The things we learned during our first, lowly, jobs stay with us through our professional careers. My first job was labouring in a furniture factory. I learned how *not* to manage. . . I learned early on that you can always frustrate your manager by doing exactly what they say. For example, I was once about to drop a couch down on the floor from shoulder height, but my manager, to show what a big man he was, pointed directly down and yelled No. Put it here you f*** idiot. I did. It hit his foot and he was hopping around screaming. What are you trying to do? You said put it there. Not on my foot. But you said put it there. And so it went for a few minutes; the boys were laughing so hard he had to leave the area. Which brings me to lesson No. 2: laughter trumps everything, so if you can make a group of people laugh at what your manager is up to, hell probably give up and sulk. In short, never micromanage. Management is about inspiring people, and letting them grow. Soon enough they can do the particular task better than you can, and you will be going to them for advice. Heres an example from the BBC. Brad Smith, President and Chief Executive Officer at Intuit about his first job, as district sales manager for Pepsi: “In 1991, I was inspecting our execution in a key account and nodding my head in approval as we had secured 16 feet in a major supermarket aisle as compared to Coke’s 12 feet” he recalled. “Then I looked to the left and saw 24 feet of bottled water. Bottled water? Who invited them to this fight?”
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 20:49:19 +0000
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