to myself how crucially necessary your Human at Work initiative continues to be. I will be first in line to recommend your services to all.
cheers, donna
link is to UK Times online and is safe:
http://tinyurl.com/6ed3wz
It seems to me that competition is the most destructive and yet necessary factor in the management profile. The individual drive to the top, Peter Principle and the fear of Something Happened, are two others. Corporate practices mimic that of our public schools by training administrators in the disciplainary arts.
A site you might be interested in is Penelope Trunk’s http://www.brazencareerist.com.
@ rhbee — thanks for the link to Brazen Careerist.
@ Donna — apologies for not responding before! Sometimes things fall off the radar. Thanks for the link, which I’ve turned into a tiny url.