With my friend today, there was an interesting point of discussion.
Need your views as well. Please post them as comments to this post.
You like to work for a boss, who
a. Keeps a safe distance from team.
b. Comes across as knowledgeable and has all the answers when you approach them.
c. Shares their knowledge and enables others to do their work better.
d. is a liberal and does not give tough feedback.
There can be more options, if you opt for it. Please post them as well.
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Learning Practice by Shrinivasan.G is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License All views expressed here are my own and does not reflect that of my employer or clients or any other sources.
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Definitely the third option Shrini...coupled with this and some tough, honest and critical feedback makes for a great "boss" according to me.
ReplyDeleteThe latter would force me to strive to be better, be more self analytical, and exacting of myself.
Your second option "Comes across as knowledgeable and has all the answers when you approach them" at first read seemed to be right.
Then, I deconstructed the sentence, and it didn't seem right to me.
You have written "comes across..."; does that mean superficial knowledge that is more on the surface?
The second part of the same point, "has all the answers when you approach them" also didn't strike a chord with me. It seems to imply that this kind of a "boss" would only provide guidance and answers when a team member went to him/her. Otherwise, s/he would not really know what is happening in the team and how the members were faring...
On the contrary, the third point you have mentioned indicates someone who would willingly share knowledge and "enable" the team to move ahead...show the path and leave team members to leave their individual mark along the way...
I would to answer it in as what would be the ideal character of a manager:-
ReplyDeleteStarting from the most important character, as suggested by Sahana, it is definitely a manager who shares the knowledge is much appreciated. A manager who doesn’t share the knowledge is a man who is neither confident of himself nor with his team’s caliber. A man who shares and gets work from his team is a person who knows the work and who knows how to get the work done.
Second, comes across as knowledgeable and has all answers - is also a necessary quality to bring out the teams confidence in a meeting. When there is a meeting of different people or when there is a meeting with the client, this quality would be much appreciated as it would be a tool to bring business as well.
Third, keeps a safe distance from the team is also sometimes essential as it could give the team more space to work on more points. A manager who is always around though much appreciated most of the times, sometimes need to give the space so that new ideas come up. But this safe distance of the manager must not lead to disowning the teams’ work.
The forth being liberal and does not give tough feedback will never hold a good character of a manager. This will lead to false interpretation and the team member will not know the actual intention which will in turn lead to more assumptions. When suddenly he is going to open up to the team of the actual case, it will turn to be very disastrous.
Apart from the 4 stated, I would also like a manager who is
1. Decisive – frequent change in plans and actions aren’t much appreciated
2. Transparency - Being open to the team with regard to the delegation of the work and assigning the job.
3. Comfortness - A manager should always feel comfortable to his team. Excuse of having comfort with some and not having with someone will cause more problems to the team.
4. He is a person who knows what the team performs and how the team performs. If at all a manager is disconnected because of various reasons, he should adopt more decent ways to know his team rather than spying with the help of some people around him.
5. Analytical – both with respect to work and outside work. Should not see things with jaundice eyes.
A quality of a manager or working with a manager who possess all the above qualities would yield more quality work of team and greater achievement to the organization as a whole..
While my comment to the post had been at a much lighter level with some semantic deconstruction thrown in, Srilakshmi has analyzed the desired qualities in a manager at a much greater depth.
ReplyDelete@ Srilakshmi The analysis you have put across for each of the questions posed in the original post made me think.
I completely agree with what you are saying. Very well made points. Your point about "If at all a manager is disconnected because of various reasons, he should adopt more decent ways to know his team rather than spying with the help of some people around him" is pertinent and well put. This reminded me of a past experience (a bad one :)) where the team fell apart because of the reason you have described so well.
To add on to your thoughts, a few more qualities I feel that managers need, especially in today's scenario.
Today's managers have to be:
Great communicators--with everything changing at the pace of lightning, lack of timely communication can lead to loss of business, a demotivated team, misunderstanding, lack of productivity and all things else. Most importantly, they should be able to communicate the vision--short term and long term--to the team such that the team can work cohesively towards a unified goal. This probably is the tallest order of all and makes a manager seem like a superhuman being. But not impossible.
Good to very good at Change Management--Shrini, I leave you to expand on this point in your next post :) and look forward to reading that...
Be quick to learn and unlearn/adapt/accept that the old order is passing and the new is already here--old ways of working will not be very successful.
Be as generous with praise as with timely criticism. However, both should be of an objective nature, focused on the quality of work delivered. Praise from a person the team looks up to can work wonders for the moral and improve productivity and quality without any external pressure.
Look forward to more such discussions, Srilakshmi. Shrini, do write more posts we can have such discussions on...