What is the position of management in the company? Why some managers fail?
Different companies are doing different businesses on a completely different way. But many companies are losing money� because of lack of understanding of the position of management. If you follow books: "managers are entrusted by owners to do business as eyes and hands of company owners by� respecting� owners best interest". That said, what is the problem? Many managers do not know, care about� or� understand that statement. You will see a tendency of bureaucratization in every management and also transition of management to do their jobs as "union leaders". If anything will increase the value of staff you manage, do it but do not forget who you represent.
From my experience, common error in communication between owners or upper management and lower management is question as: "how you will fix xyz?".� That is not the question. The right question should be: "how you will use your team, create a lean and effective procedure following quality standards to resolve tasks management above you or/and owners put on your list to do?". No one want to answer that question and upper managers and owners will rarely ask that one even that is the only proper question for a manager. As I said in one of previous articles: to learn management best practices you have to be able to learn from your and other people's errors. First error is that managers are playing as "resources" and not managers. In the meeting, they have opinion about all professional topics and they will rarely or never ask their team to help them with something. Also, you will see micromanaging that promotes chaos, dissolves trust and introduces complete demotivation especially with senior staff and always ends with a failure.
The main focus of every team and every manager should be measurable productivity. In IT, a modern CIO� has to use architects to create framework for responsiveness, stability and scalability of products. He has to introduce culture of learning and adaptiveness. As every other manager he has to create a positive culture that will increase productivity and quality and that is his best contribution to company he is entrusted to manage. As manager is hired on basis of significant trust, hiring process of all staff members has to follow similar principles. If you are hiring senior position staff member, you have to be able to entrust some task and to rely of his/her decisions. If not, you hired junior staff member as a senior one or you hired wrong person for needed position.
In modern time, good companies' managers provide really impressive project plans, show dedication and good culture creation which promotes them to A-grade leaders. As a manager, you have to respect the feeling of owners that they are spending too much and that everything can be cheaper. You have to show them all benefits of your decisions and to emphasize ways how to use their money as an investment that brings benefits for the company. You have to have intensive communication on appropriate language with everyone. If you are CIO, you are called to help company in creating longterm strategy and goals in IT. Today, by following of TOGAF architectural principles: "IT is everyone's business". It influences all parts of the company so it has to be really reliable and enable company's growth. When you select best technologies for your business, do not forget that technology is not a goal, but only a path to achieve business goals.
To conclude: As a manager, you have to improve your management skills every day. You have to learn from others, both their successes and failures. After you complete one phase or some task, use some time to analyze what could be better done. If you are not able to find anything wrong, you will not be able to grow and improve your skills in time which leads to deterioration of managers value in time. Ask people for opinion, try to use all resources to improve your performance which will bring fruits both to you and to a� company you manage. Never forget: be focused to your team's productivity because in many cases that is the only visible and important outcome of your work!