Are You a Scary Manager?

ZDNet UK has their take on what makes a scary manager.

It often comes as a surprise to bosses to discover an employee finds them intimidating. Here are a few reasons why managers can seem scary

As part of your Leadership Training it is important to be able to take a “meta” view of yourself and the environment around you to ensure that you are fostering the best environment for your employees and co-workers. After the jump, I give some suggestions on how you can use these same situations to strengthen your team and become more productive.

Bad Action: Position
While the title alone can bring fear into some employees eyes, it is also one of the best opportunities to set the culture and tone of your group or organization. How you interact with others shows everyone else what is expected. This is even more true the more levels between the positions.

Bad Action: Unpredictability
This is another great area to help teach yourself and your co-workers how to manage their boss. The opportunity is this: when you go to your boss, if they give you a decision that you didn’t expect you need to take that information and incorporate it into how you present to them. STAY POSITIVE. If you assume that your boss is an idiot and try to undermine them, you only make yourself look bad. Why would any boss, even a good one want someone that undermines them working for them? If your boss truly is horrible, most likely everyone else knows it as well. So use this as an opportunity to learn how to grow despite your boss. When their decision goes against your expectations say this to yourself - “Either I didn’t give my boss enough information to make the correct decision, or my boss has more information that I do about the bigger picture of situation.”

Bad Action: Volatility
Everyone has good and bad days, that is why it is so important to be constantly reaching out to help (getting out of your “me” box) your co-workers, employees, and superiors. That way, when the bad days do come, you have a TEAM of people that are ready to help.

Bad Action: Mistrust of staff
Empowerment. You must empower your employees and co-workers to do the job you hired them for. They must be properly trained to do the work, and then be allowed to do that work. Proper training can be difficult, especially when you hire new people because the reason you hired more people is that you don’t have enough resources to get the current work done! But without it, you are only setting yourself and your employees up for failure.

Bad Action: Hoarding information
Communication to all levels is key. You should constantly be sharing information up, accross, and down your group and organization. The fear here is that by being the only one who knows how to do a certain job, or has the information to perform it properly they have job security. But the opposite is true. By being the only one that can perform a job, you are THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN PERFORM THAT JOB. You are stuck in place as others that share information continue to pass you by. When the layoffs or cutbacks come, who are the most valuable people?

Bad Action: Not protecting staff
This really brings all the above together, by Empowering, communicating, and training your employees, allowing them to make the right decisions, for the right reasons, at the right time - you should WANT to back them up 100%. Because they are making the same decisions you would have made yourself.