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 ...
How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
121–130 of 235 posts
Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
#122Please, 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
#123A 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.
Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
#124A 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
#125Earlier 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,…
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
#126Earlier 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?
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
#127This 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…
Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
#128Great 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?
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
#129This 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…
Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
#130This 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..)