Eliminating micro-team managers may make perfect sense. Eliminating layers may make sense, too. But gutting management capacity and turning managers into players with token responsibility for coaching, coordination, development, and execution is a recipe for trouble.
If something goes wrong, how do you respond? Do you look primarily outward at the external factors that created that outcome…circumstances, other people, luck, management or others? Or, do you focus your attention on what you can influence moving forward? Your locus of control counts in your success.
I’ve had a lifelong love of receiving publications that make me think. I love authors and ideas that spur the imagination, challenge convention, and raise possibilities. As a teen, I made the regular trip to the mailbox hoping to find the latest science fiction pulp...
Everything is and/or will shift about how we structure, lead, invest, and engage our people in this world. It’s an amazing time to rethink the need for, use, and impact of the manager. It’s an amazing time to think differently about everything we do related to strategy, innovation, and engagement.
A mentor would regularly offer: “Art, if you’re getting flak, you’re close to the target.” While always a sucker for good air force analogies, the flak or resistance didn’t feel good. It turns out, my mentor was right. Here’s how to better leverage the resistance or flak, as my mentor described it, as part of leading successful change initiatives.
Wake-Up Calls for Managers — Insights to Sharpen Focus and Elevate Results is my latest contribution to helping anyone responsible for the work of others survive and ultimately thrive in the hardest parts of their jobs. It’s also, as the title suggests, a “wake-up call” to think differently about how you engage with your colleagues and get the results you and your organization need in this world of change.
In the next few weeks, two of my projects focused on manager and leader development are coming to life in very different formats. Wake-Up Calls for Managers (the handbook no one hands new managers) and The Manager’s Journey move to publishing. Wake-Up Calls will be available via Amazon.com and The Manager’s Journey will be published in a unique serial format on my blog.
We’ve seen this movie before. A shock hits the broader system and organizations decide to ‘delayer’ focusing the brunt of their efforts on middle management. This time AI is the excuse. Yet the real opportunity and need here is to redefine the role of manager, not eliminate it.
We overuse the word ‘team’ in the workplace. While I usually don’t get hung up on semantics, I encourage leaders at all levels to reserve the ‘team’ concept for those occasions when a loose confederation of functional experts won’t cut it. Building a true team takes deliberate effort in the right areas.
You have an amazing array of tools at your disposal to succeed as a communicator. Your technical command of a topic is important, but not enough. Your ability to articulate in terms they value and to do so with authentic passion, ensuring your body meets your message, and your message meets their needs, are all critical.
