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As a Manager, be a Thought Partner
A term like ‘thought leader’ is largely bullshit, and while I understand how you might think ‘thought partner’ is the same degree of bullshit, it’s not. In fact, being a thought partner might be the best managerial move out there. We’ve got enough books and podcasts and landing pages and platforms about management now to choke an entire continent of horses to their “Lead with transparency!” deaths, but here’s the real series of issues:
- Management isn’t intuitive for many people: What gets you there isn’t what makes you good when you’re there.
- The goal of work often isn’t productivity: Rather, it’s pleasing the supposedly-right people, i.e. stakeholders.
- Usually, the best managers have the most “soft skills:” … but we crap on those because they’re not revenue-focused skills.
- A lot of managers simply do nothing all day except suck money out of the company: Sorry to break this to you.
That’s a complex four-way intersection. What happens at that intersection, usually? A lot of running around on low-priority tasks and unclear notions around “What makes a good manager?” That’s why we have all these books, podcasts, speakers, etc. This stuff isn’t that hard, but we love to over-complicate it in…
