RE: manager credibility

["Bill Swallow" <wswallow -at- nycap -dot- rr -dot- com>]

::: > Thanks for paraphrasing me. :) Except for that last 
::: part... You confused
::: > me
::: > there. It's never confusing to be able to identify a leader.
::: 
::: I disagree. It is confusing to employees when the source of 
::: organizational 
::: vision (put a man on Mars, broad band for everyone by 2007, 
::: peace in our time, 
::: a model democracy in the Middle East, etc.)is the same 
::: source directing the 
::: assembly of a widget. They are fundamentally different 
::: activities, and mixing 
::: them is not recommended. Organizational vision and 
::: organizational reality are 
::: two very different things. The concept is easier to grasp 
::: in Russian, which has 
::: a particular syntactic construction used for "futures that 
::: are likely," as 
::: opposed to "futures that would be nice, but probably won't happen." 

OK, we'll agree to disagree then. :)

Leadership and management qualities are mutually exclusive bundles of many
small but useful and effective bits of wisdom. Anyone, no matter their
title, can possess any ammount of either. Strong leaders *can* be strong
managers, or can completely suck at management. Strong managers can be great
leaders, and can also not have what it takes to lead a SME to a code review
(ba-dum-ching!). Seriously, they are mutually exclusive talents. Usually you
never see someone highly proficient in one and completely lacking in the
other; it's usually a 70/30 split somehow. Think of it as the blending of
the corporeal and the ethereal. ;)

Hey, anyone got a lava lamp?

::: > By the same token, I can easily
::: > generalize that people who share your viewpoint of managers are
::: > narrow-minded and bitter, and would not make good 
::: employees because
::: > they
::: > have conditioned themselves to distrust anyone within a 
::: position of
::: > authority.
::: If anything, the opposite is true. I distrust incompetents 
::: maintained in 
::: positions of authority because they have successfully 
::: manipulated superiors 
::: into believing they are competent. It isn't personal. 

I can understand your viewpoint, but to stretch it over all of managementdom
is a bit much, don't you think?

::: It is always easier to pigeonhole something than it is to 
::: think critically 
::: about it. Without invoking Korzybski, the basic process is 
::: that once a person 
::: can attach a label to something, he or she can stop 
::: thinking about it, and 
::: respond to the label as if it were the thing labeled. In 
::: some cases it is 
::: useful. but not in managing virtual teams. Probably not 
::: even in management of 
::: any type, because it both creates and fosters an 
::: impoverished response set to 
::: complex events. 

Well, we agree there. ;)

Bill Swallow
wswallow "at" nycap "dot" rr "dot" com 



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