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June 10, 2004
So What Can I Do?
So, hopefully you’ve had a lot of useful information here, so lets look at what you can do when you go back to the office on Monday:- Get used to the idea that you’re trying to do something new and give yourself a bit of a break
- I’ve got a mighty great bookshelf filled with all the O’Reilly Perl books, books on Unix, C, XML, Java, PHP, Photoshop, Interactive TV, Flash, you name it. I have a whole *five* books on people management, and I suspect I’m actually above the norm on this. And do you know what? They were great, and I learned stuff about myself from them. Obviously you’ll quickly skip over the asset-stripper hatchet-man books, but there are lots of good inspiring reads out there. Well, I say that, but it doesn’t stop me – I started a new project the other day, and what did I buy? A book on UML. It has no bearing on the project whatsoever – I should have bought a book on how to manage Chinese-language website builds from the other side of the globe, but I panicked. Anyway, try to remember this where you can.
- Management is made of a bunch of learned skills – interpersonal skills, leadership, time management, philosophy etc. Take the time to learn them and improve them. Your staff *will* notice even incremental improvements.
- When you’re with a bunch of people in a similar position, try not to hark back to the olden days – compare notes on what’s working for them and you’ll get loads of pointers on things you want, and don’t want, to do.
- This is important – if you ask your staff what’s going wrong early enough, they will tell you nicely. If you pretend it’s all going swimmingly you’ll only find out when they either all leave, have screaming matches at you, or go to your boss to say you’re shit. Keep reviewing what they need you to be doing in this symbiotic relationship.
- If things aren’t working, change them. If you mess something up, apologise. Try things out – test your management as rigorously as you would a bit of software and you’ll reap great rewards.
- And if you behave like a mean-spirited selfish argumentative arse who turns up late for work, don’t expect to have a lovely cooperative punctual team...
So where does this leave us?
Posted by Tom Dolan at June 10, 2004 04:25 PM
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