One side of becoming a manager is taking greater responsibility. You have to look at more and more things. You go higher and you become less connected with real work and start to create strategies, visions etc. You start to have people to do the work. He will develop that feature. She will resolve this issue with the user. He will manage support team. She will organize project management team. It’s easy. If you’re lucky or you’re a good recruiter they will do all those things and they will do that well.
The trap is that lose contact with reality. Not reality as a whole, but reality as it is seen by most of your people. You look higher and higher, but you forget to look, even get a glimpse, down there, where everyone’s eyes are pointed. It’s just below your radar.
When I think about all those surprised managers, when something went completely different way than they’d planned, usually the reason was forgetting about everyday people’s problems. A VP who lost all but one of his directors during a year. A director who dealt with constant rotation in his team. A manager who had a series of conflicts with other managers about “unimportant” things.
Great visions of future aren’t as important when it’s another time when you run out of coffee in the kitchen. Forging perfect strategy isn’t the key thing when people become frustrated with constant chaos in administration. Discussion about new product ideas shouldn’t be number one on to-do list, when people don’t trust management. I know it’s hard to see that kind of things from heights, but if they’re below radars of the management, radars should be reset.
Great successes start from great people. Keeping great people happy is one the most important of managers’ roles. Definitely the one which is most often forgotten.
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