Blogging about Management

We spend majority of our time in workplaces and work gets more fun and consequently life, if everyone is nice and helpful and deal with one another in a friendly manner. We should remember, we all are humans in dealing with each other. Being humans, we cannot remain untouched by emotions: love, hatred, envy, jealousy, anger. Yes of course in workplaces, there are office romances, gossips that ruin people’s careers, jealousy over the promotion your colleague received, even though he joined the organization after you. Most of us are taught to keep personal and professional lives separate, one can, may be strike a balance between the two, but they cannot be separate. Emotion does affect one’s work. If one has a sick child or a special needs child at home, work suffers and in the similar way, things that happen at work, one’s colleagues or supervisor’s attitude towards one, or stress at work may drag into your personal lives. Thus as one’s behavior and attitude towards one another affects everyone in the workplace, it is necessary to put one self into another person’s shoe so that there is understanding and harmony in the workplace. A manager has to be compassionate and caring in understanding that a person is a human and may have personal problems or problems at work. Being caring, polite and having empathy with one’s staff rather than being indifferent may also change people’s perception towards work and also motivate and uplift them at times. We all enter into our workplaces determined to give it our 100%, work up the career ladder and have a satisfying career however there are times when we do not feel the same level of enthusiasm and confidence. Either personal problem, age or routine work creeps in and at times, we feel like work is a burden and one cannot wait to leave work as soon as clock strikes five. Work has to a place where we have fun, and see it a source of dignity as well and not just a source of pay check. As we cannot be alienated by our emotions, we should think that it is true for every other person, and we should work with our hearts as well at times. I have had managers who would act in a rude way at times and later come to the staff and tell us, ” Do not take it personally, it is just for business.” Whatever it may be for or wherever, but kindness and compassion has magic elements to it and works wonder in every situation. Work with your head but bring heart along! Good luck with the finals everyone and remember holidays are coming soon.

I ran across this article today and thought it related to our discussion last week about women in the workplace. It is quite an accomplishment to be named GM’s highest ranking women. Mary Barra has climbed the corporate ladder from being a student intern at GM to her position now. She is truly and inspiration and motivation for women trying to be in the corporate world and make it as far as she did.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/10/autos/mary-barra-gm.fortune/index.html

Last week as I was driving upstate I heard a great segment that relates to our management and gender class discussion. It was on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook and the segment was called Women, the Workplace and ‘Second Generation’ Gender Bias. The main guest co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review called Women Rising: The Unseen Barrier. She talked about how women are still faced with a glass ceiling and how organizations need to be more involved in resolving this issue. Companies try to address this issue through mentoring, training and hiring programs for women, but organizations still need to do more. Mainly, they need to change the culture (policies and practices) in the organization that makes it difficult for women to advance in leadership roles.  Women are constantly faced with mixed messages to be a certain way in order to become a leader. The answer to avoiding a doomed leadership style is to find a sense of purpose. It serves as an anchor to help focus a woman on doing what is good for her and her team/organization and this will create her sense of self instead of trying to be like other senior leaders. According to the article, developing a sense of purpose is the way for her to become an effective leader.  The segment also gives examples of what organizations can do to help address the problem.

I’m not doing a great job explaining the segment, you should check it out.  Make sure you go back to the September 3, 2013 broadcast on the website if you want to listen to it.

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/11/29/women-the-workplace-and-second-generation-gender-bias

My people,

As some of you know, I’ve been reading the autobiography of Alex Ferguson–quick background for those who don’t know him: He managed British football club Manchester Utd. His success makes him, arguably, the best football manager in the history of the game.

On Saturday while seating in Starbucks and drinking a tasty hot chocolate, I ran into this two interesting lines on his book. They read, “The moment the manager loses his authority, you don’t have a club. The players will be running it, and then you’re in troubles” “The authority is what counts. You cannot have a players taking over the dressing room.”

What’s your thought on this?

I personally agree with Ferguson. In the football world, managing big egos is a challenge and keeping them under this check is a must.

Now, I believe this can be applied in the office or organization management as well. In this case, the name of “boss” or “manager” etc is irrelevant, it is how subordinates accept this person and ultimately granted him/her the right to delegate them. Let me get this crystal clear, an authority should not mean neither oppression nor total freedom within any team, which I believe both oppression and total freedom seat at the extremes of the spectrum. There’s got to be a balance. Assuming that in  team X, all its members know what their task is and how to go about it. But if they do not know who the authority is and who is setting the direction, not matter how good they are, it is possible that chaos may arise as a result of conflict of interests or power struggle etc. There’s got to be some sort of  reference point.

Authority also shows that the person who is the authority is doing a good job staying at the top of a team, because the moment you see someone as authority, it is implied that you have given him/her power over you. Why did you decide to give him/her power? who knows!… but its implied that you have given up some of your power to that person because you respect, believe him/her in some capacity and that your hard work will contribute to an ultimate goal. This is different from power, power is all the way around. It is exercised by the other party without your consent, the minute someone has a gun over you, it has power over your by coercion e.g. Saddam Hussein. Authority is exercised because you have given that consent previously e.g. governments running a democratic society–as explained in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

Cheers!

Andres

I agree that managers do help keep organizations stable and leaders help evolve an organization.  I also believe, like your friend, that being a leader can be learned. Some leaders may be better than others, but some leadership skills and qualities can be taught.

I found this article from the Wall Street Journal that relates to what we’ve learned on leadership in class.  It’s a quick read.  Check it out.

http://guides.wsj.com/management/developing-a-leadership-style/what-is-the-difference-between-management-and-leadership/

They say Leaders are born. I like to observe people, the very nuances of people’s behavior; what makes them tick? Sometimes watching kids, I see a kid clearly leading a group of kids. This makes me ponder, is leadership inherent? A couple of years ago, I had read that people who are the first born in their families usually have leadership qualities in them and they seem happy to lead later in their career and their lives. My friend who was in army, however told me something different. He told me that leadership is taught in the army and the leadership skills are developed in their training period. I wondered whether the army instills the leadership skills in  people or develops the leadership that is latent in people.

We read and discussed, whether leaders and managers are different or are they the same? Could one person be both a manger and a leader? From my point of view, managers are what organizations build and leaders are born into situations, especially in critical situations where leaders are needed to stir things up in an organaization and take the organization to a whole new level with his vision and leadership. I have had mangers who were clearly just managers and not leaders. In retrospect, they were infact good mangers and the organization ran smoothly in their management, however if a scenario occured where the organization stumbled into a chaos, we clearly would have needed somebody to come into the picture and fix the chaos, by taking employees out of their comfort zones, pushing them to their limits and capacities and having them adapt to the prevailing scenario. Thus I think organizations with good mangement are stable and thriving while organizations with good leadership are constantly evolving and  reaching higher greounds. This is my take on mangers v. leaders, what is yours?

The Metro-North train derailment it is so sad and frustrating. How does a situation like this happen, people are on their way to work, the last thing on their mind is this might be the last train ride they will ever take. Reports of 4 people dead, 11 critically injured and 6 with serious injuries, 67 total hurt and/or injured. The TV and media keep referring to it as a “Death on a Curve” how horrible. It is reported as a section of track that the New York governor previously called “dangerous.”  Why was the track not repaired, changed or another solution looked into? This was reported as the third major event to occur on Metro-North tracks this year. How do they explain to the four families who have lost a loved one that the train track was not safe and they knew it…It’s like another Katrina incident in New Orleans, they were told repeatedly that the dikes would not hold, and did nothing to fix them just waited until mine and others family members died in the flooding before replacing the dikes. Ironically they replaced them with the same engineer’s specs and same ways that lead them to fail the first time. So back to the train derailment what are they going to do differently? Is it poor management structure did someone not get a strong enough memos letting them know of the danger and possibility of loss of life when and if trains derailed? Were the memos hidden, destroyed and/or not taken seriously?  Also was it a case of operator error and if so what and how long before something will be done now that people have died? How long will the investigation take as people need closure… I feel sad for all involved, I take that train to see my friends and that could have been you or me. Looking at it from the political frame who are the stakeholders in this situation?  How are they going to negotiate their way out of something they were aware of but did nothing about? What would you do if your family member was one that had been killed? Barbara

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579198281053673534

Jack Welch, who was the CEO of GE and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal to support Microsoft’s new evaluation system for employees’ performance. The concept behind this system is called “differentiation,” which allows the company to find out how much difference in goal setting and culture exists between employees and the company. Through evaluating the employees’ performance twice a year, and letting their employees know where they stand in the company, company officials believe that transparent grades—just like how well students do in a class— would advance a company’s mission and strengthen its core values once they can get rid of the bottom 10 percent.

After reading this article, I began wondering to what extent differentiation can be applied to employees of a professional bureaucracy, such as teachers working for a city’s department of education or professors employed by a university. In New York City, for instance, teachers are being evaluated under a new system imposed by the state Department of Education after the city failed to reach an agreement with the teacher’s union. The system ranks teachers on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 meaning “ineffective” and 4, “highly effective.” After a series of observations, along with their students’ performance on standardized tests, each teacher will receive a grade from 0 to 100 at the end of the year.

While any system designed to improve worker performance is good for a company, I wonder who is really responsible for designing these assessments. Is it the teachers? Principals? Or outside consultants who may have studied a teacher teaches, but who themselves have never actually taught? Obviously, there will always be some push back when it comes to evaluation, but when assessments are imposed by faceless bureaucratic institutions that do not seek the input of employees, these evaluation systems always run the risk of being met with fierce resistance.

I also wondered about just how effective it is to arithmetically grade teachers based on how they arrange furniture in a classroom, for instance, or whether their students always call each other by name? It seems that even differentiation, while quantitative, acknowledges that much of how a worker functions in his or her workplace is also qualitative and cannot be expressed in the form of a letter or a numerical grade.