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I feel very honored, Rosa, by how you've used my post as a springboard to your own great thoughts about the value of managers and a healthy culture. Your four points about the role of managers are elegantly stated, and I agree wholeheartedly that too often managerial work is easily misunderstood or undervalued. Framing it as you have, to manage well does become a calling more than a stepping stone of career advancement. I have been lucky enough in my life to know a few managers for whom that calling was present. They can be quite unassuming people who happen to be very good at human being as well as technical being. I think of a woman who sees herself symbolically a kind of "choir director" for the various voices in her department. I think of another, a man who serves as a master translater between an especially harsh senior management world and the group of devoted associates who report to him. These people see their value in handling the daily emergency and live for the service they know they can provide. They never lose humility or their desire to learn. One of the people I also think of is in an industry, highly specialized, where many employees typically come to work with a negative bias against management from years of contentious labor/management disputes -- which appears to be the industry standard. But in this manager's unit it is different. "Some of these folks come to my team," he told me one day, "it's just painful how negative and cynical they've become. Sometimes it takes me two years or so to help someone understand that I'm not the enemy and that I will personally support them; two years of sending that individual positive messages about what's possible, before they can turn around."
I think of the utter stamina that such coaching takes, the patience, the long-term belief in people.
The word for these managers, the ones called, is "treasure."
Posted by: Dan Oestreich | March 16, 2009 at 02:42 PM