Managers, Do You Even KNOW What Your Job Is?

Last week, I had my daughter Elle in the ER. She had appendicitis.

Two ERs, actaully.

We asked to be transferred from the first one after they insisted on doing an unnecessary procedure. The doctor there said that the pediatric surgeons wouldn’t touch her unless the procedure had been done. Thing was, this particular hospital had no pediatric surgeons—they were going to have to transfer us to a sister hospital for the appendectomy!

I was furious. Why hadn’t the hospital triaged us and gotten us to their sister hospital immediately? There was a two hour wait before we could do the procedure anyway—more than enough time to issue a transfer and get us to the other hospital.

(As it was, I asked to be transferred out of the hospital system altogether; my wife and I took our daughter to Children’s Memorial Hospital, where she got great care.)

The doctor had made a classic mistake that I see managers make all the time in business: she had acted like a technician rather than a manager. When she saw my daughter, she looked at the symptoms and started making decisions based on those… but what she should have done is looked at the situation and made decisions based on that.

I would hazard an unscientific guess that upwards of 80% or more of the managers I work with—and by managers I mean people who are responsible for leading other people—make similar mistakes.

Which is why they all need to read Super Staying Power.

The managers I work with are generally good people who want to do what’s right by their teams.

They’re just not properly trained.

Their companies have them sit through training session after training session, sure, but the content covered is the wrong stuff. They learn their MBTI quadrants, for instance, but not how to use them in the fog of daily life.

So like soldiers who have been taught about a weapon but not how to shoot while being shot at—or doctors who have been taught to respond to symptoms but not how to manage a busy ER—they are at a loss when called upon to act under pressure.

As a result, good managers too often revert to what’s comfortable. They don’t mean to, that’s just what happens when autopilot takes over. For managers who have deep technical expertise (like that ER doctor), autopilot can mean diving into the details. For others, it can mean slipping into fear-, ego-, or expedience-driven decision making.

Managers need to understand that their job is not just about efficiency. It’s more than delegating, running effective meetings or being good at time management. Managers’ jobs are social. Managers need to look at situations from an entirely different perspective than the doers around them, and make sure that the situation—on the whole—makes sense.

This is what drives career resilience for managers. This is what creates value. This is what people want. But how many of them actually do that?

Managers, is this what you’re offering?

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.