there is more than one way

By Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter

After an interview with Mike Pritchard of Find Your Dream Job, I was reminded of the fact that there is more than one way to do something. This was a great lesson for me and I hope it will be the same for you.

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I want to talk to those of you in management about what many of you are calling necrosis.

You know the right way to do everything.

I know.

I expect myself and others to offer their strength to me on a regular basis because I know it. I know everything.

When my wife and I bought our first house on Long Island and faced our first snowfall, I was going to work in New York and she was going to Home Depot to pick up my snow shovel. I told her what I wanted and she bought it for me and started shoveling the snow before I got home.

It wasn’t until her back started hurting that she remembered I grew up in an apartment building where superintendents took care of things and I knew nothing about snow shovels.

This is a simple example.

Remember, when you’re new, you’re likely to second-guess how your manager should do things. Many times you are wrong. Many times your manager is wrong.

Now you are the manager.

Many times you will be wrong.

Have you considered asking your employees for their input on an upcoming decision?

Yes?

Great!

Did you anticipate follow-up questions to find out why they thought that?

Do you challenge them with your ideas, telling them, “I want the best idea, and if mine isn’t, great! If yours isn’t, you stress-test my idea. Great!”

Do you think part of your job as a manager is to train your employees to think creatively?

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Do you think the people who work for you are like you were a few years ago? Ambitious. Want to get promoted. Believe they know more than they know. Want to safely challenge their boss and show their stuff.

They’re just like you were when you first started working and, frankly, just like you are with your reports now.

Part of being a manager or leader in an organization is being like a good mother or father to your employees. I’m talking about wise parents who guide their children’s development.

Wise parents know they will be judged and know that something needs to be done. These are not mutually exclusive.

Your child/employee may not do so well at first. After all, they have received industrial-era training that taught them to do what they were told to do.

That’s what the school system dictates they do.

As Seth Godin wisely said, the first time a student asks about taking a test is the first sign that they understand the education system, not the learning system.

You can be an old-school manager and have old-school employees reporting to you, who do what you’re told, and then talk behind your back about the decision you ended up making and how dumb or stupid you were.

Just like you would do with your manager.

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This will not inspire your employees. It creates robots with glassy eyes that you need to motivate to do well enough to get passing grades, just like they did in school.

If that’s what you want, then keep doing what you do. If you want to develop your replacement so that you can get promoted, see that you are not indispensable and can move on to other jobs, you need to do it differently than you might have done.

There is more than one way to manage. If you want industrial age management, they want to know why his or her employees aren’t fully engaged in their jobs (in the US, despite everything known and measured, employee engagement consistently sits at around 32%. That means other employees are completely uninterested or actively opposed to what you’re doing. The rest of the world is even worse).

There’s more than one way to manage people in order to get the results you want from them. For many of you, the next time you see them smiling at work will be the first time.

There’s something wrong with this.

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