How to Burn Your Staff?

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If you are ‘that-kind-of-manager,’ then you will must enjoy the following tips on how to burn your staff. And you do not have to worry about what other people would say or think about that, they just do not understand your style and how you think you are driving your staff to be big performers. And hey, you are ‘The-Manager,’ people have no right to question your ways of conducting business … and from there we start:

• Keep reminding your staff, and everyone around, that you are The Manager. If they are working as your subordinates, then they should better understand it very well because there are consequences (read the next tips). You can remind them of your superiority in various ways: in meetings (e.g. start the meeting with something like ‘as the manager, I have decided’), in phone calls (e.g. you can say something like ‘tell them to do it because the manager said so’), and in emails of course (e.g. send emails saying stuff like ‘I have noticed, as The Manager, that …’).
• Try to integrate some military practices into your style. Your requests should be treated as orders; do-first-ask-later kind of why (on the long run, they should be trained not to ask at all!).
• Do not share your strategy, your plans, or the company strategy with them. They do not have the mental capacity to deal with it.
• Take away these words from your dictionary and pretend that you do not understand them: overloading, logical arguments, and work/life balance!!
• Do not allow them to discuss or circulate modern management articles; this is a place of work, not a university. And they have to understand that your abilities and experience exceed all that academic mumbo-jumbo.
• Do not care much about processes nor scope of work. Let there be processes, but they should know that you have the power to overrule them whenever you like.
• From time to time, ask them to do illogical or irregular stuff. Lists of things nobody cares about, check ups that do not make sense and alike. By doing so you are training them on obedience. You do not have to explain yourself, remember the tip about military practices.
• Always, and I mean, all the time, give them a very tight time limits to deliver your requirements. If a certain study normally takes 3 days to accomplish, come at the last minuet and ask them to finish it before the end of the day.
• Keep the sense of urgency and every-thing-is-a-priority way of work. They should know that you do not care about them because there are always bigger picture that they do not, and cannot, see!

So … do you have any more tips to share with us?

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Let There Be Processes

I had the chance to be in a casual meeting with one of those big guys in one of Saudi companies. There came a discussion about companies’ strategic plans and work procedures. This gentleman said something that really startled me! Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to discuss that idea with him more throughly but to simply put his concept, it is something like : ‘let there be rules, respect them, but do not follow them!!’

Now in my humble understanding, whether it is Google, Apple, or Amazon, they all have some kind of business processes. There is no way a business would be able to conduct its daily activities or long term objectives without setting its work on a clear path … and that clear path is nothing but a group of processes.

[picapp align=”right” wrap=”true” link=”term=manager&iid=7281429″ src=”0/5/a/4/Closeup_of_a_9c00.jpg?adImageId=9909151&imageId=7281429″ width=”234″ height=”156″ /]However, processes should not be confused with bureaucratic-old-school kind of paper work and hundreds and hundreds of signatures. While such bureaucratic rules are always treated as if they are coming out of holy books, there is a room in modern processes to be flexible and they are always subject to modifications and enhancements.

In todays world, businesses are faced with tough challenges and frequently changing market rules. For that, it is necessary for organizations to have the ability to adapt, change course, and interact with their environment. This cannot be done by letting everybody working on his/her own without any kind of direction and guidance and, of course, it cannot happen by imposing rules that have been around for the past 50 years.

Even innovation and ‘thinking out of the box’ have their own rules that turn them into useful and practical models instead of wasted time, efforts, and resources.

I really hope that I misunderstood this big shot executive and hope that he really has some logical explanation to his strange idea, don’t you think?

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