Skip to main content

What Makes for Ideal Managers?

Opinion

Anyone that knows me that I read a great deal, and one of the topics I focus on is management and leadership. It has meant attending B-school, reading books on management, as well as reading numerous articles and studies - I definitely prefer to base my ideas on statistical proof - so I think I have a good sense of what research says excellent management and leadership means. After reading a blog post that resonated with me, but I thought overly-specific, I decided to abstract that article's rules into something generic, add some needed items, then convert those items into practice.
  • Making sure one's team has adequate tools, resources, contacts, and training
  • Being a leader, and in that providing vision, expectations, goals, and standards, as well communicating that clearly
  • In one's self, exemplifying excellence, being a role model, maintaining a positive image, having personality and charm, while earning respect
  • In one's team, having excellence, cohesion, friendship, and camaraderie
  • Developing one's people, having a concern for their welfare, providing praise and encouragement, and listening
  • For the business, service, strategic goal-setting, clear communication, protecting the team, improving efficiency, managing requirements and resources

The only issue is that this list is a bit of a 'kitchen-sink-laundry-list' including everything without concern for the appropriateness. When I look through my history, very few managers have been what I saw as truly excellent. For other items, they were not specifically a manager's duty but were provided by the organization, such as with providing training.

The Source

How to Tell If You're a Great Manager:
  • Do I know what is expected of me at work? 
  • Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
  • At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
  • In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
  • Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
  • Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
  • At work, do my opinions seem to count?
  • Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
  • Are my co-workers committed to doing high-quality work?
  • Do I have a best friend at work?
  • In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
  • This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews

Don't learn to code. Learn to think.

A response to  Don't learn to code. Learn to think. : Below is is my usual response when I see an article stating that everyone should learn to code:  Rather than programming, it is more important to impart the thinking of computer science (CS) than a specific implementation. Programming can be an end point for some students, but it is likely that programming itself will be increasingly automated, so that one needs more the general concepts common in CS. Even then, programming itself is to some degree a grunt task that one progresses beyond:  The following are typical components of a CS degree: algorithms & flowcharting systems thinking logical systems and set theory object-orientation & patterns probability, statistics, mathematics All of the above can be useful in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.

A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming