Otherwise known as 'your people', or 'your team', or sometimes simply as 'our team' depending upon how heirarchical your approach is. Setting aside the issue of how technology teams and heirarchies arrange themselves (another post another day) the thing that interests me is to what degree managers, circumstances or staff conspire to 'educate' managers to be better managers. Or to what degree they don't. And whether it is possible to improve the chance of that education happening, and the quality of the outcome.
I think we can start from the premise that while many managers are 'born to lead' most of us have had to learn 'along the way'. We learn (those 'qualities of a good manager' ) from our peers and through formal training. What interests me (and its usually only the non-obvious that interests me) is to what extent we (managers) learn from the people we are supposed to 'lead' or 'manage' and (as a slight detour) to what degree we use referential experience (that's to say 'borrow' from our experience outside our work life) and how well that works.
Talking about learning from your own people also makes wonder about the ways that might occur, whether its through people 'telling us directly' or 'leading by example' or though 'telling stories' that illuminate things for us even though the connection is 'not immediately obvious', or simply by things that they do (or refuse to do). It seems, as you consider the channels by which this learning might occur that you could increase the likelihood of it occurring (which is something I wasn't convinced of when I started this train of thought). Of course any of this requires that you are already 'sensitive' enough as a manager to notice when your staff defy you or shout at you, and humble enough to take it as a 'enlightenment opportunity' rather than a declaration of war.
I think I'll let this concept sit for a while and see what grows out of it, and thank my colleague for the perfect enlightenment moment out of which this concept grew.
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