Quote:
Originally Posted by Tcoat
If the guy was any good at all he would have figured out that they were playing him.
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The cynic in me laughs at that, but the reality is that it's not true. It has less to do with how "good" a manager someone is and more to do with how they're programmed. This guy was hard wired for social interaction.
While we were playing him in one sense, in a different sense we were giving him exactly what he needed. That was the focus of the course where this all hit me. You observe your colleagues, figure out what their work style is, and from that figure out what they need from you to get the most out of the job. A thinker needs you to give him lots of information and be patient with him while he digests it. A director needs you to get right to the point and avoid wasting his time. A socializer thrives on the social interaction and sees the director types as unfriendly. A relater just wants everyone to get along.
Before I took the course, nobody in the group actually got along with this guy, because we were all focused on the work and couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing. He really did seem incompetent, despite having an alphabet of certifications and an encyclopedic knowledge of accounting. All his coaching notes turned into vague arguments that left everyone, including him, unhappy.
When we started "managing" him, not only did our own evaluations from him improve, but his evaluations from above improved as well because his projects were running smoother and meeting deadlines and budgets. And I actually started liking the guy.
That's not something we could have done by sitting down with him and discussing it. That had actually been attempted with disastrous results because the guy was in complete denial about his own work style.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stugray
How many people like to turn off the stereo and climate controls when driving hard to maximize focus on the car?  |
I turn down the stereo, but there's actually research around that to support doing it. Parts of the brain that interpret speech and music are also involved in driving, and having that noise on can be a distraction from the road. It's one of the reasons hands-free units for cell phones don't do anything at all to keep people from driving like morons when they're talking on the phone.