Information Technology Dark Side

A while back I blogged about questions you should ask your potential employer that reveal what it’s really like to work at the company. Lately I’ve been thinking about the kinds of qualities I would like in a manager. I’ve broken them down into a few categories:

Need to Control

Ability to Facilitate

Ability to Resolve

Ability to Judge

Need to Control
I have a hard time playing well with a manager who has a strong need to control. I try to find one who is comfortable letting other people contribute without his fingers all over their work. This can be tough – no one will readily admit to being a controller in an interview if you ask them if they are a control freak. I try to ask challenging questions, sometimes posing unorthodox situations to them to see how they respond.

Ability to Facilitate
Can the manager take a group of smart people with different opinions and goals, sit down with them, and work out a solution to a problem that everyone can support? Can he talk a frustrated co-worker “down from the ledge” in a moment of crisis? This is facilitation. Every manager should be good at it. If they’re not, they should be developing a plan to get good at it.

Ability to Resolve
Can a manager solve problems? Can he resolve issues between people? Can he help a project sponsor understand why their project will take six weeks instead of the one week they want it to take? Can he turn chaos into order, and crisis into a plan? This is a manager who knows how to resolve problems.

Ability to Judge
I like to think of this as the Solomon skill. Can a manager tell the difference between crap and gold? If someone paints a turd blue and puts it on a plate does he think it is blueberry pie? When co-workers start pointing the finger at each other after a failure, can he figure out what really happened? Can he tell his most productive worker from his least? Judgment is born of experience, intelligence, and observation. Few people have great judgment. More have decent judgment. Most are wrong as often as they are right.

I’d welcome suggestions for testing a manager’s abilities in these areas without letting them know they’re being tested. Just post them as comments here.

Dave

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