Puppet vs. Puppeteer
I had coffee with Dr. Skippy this morning which always gets me thinking. While talking about how our motivation plays into how we behave at work I got thinking about how bizarre our philosophy is when it comes to promoting people.
Basically, you do a great job as an individual contributor you are rewarded with more responsibility until ultimately you are overseeing a bunch of people.
From puppet to puppeteer. How can we possibly think that being a good puppet means that we’ll be a good puppet master?
Switching metaphors, I like looking at sports because things are relatively simple, transparent and the stakes are ‘enormous.’
Only eight of the thirty baseball teams have managers who were all-stars in their playing days. With the possible exception of Joe Torre, there isn’t much chance of any of those guys being mistaken for a Hall of Fame player.
The old axe in baseball is that good players don’t make good managers. The reason given is that the skills needed to succeed came naturally so explaining how you perform a task was difficult. While I think there is some truth to that the biggest reason is that one has nothing to do with the other. The skills to succeed in each are completely different.
Having the skills to perform on the field are different than knowing how all the pieces should be utilized. The most successful managers know how to motivate people. They are able to adapt their style to meet the person they are coaching.
Good managers care about people. That doesn’t mean they are softhearted it just means that they are aware of what is happening in the heads of their players.
In the working world, selflessness is often the flint that starts the fire.
If a manager who came up the ranks as an outstanding performer is motivated by receiving recognition via his own performance excellence he clearly won’t have the team’s best interests in mind.
If a manager has the people-centric traits and is intrinsically motivated by achieving performance excellence for the team you can bet that the team will have far more staying power, evolve to take advantage of everyone’s strengths and ultimately produce better results through the manager’s motivational skills.
I’m not naive enough to think we can change this any time soon, but we have to start evaluating managers on the softer skills. Gone should be the days where individual drive, excellence of thought or sterling silo’d performance get someone to the head of the line. Good performance should be rewarded and promoted, but it shouldn’t default to managing people.
Let’s get smarter about this and figure out how to separately assess and cultivate the people skills that will make for successful teams.
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