Last week I was pretty hard on management writers/bloggers who come up with those silly little management lists.
Lists with titles like these, for instance:[1]
- 5 Mindset Shifts That Will Get You Fired Up on Mondays
- Top 10 Ways to Avoid Being Labeled a Complainer at Work
- 12 Deadly Career Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Well, this week I take it all back. Why? Because I’m posting a list of my own for you to consider:
6.5 Questions Every Manager Should Be Able Answer
These are the six (and a half) questions that I sincerely believe every manager should absolutely, positively be able to answer correctly. No matter who they are, where they’re employed, or who they manage.[2]
And here they are (in no particular order):
- Advisor-evaluator paradox. The roles of “advisor” and “evaluator” are incompatible with each other.[3] So how is it that you—as a manager—are expected to act as both when it comes to your subordinates?
1.5 – If you are in fact responsible for assessing your employees’ performance, how do you explain the “catch-22” this creates? After all, one of the things that seems to most influence that performance is how well a person is being managed.[4]
- Flatten that span. Organizational efficiency is supposedly increased by both “flattening” an organization (reducing the number of layers in the hierarchy), and by limiting a manager’s “span of control” (which keeps managers from spreading themselves too thin).[5] But to flatten the hierarchy you must necessarily increase the span of control. So how’s that work?
- Teamwork. You probably talk about teamwork a lot, and how important it is.[6] Which is great. Cooperating and working together – I get it. But “teamwork” also seems to require “taking one for the team” on occasion – or subordinating one’s own interest to those of the collective, so to speak.[7] Except that doesn’t sound like something a capitalist would say, does it? (More like something a communist would say, actually.)
- Politics. Why is it still who you know, and not what you know, that’s so important at most companies? In other words, why all the “office politics”?[8]
- Organizational authority. The person closest to a problem is typically best equipped to solve it.[9] So why do you, as a manager, routinely deny your frontline employees the authority to fix the problems that prevent them from doing their best work?
- Authority (part 2). Where does your authority come from anyway? What makes you the boss?
I should point out that these are the same questions I posed to some of the world’s foremost experts on managing a couple of months ago at the Academy of Management’s 2016 Annual Meeting.
And to be honest, they didn’t do so well.[10]
So this week I’m asking you.
Think them over – then please post your answers in the “Comments” section below. And then stay tuned; I’ll have the correct responses for you in an upcoming post…
Endnotes
[1] Respectively: http://www.inc.com/nicolas-cole/5-mindset-shifts-that-will-hype-you-up-on-a-monday.html; http://www.inc.com/john-white/10-ways-to-avoid-being-labeled-a-complainer-at-work.html; http://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/12-deadly-career-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them.html. All retrieved October 27, 2016.
[2] If you follow my blog, these questions will be familiar to you. They’re essentially the same ones I asked in one of my first posts (“Why your boss probably sucks”), and then later posed to management scholars, consultants and other management academics back in August (Please see: “’Live’ from the Academy of Management’s 2016 Annual Meeting”).
[3] Hill, Linda. 2003. Becoming a Manager. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, p. 209.
[4] Wagner, Rodd, and James K. Harter. 2006. 12: The Elements of Great Managing. New York: Gallup Press; Shaer, Steven J. 2013. Fix Them or Fire Them. Challenger Books.
[5] Simon, Herbert. “The Proverbs of Administration.” As reprinted in Jay M. Shafritz & J. Steven Ott. 2001. Classics of Organization Theory (5th edition). Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., pp. 112-124.
[6] Lencioni, Patrick. 2002. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Boss.
[7] Fayol, Henri. 1949. General and Industrial Management. New York: Pitman Publishing Corp.
[8] Morgan, Gareth. 1998. Images of Organization (Executive Edition). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Kohler Publishers, Inc. and SAGE Publications, Inc., pp. 149-181.
[9] Peters, Tom, and Robert Waterman. 1982. In Search of Excellence. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
[10] The high score for the week was 1 correct answer. (Please see my post “AOM 2016 Recap: Melissa”)