Successful managers are different from unsuccessful ones - and I think we've all seen the symptoms.  You've probably seen them, too.

This week my E-Zines – I publish two currently – are both about the difference between ‘doing things’ and ‘getting things done’.   In it I allude briefly to the differences between managers who succeed and those who somehow remain forever stuck in their careers.

The one major difference I’ve seen is that those who get ‘stuck’ seem to thing THEY are the ones who’s job it is to DO things.  Those who I’ve seen succeed have held a different philosophy:  They see themselves not as the doers; but as the catalyst charged with ‘getting things done!’

This doesn’t apply only to managers.  Some major league corporate CEOs have fallen prey to the same fixation, much to their detriment.  You can even look back at the U.S. Presidents over the past half century – the failures always seemed to be the ones who felt they had to DO everything, never realizing their need to micromanage was their worst enemy; and the ‘successes’ always seemed to be those who managed the ‘big picture’ – something business schools call ‘the view from the balcony’.

A recent Harvard Business Review article discussed this in terms of ‘diminishers’ vs ‘multipliers’.  You can guess which is which, but suffice to say ‘multipliers’ get things done through people, both internal and external.

My ezine articles mentioned a CEO I met many years ago, as well as a specific client who’s attitude was quite different.  You can make your own comparison between these two separate unrelated instances:

• The CEO of a failing newspaper:  (Coming up to me after a convention session) “Jim, I’d love to have you come in and train my people; but, I think I’d have some political problems if I did that.”
  
  
• My Ad Director client: (When I asked him about his CEO’s attitude about his bringing me in)  “Jim, my job isn’t to spend my time doing things.  “It’s my job to see they get done.  I see you as a resource.”   He was saying I was a ‘tool’ in his tool chest.  He was right.  He wanted me to train his people and be a resource for the ongoing coaching the line organization must do to make the training effective.
  
  

It isn’t hard to see who the ‘multiplier’ is.  In the meantime, the CEO was stuck – afraid of his middle managers’ attitude – or just as bad – the managers may have been afraid to look as though they weren’t doing their jobs.

This is my second blog post on this subject; but, it’s so central to effective management, I felt it was worth the effort.

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