A recent piece by
Dr. Glenn Bassett in the AMA Playbook hits several nails square on the head. I
fully agree with his emphasis on developing and encouraging teamwork and team
commitment, continuous efforts to inform employees and ask for their input and
buy-in for both planning and operations, and exercising authority "with
great restraint and delicacy." That's just for starters on the manager's
TO DO list. Bassett’s advice is commendable, but I think it mostly falls on
deaf ears.
A recent, related piece in The Atlantic is curiously entertaining. Jerry Useem mentions some
relatively new research that seems germane to the endless pursuit of
understanding what makes a manager tick and what makes a good manager. I'll
risk over-simplifying when I say it's interesting to me that Useem says some
behaviors and personality types are shared by the best and the worst managers.
This suggests some element of randomness that may or may not deflate his theme.
My principal
criticism is that Useem's article is focused on behaviors and personality types,
and largely ignores actual operational competence on the part of the manager.
He says (p. 54) "The problem with competence is that we can't judge it by
looking at someone...So we rely on proxies--superficial cues for competence
that we take and mistake for the real thing." Exactly. In my management career I knew literally hundreds of co-workers who
assumed that the high bosses knew what they were doing, often without proof
and/or despite evidence to the contrary.
We’ve got a long way
to go before we fully understand why there aren’t enough good managers and good
leaders. I think a big part of the explanation is there aren’t enough competent
managers to fill all the slots.
Plain and simple. I
think it’s a systematic defect in most organizations.
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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