Entries Tagged 'Credibility' ↓

Guest Post from Geoff Sowrey – tech manager, blogger, all around good guy from Calgary Alberta.

With great power comes great responsibility.
- Various sources

I’m sure you’ve heard this quote before. It’s a good one, often used to reinforce the need for people to not slough off their priorities. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all fine and dandy, but I don’t really like it. It works for superhero movies and parental figures. It fails in my mind because it puts more of a burden on responsibility, rather than the sense of freedom one gets from being responsible.

Instead, I prefer this variation:

With responsibility comes a sense of great empowerment.
- Me. ‘Cuz I just said it.

I know what you’re going to say…

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First day back at work after the holiday season and I realize I’ve been slacking in terms of fresh content for DGM. This looming sense of slacker-dom has inspired me though. By neglecting my blog I was reminded about the golden rule of not neglecting your employees. It’s one of the worst things you can do. We all get pulled in a number of directions on a daily basis, but we have to remember that without our team, many of us couldn’t do the jobs we do.

Like most things, it’s all pretty logical:

Keep Them In The Loop – You don’t need to tell them every gruesome detail of every single situation, but one of the best things you can do is making it a habit to keep your team in the loop around timely events. Not only does it give people a sense of inclusion, but it’s an easy way to open the door to questions, clarification, and gives the eager ones in the group a chance to step up and be noticed if it’s a topic they’re passionate about.

Get Good At HR – There’s nothing worse than managers who are bad at following through on HR related issues. HR issues are the kind of thing that can cause mass amounts of stress, turmoil and paranoia for many employees. You don’t need to be an HR guru to be good at this stuff. As simple as it sounds, just going over and making friends with your HR counterparts makes this all a lot easier.

Communicate - Whatever you do, do your best to not be a black hole when it comes to communicating with your team members. You should make it a habit to try and manage by “walking the shop floor” and interacting with as many people as you can on any given day. Consider this your daily recon mission to gather new information and add some context to the daily activities. You’d be surprised how much useful information you can garner just by being friendly and taking a second to chat.

Follow Through – If you commit to trying to “make something happen” you better be ready to put your money where your mouth is. Nothing makes an employee feel more neglected than a manager who promises to do something and never finds the time to actually do it. On the flip side, if you do actually try and follow through, but hit a roadblock, make sure you refer back the first points above and keep your employees in the loop regarding the roadblock. An active and attentive management style tends to go a long way for many people.

At the end of the day your job as a Damn Good Manager is to facilitate awesomeness from your team and you’ll never do a truly good job of that if you have a habit of neglecting people.

How many bosses have you had in your working career? How many of those bosses were great? How many were terrible? If you are like most people, the truly great bosses and leaders tend to be vastly overshadowed by the sea of lack luster ones. On the surface this is a pretty bleak outlook on ones working career; that is until you consider how all those bad bosses can help you to become one of the few great leaders in the work force. The rule is simple – when in doubt, do the opposite of what your worst boss would have done.

It sounds almost too simple, but it really works. As a manager you’ll be challenged on a regular basis. It really can be hard to make the right decision or figure out how to motivate your team. As long as you keep those bad boss memories close at hand you’ll have a reference point to guide you through murky waters. If your bad boss had trouble making definitive decisions, make sure you try your hardest to be as definitive as possible. If your worst boss was a terrible listener, make sure you are a very conscious listener. Literally, turn all those historical criticisms into your own personal management fuel.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times this trick has come in handy for me in the last decade or so. The one thing I can say though, is that I’ve never come up short by channeling my bad boss experiences and memories into my overall management style.