Work World Myth #8: Managers should know how to do everything.

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Comments

[John Richardson]

As a newly promoted manager, I appreciate your article. The more I know, the more I realize I don't know. That is where the stress level rises. If I don't know it I can't do it. Now that you reinforced the need to manage and not do... you took a huge weight off of my shoulders.

Thank you,

John

[Rosa]

Aloha John, mahalo for visiting Talking Story and for your comment, it is good to meet you.

As new managers we soon learn to get more comfortable with humility, and wonderfully, our humility soon gives way to more eagerness in learning openly. Best of all it actually endears us to our staff: we start to connect better with those we manage because they absolutely love it when we ask them instead of tell them.

I visited your blog, Success Begins Today (Great title!) and really liked your I-Force; I'm going to start using it too!

Dear readers, visit John's blog and read how he "decided to put my favorite Sausage Biscuit through the I-Force. The I-Force is Information, Innovation, and Imagination." Find it at http://www.successbeginstoday.com/wordpress/
Rosa

[Half Sigma]

The worst manager I ever worked for once said something like "I should know how to do Mary's job because she works for me."

[Half Sigma]

But then the second worst manger I ever worked for knew so little about what the people under her were doing, she couldn't effectively manage them.

There's a compromise between the extremes.

[John]

I get what you mean on managers not being able to do everything but I can't reconcile it with my experiences with managers. The managers who got respect were the managers that were not afraid to on occassion do some of the dirty work. It may be the result of the Peter Princible but managers often ascend to management because they put in their time doing the grunt work. From legal aide attorneys to apprentice carpenters, the line staff appreciates a manager that knows what their facing because he takes it on too.

[Rosa]

Aloha John,
I completely understand the point you are making, for there is much to be said for that time a manager spends in the trenches with his or her staff, and the argument can certainly be made that rolling-up-your-sleeves time is quality time too --- an important part of it. It just can’t be the whole picture. However I do agree that working hand-in-hand, and side-by-side shouldn’t be totaling missing either.

Another reader had sent me an email about this, and she said it this way: “I like it when my manager works with us periodically, just enough to understand what we do, how we do it, but most importantly, what we really need to get the job done better - like hiring more people when we are short-handed, or buying that new software program we say will increase our productivity. After that, I want him to get back to work on what he should be doing to work on the big picture stuff that eventually impacts us in other ways.”

John, one of the things you said gets to the core of what we are trying to do here in sharing our thoughts: you said, “but I can’t reconcile it with my experiences with managers.” The more we talk story about these things, we can engender a workplace reinvention where all of our future experiences with managers and as managers are greatly improved.

Mahalo nui for visiting Talking Story and for your comment; I do hope we’ll hear more from you here! My aloha to you.