eManagr News

Continuing our series on management styles, we took on technical management last time, leaving us with the other extreme:  The business manager, who rarely comes from within the company or even industry, and relies on an MBA to provide understanding and even authority.

What could possibly go wrong?

First off, business managers have some clear advantages over their technical counterparts.  They

• Appreciate the severity of deadlines
• Base loyalties on the individual rather than the position
• Can speak for the customer

But, because they’re not “part of the team,” they frequently introduce new problems on a scale  larger than the technical managers we saw last time.  They fall into a handful of categories.

• Poor Specification
• Mistrust
• Over-modeling

The specification problem stems from the fact that business people and technical people tend not to share substantial language.  When most people talk about management, this is where they focus most of the time:  Ensuring that everybody communicates effectively.

Because of the difficulty in communicating ideas as activities, trust erodes on both sides.  The workers avoid dealing with the manager because “he just doesn’t understand,” diverging further from the goals of the project.  Likewise, the manager pushes the team into draconian workflow, where everybody needs to clear actions and submit an unending series of progress reports.

Lastly, we all tend to focus on what we’re worst at.  So, when a business-side manager does involve himself in the process, they’ll often obsess over details and want every last issue resolved before anybody gets to work.  While this sounds like an exciting way to work, it’s usually a waste of time to, for example, explain how many nails will be used to hang panelling or how the Java runtime sorts its arrays.  They’ll often question things out of everybody’s control, delaying everything.

Like the technical manager, everything will get done.  But it frequently feels as if it’s in spite of leadership rather than because of it.

Now, next week, I’ll continue discussing the better comments I’ve gotten from Nayar’s issues with American graduates.  After that, I’ll return to this topic to sort of wrap things up (for now) by talking about what good management tends to be about (and, unsurprisingly, how eManagr frees you up from dealing with a lot of it–we do have a service to sell, after all).

Meanwhile, in anticipation of adding Twitter to our communications repertoire, some of  you have noticed that these Monday posts are now joined by a Thursday afternoon Twitter roundup.  It’s experimental.  I doubt the team here will Tweet live updates except possibly some tests.  On the other hand, we are experimenting with automatic features that may interact with Twitter.

If you’re interested in seeing it as soon as it happens, obviously watch this space and follow @emanagr.

Tags: Management, Series

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 12:00 and is filed under Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.