There’s a place for the term, “manager”, but I don’t like what it’s come to mean. “To manage” has come to mean being responsible for processes, schedules, inventory, projects and people. One can manage most anything, but we should not be managing people.
I don’t want to be “managed”. I’m not a thing to be directed, changed and ordered about like some factory robot. I am a human and, as such, I need – and deserve – more than being handled in the same manner as an object or an idea.
A strange thing happens when one becomes a manager. He or she begins to see others as thing-doers, as job descriptions. I know what it feels like to be managed. I also know how poorly I’ve acted when managing others. It’s how our management culture is built. But frankly, I’ve seen better cultures in a petri dish. We need to change.
If you’ve not yet read 12: The Elements of Great Managing by Wagner and Harper, pick up a copy. The authors utilized Gallup’s resource of over 10 million employee and manager interviews to discover how to engage employees. It uses the language of management, but in my opinion, it has very little to do with managing. Of their 12 elements of great management, only one element has anything to do with “stuff”. All of the others are decidedly related to relationships.
10 million interviews. You wanna find a better sample?
The responsibility of today’s managers needs to be in the arena of managing relationships. I advocate thinking of yourself as a Relationships Manager first. Everything else should fall in at a distant second.
Things don’t respond. People do. And when the people in your organization flourish, the organization will flourish. It’s just not any more complicated than that.
Management of relationships doesn’t deal in numbers. It focuses on the ideal of caring about – and treating – people as people: encouragement, listening, friendship and relationships with coworkers. Relationship management discovers talents, it educates, empowers and allows. If you want to make an investment in the growth of your organization, check all the numbers, processes, inventories, outputs and project timelines you like. But those are all results of something else: what people do.
Change the culture. Manage relationships. When you think and act like a Relationships Manager, you will have primed the real engine of your organization’s growth: the people.
