Erudite Relics of Loc Huu Ho

This article is based on the following book:
The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork
“Embrace Them and Empower Your Team”
John C. Maxwell, author of ‘The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership’
Published in Nashville, Tennessee by Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2001
265 pages

To achieve great things, you need a team. Building a winning team
requires understanding of these principles. Whatever your goal or
project, you need to add value and invest in your team so the end
product benefits from more ideas, energy, resources, and perspectives. Read the rest of this entry »

By Scott Berkun, June 1, 2006

In part one, I covered getting started, why managers are different and other essentials. Here in part 2 we get into tactics you need for the first few weeks.

Getting acclimated

Survival training of any kind teaches you one thing: before you act, know where you are. Say, for example, I dumped you, blindfolded and dehydrated, in the Swiss Alps. Your first move wouldn’t be to run around, tripping over stones, yelling orders at sheep. Instead you’d be best be served by figuring out how to remove that blindfold and get your bearings. Only then could you possibly find the direction most likely to provide you with shelter and drinking water (or at least some Swiss chocolate. Yum).

When you become a manager, even in an organization you’ve worked in for years, the landscape changes because of your new managerial status. Before you throw orders around and correct the mistakes of manager’s past, stop, look and listen. Observe what is happening today, right now. Talk to the people you’re working with and ask them what they see happening that you should be working on in your first weeks, especially the most experienced and respected people on your team. See what concerns or ideas they have that perhaps went unheard before. If nothing else, start building relationships from day one with those that work with and for you. Watch the clock in these meetings: make sure you spend more time listening to them than talking. If they ramble, ask them for recommendations. If they have nothing to say, invite them to follow up if they wish, but move on: there’s a lot to do. Read the rest of this entry »

By Scott Berkun, January 25, 2006

The central mistake new managers make is egoism. On the surface, the change is all about you: you’ve been promoted, you have a new job title, you have a new office. Perhaps you’ve been waiting for this change for some time, while watching peers or friends get promotions, and now finally you feel you’ve received the respect you’ve earned. Congratulations! But be warned: how or why you became a manager has little to do with doing the job well. The sooner you recognize how different success as a manager is from success as worker, the better off you’ll be. Good managers are rare (how many have you had?): so if you’re new to the game, and would like to be a good one, this essay is for you.

Why managers are different

On the day your job title includes “manager” others depend on you. They will look to you for leadership, guidance, or advice. They may rely on you for career direction and job security. You have more influence on their happiness, and success than most people in their lives. All this is what makes the transition to management a challenge: even if you are currently the most important programmer, marketer, or designer in an organization, there are new stresses and responsibilities you’ve never faced. The psychology and responsibility of managing others is complex and should be taken seriously. Read the rest of this entry »

As a positive counterpoint to my list of why managers become assholes, and as a counterbalance to my tendency to write cynically,  here’s a list of why people become great at managing others, trying as much as possible not to just do the stupid thing and invert my other list.

1. Enjoy helping people grow.  Few things feel better than helping someone who is new to a role, or who has been struggling, into becoming a productive, confident person. There’s a kind of satisfaction in helping someone figure out how to be successful that doesn’t come from many other living experiences. Great mangers love seeing this happen on their teams.
2. Love creating positive environments. A great manager creates a team and and office environment that makes it easy for smart people to do good things. They love that moment when they wander the halls and see all sorts of amazing things happening all on their own, with passionate, motivated people doing good work without much involvement from the manager.
3. Want to correct mistakes inflicted on them. Some great managers are looking to undo the evil managers they had. Rather than take it out on their subordinates, they want to do a kind of pay it forward revenge: prove to themselves and the world that it can be better that what happened to them in the past. This can create the trap of fighting the last war: your team may not care at all about avoiding the mistakes of your previous manager. They want to avoid the mistakes you, and your blind spots, are probably making right now.
4. Care deeply about the success and well being of their team. Thoroughbred horses get well cared for. Their owners see them as an expensive asset and do whatever they can to optimize their health, performance, and longevity, even if their motivations are largely selfish. A great manager cares deeply about their staff, and goes out of his way to protect, train, care for, and reward their own team, even if their primary motivation is their own success.
5. Succession mentality.  A successful manager eventually realizes their own leadership will end one day, but if they teach and instill the right things into people who work for them, that philosophy can live on for a long time, long after the manager is gone. This can go horribly wrong (See, history of monarchies) but the desire to have a lasting impact generally helps people think on longer term cycles and pay attention to wider trends short term managers do not notice.
6. Long term sense of reward.  Many of the mistakes managers make involve reaping short term rewards at the expense of long term loyalty and morale. Any leader who inverts this philosophy, and makes short term sacrifices to provide long term gains, will generally be a much better manager. They recognize the value of taking the time to explain things, to build trust, to provide training, and to build relationships, all of which results in a kind of team performance and loyalty the short term manager never believes is possible.
7. Practice of the golden rule.  It’s funny how well known this little gem is, and rare in life people follow it. But I think anyone in power who believes in it, and treats all of their employees the same way they truly would want to be treated, or even better, treats employees as they actually want to be treated, will always be a decent, above average manager. A deeply moral person can’t help but do better than most people, as treating people with respect, honesty and trust are the 3 things I suspect most people wish they could get from their bosses.
8. Self aware, including weaknesses. This is the kicker. Great leaders know what they suck at, and either work on those skills or hire people they know make up for their own weaknesses, and empower them to do so. This tiny little bit of self-awareness makes them open to feedback and criticism to new areas they need to work on, and creates an example for movement in how people should be growing and learning about new things.
9. Sets tone of healthy debate and criticism. If the boss gives and takes feedback well, everyone else will too. If the boss is defensive, passive-aggressive, plays favorites, or does other things that work against the best idea winning, everyone else will play these destructive games. Only a boss who sees their own behavior as a model the rest of the organization will tend to follow can ever become a truly great manager. Without this, they will always wonder why the team behaves in certain unproductive ways that are strangely familiar.
10. Willing to fight, but picks their battles. Great managers are not cowards. They are willing to stake their reputation and make big bets now and then (I’d say at least once a year, as a totally random, put possibly useful stake in the ground). However they are not crazy either. They are good at doing political math and seeing which battle is worth the fight at a given time. A manager that never fights can never be great – they will never have enough skin in the game to earn the deepest level of respect of the people that work for them. But a manager that always fights is much worse. They continually put their own ego ahead of what their team is capable of.
11. (Bonus!) Instinctively corrects bad behavior within their team. True story:  on a new team I once saw a mid level manager make a personal attack of a junior employee in front of the VP. I looked at the VP, expecting him to jump in. He did nothing. Not a thing. Message to team? It’s ok to pick on people if you outrank them.  Micromanaging is never good, but correcting destructive behavior, is always appropriate even if you have to jump levels to do it (Sure, perhaps there was an offline conversation. But something like this was so egregious it should have been corrected on the spot). Nothing builds morale and respect faster than a manager who jumps in to the fray to defend someone who is being picked on by a bully, except perhaps a manager who gets rid of the bully altogether.

Also see: Advice for new managers (A popular essay)

What did I miss? Think of the last great manager you had and what traits you’d add to the above.

Source: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2009/top-ten-reasons-managers-become-great/

Definitions

• adept: is an individual identified as having attained a specific level of knowledge, skill, or aptitude in doctrines relevant to a particular author or organization
• axiomatic: evident without proof or argument; of or pertaining to an axiom; obvious (layman)
  
• exegetical: related to an exegesis, which is the interpretation and understanding of a text on the basis of the text itself
• gnomon: pronounced NO-mon, a Greek word meaning “the one who knows.” The gnomon is the pointer on a sundial, the part of the sundial that “knows” the time
• interlocutor: a person who takes part in a conversation
• par excellence: being the best of its kind; being a quintessential example of the kind in question
• truth-value: a proposition’s truth-value is its being true or its being false

Notes

• Mathematics, or at least geometry, provides a straightforward instance of the gap between the flawed material world around us and the serene, ideal perfect world of thought.
• Plato believed that the propositions of geometry are objectively true or false, independent of the human mind, language, and so on of mathematicians. He believed that geometrical objects are like Forms and are in the world of Being where it is not physical, and that they are eternal and unchanging. He would thus reject the above suggestion that geometric objects exist in physical space.
• Refer to the end of Book 6 of the Republic Plato gives a metaphor of a divided line: the divisions are unequal, with the Forms getting the largest space. The following double proportion holds: Forms are to mathematical objects as physical objects are to reflections, as Being (i.e. Forms plus mathematical objects) is to Becoming (i.e., physical objects and reflections). Although Plato does not mention this, it follows that the ‘mathematical objects’ segment is exactly the same size as the ‘physical objects’ segment.
• Geometry is not about anything in the physical world, the world of Becoming, and we do not apprehend geometric objects via the senses. With the exception that some physical objects approximate Euclidean figures, but geometric theorems do not apply to these approximations.
• We are in position to better understand Plato’s remark in the passage from Book 7 of the Republic, quoted in chapter 1:

[The] science [of geometry] is in direct contradiction with the language employed by its adepts…Their language is most ludicrous…for they speak as if they were doing something and as if all their words were directed toward action…[They talk] of squaring and applying and adding and the like…whereas in fact the real object of the entire subject is… knowledge…of what eternally exists, not of anything that comes to be this or that at some time and ceases to be. (Plato, 1961, 527a in the standard numbering)

(510d) You…know how [geometers] make use of visible figures and discourse about them, though what they really have in mind is the originals of which these figures are images. They are not reasoning, for instance, about this particular square and diagonal which they have drawn, but about the Square and the Diagonal; and so in all cases. The diagrams they draw and the models they make are actual things, which may have their shadows or images in water; but now they serve in their turn as images, while the student is seeking to behold those realities which only thought can comprehend.

• Most Platonists maintained that geometrical knowledge is a priori, independent of sensory experience. It may be that some sensory experience is necessary to grasp the relevant concepts, or we may need drawn diagrams as a visual aid to the mind, or perhaps to awaken our minds to the eternal and unchanging geometric realm of Euclidean space.
• The details of Plato’s views concerning arithmetic and algebra are not as straightforward as his account of geometry, but the overall picture is the same. We see that arithmetic, like geometry, applies to the material world only approximately, or only to the extent that objects can be distinguished from each other.
• Several ancient sources distinguish the theory of numbers (world of Being), called ‘arithmetic’ from the theory of calculations (world of Becoming), called ‘logistic’.
• It is through the study of the numbers themselves, and the relations among numbers, that the soul is able to grasp the nature of numbers as they are in themselves.