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How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

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Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#121

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 ...

Management is easy when your employees have to go to prison for not obeying you and you can exact non-judicial punishment any time ou want.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#122
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, then they must not want me to read their content.

Please, let's end this scourge by closing more tabs and not driving more traffic to these sites.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#123
post #81

A better title would be "How Management Works in 2018." Half of being a manager is managing other's behaviors to produce a great product. The other half is managing your own behaviors -- i.e. being consistent with your communications and consistent in your behaviors. Both of those topics have been left out of this piece.

I tend to agree. This piece reads more like, how to be a director or VP. Setting the culture is not a front line manager's job any moreso than individual contributors. A manager just needs to keep his folks productive in a way that's aligned with the company goals.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#124
post #81

A better title would be "How Management Works in 2018." Half of being a manager is managing other's behaviors to produce a great product. The other half is managing your own behaviors -- i.e. being consistent with your communications and consistent in your behaviors. Both of those topics have been left out of this piece.

I tend to agree. This piece reads more like, how to be a director or VP. Setting the culture is not a front line manager's job any moreso than individual contributors. A manager just needs to keep his folks productive in a way that's aligned with the company goals.

Thanks for the feedback -- definitely a fair point. I think the piece can be beneficial in different ways for different people. In the first section I noted that CEOs/Founders might use it as a template for their management structure, while department heads (i.e. Directors and VPs) may not care as much about the culture aspects, but the Objectives and Process sections may be most relevant for them.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#125

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 ...

This seems to be the impression in the business world, which has what I can only describe as a fetish for stories about the military, but Marines in particular have a very tough time adapting to life and careers outside the military. 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,…

Yeah but if making money was the same as charging a machine gun nest then the military model would be top notch.

Military leadership has the extra ace up its sleeve that all the people reporting to you are bound by law to do what you command.

Leading Civvies is like herding cats by comparison.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the impression in the business world, which has what I can only describe as a fetish for stories about the military, but Marines in particular have a very tough time adapting to life and careers outside the military. 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,…

> the reality is if the military were in the business of making a profit, retaining employees, or pleasing customers, it would fail miserably. Is that because of management issues or because of the intrinsic issues that come from being in the business of killing people to gain land, resources, power, or whatever?

They're linked. When you are managing people who can legally be put in jail or shot for not following orders, the dynamic is quite different.

Especially in the case of Marines, if you have a very well defined objective that requires brute force to solve, that's the ideal situation for them and they'll do amazing things. Anything that's a gray area, not covered by rules, or that requires creativity or questioning authority... It's not going to end in a good result.

I can't count the number of times Marine officers did ridiculously inefficient or plain stupid things because an authority figure or regulation said so. Usually the justification was, "the rules are there for a reason," or something similar. Whole that might be true, the idea that someone in authority can, in advance, create a set of rules that we can blindly follow to a successful outcome is insane for all but the most desperate situations.

Most of the military was like that to some extent.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#127

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, t…

I'm on board with this. There's nothing wrong with a good old fashioned call to action at the end of the article. Encourage subscription by producing good content, not by abusing your reader's time and attention.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#128
post #15

Great for building a brand new team. Not so great for assuming leadership of an existing team/business. Also, very American. I just stopped being CEO of a SE Asian business, and this just doesn't apply globally. There are culture differences that make enormous differences in leadership styles and outcomes.

What were a few differences you ran into?

Asians have massive respect for authority. This, in effect, mean that they won't ever say no to, or disagree with, their boss. I had to learn to ask open questions, because if they could say yes they would. They would still guess at what I wanted to hear and tell me that. I got told different things than other members of the management team, not because anyone was trying to deceive, but purely as a show of respect.

My favoured leadership style is servant leadership, that my job is to enable everyone else to do their jobs properly. That didn't work. I had to teach myself how to do authoritarian leadership, which I hate with a passion, but it's the only style that works.

The language barrier is a huge thing. I would give an instruction, something else would happen, and the reason would be "I didn't understand you". They wouldn't ask for clarification, because of the respect thing. After training myself for years to not send emails, I had to get used to sending lots of emails again, because if it was written in plain English it had more chance of being understood and followed.

There's a ton of other, more subtle, stuff. I've been comparing notes with other western leaders here and it's a shared experience. Except for the douche bosses who are naturally authoritarian - they love it here.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#129

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, t…

However, those tactics really work. I don’t like them either, but I have done A/B tests and the intrusive model always results in people who are more “gullible” and thus more likely to buy whatever it is you are selling. The dismissive types — they wouldn’t have been a customer anyway. (Generally speaking..)

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#130

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, t…

However, those tactics really work. I don’t like them either, but I have done A/B tests and the intrusive model always results in people who are more “gullible” and thus more likely to buy whatever it is you are selling. The dismissive types — they wouldn’t have been a customer anyway. (Generally speaking..)

Hmm... yeah, you're right. They're filtering out customers like me. That means the intent of the site is not the site content, but the mailing list they can generate by dangling that content via a link, eh?
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