Corporate Cruelty

Corporate Cruelty

The best engineer might make the worst manager. The best manager might make the worst engineer. The best sales person may be the last person on earth you’d hire for the sales managers job. The best doctor doesn’t run the hospital. Management is a job. A set of skills vastly different to any other. To be good at it is a gift, but not everyone is born to manage, all day every day.

Wrong people in wrong jobs causes domestic breakdowns, social violence, office politics and personal health breakdown. Business’s that demand high levels of management skill from their best technical or creative people are demanding blood out of a stone and should be held accountable for it.

The best sales person might ask to become a sales manager, because for them, this is their only path to leadership. They might look at the company hierarchy and see that the only way forward is either up or out. So, like most, they choose up. But management is different to sales and no matter how many training programs or MBA’s a person gets, there are certain people who are just not suited to the task.

Personnel consultants have no idea. Don’t rely on a staffing agency to be able to determine the sustainable managerial qualities of a person. They are as vulnerable to the smoke and mirrors game of endorsements, testimonials and references as you.

The key here is to understand the differences between your expectations of how a job will be done, the individuals expectations of how they would do the job, the needs of the job and the leadership required to support a team. Four factors and even then, the story is not finished. What if, the technical skill, the experience and the capacity of the individual you are considering for a job are perfect? Is that it?

If you trained an elephant to jump through a hoop, would you expect the elephant to do it all day, and last the distance. Cruelty to animals is prevented by law. Cruelty to humans is endorsed by business. Wrong people in wrong jobs, is as cruel to the individual as any other breach of human rights. We are just not sophisticated enough to see it yet.

Self management means knowing your constitution. Built for speed? Build to lead? Built to create? Built to Engineer. Built to manage. Management is, without doubt a career, and doing it well demands a series of capacities that are particular to a certain group of people.

To get around this we must divide management up into its component parts.

Leadership
Organization
Communication
Planning
Visioning
Motivating
Accounting
Coaching

All people can do all of these elements. All people cannot do all of these elements for long periods of time. So, some management jobs are 99% planning and 1% the rest. Or some management jobs are 99% leadership, communication and motivation and 1% the rest.

So, instead of dividing jobs into generic categories like “Sales Manager” you are far better off to divide jobs into percentages of the above categories. Then, you know the sustainable strength you need from a person.

A high coaching percentage will eliminate fire and air people. A high visioning percentage will eliminate earth people. The key here is to understand that everyone can do every task. The only real question is sustainability. For how long can a person do a certain element of the management role?

Cruelty to animals is banned. Cruelty to humans is not. Putting people in the wrong job, affects their health, family, relationship, happiness and ultimately their spiritual core. Both employee and employer need to be conscious of the pitfalls of “I can do anything: mindsets.

Live with Spirit

Chris