The Perfect Manager
John Cutler has a little piece on “the perfect manager”, wherein he notes that one key trait of such heroic figures is to shield their teams from bullshit from above. He goes on to question why that would be the norm, because it would imply that BS is the norm.
Obviously, part of my job is to represent the company to my teams, which may involve such shielding, and which more likely involves translating messages from “above” and from stakeholders. Notably, another part of my job is to represent my teams to ”above” and to stakeholders, which may involve translating as well.
Ideally, there is no BS that people need to be shielded from. Ideally, there’s clarity about priorities and their rationale. I would even go so far as to say that ideally, no translation is needed at all. In such a perfect world, people speak the same language and are on the same page about what needs to happen because clarity is established early and with the necessary amount of repetition.
In such a setting, I could just contribute to the work going on at my level, which involves such beautiful things as thinking about and implementing an organisational vision, and caring about people’s growth trajectories.
Patrick Lencioni calls the state in which this is possible because everyone operates with optimal clarity “organisational health”. I really believe it’s worth working towards.
Tags: work