Loving the management-speak thread and got to thinking 'What is that makes a good boss?'

Would like to hear about people's experiences with good managers and the specific things they did.

Positive things I have experienced is where managers encourage and support ideas and new-thinking. And also giving praise in the right places.

When I owned a business I always went out of my way to show that I wouldn't ask anyone to do a job that I wasn't prepared to do myself.

So when we won that contract to service the hotel in Barbados it was me who had to go there five times in as many years.

Its not all roses you know.

My approach to management is fairly simple. Hire the right people, train them appropriately, continue to train them, and then let them get on with their job.
There is only one management decision that matters, that's when you hire the person in the first place. If you mess that up, then you have to have the nuts to admit you made a mistake and get rid of the person. So many managers hire the wrong person for the job, then spend the next couple of years failing to admit it. Their solution is to then micro manage someone into therapy. It always ultimately fails, and seldom is the manager (who has spent all his effort making sure he doesn't look bad to his managers - who are also failures because they fail to engage) brought to account.

Micro management doesn't work. If you have to do it you've got the wrong person working for you.

You're an inspiration.

you have my utmost respect for putting yourself through that mate time after time. and also not putting that burden on your workforce is commendable. hope you have got through that nightmare with no long term issues.

I'm available for seminars and motivational speaking...

IN BARBADOS.........

Good management to me is the exact polar opposite of my boss. Micro-management, bullying, shouting, aggression, harassment - all traits we put up with day to day. She's just relentless. She only ever congratulates us through gritted teeth and soon gets back to picking whatever we do apart and criticising every action. Horrible, horrible woman.

And it's not just us who feel that way. When the Indian saint [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15769467Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma of India)[/url came to town last year our boss went there with one of our Hindu staff to get a hug. After hours of queueing she got to the front, where Amma took one look and said, "not her, she's bad news" and turned her away.



If I didn't work from home and manage my own hours and movements I'd have left a long time ago. As it is, my quality of home life is great, the pay isn't bad and I can be around to help my wife with her various ailments.

He he. Movements.

Knew it even as I typed it...

When I left school I worked for four bosses at the same company in quick succession, two of them were "desk-thumpers" who believed that shouting and hissy-fits were all that was required, two simply asked you as if they were asking a favour and were approachable if you had a problem with something.

Guess which two got the respect and who I modelled my own management on ?

The shouting, bullying form of management has no place in any workplace regardless of what those who practice it say, all that actually happens is that the employees find other ways (and there are plenty) of stitching up the bully but will back to the hilt the one that they respect.

Seems to be mostly about what is not good management.

Micro-management, bullying and a lack of praise and encouragement when due/needed – absolutely agree all are counterproductive etc.

I'd add not having the guts to tell you things to your face and sending someone else to do it.

[url=http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/angry-emails-'a-threat-to-traditional-bollockings'-201111254591/Or doing it by email...[/url

Not shifting the blame - if you are the manager and someone in your team screws up it is you who has to carry the can.

You should be the one taking the pressure off the team not the other way round - asking for unrealistic deadlines to be met because of your own inefficiency is wrong - a manager should be planning the work to ensure time pressures are reduced not increased.

Treat the people you manage with respect, put yourself in their shoes and ask if you would like to be approached and talked to in the way you have just talked to them?

Yup.

I made three predictions about mine when he came in.

1) Change the name of the department

2) Institute a tidy desk policy

3) Move people between teams, possibly renaming some teams.

And then I said we'd never hear from him again. Still waiting on the tidy desk policy, but nobody's seen him for weeks.

Ex- boss of mine was nice when he wanted to be, but would just turn into a grade 1 knob at the drop of a hat and start taking his problems he was getting from higher management out on us lot in the yard. Everything had to be done his way, no matter how efficiently you were doing a job he'd always chirp up with "wouldn't it be better doing it like this....". Problem was, he tried to play the hard man and thought he had us intimidated - P*ssed off and fed up, yes, intimidated, no.

Don't agree. If you clearly outline expectations and someone f***s up by doing the opposite of what you have told them then it's their fault. I hire people at a particular level, many of them have PhD's and/or years of experience in research or customer service roles. There are certain expectations, when you give people responsibility they have to accept it. If they are not happy to do so then they should say at the time and then we'll discuss more training and ways to support them (usully by me getting involved). If something is beyond their capability there are several levels of more senior company executives whose job it is to take these things forward and intervene. If they blunder on and make mistakes when they know they should be getting help then it's their fault and they take the blame.
The main issue is that some managers like to make small f*** ups appear like big ones. I have seldom, if ever seen a single c*** up by anyone in my team that caused us real issues as a company. Most problems are blown out of proportion needlessly.

I have current issues with one guy who simply doesn't understand the meaning of paperwork. He's been like that since we hired him nearly 4 years ago and I've done everything I can to explain to him why what he does is not acceptable. He hasn't changed, despite apology after apology and promise after promise. The difficulty is that his main function is to support customers and a sales team, which he does spectacularly well. He's dilligent, willing to go anywhere anytime, technically excellent and his customers love him. So I don't blow the paperwork thing out of proportion because it does not effect $1 of the sales figure. In the past I've had to hassle him regularly about paperwork and every year I set his performance objectives to improve it (I know he does a good job, the rest of the team know he does a good job, but unless he actually bloody documents it our US colleagues, some of whom only look at reports logged on our internal system, may not). This year we have moved to a new database/calender/contact management system called SFDC (the most widely used in the sales industry) and we are monitoring metrics on everything. We can't do that unless people fill out their calender entries correctly using the specific fields we have written. This guy doesn't do it. His entries are hopeless - when he bothers.
He's had my foot up his backside twice this year already and he's now trying to get out of the office as much as possible so we can't sit down and do his performance review - where he'll get kicked again.
Is that his fault? Yes. He knows what to do, everyone else is making the effort, he won't do it. Fake ignorance is no defence.

Prior to me being promoted to UK Sales Manager, the incumbent, who I reported to, insisted on endless reports. Sales Reports, Fleet Reports, Competitor Intelligence Reports etc etc etc. Half of my bootspace was taken up by reams of NCR paper forms, all having to be submitted each week.

One day he called me into his office and informed me that he hadn't seen any Fleet Reports from me for quite a while. I told him I stopped sending them in when I realised that he never read them anyway. He was insistent that he always read them in full and acted on them accordingly. I managed to blow his argument when I asked him to dig out my last report and read it in front of me. He was almost apoplectic when he got to the bit "Company Directors". The company in question was Rainbow Transport of Nottingham, I had listed the directors as: Zippy, Bungle & George.

When I got his job, I burned a storage cabinet full of his forms, replaced them with one, rigidly enforced, Weekly Itinerary and the message that if any of the guys had anything to report, they should do so by fax or phone.

Best manager I ever had was one who started a tradition of whenever anyone went abroad on business they brought back a bottle of the most disgusting alcoholic drink they could find which was then put in his filing cabinet to be brought out along with all he rest on a Friday afternoon in the "team meeting".

Those were the days!

I know there are lots of times where paperwork and forms/reports are a waste of time and not used. I now refuse to write any marketing or training documents because for 6 years everything I've done has been a waste of time and never seen the light of day. My American counterpart differs from me spectacularly in that respect and the US team have to write reports pretty much every time they break wind. Pointless and I don't require it.
However, we have to share information about what we have done somehow. For example, when one of the team works on a particular bioassy, that we don't sell as a kit, with a customer we have to capture what was done, what reagents were used and what was learned. We have a report template that we then supply (in certain circumstances) to the customer as a professional document and a sales tool. The reports (even if they don't go to customers) are all uploaded to a searchable database on our intranet so when a potential customer walks up to me or sends me a request for a human soluble CD40 ligand assay (like happened today) I can find out if any of the 22 guys out in the field anywhere in the world over the last 6 years has done any work on that with a customer. I use this database many times a day. So you can imagine if someone who I know has done a dozen assay development projects in 2011 had only uploaded one report that would be a little annoying.

Our sales database is critical for us to work out where we need extra resource and when I need to hire someone (like now we probably need someone in scandinavia), it also tells us what applications people are developing. We also need to track how much time we spend on training - especially software - because we earn no money from this and it costs us a fortune in man hours. Christ knows why we don't charge for training, but I am not banging my head on that one again.
This database and calender has to be filled in and it has to be accurate or what comes out is garbage.

Needless paperwork is truly awful though and I have experienced how demotivating that can be. Because of this I will happily sit and discuss in person with anyone in my team why they think they don't have to do what I've asked them to do. If they can give me a good explanation then I'd be happy for them to do it their way. I'm completely confident they can't.