Ignorance

“How can you possibly be expected to manage a group of people if you don’t understand how to do the jobs they are doing?” someone asked me the other day. It’s a good question. Ideally, of course, you would like to have every member of the management team learn how to do every job within the entire organization, or at least within the part of it that they manage, but the simple truth is that this won’t always be possible. Any large and complex organization is likely to have more individual jobs in it than any person could learn to do in one working lifetime, and as I noted in my post about Institutional Memory, just knowing how to do that type of job may not be enough to handle the specific requirements of a particular job.

In most cases, except for the foreman or team leader of a group who began as one of the workers in that group and has received promotion since, taking over any business unit is going to mean that there are people reporting to you who have jobs (or at least tasks) that you do not fully understand. If you are a senior manager, this will almost certainly be the case; the CEO of an oil company is probably not qualified as a research chemist, an IT manager, a CPA, a drilling team manager, a transportation unit foreman, or the captain of an oil tanker in addition to his or her expertise as a strategist and a businessperson, for example. The CEO may not even have experience in other aspects of business itself; he or she may not be a marketer, a finance expert, or even particularly good with numbers.

The key skill that our hypothetical CEO must have, and all of us who practice the profession of management should aspire to, is the ability to learn the essential issues of getting the job done. The CEO does not need to understand how to operate an 80,000 ton ship in dangerous waters, but he or she needs to understand how long it will take to get the ship where it needs to go, what the costs of doing so will be, and why the safety precautions required by corporate policy and Federal law are important. Similarly, the CEO doesn’t really need to know how to create a new computer system to handle order capture, inventory management and billing operations so much as what resources will be required to do so, how long it will take to properly test and de-bug the software, and how much time and effort (and money) it will take to re-train the product replenishment and billing personnel to use the new system.

The key to finding out these things – and therefore the cornerstone of this absolutely critical managerial skill – is to avoid the fallacy common to all too many people that anything you don’t understand must be simple. This simple logical disconnect, a combination of ignorance and arrogance, kills off more good companies and ideas than every other management blunder put together. And the worst part is, it is 100% preventable. As a very wise man once told me, “Stupidity is forever, but ignorance is curable.”

To avoid making this mistake, all you have to do is learn things. Make sure that you understand all of the requirements to achieve a specific goal, and if you don’t, keep having people break it down for you into simpler and simpler pieces until you do. This will require the commitment of time, and a significant amount of work on your part, which is why so many managers avoid doing it, but the long-term effects are worth the effort. In addition to curtailing stupid management mistakes, this procedure will help you to avoid resentment in your subordinates by not undervaluing their expertise or ordering them to do things that are stupid, wasteful or time consuming (as they see it). In fact, you can even use it to raise morale and make your people feel appreciated (thus appealing to their Security, Recognition and Self-Actualization needs).

Of course this does require more from the management team than most people realize – but that’s going to be my next topic…