Learning As You Go

In my last post, I mentioned that the single most important skill for any manager to develop is the ability to learn from other members of the company, even though this will inevitably require the manager to make greater efforts to expand his or her own knowledge and overcome his or her own biases than any subordinate worker. It seems a bit counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Especially since I’m already on record admonishing managers to see things from their subordinates’ point of view, and reminding them that the people who work for them are really not that different. How can I square this contradiction, I hear some of you asking.

The truth is that managers, even those who obtain professional degrees in Business Administration and devote their lives to its practice, ARE just ordinary people, like any of those reporting to them. They are just as subject to flights of common fallacy, such as judging the entire world according to one’s own tastes and dislikes, or believing that anything they don’t understand can’t be that complicated. My point here is that people do not stop using “famous last words” phrases like “How hard can it be?” just because they are promoted into management. My point here is that they have to.

When you accept the promotion into any supervisory position, regardless of level, you have become part of the management team, and therefore at least partially responsible for the success or failure of the company. On your shoulders now rests at least some tiny amount of responsibility for the lives of the employees, the fortunes of the stockholders, the welfare of the customers, the economy of your community and your country, and the careers of all of the people who report to you. And this responsibility will only grow greater as you advance into higher and higher levels of management.

Assuming that anything you don’t understand must be simple – dismissing the complexity of the task, undervaluing the importance of the knowledge, and denigrating those who have the skills and knowledge that you lack – is merely stupid, arrogant and condescending in a line worker. Annoying personality traits, and not the sort of thing that will get you made captain of the department’s softball team, but hardly tragic. In a supervisor, however, these same character flaws could undermine the performance of an entire work group; in a CEO they could easily destroy the entire company. If the guy in the next cubicle believes that since he doesn’t like Country music it can’t be popular, that’s just insulting to anyone who likes the art form; if the Director of Marketing does it you could easily lose all of your customers who listen to Country and Western radio stations.

The simple fact is that more IS expected of managers, at every level, than of the ordinary employees. Along with the power, the perks, and the higher salaries comes responsibility. It is sometimes said that in any company, any given employee can expect the CEO to be working even harder than he or she is, but this is not always the case. It only works that way in the companies that are being managed correctly…