91–100 of 235 posts
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Following the links, I stumbled upon this amazing seeming resource: http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm The military are really very very good at man-management ...
The military, from my experience, is a big burocratic organisation with generally substandard management culture.
The only thing its got going for it, is that everybody gets paid.
Going beyond an article, 'Peopleware' is a fantastic book for engineering folks transitioning to management - it's not new but the fundamentals stand the test of time. It's the book I started out with 15 years ago and I have suggested to many others. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321934113/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_j-...
Sadly, I read Peopleware long before I ever became a manager, and it made me very attuned to being treated badly and being given ineffective tools or support (e.g. crappy open plan seating arrangements instead of private offices).
Peopleware will open your mind to the obviousness of productivity-first thinking and accomodating basic, inescapable human needs. Which can make you reflexively sad when you see how much of our industry steamrolls these ideas in favor of idiotic open plan disasters, hazing-focused interview barriers to entry, unrealistic mandates for Agile-style estimation and work tracking, etc.
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"leader" == "manager" is a bright flashing warning light for a toxic work environment with self-important ladder-climbers.
Hey, this is interesting. Would you care to explain?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Following the links, I stumbled upon this amazing seeming resource: http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm The military are really very very good at man-management ...
The military, from my experience, is a big burocratic organisation with generally substandard management culture.
Bad management is everywhere.
Being able to do even a mediocre job at the scale of a major military is still not entirely unimpressive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Following the links, I stumbled upon this amazing seeming resource: http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm The military are really very very good at man-management ...
The military, from my experience, is a big burocratic organisation with generally substandard management culture.
At the end of the day, it's really just a good place to start thinking. You'll find great bits, and parts that are completely irrelevant to a civilian workplace. After all, it's not as if I can smoke my team when they fail to meet a deadline or engage in some "physical correction."
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Leadership is outward facing, attracting followers by sharing a vision, inspiration, goal and working with the team to achieve that goal. Management is inward facing, paying attention to the people you are responsible for, and knowing the right thing that's needed at the right time. "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long f…
This is an interesting idea and it certainly seems to make sense to me to see it described this way. I am curious, though, can leader be a manager, and vice versa? Or, are these roles so distinct from each other that they should be separate? Maybe these roles can't co-exist at that level because it's exactly the problem that leads to so many of the problems we discuss on this site?
There reaches a point where leadership requires you to take the manager gloves off and get your hands dirty. For small teams or small problems, a good leader/manager can be both one and the same.
However as the size of the team or problems grows, it becomes more difficult (think n^2) to tackle both issues at the same time with the same person.
Management issues (firing, hiring, expenses, budgets) and Leadership issues (decisions, progress, advocacy, examples) on a team of 5 may be doable by one person, but may be stretched with one person servicing a team of 15 or 150.
Or if there is a ton more problems in one area vs. others, the challenge of dealing with that problematic area can leave a gap on the "less problematic" areas, which eventually turn them into actual problems. That's my guess as to what people complain about the most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Following the links, I stumbled upon this amazing seeming resource: http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm The military are really very very good at man-management ...
The military, from my experience, is a big burocratic organisation with generally substandard management culture.
Fan of the Marine Corps model: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm Some of them are painfully obvious, but these are sometimes absent when they shouldn't be. (I also suspect this is what Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr either draw from, or coincide with.)
'Painfully obvious' can sometimes completely non-obvious when you're in an environment where bad habits, political bs, and other human weirdness dominate the patterns of interaction. This is true for most organizations.
It is difficult to understand what Good looks like until you experience it first-hand.
Afterwards, Good is as obvious as water.
Unfortunately, Good requires infrastructure, both physical and cultural, that most organizations lack.
It is also exceedingly difficult to parachute into an organization and introduce Good, as that change threatens the balance of political power. People will strongly oppose Good because it means that their jobs will change, and change is -- very honestly speaking! -- scary as hell.
Fan of the Marine Corps model: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm Some of them are painfully obvious, but these are sometimes absent when they shouldn't be. (I also suspect this is what Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr either draw from, or coincide with.)
Following the links, I stumbled upon this amazing seeming resource: http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm The military are really very very good at man-management ...
It's fun to think of our businesses as just like a Seal team and try to glean lessons from stories of heroism, but the reality is if the military were in the business of making a profit, retaining employees, or pleasing customers, it would fail miserably.
The reality of the U.S military is far different than the impression that the leadership papers give you.