How Will You Manage?

7 thoughts on “How Will You Manage?”

  1. Excellent post Luis. I agree with you. When I look at my back, I see a tsunami of young people joining or ready to join the workplace in the next few years with a lot of new fresh ideas. Applying the traditional command and control schema will head them to burn-out people, apart of limiting their potential and creativity. Definitively, a great challenge for managers.

    1. Hi Ferdy! Many thanks for dropping by and for the great feedback comments! I agree with you on those very key points, although I would go one step further and perhaps venture to state that those younger generations would be thinking in pretty different terms than the rest of us did. We probably didn’t care much about command-and-control and go for the job because we thought it was the right thing to do.

      I doubt that would ever happen anymore with the younger generations. I think they would be much more informed about how a particular business would operate and how their creativity may well be impacted in the long run and if they sense a glimpse of that command-and-control attitude I bet they wouldn’t even think about joining those companies, which means those managers would have a much bigger issues: how are they going to manage to retain some of the knowledge from the senior knowledge workers, as they retire, when they would not have younger talent around to absorb it and re-apply it again?

      Interesting times for both traditional and new business leaders, don’t you think?

  2. Luis, you’re right. Just as an experiment, take a look to sites like glassdoor.com. You’ll realize that most of the complaints about workplace, even in the “best companies to work”, are always “management”!

    1. Hi Ferdy! Thanks for the follow up comment and for adding further up! I have just been peeking through glassdoor.com and WOW! Talking about going through some fundamental changes in leadership! Goodness! Quite revealing, to be honest! I guess there is still plenty of work to get through in this area if we would want to change those perceptions on what our new leaders should be like and how they should behave, and treat!, their colleagues. Lots of work, indeed, ahead of us!

  3. Great post, as usual Luis! After this post and the video, I don’t see how one can continue to deny reality. Now the question is- what are companies going to do about it?

    1. Hi Laurie! Thanks for dropping by and for the great comments! Well, I guess it’s probably a combination of a number of factors that those companies will need to start asking themselves and rather soon!:

      1. Are they willing to leave behind that command and control attitude?

      2. Will they also leave behind that fear of the unknown / unexpected and start trusting ever so much more their employee workforce?

      3. Will they want to step forward and help prepare the leaders of the 21st century?

      4. Will they be willing to trust their knowledge workers “do the right things”, since they have hired, in the first place, professionals?

      5. Will they finally realise the more opposition they put to it the worst it would be? For all of us?!?!

      I would love to know how they would be answering each and everyone of those questions, because I think they would be the first starting point towards provoking that change, but will the?

      Time will tell …

  4. Ah Luis, that’s a lovely post and a really valid point about the different approaches between generations.

    Thanks for mentioning “Monkeys with Typewriters” – it’s always great to see a positive comment about the book!

    Of course you’re quite right about the need for a new type of leadership and I think the stuff that you’ve more recently been telling me about social media rings true here: as people now appreciate that social tools are here to stay, they are also generally aware that command and control is no longer the way forward.

    But a lot of the problem lies in what legendary management consultant Chris Argyris described as “espoused theory” versus “theory in practice” – look at our own British Prime Minister Gordan Brown: his colleagues accuse him of bullying, while he just describes himself as sensitive, passionate and emotional.

    Before worrying about the behaviour of the people around them, I fear many of these “old-fashioned” managers you refer to (and they come in all ages!) need to first attempt to look at and understand their own actions and motivations. Doing this would make them better leaders and improve their level of what that amazingly clever psychologist Daniel Goleman termed as “Emotional Intelligence” – essential in top leaders of all ages.

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