Good Management Within Business

[Tommy T]

Started a new role a few months back and my new manager is exceptional. Learnt a lot from him. My transition has been almost painless. As a result I feel a sense of loyalty and admiration for him. I noticed he's had the same effect on a few other colleagues and the environment at work is great at the moment. Very productive and hard-working, but still fairly 'casual' feeling.

Always been interested in leadership, but thought it would be interesting to gauge other people's opinions on strong leadership / management. At the same time, what interesting stories do you have about awful managers and what you think made them so bad?

[Spectral]

I think the biggest thing that defines crummy leadership in my experience is a lack of demonstrated competence. If an individual doesn't show they're competent and hard-working, it's very hard for them to take any sort of meaningful leadership role. I'm basically incapable of following someone that I view as beneath me or lazy.

[Fencers]

The best bosses or managers I worked with were all people who had the ability to see the 'big picture' but communicate on a one-to-one basis very effectively. Allowing those managers or CEOs to set goals for us as a collective yet each team or brigade was very specialized in their roles and structure.

I think more autocratic leaderships styles create a bit of resentment among your employees. Direction is good but a too overbearing leadership style makes otherwise competent workers feel marginalized &/or inflexible.

For example, I had a team lead who was all up in our business. He basically dictated everything to us and we needed to check-off with him on just about everything. It was useful during crunch time and increased efficiency to a point. However, during more normalized functions of the job and downtime it made the team feel they were being treated like children, that they could not be trusted, that they were lazy by default.

The end result was the team stopped thinking through problems on their own, stopped coming up with creative solutions, stopped trying- what was the point? The manager was going to tell you what to do regardless and if you did something on your own it had to go through him anyway; with a high likelihood he would tell you what to do. So I didn't need to think or be engaged in the job anymore- we were just worker bees.

When that manager took over the entire division- all teams felt as my team did 6 months previous. Production plummeted and people stopped 'trying', so to speak. I actually quit because the working environment was so uninteresting and miserable.

That manager's style was more suited to like a McDonalds. Not a professional working environment.

By contrast, my current department director is quite cool. His style is more in line with what I said above; clear goals/direction but each team is allowed some autonomy to achieve those goals. We have a fairly high level of communication to facilitate equal footing among our teams. Weekly meetings among all leads, end of shift reports from each lead, constant flow of communication between each team member and our director, etc. Really good stuff.

As a result, we try. Everyone is really motivated to rise to the top or meet our goals & deadlines.

Our director is also pretty personable. He is always hovering around, his office door is literally always open and we just waltz in there drop some info on him and waltz out without fear, he comes to our offices personally to check statuses or relay info between the leads and team members, etc.

He also understands how to leverage our abilities. Which I think is a supreme skill. For example, one of the team managers is on vacation this week. She is out of communication totally when the client requested a data prep ahead of schedule. The director got a few people together to handle it without leaving their respective teams lacking.

That's skillful- to know to pull Ronald and William from a project running the 8th of August for a 48 hour prep notice but to also know Ron and Will could turn over that work quickly if you tasked Nicole with the analysis for Monday and Tuesday and let Jan and Kathy complete prep the August 8th data. In fact our director did such a good job shuffling us around and assigning tasks we excel at in a crunch that we actually got ahead of work schedule.

So we all had a free day yesterday. We putzed around the office watching movies, playing Pokemon Go!, one of the team leads went to the bakery and got a whole bunch of pies/cakes/breads and we had a little open lunch thing in the cafe of the office.

That's awesome! We "worked" at most half the day on a Friday and all left before 2PM on a Friday happy into our weekend. Even though we got a last minute change- effective leadership not only met the challenge of a short notice but he did it so well, efficiency was super high and everyone was happy and stress free.

That's a leader.

[TITAN308]

Prior to leaving the corporate world I have never had a single boss that instilled inspiration in me. Ever.

All of them, every last one was a "Yes Man".