EVEN if you’re blind, you can excel in management if you can visualize things that other people cannot see. That’s the key. Otherwise, you can’t be an excellent manager. “I never predict,” Peter Drucker was quoted by Forbes magazine. “I just look at the window and see what’s visible — but not yet seen” and appreciated.
That was one of the things that corporate executives are missing — to see visible things and make sense of them. Take gravity as an example. It can’t be seen but almost everyone understands it. Gravitational force is beneficial to mankind in many ways.
That’s how the Japanese invented the Karakuri in Japan’s olden times when they used puppets as a form of entertainment. Today, the Karakuri is applied in many industrial settings where factory operators use it to save electricity and reduce processing time, among others.
In fast-food restaurants, gravity is used in slanted aluminum plates to help slide down the customer’s order like hamburgers or fried chicken in a first in, first out line. Very simple. It’s visible, but how many of us can understand that?
Consider a different situation. This time, you’re occupying a key department manager position. Tony, one of those directly you, comes to your desk selling boxes of cookies for a fund-raising project by his Girl Scout daughter. The price is a bit stiff for those types of homemade cookies, but you don’t want to disappoint a colleague who has excelled in his job many times.
You don’t want to buy only one box as it could be misinterpreted as a mere courtesy. What would dictate you to come out with a wise decision? Maybe, you’ll take into account the number of co-workers you have during a coffee break, your pre-diabetic condition, and the amount of money you have in your wallet.
Work relationship
Unlike the Karakuri, it’s not easy to solve this dilemma with gravity. Suddenly, you’ve come to realize that work relationships could be expensive. The decision is to support your colleague’s daughter, but how many boxes would you buy? When you buy too many boxes of cookies, you may be misinterpreted as a show-off.
But imagine the amount of goodwill you’ll be making with Tony and his office colleagues. For Tony, the situation could propel him to work harder. For his colleagues, they may do the same thing. Sometime soon, they could bring in other goods for sale under the guise of a fund-raising project by another non-profit.
It’s almost obvious you can’t simply refuse Tony’s sales pitch. But what if Tony offers the cookies for free? Chances are, your work colleagues would shamelessly take their share. You as their boss may come in late in the queue to allow others to take their first bite. Somehow, you may be thinking of buying cola for everyone to help them drown the cookies into their system.
If not, return the favor the following day with several boxes of pizza while thanking everyone for their imaginary contribution to the department’s objectives. For you, it is not about making excuses to celebrate a milestone. What’s important is you want to cement a positive work relationship with people.
Quid pro quo
If there’s one thing that managers should understand is the invisible rules in work relations. One example is how to return a certain favor in a positive sense. You can’t find this in any provision of your company’s code of conduct or employee handbook. You may call it a quid pro quo or a reciprocal exchange of favor.
It is an important measure of how people make themselves important to others. Many times, in the past, I’ve been invited for lunch or dinner in some expensive restaurant by many of my former work colleagues. Always, it was a one-on-one situation and it was difficult to determine if the cost of our meals was to be charged to the company because their motivation was unclear.
I accepted the invite just the same to cement our professional relationship. But weeks after that, I would return the favor unmindful of the fact that I was charging it to my account. If you’ve been in a managerial job for at least 20 years, you should have learned all these invisible rules by now.
Albert Einstein was right: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that’s counted truly counts.”
Rey Elbo is a business consultant on human resources and total quality management. Contact him on Facebook, LinkedIn, X or email [email protected] or via https://reyelbo.com.
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