Why We Have Management

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As a Program Manager I sometimes speculate, analyze, and answer the question “why the hell do we have managers?”  Admittedly that question is usually “why the hell do we have this manager,” but people tend to tar us all with the same brush.

Management is a skillset like anything else, but here’s the thing – we’re all managers.  It’s just what we’re able to effectively manage.

Some people have the knowledge and intensity to write a program, others can lead and perform in a surgical team, others can guide a company.  All of that is management – even if you’re managing yourself (though sadly some people can’t manage that).  We’re all managers.

It’s just that some of us have the skill, perspective, and ability to manage people and organizations.  Not everyone can do it.  For that matter, some people who could manage a team couldn’t manage writing a book or managing a department.  We’ve got different management abilities – some of us just end up making a profession of it.

So we need managers – good managers – like we need anyone else.  I find looking at it this way gives a useful and true perspective.

So I don’t think less of people who aren’t managers, nor do I think everyone with the title is necessary good at it.

But necessary?  Yes.  Ask yourself how you organize things in your career, and what would happen if you weren’t there.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Offense, Defense, Whyfense: How We Got To The Defensive Job Search

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Last Column I put out the theory that there’s Offensive and Defensive job searches, and we may want to focus more on “offense” and active career planning and pursuit.  This begs the question – if my theory is correct (let’s assume I am of course) then how did we end up in a state where there was so much defensive job searching – or when it became such a bad idea.

First I think that people have often played defensive with their jobs because that’s where the money is.  There’s an inherently conservative approach to where the cash-flow is.

Secondly, I think for years (but not the last 20 or so) that people often didn’t worry career-wise as much as they do now.  Paths were more defined.  Companies had promotion systems.  The economy hadn’t been ruined by morons.

Third, though I feel that people got more “careerist” 20-30 years ago, more aggressive (coinciding non-coincidentally with globalization, the tech booms, and ideas about economic ownership), this didn’t last a long time.  I think people need to be more “On Offense” in careers, but the idea we’re all Internet-dot-bomb era super-go-getters who lapsed is terribly wrong.

Fourth, then we had repeated economic meltdowns all engineered by various “go-getters” who were unethical, greedy, and ignorant.  Also, probably ugly.  Anyway, you then had people playing Defense on careers because we kept having dot-bomb meltdowns, economic collapses, and of course finally the big ol’ financial meltdown.

Of course people play Defense a lot – they always have, they didn’t have to in a lot of cases, and any era of super-careerist go-getterism was short and got wiped out by the big economy-go-booms of the last decade or so.

So now we’ve got to play more Offense and I don’t think the “cultural infrastructure” is really there for it.  But it’s time – we don’t have much choice, and I think more active engagement may let us solve the problems.

Kind of makes me wonder if we’d had more people on Career Offensive if they’d have stopped some of these problems – and how many aggressive people actually helped cause them . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

The Truth Of Meetings

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Meetings seem to be the bane of most businesses.  And employees.  And people.  I judge this by what people tell me, and by my own experiences of slowly fading out as I sat through a meeting that had no reason to be.

Of course meetings are necessary.  I find them useful to resolve conflicts or sign off on agreed-on things, but why do people schedule so many meetings?

I find meetings are usually held when other things don’t work.  Meetings are treated as the duct tape of management.  The greatest reason for these meetings is to tell people stuff, so meetings are often done because statuses and status reports aren’t clear or communicated.

Of course sometimes you don’t even need the status reports, but people make them anyway.  Long, pointless, complex, unneeded, too short – we’ve all seen bad status reports.

Of course status reports are needed when simple communication isn’t enough.  Sometimes that’s the truth – and sometimes people just communicate poorly.

So really – too many meetings are often due to people just not talking to each other.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.