13.SmartPeople.pdf

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SMART

PEOPLE

by Scott Berkun

| iss. 13.04 | i | U | X | + |

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How to Manage

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The other day, over lunch, a friend recounted how her boss was just

like the manager from the movie Oﬃce Space . After a few stories of

cubicle horror related to said manager, she looked up at me and asked,

“Am I an idiot? Or did something I did in this or a previous life make

me deserve this?”

I didnʼt know what to say, other than that no one deserves to have a bad manager

(well, almost no one). Certainly this friend, who is bright, hard working, and fun,

doesnʼt deserve one. But unfortunately there is a normal distribution of manager

quality, and many people with the job title of manager donʼt quite rise to the chal-

lenges of the role. Itʼs often not their fault; sometimes theyʼve just never had a good

manager themselves to model after. Then again, other times theyʼve just focused on

the wrong things.

What follows is some advice for managers on how to manage people, especially tal-

ented people. I worked for nine years at Microsoft, sometimes managing projects,

sometimes managing people, but always with a manager above me. I think Iʼm smart,

but many of the people who have worked for me deﬁnitely were. Over the years Iʼve

experienced many mistakes and successes in both how I was managed, and how I

managed others. What follows is a short distillation of some of what Iʼve learned.

Thereʼs no one way to manage people, but there are some approaches that I think

most good managers share.

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MANAGEMENT DEFINED

I once had a manager that his other reports and I called “the bossman.” We called him

this in jest, making fun of his authority, because it was so rare that he needed to use

it. Instead, arguments always centered on some problem that needed to be solved,

and what the best approach would be to solve it. If there was a disagreement, heʼd

restate the goals and expectations, make sure everyone was still on the same page,

and then lead a discussion of possible alternatives. Working for him always felt like a

partnership. Decisions were made on the basis of their merit, and any point of view

was allowed, provided it added value to the discussion. He didnʼt care if he was right

or wrong, only that the best ideas survived. In years of working for this guy, I can only

think of a handful of incidents where he asked me to do something that didnʼt already

make some degree of sense to me. His authority, though obvious since he was my

boss, was rarely something he had to exercise or use as a tool to get things done. Was

this guy a good manager? It depends whom you ask.

For many people and organizations, management is considered in relatively strict

and authority-based terms. The manager, or the boss, is the person who has author-

ity and responsibility over a bunch of other people. Often he or she can hire and ﬁre

people, give raises, decide who works on what, and has political and social access to

other important people in the company. Depending on where you work, these things

are true to varying degrees. I learned that the more you talk to diﬀerent people in dif-

ferent lines of work about managers, the more you learn how diﬀerently deﬁned the

role and job can be. There are also huge diﬀerences in what employees in diﬀerent

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organizations expect their managers to do for them. What is expected of managers in

one organization would be a revelation in another.

but there are some approaches that I think

most good managers share .

My experience with “the bossman” taught me that managers have many undocu-

mented, unsaid, but incredibly important functions. Managers have more to do with

enabling the happiness and productivity of the people that work for them than any-

one else in the organization. A manager, at any level of hierarchy, from line project

manager to CEO, has an emotional responsibility to their reports, or to the people

who are dependent on them. Like a parent in a family, or a coach of a sports team, a

manager sets the tone for dialogue (open and thoughtful, or defensive and confron-

tational?), enables or prevents a fun work environment, and interprets or ignores the

corporate rules and structure, for a daily practice of shared work. While managers are

hired to get stuﬀ done for their employer, they also make a personal commitment to

each of their reports by being their boss. The manager automatically takes on more

responsibility for the career of their employee than anyone else in the organization

or company. They might ignore this responsibility, or do a crappy job of it, but the

responsibility is still theirs.

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There’s no one way to manage people,

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I look at the “bossman” as an example of a very eﬀective project manager. I think he

hired people very carefully, trying to ﬁnd people that would work within his manage-

ment philosophy. He chose people who were self-motivated and conﬁdent enough

that he didnʼt have to expend much energy ﬁguring out how to get them to work hard.

Then he created an environment where good ideas rose to the top, further encouraging

smart people to want to contribute. “The bossman” made working for him feel like a

proper relationship: He got something from us, and we got something from him.

proper relationship : He got something from us,

and we got something from him.

I think that this kind of management style requires more skill and savvy than a more

hierarchical, drill-sergeant type of manager. Unlike the latter, the former demands

comfort with degrees of ambiguity, and the conﬁdence to allow reports to openly

disagree, or intellectually trump, their manager. But from my experience, this open

management style is the only way to have a “best idea wins” kind of culture.

However, I know some people who would have criticized ʻthe bossman” as a manager

who was not in control of his team. If you walked into the room at a brainstorming

session, or group discussion, it wasnʼt always clear who the head honcho was. Theyʼd

also say that he delegated too many decisions down to the people that worked for

him, and perhaps trusted them too much. I suppose the ﬁnal analysis has to come

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“The bossman” made working for him feel like a

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