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There are many management mantras and rules-of-thumb, touchstones that are purported to give you some generalized wisdom that you can use over and over. Covey has the "Seven Habits". Warren Buffett supposedly has "Nine Rules".
Personally, I have found one general rule that suffices in the great majority of cases:
This covers probably 90% of dumb management behaviors. Sure, it assumes you're at least reasonably competent at the nuts and bolts of your job, but most managers in my experience--especially if they've been promoted up from a technical role--are. The problems and behaviors that I've watched destroy teams aren't usually a failure to understand the technology or problem-space. They're much more often related to bad management.
And "bad management" is usually the direct result of somebody violating the "don't be a dick" rule.
What does "being a dick" involve, though?
My first temptation is to punt on it completely and unhelpfully, and paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart's immortal (and equally unhelpful) guideline to defining pornography: "You'll know it when you see it." Nearly all humans have an ingrained sense of fairness, and we know when that's being violated. But saying that "being a dick" is analogous simply to being *unfair* is too reductive. There's more to it than that.
So here's my attempt at a working definition:
There's various grades of dickery, of course, ranging from the trivial to the severe, but if you listen to people talk about times when they've been *dicked over*, there's nearly always a common thread: betrayal, typically in the form of someone *taking advantage of* a subordinate or peer.
The betrayal of what is supposed to be a non-adversarial relationship is critical. You don't hear complaints about people dicking over their enemies (for whatever value 'enemies' has in a particular context, i.e. competitors or whatever). That's at worst sharp practice, but within the usual rules of the game. As long as the other party knows they're in an adversarial relationship, that's just business--until and unless it crosses the line into unethical or criminal behavior, it's probably fair play.
But if you behave the same way to a subordinate, particularly a subordinate that you're supposed to be looking out for, that's when you enter being-a-dick territory. Getting a promotion by making a competitor look bad, is very different from getting a promotion by making a junior team member on your own team look bad. In the first case, shame on the competitor for not seeing it coming; in the second, shame on you for taking advantage of someone's trust.
Date Written: 2019-02-19
Tags: management, work, philosophy, business