Imagine a manager complaining: "Look, I am here from dawn to dusk. I do not mind being here, I like it. But all the people here are, pardon me, like children. They are absolutely helpless. I must decide every small thing for them. They come to me with such trivialities that they could and should solve themselves. And when they solve such a thing themselves, they do it so badly that I must take it from their hands and solve it for them again. That is weakening me terribly much. What if anything happened to me?”
If a situation like this occurs in your company, you should try to find out why it occurs. In his article on HRNews.cz, a Czech corporate sociologist Vojtěch Bednář explains that such a manager may be right. His subordinates could really been helpless like children. Every coin has, however, two sides and the other side of this coin is that he has not given them any possibility to behave independently.
This story is well known and well described in the management literature. Nevertheless, it happens all over again. What to do with such a manager? It would be neither useful to reduce his powers nor effective to force him to do anything.
It is, however, necessary to try to ensure that the manager will get what he lacks - trust in people. Then he can stop being a tyrant who rewards absolute obedience and punishes any hint of a self. Deprived of these bonds, he can become a mentor.
You can read the whole article below (see the "Information Source" link).
-kk-