Your Role as a Manager

This newsletter’s focus has always been providing practical advice to help you be a better manager.  But occasionally it pays to look at the bigger picture of what it means to do the job.  It helps put all the advice in context and guides us through the unpredictable challenges the role throws up.

This week, we came across a couple of pieces which do exactly that.

First up is Tania Luna, co-founder of LifeLabs Learning, who said in a recent interview:

‘It's really important to recognize that a manager's job is not to manage people.’

Seems contradictory, but it’s a very valuable observation.

Her point was that successful managers don’t try to control individuals directly.  People hate that style of management.  What we actually ‘manage’ are not people, but things like processes, projects, time, resources, and information to create the right working environment for our teams to excel. 

This chimed with a tweet thread by Marco Rodgers who expanded on this idea by looking at the nature of knowledge workers. 

He noted the key challenge at the heart of managing these teams.

1. Your team is full of bright, curious people who you’ve hired to work independently and take important decisions about their work.
2. Without the right details, direction, and coordination, these individuals will make the wrong decisions.

BUT

3. These individuals typically hate it when they’re given too much detail and direction. 

His solution is context. Lots of it. 

Managing people often doesn’t mean managing them, but managing the environment around them. A lot of the time, this starts with context.