Seven deadly sins of a manager
Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone…
Contribution. I mean this common phrase, if you want someone to do it well — do it yourself. This phrase has to be tabu for a manager.
The value of a manager is not the contribution, despite the necessity to contribute from time to time. The value of a manager is in the decisions that are made. It’s from one side. The conversion or implementation rate of decisions is another value, from the other side. It means the team gives buy-in and contributes to implementing the decision. However, can the decision be valuable if a manager is not able to implement it or get a buy-in from the team?
So, if a manager sins by contributing too much the consequences are bottlenecks, failure to scale, loss of focus, time management failure, permanent crisis management, total accountability for everything, and burnout, finally.
A manager has to be a decision-making machine. However, to avoid permanent crisis management, one of the decisions has to be delegation. Self-organized employees, who are accountable for their decision, isn’t it a good focus for all manager’s decisions?
Hopefulness. A wise person said, “hope is a bad management plan”. I mean the hope that everything will be alright.
It’s not the same if a manager decides to do nothing with the case. Certainly, if a manager predicts the consequence of inaction. If doesn’t predict, it’s false optimism.
One of the biggest managers’ hopes is hope for common sense. A manager hopes the employee is his/her “clone”, a “perfect” employee who thinks and behaves like a manager. A manager hopes employees can guess what he/she means. Because it’s common sense!
As a result, expectations sync absence, insufficient attention to the tasks, high rate of task turnover, low velocity and predictability of operations, loss of control, chaos, and burnout, finally.
To have the right to hope a manager has to invest a lot of time in his team. It’s a process of permanent thought-sharing, after-action reviews, values discussions, and correct disputes.
Judgment. I mean value judgment. Certainly one of the responsibilities of a manager is evaluation (of results, employees’ performance, operations efficiency, and so on).
The evaluation differs from value judgment, it is based on data, evidence, and facts. A manager has to be an “investigator” to evaluate instead of do value judgments. It takes time and energy to gather all the data to correct conclusions.
Another side is rhetoric. Even if data is collected, it is really important to come to the right conclusions and use the right words. No generalization, no accusations, no comparisons. Just the case and expectations for the future. And that is a manager’s job.
And the worst case of judgment is judging by ourselves. People are different! They don’t have to be managers’ “clones”. If a manager refers to his/her experience in the case he creates opposition and distrust. But employees need help, they need to understand their right behavior in the case.
As a result, people just leave judgmental managers.
Blindness. I mean the situation when managers don’t see and don’t accept their mistakes. But managers make mistakes all the time! Their decisions don’t have negative consequences in rare cases.
It’s important to remember, any management system is characterized by not mistakes, but the reaction to those mistakes. If a manager doesn’t build a system for mistake identification, a manager is “blind”. The consequences of the decisions become less predictable.
If a manager sees mistakes but does nothing… The reason for passiveness doesn’t matter. A manager creates a snowball of unresolved problems. Problems are amassed and managers are smashed.
Sometimes managers are “deaf” in addition to ”blindness”. I mean their communications are one-way directed. They just talk but do not listen. They formulate tasks but don’t make sure the task is understood correctly.
As a result, the setting of tasks transforms into the issuing of orders. Outcomes can be really surprising for a manager.
Positivism. I mean a wish of managers to be a good person for their employees. But managers are not ice cream sellers.
It’s not easy to tell unpleasant things to employees. But this is part of the manager’s job. Sometimes managers have to be surgeons. They have to hurt now to prevent more harm in the future. It’s hard and there is a temptation to avoid it from time to time.
But, If negative feedback is absent there is no way for improvements. It’s a dead end for a manager and employees will most likely use a manager for their own benefits.
Negativism. I mean it’s really hard to be a good feedbacker. Sometimes managers prefer to give feedback as is. They become “bone breakers” instead of “surgeons”.
Negative sequences, focus on a person but not on the problem, focus on the past but not on the present status and the future, and emotions. These are signs of negativism that only hurts but don’t help to resolve the problem, and don’t help to improve.
As a result, people leave such a manager or work in a state of depression. And I’m not sure what is worst for such a manager.
Haste. The sin of the sins. The deadliest one. It cancels out all the skills of a manager. It leads a manager to a pure “unmanaged” state. Manager’s brain becomes almost limbic. A manager reveals the true face.
It’s a crisis time when managers have to hurry. Time is pressuring. The situation is pressuring. The responsibility is pressuring.
And this is a time to pause. It can seem counterintuitive. But managers have to do it. It’s necessary to break before a sharp turn. Furthermore, it is necessary to always do it. This is because a manager is a problem-solving machine and there are a lot of sharp turns on his/her way. The highest value of each manager is to solve problems.
The ability of a manager to take control in a pressure time, the ability to remember all the skills and knowledge, and the ability to activate critical thinking, all these things define the real level of a manager.
So, is it possible to avoid these and other sins? I believe it’s not. But I believe that awareness increases our ability to prevent harm to our own decisions and actions. My weak hope is that I and other managers will sin less often than it is now!
