Secure managers share their own tools

Managers can be in a world of their own. While common employees do the work assigned them, managers are huddled in rooms making important decisions. Managers have all-day ‘off-site’ meetings to shape the future of the company; common employees meet to plan their week. Common employees are at their desks all day; managers are away from their desks, meeting with one another, reporting to their supervisors, and performing one-on-one meetings with their direct reports. The dramatically different work the typical manager performs on an average day from the common employee can build a divide between the leaders and those who follow them. This difference can lead to the belief that managers require fundamentally different tools from the common employee to accomplish their work. But wise managers seek to tear down this barrier between their work and the work of their direct reports. A favorable way for a manager to accomplish this is to equip her employees with the same tools she uses.

When managers maintain the lie that they are a special breed, with special tools not available to the common employee, they hinder the development of leaders within their organization. The longer this barrier remains, the less likely it will be for new leaders to rise to the surface and the more dependent the organization will be on hiring managers outside its walls. When the organization hires managers from outside, it reinforces the barrier between manager and employee and causes the pattern to reinforce itself. Organizations that operate in this way are diminished by this pattern because they are unable to equip their employees to manage their own work. The managers have secured their position by withholding their tools from the common employee, and now the organization is unable to function without their elite class of manager. Therefore, it is critical for an entrepreneur to beware insecurity in herself or in the managers she hires lest the pattern of dependency hampers the growth and effectiveness of her organization.

One surprising highlight of Blanchard and Johnson’s parable about the one-minute manager is the way every direct report interviewed believes that they are learning to be a one-minute manager themselves. While there is respect for the one who wears the manager title, the employees all see that the tools which the manager uses to govern his own work are the same which he uses to govern theirs, and that these tools are no secret but are available to them also and as effective for them as they are for their manager. Like the manager in the parable, I want to empower my future employees to perform at their best by sharing the skills that I have gained, and not to hoard these tools in order to maintain my position of leadership over them. This requires a level of security I can only envy right now because of the little practice I’ve had leading others, but as I seek to be a secure person I will be better able to freely share all that I have with my employees ((Blanchard)).

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