Sivaram V. T.

Recently, I had to work with a manager who follows traditional style of people management. I could sense that he failed utterly in his management. So, I thought to write few words on people management in a business environment.

People management is not an easy job. There are 2 schools of thoughts in people management.
1] Task oriented
2] Relationship oriented

I am not gonna argue on which is the better style but youth prefer the 2nd one and hate the 1st one. It also depends on the context and your sub-ordinates.

The manager I had to face came to me 3/4 times a day asking about the status of the work. He never missed to exaggerate the complexity of the problems. I felt very difficult to work with him & I spent some time in analyzing the reason behind it. Here goes few of them.

1] He didn't want to take the bottom-line responsibility.
2] He had never given me confidence to take up the challenging task but he talks about the complexity of the problem many times a day. This induced fear in me which made me little ineffective towards the work.
3] I was not empowered to produce better result; Authority was not rightly delegated.
4] He didn't trust my abilities.

Thought to post these points here at least for my reference.

Are you a manager? Give your people little breathing space and trust them; You will see the visible difference!