Brilliant Manager, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 8

Managing

your

organisation

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A confession

U

ntil this point in the book I think I can reasonably claim

I have ‘practised what I am preaching’. In this chapter I

am suggesting that you ‘do as I say, not as I did’. Putting

a positive spin on the situation, I am offering you the hard-won

experience of many a battle-scarred manager.

Managing your managers

Do not get emotional

No matter how stupid, demotivating, contradictory and small-

minded you think your managers are – STAY CALM. If you get

emotional, you are dead. The problem is that if you are good at

your job you are likely to be passionate about it, and in dealing

with the rest of your organisation you have to remain cool and

cerebral.

In most organisations your bosses will be middle managers. You

need to understand that middle managers inhabit a world that

is considerably more surreal than any created by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Most middle managers know little more than you do about the

strategic direction of your organisation and spend their entire

lives trying to satisfy the magic processes spun by the wizards

from head office. Do not get angry with them, it is probably not

their fault. Also remember that, like most people who practise

the black arts, they can be very dangerous.

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166 brilliant manager

Never threaten people’s authority

The ‘powers that be’ will not accept explicit threats to their

authority, so you need to achieve your objectives without any

crude confrontations.

Good teams are, by their nature, threatening

One of the most depressing facts about being a small team

within a larger organisation is that the better your team does, the

more it will threaten other people and teams in the organisation.

The only way to tackle this is to go beyond the mere avoidance

of threatening behaviour and to actually be friendly to those who

implicitly feel threatened. The easiest way to do this is to try to

get them to feel part of your success. Seek advice and help from

people and teams who may feel threatened.

Never, ever, threaten to resign

Just as I advise that you should not give in to threats from your

key staff, I think that any sensible organisation should accept

Do not get emotional

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Managing your organisation 167

your offer of resignation. Threatening to resign is never the way

to handle a conflict.

It is possible that you will be put in a position that is completely

untenable, in which case you may have to resign. If you are

unlucky enough to find yourself in this situation, just go quietly.

Cock-ups are more common than conspiracies

It is very easy to convince yourself that the organisation is out

to get you and your team. It is my experience that cock-ups are

far more common than conspiracies. Communication within

organisations is usually pretty awful. When you start seeing con-

spiracies behind every tree, it is best to go and have a chat with

your boss, or whoever you think is conspiring. I suggest you go

in thinking the best . . . it’s probably just normal organisational

incompetence!

It is also important to keep pointing out this viewpoint to your

team. There are bound to be plenty of conspiracy theorists

in your team. It is important that you provide a calming

influence to your team, because

the mood will tend to be anti-

establishment. Middle managers,

personnel managers, accountants,

lawyers et al. tend not to be bad people; they are usually doing

their best under very difficult circumstances. It is important that

you try to be tolerant yourself, and try to imbue that tolerance

in the team.

Do not fight battles you cannot win or are not worth the effort

Your team will tend to see every action of ‘the system’ as an

attempt to destroy the team’s value. There will occasionally

be genuine threats that you have to avert by the more subtle

methods I outline below. There will, however, be many issues

that you either cannot win or which are not worth the effort to

fight. As with so many things, there are only a few things you

the mood will tend to be

anti-establishment

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