Inspired Manager

After I got my first position in management at the bank where I was working, it dawned on me that although I now was a manager, I had no training or worse, idea, of what being a manager or a leader was.  I just knew that whatever that was, I was not it.   I was good at what I was doing before, but now I had a team to run and all I had was a sense of guilt and the examples of a few managers around me.

They were not good examples.

One day, I got an ad across my desk from the Harvard Business Review, and in the ad I noticed the phrase that ‘managers are made, not born’.  I heaved a sigh of relief.  I could learn to become better,  I didn’t have to be born to it.  There was still the vast gulf of what I did not know, and there wasn’t a whole lot of training available.  And what do I do in the meantime?  I still had a department to run.  One I was the ‘leader’ of.  As John Maxwell says, "the only thing a title can buy is a little time..." so I quickly had to decide how honest I was going to be.  Was I going to pretend I knew more than I did and take the risk of being exposed, or would I be honest and admit what I didn’t know and be thirsty for all the information and guidance I could find, wherever that would be?

Well, nothing is ever clear cut.  I did both, of course and had plenty of interesting outcomes as a result.  But more on that later.

There is an old saying that ‘when the pupil is ready, the teacher appears’.  So, throughout my career, my own leadership style has been informed by many diverse voices.  There were professors in the school where I got my MBA.  There were authors of great management books.  There were the colloquial sources.  Managers who did well.   More interestingly, managers who did poorly.  The New Yorker cartoons, which are indispensable.  Then, an eclectic assortment of people, voices and objects from all aspects of life, whether a movie marquis, someone I meet in the surf lineup, something totally out of left field.  Suddenly, I am inspired.  Then, just being who I am influences the culture at work.

One of the managers I did admire at the bank was a young executive who was over the retail operations of the bank.  In one of our brief meetings, he told me that afternoon he was following the M.B.W.A. plan.  This was one of those moments when I had to decide how honest I was going to be.  I knew about M.B.O. plans, which were trendy then.  Management by Objective, a team collaboration tool where you co-create goals with your employee.  But I hadn’t heard about M.B.W.A., so I asked him what it meant.  He said, “management by wandering around”.  He wandered around through the organization, having informal meetings conversations with staff and customers, seeing what came up.  Very powerful.  I later found out that this method was used as early as the 1940's at Hewlett Packard and popularized in 1980 by Tom Peters in his book In Search of Excellence.  Interestingly, today M.B.W.A. is being re-discovered as a relevant tool for organizations, especially those in states of change.

In coaching, we talk about ‘being’ with people, experiencing them as they are, without judgment.  Just taking them in.  Since leadership in the workplace is all about people, this is the most important step.  We can invent a new initiative and immortalize it in procedure and code, but if we aren’t reading the signals of those who the initiative affects, we might not get the results we want. 

So now I notice things.  Little things, big things.  I listen.  I look for patterns.  I ask, and I gain insight.  This informs my process of leading.  It opens possibilities for things to get done, perhaps in unconventional ways, but done.  This blog is about realizing the possibilities that can open up in the course of leading an inspired life.  I hope to challenge you to welcome inspiration into your life, your career and your management style and so to transform your own workplace environment.