Must Read for Managers

I just read this post by the user who calls himself Armand28 on the WWII Online Off Topic forum, and I’m reblogging it because I think it contains great wisdom.

The discussion was in regard to something that President Obama said recently, that we do not need young people to become investment bankers or financial business men, we need them to want to become engineers.

Armand28’s comments came in response to an earlier post in which the commenter said that in his experience many business and law students seem to have no clear understanding that a manager’s job is to remove obstacles that prevent workers from getting work done, because their heads are clouded by numerous facts and case studies, and many saw the large paycheck they would receive as an entitlement due them for their education, and not for being good managers.

“I saw further evidence of this later in law school…fellow students who wanted to go into corporate law, strictly for the money,” he adds.

Armand28 replied:

What wooster saw was a bunch of kids in school. Kids in school always think they know everything, that’s why they tend to vote Democrat.

Once they spend some time in the real world they begin to see how those case studies can be used to help guide actions, not control them, and then they begin to understand how little they really know. Soon they start to realize that their employees know more about what needs to be done around the company than the executives do, but empoyees don’t have the skills to collect, interpret, document and deploy their ideas on a mass scale, that’s what management should be doing. Those MBA’s who knew everything in college then start realizing their job isn’t to know everything, they cannot, but rather their job is to gather what everyone knows and use it to move the company forward.

They start to realize that they are not a producer, but they are a force multiplier. An unmanned spy craft doesn’t actually kill any enemies, but they allow the troops they support to become many times more effective, that’s what a good manager is. Without good management all of the employees’ knowledge and experience will remain locked in the front lines and the company doesn’t move forward. Without good employees you have a bunch of managers on the front lines serving as individual contributors which is a waste of their particular talents.

Whenever I hire a new employee I draw them an org(anizational) chart that has them at the top and me at the bottom. I tell them, “My job is to make you as successful as you can be, so I work for you. If you need something let me know and it’s my job to get it for you. If you are having trouble doing your job because you need your car washed let me know and I’ll wash it for you. I work for you.”

I have been very successful.

~ by dobee on March 22, 2009.