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How to Become a Manager No One Will Work For

By Ted Coine, Business2Community.com
Special to Online Career Tips

Editor’s Note: This post was written by a friend of Ted Coine. She’s a well-respected, experienced management professional who wished to remain anonymous regarding this post, due to her current employment. So, without further adieu, please enjoy this enlightening post by today’s guest blogger… Anonymous.

Management advice often begins under the assumption managers already have a firm grip of the basic, obvious people-management skills. Your team, however, may have a different point of view.

Not mastering the basic skills often leads to plummeting morale and distrust among your team members. Master the following “Don’ts”, and you will become the manager no one wants to work for.

Don’t Advocate for People Who Eat Up Staff Time

As manager, your task is to help your staff do their work, not open the nooks and crannies that outsiders try to wiggle through to eat away at precious work time.

When your staff reports that they get endless emails claiming their time to answer, don’t engage those time-eaters. Doing so simply eats up more of their time. The same goes for adding to the email threads.

Instead, re-work request processes so requests go through you or an administrator. Your job is to plug those nooks and crannies.

Don’t Memorize “Feel Good” Scripts

This may seem obvious, but people really do see through scripts designed to show you have empathy and compassion for their whole personhood; not just how many widgets, memos, or presentations they deliver. If you don’t want to know your team better, don’t pretend. Don’t be closer. Your team will respect your emotional honesty.

And, you might want to re-think your career path. If you have to script emotional conversations with people you work with every day, are you really a “people person”?

Don’t Favor Those Who Are Just Like You

When you look around at the people in your “inner team” – the people you give new responsibilities to, promote and know most about their personal lives, are they people who are runners just like you? People who are as tall as you? Etc.

As manager, your task is to help your staff do their work, not open the nooks and crannies that outsiders try to wiggle through to eat away at precious work time.

If so, step outside your comfort zone to get everyone into the inner circle once in a while.

Not only will you treat your team more fairly (and avoid charges of sexism, racism and ageism) but you may discover you have more in common with the rest of your team, too.

For example, a manager recently chit chatting with a team member at the end of a weekly status update found out that this team member was biking 25 miles per week – an activity that he had no idea she did and a hobby they both shared. That team member (me!) knew from her manager’s silence that he was surprised by this revelation.

Don’t Volunteer Staff for Assignments and Wait to Tell Them After It’s Public Knowledge

Everyone likes to be recognized. Not everyone likes a surprise – especially at work. Surprise birthday parties are one thing. A surprise work assignment environment destroys your teams’ trust.

Don’t Reveal You Don’t Know What Your Direct Reports Do

I’m not thinking so much about the rest of the company; I’m talking about your staff – your direct reports. Don’t reveal in some communication that your direct reports can see, read, or otherwise access, that you don’t know what they do.

In doing so, you have revealed your true weakness: You don’t care. You don’t care enough to know what your people do, what their actual work is, what their responsibilities are.

At that point, your credibility is shot. Your direct reports won’t respect your opinion or your orders anymore. They won’t tell you anything directly or even indirectly because they know you don’t care.

They may still follow your orders and requests, but they are not following you because you are not leading. You are merely managing them – probably kowtowing to senior management pressures to affect staff performance in some way.

The only thing you have affected, however, is your staff’s morale – negatively.

When Your Employee Has an Idea for a Innovative Customer Services/Sales Initiative… Explore It

Don’t recite the corporate-sanctioned rhetoric to shoot down the idea without exploring its merits first. Your area isn’t sales/service, so you aren’t measured or paid by the department this suggestion will benefit? That may fly with your boss, but what would the stockholders think?

Your direct reports won’t respect your opinion or your orders anymore. They won’t tell you anything directly or even indirectly because they know you don’t care.They may still follow your orders and requests, but they are not following you because you are not leading. You are merely managing them.

More importantly, what does out-of-hand dismissal of a good idea do in the eyes of the staffer who brought it to you?

These are only six ways a manager can puncture a hole in his team’s morale. Of course there are many more. Still, if driving top talent from your company is what you’re all about, you’ll get pretty far with these suggestions. Good luck!

Art by: Hidden-target

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