Management Blues
So, for a long, long time, I didn’t have a very high opinion of managers. Mostly because my expectation was that they would lead, whereas in reality they seemed to spend most of their time administrating!
This bothered me, because for a change initiative to be successful, you need leaders and not administrators. However, with time I came to appreciate that managers were often a victim of circumstance. They were raised in a company culture to behave a certain way: to play by the rules of the game, no matter how inane they might be. (Most prevalent in Laloux’s red organisations.) Slowly I began to realise that they had their own needs and expectations to fulfill. This understanding let me empathise more with managers – but also to evaluate more quickly the chances of success, based on a given manager’s willingness to change their own habits.