Work Wednesday
If you’ve ever held a job of any kind, chances are you’ve reported to a manager. This is that annoying person who, at a minimum, periodically checks to make sure you’re still around and that your work is somehow getting done. If you’re like me, you may have even been given the dubious honor of being called a manager yourself. Probably because, like me, someone noticed that you’re always telling other people what to do and how to do it.
“Finally,” you said to yourself when you got that promotion, “things are going to get done the right way around here.” But before you rent that bulldozer and start smashing silos, you may want to take a step back and honestly evaluate your readiness to do the hardest part of all—deal with people. People who have (shudder) unique personalities.
What you should really do at this point, if you haven’t already, is get some honest-to-god professional training in people management. But if you can’t work that into your busy schedule right now, you can start honing your people management skills by making sure to avoid these five things:
What’s your personality type? Chances are, you’ve taken a Myers-Briggs personality type test at some point in your life and you know you’re an ESTP or an INFJ or one of 14 other 4-letter combinations that characterize the dominant attributes of your personality. As a new manager, you might feel more comfortable talking to people who share your own personality type. If you’re bubbly, talkative, and quick to make decisions, you might write off a quiet, cautious person as sullen and slow, not a team player. If you’re introverted, you might avoid consulting a coworker whose constant pep talks you find abrasive and unwelcome. Well, guess what. Good ideas and dedication come in all personality types, and now that you’re the manager, you need to make sure you’re listening to everyone on your team—not just the people who make it easy.
Mistake 2: Micromanaging
I’m going to guess, because you’re reading this on CurrentMom, that you probably have children or know someone who does. Have you ever tried to get a 3-year-old to do something (or do it faster, or do it the right way) by micromanaging? Did it work? What about a 4-year-old… or a 14-year-old? I think you see where I’m going with this. Next time you find yourself popping into a subordinate’s office every 20 minutes and hear the word “status” repeatedly flying out of your mouth, picture your dear little one throwing everything she owns down the stairs and shrieking “GO AWAY!” Because that is what is happening in your team member’s mind—and it’s not helping her get the job done any faster.
Mistake 3: Not managing at all
This one’s for my fellow introverts. Flummoxed? Anxious about managing people? Hiding behind some important task and pretending you’re not terrified? We all get swamped with work, but if you spend all day camped out in your office, forcing your team members to come to you (and then looking annoyed at the interruption), eventually they will stop coming to you. (This is not a good thing.) To lead people well, you need them to trust you and know you’re there for them. To do this, you need to get into a habit of talking to them every day.
This is not the same as micromanaging. One of the best bosses I ever had was a quiet, less-than-social person. She didn’t talk a lot and hardly ever held staff meetings. But every morning, she would make the rounds and visit each of people on her projects, and just sit down and chat for a few minutes. Those check-ins always helped me focus my day and week a little better, and they let me know that my boss was available to me.
Mistake 4: Opening the floodgates
You may be the boss of your project and your team, but someone’s still the boss of you. When your boss gets bad feedback from a client or something else goes wrong, you may be called upon to explain how it happened and what you are going to do to fix it. This is probably the hardest part of being a manager, because you are responsible for the project—you can’t pass all the blame on to your staff and then expect them to fix it for you.
When the “stuff” starts flowing downstream, it’s your job to act as flood control. When you talk to your boss, stand up for your team. Instead of saying “I’m going to strangle him one of these days” (something I have actually heard a manager say, frequently, about the people who reported to him), focus on the problem and how your team will find creative ways to meet that challenge. When you talk to your team, don’t go on and on about how angry your boss is. That will just put them in a panic or a depressive funk. Instead, talk to them about how the problem is affecting the people your company serves, and get their input about how to make things work better.
Mistake 5: Trying to read people’s minds
You might be really good at reading people’s emotional states—or, at least, you think you are. Either way, you should refrain from doing so at the office. If one of your team members comes in looking sad and doesn’t respond to email in his usual peppy manner, it’s ok to feel worried about him, but it’s not ok to theorize that he’s sad because he hates his job, then start treating him as though that were true. Maybe his cat died. Maybe his marriage is on the rocks. Whatever it is, unless it’s negatively affecting his work, it’s none of your business, and whatever your theory is, it’s probably wrong.
There are, of course, a lot more than 5 mistakes you can make as a manager, but I didn’t want to totally bum you out. Please use the comments to tell me what I missed!
Photo of my office door by @10 on Flickr via a Creative Commons license.
I would say one of the biggest mistakes managers and especially entrepreneurs that start hiring people make, is assuming everyone gets what they are supposed to do! These suggestions work well in a larger, corporate environment where everyone has a specific job description, etc. Most of my working life has been spent working in companies with under ten employees and now for myself! I can attest to the fact that in addition to these rules for interpersonal management, actually knowing what you want your people to accomplish and figuring out how best they can accomplish that is a major factor many, many small business people utterly fail at!
Posted by: Melody Bakeeff | Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 10:59 AM