Don’t Be a Bad Manager
In these blog posts it is required of us students to analyze another person’s blog post that coincides with our own point of view. When looking to achieve this task I stumbled upon a blog post by Jason Fried entitled “On being a bad manager.” The first thing that stuck out about this article was the title. The author created an enticing topic about how to not be a bad manager instead of the more classic approach of telling the reader how to be a good manager. I used this tactic of his to create a hopefully enticing title of my own.
Fried initially brings up the question of “why is it so easy to be a bad manager?” This is an important question to recognize when in a managerial position to understand how to not be a bad manager in future situations. Fried brings up an interesting point around managing and practice. His theory is that it is easy to get better at things such as sports or playing instruments through planned reps and practice. Managing, on the other hand, has no room for trial and error with practice. This is why it is so easy to be a bad manager, because if you make one mistake it could be detrimental to all the workers associated.
It also comes into play where when a professional athlete practices their sport every day for 5, 10, 15 years in a row, they progressively get better. However when someone gets promoted to manager it is usually because they did a different job for so long that they are now ready for a new, more important and completely different job. This places this new employee in a tough situation, having no real experience in a managerial position before. So only when the employee gets placed into this brand new job is when they can truly start to become one of the good managers.
Overall, Fried is trying to iterate how easy it is to be a bad manager usually do to the lack of experience in the position. Now recognizing this, I will apply this to my idea of leadership to understand that when I am first starting out managing a company, I may not be the best right away. It is important to identify what you are doing wrong and get better at it, this will be the only way to improve as a leader. In all things, the failures one will make would hopefully shape that person into something better than they were before. The same goes with managing, you just have less of a threshold for failure, so good luck!
Fried, J. (2017, August 10). On being a bad manager. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from https://m.signalvnoise.com/on-being-a-bad-manager-e56e1fb3d9dc
