Confusion Amplified

Finding one’s style of management is not an easy task. Who do you trust, where do you get the guidance, which theory to believe? Some of us try to find our own way, some dive into books and manuscripts, some seek help of mentors. As we try to connect the dots we are distracted by The Myths of Management and if that is not enough the confusion is amplified by urban legends and conventional wisdom. What legends you might ask – let me mention just a couple –

The Legends of Complete Turnaround

I do not know how many times I heard that one. Joe Smith was one of the worst performing employees, always late to work, unproductive, rude… Linda Black took him under her wing and before we knew Joe became a high powered executive, a mover and a shaker. In meanwhile Linda moved on and now she’s turning around teams, entire organizations, planets… Well that might be a bit of simplification / exaggeration but I am sure you recognize the pattern.

I do not dismiss a possibility of a turn around. Things happen, like we see on the Biggest Loser TV shows where fat depressed slobs become extraverted health freaks with shining teeth. What an inspiration! No wonder some managers see their mission to make sure that every loser on their team turns into a winner. I call that a God Syndrome… Who are you Mr. Manager? Do you think you can change people? What a joke! People do not change unless they want to do it themselves. And not just want it… They must have a burning unstoppable desire to change and even then it’s exceptionally difficult, painful, and liable to relapse and reversal.

Five Myths of Management

Management is not a fact based science / technique / process. While many of best practices come from long-term observations of facts related to human and organizational behavior the sad reality is that there is nothing certain about management. We do not know for sure what works and what doesn’t. And “Where facts are few, experts are many.” [Donald R. Gannon] There is enormous number of management theories, techniques, trends, ideas… Picking the right path among those theories is not easy by all means. And to make it even more complex the waters are muddied by common wisdom, dubious rules, misleading tails and legends, sci-fi entertainment, and myths of management… Let me start with just a few of those, the Five Myths of Managment –

The Myth of an Instant Manager

Promoting individual contributors to management positions is a common practice. Most senior member of the team, most organized or most vocal can become manager in one wave of an executive wand. Despite of a well-known phenomena (promote a good engineer to a manager and you lose a good engineer and gain bad manager) many companies continue doing that again and again. Why is that?

The reason is quite simple – a common belief that a title change would make an impact strong enough to make an instant transformation. Most common justification is “Good people step up to the challenge”. You would not hand a scalpel to a software engineer and ask him to perform a simple surgery, would you? You would not ask a business analyst to lend a 747. You would not ask me to coach NFL team… Of course all those tasks require knowledge, experience, skills… Same with managing even at a very small scale. I have to admit that managements is not necessarily a brain surgery, it’s so much simpler, maybe just as old, common and easy as a c-section. So where is that scalpel?