Some people manage other persons and some people manage paper
Knowing and acknowledging your weaknesses helps you to improve
Albert Einstein said “We should take care not to make intellect our God; it has of course powerful muscles but no personality.”
First Impressions
Have you ever had a boss/manager that was so cold and unfriendly you found it difficult to approach them? You found it tiresome to be in their presence and the vibe they gave off felt like a trip to the Antarctic; beastly cold. My condolences if you did because working with these types of persons is not only hard but uncomfortable.
I first noticed a former manager was like this in one of my first training sessions with this person.
Training Wreck
It was like being taught by The Flash while he was on the run; lighting speed. Imagine seeing a train wreck happen right before you; painful and hard to watch but you can’t take your eyes off of it. That was how the manager trained.
Wanting to figure out if I was the problem I asked another participant who had been feverishly writing away the entire time if they understood anything in the session. The answer at first was an uproar of laughter and then a simple no. “So what were you writing?” I enquired. “I don’t know really, I just wrote what was said.”
All was not lost
Immediately I knew two things; this person had the knowledge but just did not know how to share it and secondly they were not a people person. These observations would prove to be correct over time.
The first duty of a leader which is to help everyone on their team harness skills to become exceptional was sorely missing from the managers’ repertoire. Remember the training session.
Knowing this information helped me understand early on why my enquires were met with blank stares and a general coldness. It helped me not take it personality and to come up with other ideas to obtain important information to get the job done. To the manager the team were like pieces of paper, pushed around the desks and discarded when its usefulness was no longer needed.
Personality traits of managers
In Bridgette Tasha Hyacinth’s book “The Future of Leadership, Rise of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence” she described the personality traits of managers by breaking them down into different categories.
My manager to me as coined by Hyacinth’s in her book was a Marionette. Bound by following orders, never standing up for the team, the manager was a mere puppet who exuded no loyalty to the employees. The managers cold personality only helped to solidify these characteristics.
Lessons Learned
I would be a liar if I said that I learned nothing from this manager because I learned a lot. Sometimes learning what not to do is a very powerful lesson. And by learning not what to do; I learned what to do.
I learned to embrace connecting with my co-workers and being someone that they could ask questions about the work we were doing. I learned to train others in the way that I wanted to be trained. I also learned to ask questions and rely on the strengths of my team because I understood we all essentially had the same goal.
