Do we have good managers?

Do we have good managers?

By Tharindu Weerasinghe (MSc.Eng, BSc.Eng(Hons), MIEEE, AMIESL) The writer is a software engineer at a leading software company in Sri Lanka.

Sometimes you manage someone; sometimes you are managed by someone! If you are married and have kids, then you are a manager at home. [Here I mention as “a manager” but not as “the manager”, because your spouse is the other manager at home whether you like it or not…!] If you possess a managerial position in the organization that you work for, then you manage the employees who work under your management. If you are employed and you are not the CEO, then it is clearly obvious that you must report to your management, in other words, you are managed by them. Many administrators (both in government and private sector) have managerial responsibilities.  Many professions have various types of managerial responsibilities as well as capacities. Engineers, doctors, university administrators, professors, school principals and many other professionals get the opportunity to manage their subordinates at a certain level of their professions. So, it is very important these managers know how to be successful in managing people!

What is management? (According to Wikipedia)

Management can be regarded as the act of coordinating and organizing the efforts of people and their activities to accomplish the goals and objectives with the help of available resources efficiently and effectively. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization. [Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management]

Manager at work:

Management is not only about managing resources but it is about managing the human relationships. Management is an art, I would say, because it involves a lot of skills such as indentifying and differentiating various kinds of people, acting upon the situation, practicing patience, achieving goals as a team not as an individual, not allowing non qualified people get more opportunities in the team, and so on...

Everybody can’t be a good manager; on the other hand no one is a perfect manager because no one is a perfect man in this world. People do mistakes, but the more importantly people should learn from mistakes and try to avoid them in future. Anyways all managers should develop the art of management you should emphasize others that you are the manager!

In my opinion to be a successful manager, he or she must understand his or her team member’s mentalities, attitudes and also their pluses and minuses. By understanding the subordinates the manager can get the maximum out of them without any labor exploitation. One other important thing, when appointing a manager the higher management should consider the particular candidate’s family background. Don’t take me wrong. This is very important. Family background is not about caste and class but it is about how he/she manages his/her family… How he/she treat his spouse and children…If he/she is not married then how he/she treats parents and siblings. This is very important because if the candidate is not good at family management then how come they accept him/her to be a good manager at work? How can he/she understand the team member’s family problems? As far as my opinion is concerned, a good manager (at work) is a good manager at home! Born-in-home for Management should be HOME!

There are can be some managers who dreams only about their success. If I explain it in a lucid and palatable way, they focus on achieving goals by hook or by crook and like to be praised by the senior management. So they don’t consider their team members’ well-being and they don’t treat them as human beings! In such at atmosphere the team members are not happy with their manager. They work for the sake of survival not with desires. Due to bad managers work places become a hell for the team members or the subordinates.

Good managers give honest feedback to their team members regularly and seek for improvements. By giving honest and direct feedback to everyone in the team, he/she avoids the suspicions of favourations and partial behaviors in the minds of the team members. 

But the question: Does our socio-economic background produce managers who are not partial and honest? I have doubts on that. There can be managers who ill-treat their team members because of the fact that they criticize the manager for valid reasons. Instead of correcting themselves those managers might ill-treat the team members, may be by demoting, salary or bonus reductions and so on….It’s not ethical, you must bear honest criticisms of your team members and try to make yourself correct as you are perfectly all right with the praises of the team members for your good work! If a manager favors the subordinates who accompany him in the tavern, who give offers for shopping, who buy gifts for him/her then he/she is not a genuine manager but an opportunist!  

Manager at home:

Though you are not a manager at home, if you have dependents then you are a manager at home if not the manager at home! You must balance work-life to be a good manager at home. If you have a part of your office at home then you are not a good manager at home. If you forget your kids’ involvements in the kindergarten or at school then you are not a good manager but an irresponsible parent. If you forget your spouse needs. If you don’t organize your work and responsibilities at home then you are not a good manager at home and certainly not a candidate for a manager at work!

You are the manager of yourself:

You may not be a manager at work, you may not be a manager at home but yet you are a manager; that is of yourself. You need to plan your daily work, you need to organize you daily work, you need to control your feelings, actions, you need to seek for improvement of you self-every day; hence you become a manager of yourself automatically. Of course to be a manager of yourself you need to have a better understanding of the society. It can be true that you can’t be a manager of yourself when you are in your childhood where you need more parent attention, but when you are in your adolescence and youth then surely you must start building up a good inner manager. 

If you are a good manager of yourself, then you are a very good candidate to be a good manager at home, if you are a good manager at home then you are a capable manager at work!

By Tharindu Weerasinghe (MSc.Eng, BSc.Eng(Hons), MIEEE, AMIESL) The writer is a software engineer at a leading software company in Sri Lanka.