Who Is the Boss? Good Managers, Weak Managers, and All in between Need a Combination of Practical Assessments, Plus a Roster of Tough Questions, to Draw out the Best Possibilities for a Bright Future

LaGuardia, Dorian, T&D

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Good managers get things done. They translate a leader's vision into action, take on the projects that everyone else thinks are impossible, and get the people around them to achieve more than they ever thought possible. Managers move us and our organizations forward.

Unfortunately, too many of us work with managers who don't seem able to do any of this. They stall and impede. They hide or yell. They can make us absolutely crazy.

How do these people get into their positions? More importantly, how do we take a manager with little noticeable management talent and get her to move us and our organization's forward? Assessing one's management capacity is the first step.

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Management is not a science

There are no iron-clad laws, rules, established theories, or paradigms that dominate the entire field of management. In its best form, management is a rough assembly of principles and best practices, tips and strategies, and lots of competing theories. This diversity sometimes makes management seem like a field consumed with fads, trends, and gurus. Yet, this diversity makes perfect sense because management is complex.

It is complex because, at its heart, management has to do with people--how diverse people work together to achieve common goals. People are, by nature, infinitely complex. Some of us work better in the mornings than in the afternoons. Many of us are influenced by our organizations' changing needs and the uncertainty this often brings. And all of us are influenced by what is happening in our lives outside of the workplace.

Good managers must understand not only the complexities of the actual work--how to move a project from inception to completion-but also people's shifting moods and attitudes and the swings these often create in individual and collective performance.

Management is also complex because of all the things that happen in our organizations that are just plain baffling. …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Who Is the Boss? Good Managers, Weak Managers, and All in between Need a Combination of Practical Assessments, Plus a Roster of Tough Questions, to Draw out the Best Possibilities for a Bright Future. Contributors: LaGuardia, Dorian - Author. Magazine title: T&D. Volume: 64. Issue: 8 Publication date: August 2010. Page number: 46+. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale Group.

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