"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Tim Watts writes:
On 22/04/15 02:24, MM wrote:

Gonna have another stab at sleeping now...

Is the right answer

Having read this sub-thread, I feel very lucky to have had a number of
very good managers in my career (not all, but many of them), and I believe
I have been a good manager myself, learning from the better ones, and also
from the bad ones (what not to do;-).

A good manager is a leader whose job is to get the best from the team,

That's the theory, anyway. In reality its nothing like that.

understanding what drives each team member, what hinders them,

Very few can do anything like that. Few even understand that about
themselves.

and as far as is possible/reasonable, pushing the former

Very few have any real effect on anyone else like that.

and removing the latter.

Easier said than done.

As a manager, you should be on sufficently familiar terms
that your staff can share their issues with you, and you
should know what their longer term aims are,

Impossible when most don't even have any idea about that themselves.

and providing it matches the company's direction,
you can help them move towards those,

In theory. In practice that is hardly ever possible.

even if it means losing someone good from your
team to another role in the company (which is
always better than losing them to a competitor).

If you get an unexpected resignation, then you
weren't working well enough with that staff member.

That is just plain wrong. That unexpected resignation may
well have been because a better job has come up somewhere
else and the individual who decided to change jobs may well
have not even been aware that that was going to happen, so
there is no way that their manager is ever going to know that
no matter how good the manager is. In spades with an important
change in the individual's personal circumstances like say a spouse
has just be diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical problem
and that individual has decided to resign for that reason, so they
can assist the spouse when they need that assistance, while they
are still around.

Equally, if you get to an appraisal, there shouldn't be any
surprises on either side - everything mentioned should
have been covered in regular conversations and/or
regular 1-2-1s in the period since the last appraisal.

Real life isn't that predictable, **** happens.

It's also where the staff member gets a commitment from the
company on things like training needed over the following year.

That assumes that training is needed. It isn't for most of us.

Your manager rarely has complete control of compensation (pay,
bonuses, etc), and the appraisal is used to justify compensation
changes higher up the management and to HR, where they are
not going to know the staff member as well, if at all.

In practice not all that much of that happens in the real world.

(It's also necessary to protect companies from discrimination
cases which staff might bring if they think they have been
unfairly treated, if this was not the case.)

Companies which take management leadership seriously will usually
have some type of 360 degree appraisal system, where the staff also
appraise their manager via some type of anonymous or protected
feedback (and sometimes also their manager's manager).

Only in the worst of the bull**** brigade operations.

A poor manager/leader can seriously reduce the productivity
of whole teams, and that is an enormous unnecessary cost for
a company - indeed it is often the cause for a company to fail.

Yes, but again it's a lot easier said than done to avoid that happening.