The Jazz Improv Management Style
Or: Being
A Manager Doesn’t Mean You Have to be a Pain in the Ass, a Pushover,
Or a Stick
in the Mud
Prologue:
Let me be upfront with you on
something: I never went to business school.
I didn’t graduate from Wharton, or even have a Master’s Degree. What I do have is almost 20 years of experience
as Manager on five different continents.
I work for the Department of State, and while many people will say that
my management work won’t translate to the Private sector, I disagree. Working for one of the most underfunded
Departments in the U.S. Government, and having to deal with varied labor laws
all over the world gives me a unique perspective on how to manage, and shaped my
philosophy. But you’ll have to decide if
I’m right by reading the book and seeing if you agree. If you don’t that’s fine, but at least hear
me out.
What you can expect from this is
a thorough discussion of how I managed diverse groups of people, and maybe you
can find something you like in my experiences that you can use to improve
yourself as a Manager.
However, if you’re looking for
the Who moved the Seven Habits of Getting to Yes, then this book isn’t for
you. I’ve read many of those books, and they didn’t
click for me. I got some good
suggestions on how to improve my Management Style, but many of it felt
forced. Plus, in my opinion, not all of
those philosophies work on everybody. I
think you need a more varied approach in how you deal with your staff, and
sometimes a varied approach for each person.
Again, your mileage may vary, but that’s how I see Management.
I would like to thank all of the
people I’ve worked with all over the world. You’ve made me a great Manager, and
helped me rise through the Department of State.
I’d like to thank my friends who listened when I needed an ear, and gave
suggestions on how I could do better.
I’d also like to thank all of my supervisors, both good and bad. Watching you showed me how to improve
myself. I’d finally like to thank my
family for their support through it all. Of course my lovely wife, daughter,
son, brothers and sisters in law, nieces and nephews, and of course my
parents. My mother managed the house and
my dad managed the city we lived in, and I learned from both of them.
Chapter One: The Jazz Improv
Management Style: An Introduction.
Picture it: You’re a brand new
manager walking into the office to meet your team. They’ve been together for years, and you’ve
just arrived excited and full of energy and ideas on how to move the team
forward. How are you going to connect
with them? How do you find what
motivates them? What techniques do you
use so that you get the best work from them?
These are all questions you must
ask yourself when you arrive in a new position.
The answers vary depending on if you were a part of that company and are
just moving upwards, or if you have been brought in as leader from the
outside. What doesn’t vary is the need
to get results from your new team. As a
manager, you don’t have a large amount of time to “read in” or “ease into” the
job. You need to get up to speed quickly
and make things happen.
In this way, being in the
Department of State really helped hone my Management style. The majority of the department jobs are for
only one to three years, and so you really can’t ease your way into the
position. You must start working
immediately, and learn quickly what are the go to rewards for your staff, and
what areas you must avoid in order to keep your people happy and motivated. Here’s a list of things that I use to get
started when I arrived at a new post.
(I’ll go into each of these separately later on in more detail.)
1)
Set
the expectations you have for your staff immediately: Right off the bat, explain your expectations
for your new team. This includes
behaviors and anything else you need them to understand about how you do
business.
2)
Let
your staff know it’s ok to make mistakes: I’ve always told my staff that no one is
perfect. People make a mistake, that’s the nature of humanity. However, if you
don’t tell me about the mistake until it’s become a really big problem, then I
can’t help you out. I won’t get mad if
you discover the mistake and immediately come to me. I expect my staff to be thorough, but I know
sometimes you make a mistake in calculations, or you miss a decimal
somewhere. If you tell me immediately,
we can correct it and move forward. If I
find out from someone else, that’s when we have an issue.
3)
Let
them know you’ll stand up for them: I always say to my staff that if
they have remained polite throughout the interaction with either a customer or
my superior, that I will always stand by them.
And I’ve meant that. If your
staff know you’ll stand up for them, they will in turn stand up for you when
you ask them to work later or to do that one special project that pops up over
a long weekend that you need help with.
4)
Lead
by example: Never think that something is beneath you as a
Manager. You need to be able to show
your staff that you can work long hours with them, and wouldn’t ask them to do
something you wouldn’t do. I’ve dragged mail bags into consulates, folded up
chairs after events, help move bags of mulch from one place to another, and
loaded and unloaded luggage for VIP visits.
My staff knows I won’t be asking them to do something I wouldn’t do
myself, and so they won’t question when I task them to do something important.
5)
Get to
know your staff: It’s important to get to know your staff as fully as
possible. Know their names, their
birthdates, if they have kids, what sports they like or if they have special
interests. Following the law and not
being creepy about it, of course. This
then can be filed away for use when you need to motivate someone that isn’t
performing or to empathize with a subordinate.
I’ll discuss this more in a later chapter.
These are just some of the ways you as a manager can start to
build report with your staff. However,
you may not feel comfortable with my method.
Everyone is different. I want you
to do this then: think of when you arrived in your first position and met your
first supervisor. Were you scared? Were you confident in your abilities to do
the job the right way? What did your
manager do to reach out to you as a subordinate to make you feel more
comfortable? You can then use your past
experiences to reach out to your new subordinates to ensure they get as
comfortable with you as quickly as possible to reach your goals quicker.
Chapter 2: So you’re in charge.
What are your expectations?
Now you’ve done it.
You’ve applied for a Supervisory position and you got the job. Maybe you went to business school so you
think you’re ready for this. Or perhaps
you have been doing a job like it for some time and now is your time to
shine. Maybe you took a chance and
applied for the job, interviewed well, and had good interaction with the
interview panel and they took a chance on you.
Maybe your father was in the same fraternity as the owner of the
business and he’s paying back your pops for the time your dad talked the police
officer out of arresting the owner for using a fake ID back in the day. However you’ve done it, you’re now in charge. What are you going to do?
I’ve seen it worked many ways in my time working for the Department of
State. I’ve seen those who walk in an
immediately start re-arranging things; I’ve seen Managers who walked in and
immediately bowed down to the Alpha member of the team, using them as a barometer
of how everything works; I’ve seen Managers come in and lock themselves away in
their office. In my opinion, you need to set your
expectations for your staff immediately, so they understand what it is that you
want from them, and how you expect them to work. Setting expectations early gives your team an
immediate understanding of what you expect from them, and makes the transition
period easier and quicker.
