Years ago when I was a headhunter I recruited “John,” an inarticulate hardware engineer who wore his hair like Willie Nelson, had a beard streaked with gray, no-fashion clothes and was a bit vague about the world.

But John was brilliant and a genius in his work. He could look at a circuit design and know that it wouldn’t work, although he couldn’t always explain why.

The vp he worked for at the time ignored him, dismissed his opinion, built the circuits anyway and was shocked when they wouldn’t work.

All that changed when I stole him for a client whose focus was content, not looks or delivery.

“Jim” had no belief in intuition, but a deep belief in what he called ‘unconscious pattern recognition’, which, he said, was why John knew a bad design when he saw it.

John told me years later that Jim was the only person in his whole career who seemed to appreciate and value his skills.

According to Jim, in many ways John was a pain to manage, but his value to the product development effort more than off-set the irritation factor. He said that if managing people was easy managers wouldn’t be paid a premium.

And that brings us to the point I want to make.

I’m really tired of hearing managers constantly complaining about

• needing to hire ’self-starters’ so they can focus on building their leadership skills;
• the amount of time they spend settling team member disputes;
• how childish their people can be; and
• how the time spent hiring take them away from their ‘real’ work.

If you choose to become a manager you need to understand that

• no matter your level your people will always take precedence over everything else, because without people there is no company;
• people do become childish when thwarted or upset and that one reason that you make more money is that it costs more to hire a trained, adult baby-sitter than a teenager;
• few stars are born, rather they are the result of how they are managed; and
• if you don’t like the above three points you shouldn’t be a manager.

Management isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, so how do you know if you are/will be good at it?

Look in the mirror and answer this question:

Would you be happy and engaged if you reported to yourself?

Image credit: arte ram on sxc.hu

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 5:30 am and is filed under Business info, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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