Management is like driving along the highway. Imagine cruising happily in your cool car. The two-lane road is empty, the weather is lovely, life is great, traffic is fine – so far. Then it suddenly starts snowing, and you notice a rather large number of cars in the distance. Half an hour later you are in a huge traffic jam.
Let’s talk about managers. What’s a good manager like? Is there a general rule, or does it depend on the situation and the company? Who would you call a good manager?
If you look around you will surely be able to classify the managers you know as good leaders and bad leaders. There will be some in-between types too. You will also see that some of them studied man-agement and some of them just do it naturally. Clearly there are many aspects that decide which category a certain person belongs to. Professional qualities are not enough, there is more to it.
Your workplace is your kingdom, where your subjects live, happily or unhappily. This is a kind of arena where you make the rules. The number of employees can be a few or many, even hundreds. You will never be able to know them all. Why is it important to care about them? Because they tend the fields, build the castle and produce the goods; in other words they do the tasks which help the company grow and develop. They are the soldiers without whom it's impossible to win the war.
You are the one who makes decisions about the priorities of your colleagues, and you also make professional and strategic decisions. You are the one to cope with emergencies. You must take the consequences and the responsibility of decision-making. If you are lucky, you have someone to advise you. If you are not so lucky, you don’t. It’s useless to furtively glance behind your back and hope to get some support or delegate a task; you are like Chaplin in that film when he played the last soldier in the line who had to execute the order. You took a step up the career ladder, yet you are the last in the line when it comes to responsibility. You are even responsible for challenging other employees when they do not do their jobs properly.
Focusing is more than this. You are the captain of your little ship, and you have to navigate high seas, storms and angry waves. You need your inner compass, or else you will be lost at sea. A manager has a lot of tasks. Your colleagues approach you for all sorts of stuff, you have contracts to check, there are projects and problems. All the while you must know where you’re going, which way the wind blows.
This small Android app helps you decide wheter you are in a adequate mood to make decisions or not. Available at Google Play.