I don’t write much about self-management in this blog, and there’s a simple reason why: It’s because this Web site, and the related newsletters, blogs and magazine, are all focused on one thing — the art of managing a workforce.
Once in a while, however, I bump into something that’s a little far afield from what I normally focus on here but is still really, really interesting. So it was today when I read this commentary from Advertising Age (a sister publication of Workforce Management) titled “How to Advance Your Career Without Selling Your Soul.”
It’s written by Joe Hodas, senior vice president of brand communications at Vladimir Jones, a privately held, full-service advertising agency in Colorado, and it struck me as an uncommonly good bit of common-sense advice whether you apply it to yourself or pass it along to those you manage.
Plus, it runs counter to a lot of the snarky “I have a blog so I know better” rants by thinly credentialed “experts” who seem to be taking over so much of the Internet today. The fact that it comes from someone like Joe Hodas, a guy who has worked for years in the trenches managing people and knows firsthand what he’s talking about, well, that just makes it must-read advice in my book.
Here are Joe’s 11 rules for managing your career, or, for you to use to help your workforce manage theirs. It’s great advice for just about anyone toiling in today’s challenging and difficult workforce:
1. Nothing replaces hard work. In an industry where smoke and mirrors are used in abundance, take heed: Nothing can disguise the absence of hard work. And don’t confuse effort with results. I don’t care how early you arrive or how late you stay—it’s about ROI.
2. We all have a personal tool kit—know yours and how to use it. As my mother told me on numerous occasions, I have special talents. Specifically, I’m a good consensus builder. You may be a killer salesman. Or extremely detailed. Whatever your “special talents” are, hone them and let them help define your personal brand.
3. It’s about teamwork, but know who is and isn’t on your team. I too hate office politics. And avoid them at all costs. Ignoring their existence is not only careless, but possibly counterproductive. Even if you don’t engage in them, someone else might on your behalf. Know who has the boss’s ear, who the players are, and who could take or leave ya. Whatever the political landscape in your company, it’s your reality and one you’ll have to navigate whether you like it or not.
4. Never lose your shit—at least not in public. Let’s play a little game of association. When I say Christian Bale, you say what? Probably not “great actor from ‘American Psycho,’ ” right? Rather, I bet you said something along the lines of “overindulged jerk who pulverized some poor sound tech on a movie set for making a mistake.” I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be human, but one single outburst—even if merited—can do permanent damage to your personal brand.
5. Life is not always a box of chocolates—so decide how much you can take before you bail. The perfect job doesn’t exist. I would imagine that even the taste-tester at Krispy Kreme has complaints about his gig (though I can’t imagine what they might be). Too often we hit tough times and jump ship for a lateral move or get frustrated and stop giving 110 percent. A career is like a relationship, so make sure you’re putting as much effort into trying to fix the problems as you put into feeling bad about them.
6. Humility goes a long way. Nothing infuriates your boss (and co-workers) more than employees who feel they deserve something they haven’t earned. I’m a firm believer that raises are for the work you’ve done, and promotions are for the work you can do.
7. Individuality is to be respected—as long as you’re still part of the team. Sometimes, there is an “I” in team. It just has to be the right kind of “I”—distinctive yet collaborative, unexpected but on strategy. Don’t be afraid to stand out, but do make sure you don’t alienate your teammates in the process.
8. Always try to add something smart to the discussion. Ask a smart question or make a great point that no one else has thought of. But do your homework so you can back up your comments and aren’t asking things that you should already know the answer to.
9. Sometimes you have to shout to be heard. You’ve heard the phrase “Squeaky wheel gets the grease”? Well, take note: Occasionally, persistent voices are listened to. Don’t be afraid to speak up when you’re passionate about something.
10. Have a perspective on the past, present and future. It’s not enough to do well today. Your boss wants and needs to see that you have a broader outlook on where you/the client/the work/etc. has been, is now and will be going.
11. Always be that ray of light in your boss’s/co-worker’s day. This one’s simple. Surprise. Delight. Be the kind if individual you’d like to spend 200-plus days each year with. And to be clear—that’s much different from kissing ass.
Here’s one of them, and a question that every manager has to come to terms with: How much managing does a manager actually do?
In my view, anyone who is a manager is probably always managing at some level, but I am talking more about the outward signs of management and how aggressively you control your employees, or how much leeway your staff gets to work and make decisions on their own.
Yes, how you approach this has a lot to do with your personal outlook on life, but it also speaks to a lot of other factors—experience, confidence, the industry you work in and/or the type of work you do, and sometimes, company culture. For example, I once worked for a large media company that believed in aggressively managing everything and was top-down driven.
This worked pretty well for them most of the time, but it meant that managers were micromanaged from above so they in turn micromanaged those below them. That doesn’t make for the happiest working environment, I quickly found.
This leads to the question that I don’t think enough managers ask themselves: Should I overmanage or undermanage, and why do I do it that way?
I’ve known lots of managers and executives who, like Joe Girardi, seemed to be more focused on showing off how smart they were rather than doing the right thing by their staff, and that’s certainly an occupational hazard when it comes to managing.
But here’s the thing—managing is also about leading, about coaching, about nurturing, about helping your people to do their absolute best. Some do it with a lot of drama, but in my book, the best managers do it quietly, without a lot of fanfare, and without feeling the need to draw attention to themselves.
Each has their own unique style, but each is also focused on one critical thing: helping their people so that they have the freedom and the opportunity to do their very best. In short, it’s not about overmanaging or undermanaging, but rather, about supportive managing that lets people reach their full potential for the good of the entire organization.
If that’s what you’re doing as a manager, well, congratulations, because you’re doing it right. If that’s NOT how you’re doing it, well, you had better step back and take a good look at yourself and figure out how you can be more like Warren Buffett than Joe Girardi.
Making decisions is at the heart of what managers do.
That’s why one of the big things that gets all-too-many managers into trouble is NOT making a decision when one is desperately needed, as so many Yahoo workers discovered during the disastrous reign of CEO Jerry Yang. Yang was a terribly indecisive general who fiddled around and failed to make the kind of basic management decisions that the troops needed to help move the company ahead.
But this gets to another management truism: You gotta have a strong heart, supreme confidence and some pretty big balls (as they say on the TV show Wipeout) to make your decisions in public, where everybody and their brother gets to second-guess the call.
“Just when you thought the 2009 postseason umpiring couldn’t get any worse,” says a Yahoo Sports blogger named Duk (and so much for transparency in the media cesspool known as the blogosphere), “Tim McClelland goes ahead and makes what ends up as the worst call—or non-call—of all time. Yes, you read that right. The worst call of all time. Not just this postseason. Not this entire season. Not this decade. Not this century. I challenge you to think of one that was worse.”
Blogger Duk goes on to eviscerate umpire McClelland for the better part of 15 paragraphs. And as a sports fan who gets tired of the histrionics of arrogant, overpaid referees (Who goes to a game to watch them preen and overwhelm the action on the field?), I believe McClelland, the crew chief of this group of umpires, deserved it.
However, this made me wonder: How would you manage if every decision you made was televised to millions of people and analyzed endlessly by an army of pundits?
This is what paralyzes the Jerry Yangs of the world. It’s the inability to make a tough decision, or sometimes, any decision at all. Yet decision-making is one of the core functions of a leader and critical if the goal is to get the maximum out of the workforce.
“Decisions … are not made well by acclimation,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker, although Drucker also said that you needed healthy disagreement to really make sound decisions in the end.
I don’t think Drucker had Major League Baseball umpires in mind when he wrote that, but he’s right. The best decisions aren’t made by a committee, but rather, by a smart and insightful manager who takes in all the relevant data before ultimately making the call.
Still, most managers don’t make that call on national television for all to see. It’s why making big decisions in the public eye isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s why major-league umpires like Tim McClelland gets paid as well as they do. It’s a thankless job on a public stage, and how many managers would want to submit to that?
Yes, there are still a lot of those delusional, happy-talk types out there—and here’s a good example of what I’m talking about—but these head-in-the-sand observers are grasping at straws and overreacting to what is, at best, data that indicate a very, very slight and moderate economic uptick.
My view is formed more by what I’m reading in places like The New York Times, where a story just today said, “The nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates.”
And, it looks like I’m not alone in my pessimistic view. A new survey just released by the Workforce Institute at Kronos Inc. and conducted by Harris Interactive suggests that a lot of employees may not be feeling particularly optimistic and workplace productivity has been a casualty of the Big, Bad Recession.
Here are some of the survey highlights:
• Some 38 percent of respondents employed full or part time said there had been layoffs in the past year at their primary place of employment.
• Of those respondents who said that productivity had been negatively affected by layoffs:
—66 percent said that morale has suffered and that workers are less motivated;
—64 percent said that there is just too much work and not enough people left to do it;
—37 percent said the wrong people or departments were laid off, leaving inefficient systems and workflows; and
—36 percent said they are concerned that as the economy picks up, they won’t have the right resources to meet demand.
One surprising finding that jumped out at me: Despite the general feeling of being overworked, a majority of respondents—53 percent—said they felt the right number of people were laid off at their organization (32 percent said they felt too many were laid off, while 7 percent said not enough were let go).
“In the midst of a downturn like the one we are experiencing, the time is right for employers to re-examine existing [workforce] practices: from how work is distributed among the organization; to whether or not new hires need to be made; to what kinds of technology might enable the workforce to become more productive,” said Joyce Maroney, the director of the Workforce Institute at Kronos, in a press release about the study. “In this survey, we hear loud and clear from employees that these issues need to be addressed now, so that businesses are positioned for success when the economy kicks back into high gear.”
She makes a good point; organizations should be making changes now that will help them and their workforces rapidly recover whenever the economy starts to show some sustained improvement—even if that improvement still seems a long ways away.
But this survey also points out something else, especially from those who say that productivity has been negatively affected by so many recession-fueled layoffs: Workers everywhere are feeling disgruntled, down and maybe even depressed by all that has been going on around them. It has affected their productivity as well as their outlook on life and work, and organizations need to do something about it and do it now.
In other words, American workers have lost their mojo, as Austin Powers would say, and businesses everywhere need to be thinking about how they are going to get it back.
Hey, Management Guy! Given how tough the economy is these days, there’s lots of built-up tension in the workplace. Lots of tension frequently fuels lots of emotion, and sometimes it makes you want to just pound someone. That makes me wonder: Is there ever a circumstance where it is appropriate to take a punch at a co-worker?
This just goes to prove what the Management Guy has always said: Violence has no place in the workplace, and getting physical with a boss or co-worker is usually a surefire way to get fired in any universe.
That’s why it will be interesting to watch what happens with the National Football League’s Oakland Raiders, because just this week, there are reports that two coaches got into an altercation that ended up with one coach punching out the other.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “If you asked some other folks with knowledge of the incident, they’d tell you that it was [head coach Tom] Cable who clocked defensive assistant Randy Hanson earlier this month, a punch that sent him to the hospital.”
No one in Oakland is talking much about this incident—head coach Cable simply says, “It’s an internal issue that we are dealing with, and that’s all I’m going to say”—but the last time I checked, having one coach punch out another doesn’t make for a winning workplace culture, even in the NFL. In fact, the Chronicle points out that “any assault or battery by an NFL employee, including a head coach, could be deemed a violation of the league’s personal conduct policy and result in a fine and/or suspension.”
Yes, the NFL is a tough, violent place, and yes, the Oakland Raiders have a strange way of doing things, but having coaches resort to fisticuffs to settle their differences? That’s probably too much even for the Raiders.
It’s possible that no one will get fired over this incident, but that just speaks to the peculiar nature of the Raiders in particular and professional sports in general, because in most workplaces, putting your hands on another worker usually guarantees you a quick trip to the unemployment office, as the former CEO of Home Box Office found out.
So take it from the Management Guy, who knows a thing or two about these matters: Thumping the boss or jerk co-worker may be a workforce fantasy for many, but like most fantasies, it is one best left unfulfilled.
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