> Half of being a manager is managing other's behaviors to produce a great product
This part has not been left out. All of the content about establishing culture, vision, expectations, responsibilities, and so on, is a direct part of managing others' behaviors to produce a great product. What am I missing?
> The other half is managing your own behaviors -- i.e. being consistent with your communications and consistent in your behaviors.
The article talks about this too, especially the importance of communication, consistency, discipline, and process:
> [Communication] Communication may be the most important word in this guide. It is the key to making your team operate effectively. Failure to communicate is the #1 cause of people problems (...)
> [Consistency] If you are using metrics properly, you’ll be analyzing performance on a daily or weekly basis by consistently reviewing your metrics and measuring if objectives are being achieved. This typically happens in your weekly meetings and written updates. To help facilitate your planning, there are a couple of formal analysis activities to do:
> Quarterly Summary. Reflection is a healthy and beneficial process. At the end of every quarter, each functional leader should compile a summary of the objectives achieved. The summary should include metrics and descriptive analysis on where the team succeeded vs. struggled.
If it was really as simple as the author has posited, then anyone can be a manager, but this just isn't the case. Many companies have this framework in place, yet the management and the culture is terrible. (Amazon, HP, Microsoft to name a few)
In a number of companies I worked at the number one reason people left was a conflict with their supervisor.
I think a much better introduction to management is the manager tools podcast. And after listening to about 10 or 20 episodes, you'll see how hard management really is, especially if you want to do it right.
I think it really crystalized the issues I had reading the article; you can do (or try to do...) all the ‘right things’ and still have a terrible result.
If it was easy to get right, things would be great... but its not. Its hard. ...and a slide deck of protips doesn’t cut it as a solution.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great resource, but it's not "How to be a manager."
Just an example of this, culture is hard to get right. You can't hire yourself to culture. It's something that has to be practiced by all your employees every day.
If you have 1000 managers in your corporation, you have 1000 micro-cultures. If a chunk of those managers figure out they can berate their directs on a daily basis without punishment, then those employees experience of your company will be terrible.
That's why Amazon employee reports vary wildly from great to horrible. That's because while some managers are truly great, some are truly horrid. The culture isn't enforced equally across the company.
Jeff Bezos might treat his corporate execs great on a day to day basis say, but the average employee is usually levels of management removed from this to be inspired. Instead they see coworkers sobbing at their desk because they were fired, or forced to resign. Other's might actually deeply enjoy their time at Amazon, but it's because they got lucky in the micro-culture lottery.
This is quite a fair comment, but I can’t tell if you’re agreeing, disagreeing or just making an unrelated point.
The point I was making is: this article isn’t practically useful, its just ‘how it would be nice if things were’ not ‘how to get there’.
Its got some good ideas, sure... but as you say, reality and ideals aren’t easily matched; so as a step by step guide, its somewhat trivialising what is actually a very hard, entirely unsolved set of problems.
having been at a small company that swore about manager tools all day long and actively recommended its staff to look into it to grasp some of the concepts and their approaches to things, it is equally as dreadful as any other resource out there.
there are more than one way to do things and there are more than one different type of people that you'll have to manage. the reality is that it is a tough job that requires a lot of self awareness and a deep understanding of the risk of management drawing power hunger to really start to grasp how to leverage those tools to be effective.
This part has not been left out. All of the content about establishing culture, vision, expectations, responsibilities, and so on, is a direct part of managing others' behaviors to produce a great product. What am I missing?
> The other half is managing your own behaviors -- i.e. being consistent with your communications and consistent in your behaviors.
The article talks about this too, especially the importance of communication, consistency, discipline, and process:
> [Communication] Communication may be the most important word in this guide. It is the key to making your team operate effectively. Failure to communicate is the #1 cause of people problems (...)
> [Consistency] If you are using metrics properly, you’ll be analyzing performance on a daily or weekly basis by consistently reviewing your metrics and measuring if objectives are being achieved. This typically happens in your weekly meetings and written updates. To help facilitate your planning, there are a couple of formal analysis activities to do:
> Quarterly Summary. Reflection is a healthy and beneficial process. At the end of every quarter, each functional leader should compile a summary of the objectives achieved. The summary should include metrics and descriptive analysis on where the team succeeded vs. struggled.