Management theory is becoming a compendium of dead ideas
As someone who is a respected manager, according to anonymous surveys my managed peers take every year (and they are truly anonymous) as well as what I learned from the manager I came to most respect in my life and still go to to this day even though he isn&#x27;t any more, I think what makes good management particularly effective is a few things. Before I list them out and explain though, I just want to add one caveat: This isn&#x27;t applicable for everyone, and certainly not every industry, and everyone&#x27;s situation is different and it can be hard to relay some idea&#x27;s perfectly in text so I&#x27;m going to do my best.<p>With all that said, here&#x27;s a little background as well.  I manage a team of folks who are in charge of IT infrastructure and deployment. Mobile devices, servers, VPNs, virtualization setups, as well as database administration and some non-customer facing coding to keep everything going, all the way down to the desktop setups for employees. I work with maybe 30 people underneath me and there can&#x27;t be more than 100 of us all together. Each of my 30 team members are tasked with different tings in accordance to the rough outline i speak to above.<p>Now, to the good bits<p>1) If i learned anything, from being the manager to before that, its a really really simple thing. Don&#x27;t ever forget where you came from. Ever. I often will think about making a decision - some big, some small - and I remind myself &#x27;What would my reaction be if i wasn&#x27;t a manager, but underneath me? How would I react to this? Positive? Negative? Why?&#x27; I find that my best manager did this all the time, and it really showed because he was one of us before he was a manager (for my company this is typical, we don&#x27;t get a lot of outside management for our group that hasn&#x27;t at least had some experience on the basics of what we do). The reason for this is to me obvious, in that you will better understand the actual core of your decisions affects this way. Its easy to forget all this in the day to day, but its a huge one.<p>Specifically, it has benefited in that some changes that came down from those who manage me, were immediately rejected because I was able to articulate, in a way they could understand, why the new change would be bad. For instance, they wanted to take away our hands-on Lab for testing new technologies (this is a good part of what we do, to keep up on things) and go to a more virtual one. In theory this seems okay, there&#x27;s a lot of companies that do this (Cisco, itpro.tv, VMware, all have these kinda things) but I made the case that no, have it hands on, with good training attached to the hands on labs, was a more effective on the whole, and it cost less, because we could dedicate a rotation of people to learn something, teach it to the team, and then the team gets to test it, and they rotate into to teaching back, until we feel the technology is well covered to at least a &#x27;intermediate&#x27; level for all members on our team. With the virtualization, this was lost, and they had to pay more for the licenses. It ended up being better for us because we could just get labs setup, get documentation&#x2F;official manuals&#x2F;training material, learn it, and teach it over the course of x weeks to everyone else, and they could then come in to the lab when there was allotted time, break stuff, fix stuff etc. and round it went.<p>2) One of the best things I ever learned as well, is that if someone or someone&#x27;s is designated as a point of contact, they should be treated as such for a project. For instance, if I designated Steve the networking guy as my point of contact for network related projects that I need someone to oversee, I essentially report to him, with some exceptions, instead of him reporting to me about the project. This gives them freedom, and gets them into a position where they can also learn good managing skills or at least, focus on big picture things for awhile. I don&#x27;t micro manage, I philosophically meet my team half way. If things that we have as objectives are being met, and are exceeding expectations, then i give more leeway. I will always stick up for them if they in turn do good work, and the more good work that is produced, the more freedom I&#x27;m willing to allow. This has created a huge win for the company as well, as our team is small, but incredibly productive.<p>3) Don&#x27;t try to sanitize feedback. This isn&#x27;t a &#x27;be a jerk&#x27; card, but team members who want to improve honestly like feedback, and give it to them honestly. Good and bad. One thing old managers i know used to do is never talk about the things I did well - to reinforce those things, is the purpose - but only talk about how we could improve. My best manager, and a skill i keep as well, is whenever I do check in with my team in a 1 on 1 way, we talk about what they&#x27;re doing that is amazing and great, and then we talk about area&#x27;s of imrovement, and relate it back to &#x27;so these are your core strengths, how can you apply what makes these your core strengths to these problems?&quot; that really gives people a lot of motivation in my experience<p>4) If you make a commitment to someone, meet it, obviously huge unexpected things aside that you can&#x27;t plan for, this generally is huge. Not forgetting say, asking upper management for x thing on their behalf (our company works this way a lot, though we&#x27;re trying to change that). or even just follow up when you say you will. If you do miss it, explain why, honestly, and then go from there<p>5) Training is important. invest in your team, your team invests in you, and that makes for a great company to work for, have as a client, and essentially helps you grow. It took our company some time to realize this, but now they&#x27;re full on.<p>6) Rotate their roles, but don&#x27;t push overly hard for people to do what they don&#x27;t like unless there really is a specific reason. and I&#x27;m not talking about &#x27; I don&#x27;t like putting notes together detailing these implementations&#x27;. There are musts in every job, and enforce those across the board. I&#x27;m talking more &#x27;okay, so, you been doing the networking for like a year, year and half, are you okay, burned out, want to try something new?&#x27; this lets people pick up new skills, maintain those skills, and apply their previous work experience on your team in different ways. We&#x27;re team &#x27;swiss army&#x27; internally for this reason :) and my headcount is smaller than the next guys, but we&#x27;re always rated one of the top teams. I think this has a lot to do with it. (out of 4 teams, granted)<p>7) you can be of great value as a manager if you learn to filter what is actually nessacary and what isn&#x27;t from upper management before talking to your team about their goals&#x2F;expectations. See my example on the virtual labs. My team didn&#x27;t know that was even a consideration until another manager in the same meeting mentioned it to their team. by that time, it was dead, and my team was grateful they didn&#x27;t have to waste time thinking about it.<p>8) If someone is bad hire, and your team isn&#x27;t working because of this, don&#x27;t be afraid to do something about it. you&#x27;re a manager, sometimes doing hard things like firing someone or moving them into a different position they&#x27;re more skilled for is something you need to recongize early. this goes along with my next point....<p>9) if your team members come to you saying somehting about how they are being treated by others, take it at face value, look into it, and have their back. Always. Always. Always. Never dismiss this. I had an incident where someone was being discriminated against based on their sex by an older team mate who i think just had it in their head from a different time what the role of that person was and wasn&#x27;t, and I had recently assigned them as a project lead. I didn&#x27;t tell them to deal with it, I looked into it, asked a trusted colleague to talk to some folks about it (not revealing the nature, just said &#x27;Hey man, could you do me a favor? coud you ask around and get a feel for what people are getting a vibe about person x? I want some imparitialness to this&#x27; Idk if that violates policy in HR or not, but for me it worked well, i squashed it quickly and made it VERY clear what isn&#x27;t tolerated on my team in a short amount of time, but it also came down to the person who was saying things that were considred sexist didn&#x27;t realize what they had going on was just a reflection of insecurities. Sometimes you&#x27;re being the psychologist therapist and working them through those feelings so they can understand what happened. I didn&#x27;t end up having to separate them or fire anyone in this case, because that person came to an understanding and the person in charge separately was okay working from a clean slate as long as it didn&#x27;t continue, once they understand what triggered what. Now they both work together extremely well and are both happy.<p>Anyways, that&#x27;s my experience. I&#x27;m no lawyer, no MBA, and your mileage may vary, esp. on that last bit, but these are some representations and guidelines i follow often.