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2014-01-01 04:33:51
Eric Barton
These days in business, there is one thing all managers need to know: forget
what you used to know about being a manager.
Gone are the days when middle management was expected to lead troops into some
territorial battle with rivals. Disregard the old command-culture favoured in
the 80s. Abandon that tired business school mantra about always seeming to be
the smartest one in the room.
These days, it s about collaborating, listening and treating more junior
employees as equals. The prevailing culture for successful businesses now is a
management structure that is flat, where the most junior associate has a chance
to develop the next big idea.
Don t know how to get by in such a world? Here, then, are five things all
managers need to know to succeed in business today.
5. Trusting Workplaces Breed Creativity
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20131202-unlocking-creativity-at-work
The best leaders find a way to encourage creativity in their teams. Pulling
that off begins by dispelling the myth that some people just aren t creative.
Everybody has the ability to be creative in one way or another, said
executive coach Charles Day with The Lookinglass, a management consultancy in
New York City. The key is to figure out how to unlock it in your employees.
To help new ideas grow, be sure employees have context. In other words, they
should understand the overall goals of the company. When a new idea fits the
business strategy, be generous with the time allocated to exploring it. Then be
sure your more junior employees know they won t be criticised for trying a
novel idea that fails.
Some companies foster inspiration by encouraging employees to try new creative
outlets. Computer design firm FiftyThree, based in New York City and Seattle,
holds regular classes to teach employees subjects such as fashion illustration.
The company s IT guy won t be designing dresses for the runway anytime soon,
but the process helps employees to tap into their imagination.
It might seem strange to teach a bunch of engineers how to do fashion
sketches, admitted FiftyThree, co-founder and chief executive officer Georg
Petschnigg. But creativity happens when boundaries are crossed.
4. Trust Your Intuition -- Sometimes
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130923-should-you-trust-your-gut
Within a generation, the concept of instinctive intuition has gone from quack
science to a proven strategy for success in business.
That s in large part thanks to studies that show it s best to rely on a gut
feeling when you need to make a quick decision. It s especially true when you
have extensive knowledge of a subject.
A lot of people think intuition is general purpose, but intuition is actually
domain specific, said Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at City
University of New York. Intuition is the result of your subconscious brain
picking up on clues and hints and calculating the situation for you, and that s
based solely on experience.
Maybe one of the most famously intuitive leaders, Steve Jobs, often spoke of
following his heart. This helped Jobs green light two projects that seemed too
risky back in 2001: iTunes and the iPod. It is more than just a gut feeling,
however. The lesson from Apple, Pigliucci said, is to follow-up snap decisions
with meticulous attention to detail.
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, Jobs told the graduating
class of Stanford University in 2005. They somehow already know what you truly
want to become. Everything else is secondary.
3. When to be Funny
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130729-funny-business-at-the-office
Knowing when to use a joke can help disarm uncomfortable situations and help
bosses build real relationships with their employees.
However, jokes should never belittle a more junior employee or stray in to the
realm of off-colour humour. But a boss who can crack jokes at his own expense?
That s a good way to lighten the mood.
At Zappos, a Nevada-based online shoe retailer, toy-gun wars regularly break
out between departments, and videos of employees oddly dressed and dancing on
their desks often end up on YouTube. All that joking around has made employees
more loyal to the company and more productive.
Any type of positive humour seems to improve job satisfaction, said Jessica
Mesmer Magnus, associate professor of management at the Cameron School of
Business at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Humour shows that you re
a real person and that you can relate to your employees on the same level.
2. Trust in Delegation
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130515-trust-is-key-to-delegation
It takes faith for managers to delegate important tasks, and it s something few
successfully pull off.
The reason is simple: They often think they re better equipped to do the work
than their more junior employees.
Instead, the key is to trust them with the difficult parts of the job. Let them
succeed, with just a few nudges and checks, workers will be more likely to work
hard for you.
At the end of the day, it s all about trust and that willingness to be
vulnerable, said Matthew Pearsall, assistant professor of organisational
behaviour at the University of North Carolina s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
1. Top-Down Collaboration
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130531-collaboration-lessons-from-bees
Creating workplace collaboration isn t as simple as just telling employees to
work together. Instead, managers must give their teams specific tools, then
oversee how they are being used.
We often tell people to work together, but we don t tell them how, said E
Allan Lind, professor of leadership at Duke University s Fuqua School of
Business, North Carolina. First, we have to be mindful that people working
together is not a normal state of things.
Managers must show how good ideas come out of working together. They must also
demonstrate that real collaboration equals innovation, and be on the watch for
communication breakdowns.
David Kelly, founder of the wildly successful design firm Ideo, is famous for
asking a group of people that have very little in common on their curriculum
vitaes to solve a problem. Sometimes it s the data guy who comes up with the
entirely new engineering solution or the computer geek who figures out the best
marketing strategy. For Ideo, this team approach has helped the company create
everything from airplane lavatory signs to the first computer mouse.
Those meetings may lead to team members disagreeing. Within reason, that s a
good thing, according to Lind.
Conflict is like the fire in the firebox of an old steam engine, Lind said.
You don t want the fire to get so hot that it gets out of the firebox, but you
don t want it to go out, either.