The other day, over lunch, a friend recounted how her boss was just like the manager from the movie Office Space. After a few stories of cubicle horror related to said manager, she looked up at me and asked,
“Am I an idiot? Or did something I did in this or a previous life make me deserve this?”
I didn't know what to say, other than that no one deserves to have a bad manager (well, almost no one).
Certainly this friend, who is bright, hard working, and fun, doesn't deserve one. But unfortunately there is a normal distribution of manager quality, and many people with the job title of manager don't quite rise to the challenges of the role.
It's often not their fault; sometimes they've just never had a good manager themselves to model after. Then again, other times they've just focused on the wrong things.
What follows is some advice for managers on how to manage people, especially talented people. I worked for nine years at Microsoft, sometimes managing projects, sometimes managing people, but always with a manager above me.
I think I'm smart, but many of the people who have worked for me definitely were.
Over the years I've experienced many mistakes and successes in both how I was managed, and how I managed others. What follows is a short distillation of some of what I've learned.
There's no one way to manage people, but there are some approaches that I think
most good managers share.
