How to manage smart people

  The other day, over lunch, a friend recounted how her boss was just like the manager from the movie Office
Space. After a few stories of cubicle horror related to said manager, she looked up at me and asked: “Am I an idiot? Or did something I did in this or a previous life make me deserve this?” I didn’t know what to say, other than that no one deserves to have a bad manager (Well, almost no one). Certainly this friend, who is bright, hard working, and fun, doesn’t deserve one. But unfortunately there is a normal distribution of manager quality, and many people with the job title of manager don’t quite rise to the challenges of the role. It’s often not their fault: sometimes they’ve just never had a good manager themselves to model after. Then again other times they’ve just focused on the wrong things.

What follows is some advice for managers on how to manager people, especially talented people. I worked for nine years at Microsoft, sometimes managing projects, sometimes managing people, but always with a manager above me. I think I’m smart, but many of the people who have worked for me definitely were. Over the years I’ve experienced many mistakes and successes in both how I was managed, and how I managed others. There’s no one way to manage people, but there are some approaches that I think most good managers share.

Broadcast Your Desires

Do you hide your true desires from the world?

Do you pretend you want one thing while silently desiring something else?

For example, do you desire a new lover or playmate while giving potential partners the impression that you’d like to date them first?

Do you want to be earning a lot more money while broadcasting that you’re satisfied with your current career?

Are you making your true desires abundantly clear, or are you holding them inside while broadcasting an entirely different message to the world? Are you engaging in false advertising, either by broadcasting a false desire or by failing to broadcast your true desire?

Informative Speech

The whole point of giving an informative speech is to leave your audience with a feeling that they have learnt something. If you tell people what they already know you wont keep their attention for very long.

Putting together an informative speech doesnt necessarily mean that the speaked has something new to say. It can mean that the information is presented in a way that enables the audience to fully understand the meaning of concepts for the first time.

When preparing your outline you need to ask yourself, "what does my aidiance already know about this subject?" For example, if you are speaking to a group of third year computer science students about software you would not repeat basics that they already know.