Today and tomorrow I’ll be posting a few links I’ve saved on managing: on being a manager, dealing with managers, and how to be a better one.
To begin, a six-part series from Rands in Repose—Deconstructing Managers.
There Is Evil, Your Manager’s Job
I trust that, like me, you’re an optimist and you believe that everyone in your company is busily working on whatever they do. I also believe the fact that you don’t understand what they do automatically biases you. You believe that because you understand your job intimately, it is more important than anyone else’s.
In your head, you are king. It’s clear what you do; it’s clear what is expected of you. There is no person who rules you better than yourself because you know exactly what you’re about. Anyone outside of your head is a mystery because they are not you.
Give Him Something to Say, Where Does Your Manager Come From?
Your manager is your face to the rest of the organization. Right this second, someone you don’t know is saying something great about you because you took five minutes to pitch your boss on your work. Your manager did that. You gave him something to say.
Transforming Glaring Deficiencies, How Are They Compensating For Their Blind Spots?
Each manager, good or bad, is going to have a glaring deficiency. […] The question is, does he recognize they have a blind spot? […]
A manager’s job is to take what skills they have, the ones that got them promoted, and figure out how to make them scale. They do this by building a team that accentuates their strengths and, more importantly, reinforces where they are weak.
How Much Action Per Decision?, How Does Your Manager Talk To You?
Yes, you want to figure out how not be a bottleneck in your organization and, yes, you want to figure out how to scale, but you also want to continue to get your hands dirty. […]
Pure delegators are slowly becoming irrelevant to their organization. The folks who work for pure delegators don’t rely on him for their work because they know they can’t depend on him for action.
Incessantly Demonstrating Your Hunger
The organization’s view of your manager is their view of you.
They Might Be Evil, What Happens When They Lose Their Shit?
Your manager is not a manager until they’ve participated in a layoff. […] He hasn’t truly represented the company until he actively participates in the constructive deconstruction of an organization. There is no more pure a panic than a layoff and you want to see who your manager will become because it’s often the first time he sees the organization is bigger than the people.
The above quotes are relevant to many more areas of life than managers and managing a workplace.