A working definition of “line management”: letting people screw things up on your behalf.
Think about it. Why are you the team boss? Because you are superior to them, obviously. So are they going to do the job as well as you would? Well maybe, possibly better actually. Are they going to do the job in such as way as to ensure your success lies at the heart of their work? It ain’t necessarily so. Because they don’t, in general, understand that this is the main objective of their activities. And apart from exceptionally valuable staff (see “dependents”), you can hardly explain this to them.
Therein lies the problem. These people are dangerous and need to be contained. Staff can be divided into a number of types and each requires a different containment strategy.
The objective of each containment strategy is twofold:
A. maximise the time your staff spend on promoting your image and generally looking after number one (i.e. you)
B. minimise the chances of your staff doing anything that would reflect negatively on your image
Since it is usually the latter that causes the problems, some effort has to go into limiting their potential to cause damage. We'll now have a look at each type of staff and consider how to best contain them:
The objective of each containment strategy is twofold:
A. maximise the time your staff spend on promoting your image and generally looking after number one (i.e. you)
B. minimise the chances of your staff doing anything that would reflect negatively on your image
Since it is usually the latter that causes the problems, some effort has to go into limiting their potential to cause damage. We'll now have a look at each type of staff and consider how to best contain them:
- Extension staff
- Inferior staff
- Minion staff
- Specialist staff
- Loyalist staff (who come in two subtypes):
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