I know at least three things I am not good at and which irritate me when I attempt them.
- Coding
- Driving
- Reading commercial contracts for longer than an hour.
I therefore ensure that I never do any of these things. But here is the thing that really irritates me in the workplace – people doing things they are not good at. Like managing other people.
Managing other people is a sacred duty – it is an act of the divine. As a people leader, you help shape and bring meaning to a person’s life – where the meaning comes from being able to live life they way they want to, or need to.
So, how do many people leaders carry out this sacred duty? From my observations, really poorly. Many people are not cut out to be managers of human beings in the workplace. But these folks put up their hands up and choose to do this most crucial activity.
Why? Because they feel they can manage/lead other people or because they don’t see this as anything other than an administrative exercise, or it might be a status thing – or because someone decided that this person is skilled technically, so now let’s give them a group of human beings to manage (as though through osmosis, all people in that group will become better performers and clones of the original high (technical) performer.
And often, it’s the only way to get a promotion – you have to go on a people leader path. And so the sacred duty of helping others self actualise manifests as a prosaic task – executed without heart and nothing seraphic about it.
So what to do, people? Stop choosing to be people managers/leaders if you are rubbish at this. Or, get lessons. You can learn how to become a decent human being. From my experience, people who are decent humans make pretty good people leaders in the workplace. Oh, you can’t be the judge of whether you are a decent human being. This is for others to decide.