Well, it’s been a year now since I started this blog. I thought I should commemorate the occasion by writing something deep and reflective. The problem is, I’m not very good at deep and reflective. So, you’re stuck with this post instead.
A close friend of mine used to call me Mr. Spock, a nickname I was both proud of and resentful of. I was pleased that my friend thought me logical, efficient, direct, and striving for optimization, all like Mr. Spock. I was a bit bothered that he presumably also thought me lacking of emotions, the other defining characteristic of Mr. Spock.
I realized, though, that like Mr. Spock, I grew up thinking that my feelings and emotions merely got in the way of getting things done. (That my personal focus was/is on getting stuff done and not on feeling good, or making meaningful bonds with other people, etc., is another interesting note that will have to wait for some other post- maybe this blog’s second anniversary!) If something had to get done, it didn’t really matter what I thought of about it – it still had to get done. What I came to realize, perhaps intuitively, and perhaps as a mechanism to keep the focus off me, was that the feelings and emotions of other people did matter to them getting things done. If I wanted to do things that involved more than just me, I had to take the feelings, emotions, desires, and needs of others into account.
I started learning about what was important to others completely unaware of what I was doing. For one thing, focusing on other people kept them from focusing on me. I’ve always done things like ask my barber how she got started cutting hair, how she decided this is what she wanted to do, how she handles doing a hair cut the customer requests, but which she doesn’t like, …. I didn’t consciously teach myself to ask questions like these – it was just part of who I was. People love to talk about themselves, and it helped me in that I didn’t have to.
Later on I realized these sorts of questions, and the insights they offer, are exactly some of the keys I needed to have to be a better manager. Strangely enough, not everyone is like me, so if I’m going to get the best out of people, I have to understand their needs and desires. I have to be sensitive to their feelings and moods. I can’t treat them as chess pieces to be placed on the board in a winning position if they don’t want to be there.
There wasn’t really a particular day or moment when I realized these things; as I said before, I found myself naturally doing some of them way before I ended up managing people and projects. But I will say that as I gradually learned to pro-actively use this approach as a regular way of interacting with people, I became much more effective. (I also learned to build better relationships with people. Imagine that.)
Simple concept, really- learn what people want and find ways to help and enable them to get it.
Management, though, is full of simple concepts, yet we don’t always follow them. The tradition hierarchy of executive privilege, need to know information, top-down decision making, and etc., all violate these simple concepts. Yet they have often been so instilled into our consciousness of what management is, that we can all too easily forget about the people side of management, and we end up blindly following these rather unnatural techniques of the past.
So, part of my reason for writing this blog has turned out to be to remind myself of these obvious tenets of people and project management. And like most things I do, if I can save others time by offering something I’ve done, then the return for my time spent has increased and I’ve made Mr. Spock proud by being even more efficient.
While this blog is helping Scot be more like Mr. Spock in terms of optimization and efficiency, he’s still working on distancing himself from Mr. Spock’s dry, emotionless nature. His 8-month old daughter is certainly helping in this regards and although he hopes she grows up to know and love Mr. Spock, he hopes she doesn’t completely identify him with Daddy.