Dilemmas of Practical Management

1. Introduction

If you want a solution, you will find a way.

If you don’t, you will find an excuse.

In our fast-paced world there are basically two types of managers:

Those who know there will be trouble and

those who suspect nothing... yet.

One of my goals with this book is to help you understand the complexity of management. After reading this, it might be easier to understand, while sitting on the company toilet nursing a headache, what is happening and what all these people want from you.

It is not meant to be a textbook because they teach enough about leadership in various courses. Practice - as we might expect - sometimes coincides with theory, and often it is completely different and much more complex. For example, the picture is perfectly clear both theoretically and statistically: in 90 percent of cases, this or that should be done. Life, on the other hand, shows that I am here in this particular and very unique situation. Not in a hundred or five hundred other situations, but in this one. I can't use statistics for this 90% of the time! There's no way to go halfway with a decision either, because there simply isn’t a golden path. So all we can do is, as the saying goes, take it or leave it!

I hope this book will complement what you have already learnt and it will help you understand advantageous and disadvantageous processes and effects as well as explain why management is so complicated. I also hope that it will give you plenty of wow! and yes, now I get it! moments while you read.

Management is like driving along the highway. Imagine cruising happily in your cool car. The two-lane road is empty, the weather is lovely, life is great, traffic is fine – so far. Then it suddenly starts snowing, and you notice a rather large number of cars in the distance. Half an hour later you are in a huge traffic jam.

You remember that you neglected having your car fitted with winter tires, and you have only yourself to blame for not having listened to the weather forecast and ignoring your GPS. Well, that sounds just like management. Life is wonderful… until it all crashes and something nasty rains heavily on our sunny parade.

Some people deal with leadership issues instinctively. They don’t bother with theory, just follow their inner voice and conscience. Are they the best? Or perhaps those who read a lot, and try to implement what they read? There is more to this. No matter how good we are at management, we might end up in an unsuitable position. A leader is like a seasoned sailor: he knows the river and knows where the water is treacherous. If you sail a lot, you will eventually get to know your river sufficiently. But are you sure you won’t sink some boats while learning? On the other hand, it is easy to sail on a tranquil lake; even a child can manage that. It doesn’t need a sailor. But a new, unfamiliar and unpredictable river might pose a challenge even to a seasoned sailor, unless he has sufficient knowledge. He will need a chart. Have you seen a sailor at work? If not, find one on YouTube, and watch. If a sailor messes up his navigation, there will be trouble; perhaps the ship will be damaged badly. So, if you want to be a good sailor, I mean manager, it’s best to read a lot and find out about charts. Don’t we all prefer new colleagues with practical experience as well as theoretical knowledge? So why would managers be the exceptions?

I am not trying to judge and point fingers at managers who might do it wrong; a job done at 60% can still be acceptable. This is the minimum percentage which still passes at an exam . But as you will see later, I believe this is not enough. I can help you avoid tricky situations and understand WHY things happen, before you get buried in the quicksand of questions. I would also like to give you an idea about the vast arsenal of a good manager, in case you, dear reader, haven’t come across this information before.

This book is also full of true stories. Little real-life stories that happened to certain managers at certain companies. If possible, names will be provided, but of course it is not always possible. These anecdotes serve as examples, showing what others did in a given situation, what they found hard and how they cut their Gordian Knots.

I will offer some advice at the end of each chapter. I advise you to take my advice. Joking aside, always do the best you can. Management is really a situational task; methods need to be tailored to the background and conditions available.

So let’s see my first advice: No need to beat around the bush; it is always best to be straightforward. This book is rather outspoken. I apologize for any offense it may cause.

***

Straight talk

I had a particularly outspoken lecturer at university. He was the first opinion leader I ever met. Whenever he started teaching a new group, he always introduced himself with the words I am a real tough guy (pause for effect)… This gave him a fearsome reputation. He never hesitated to speak his mind, which might explain why he had not been promoted beyond assistant professor even though he was over 50. Well, one day this man went on holiday to Hungary in a car with a Romanian license plate. He spoke excellent Hungarian, although he considered himself Croatian by descent. He was passing a place where some road works were being carried out, and one lane was closed for traffic. A temporary traffic light directed cars from both directions, and he had to close his window to keep out the smell of fresh tarmac. He happened to be the last one to receive the green light, and from the other direction some very impatient Hungarian gentlemen awaited his arrival, gesturing from their windows. One even shouted at him: Speed up, you miserable Romanian bastard! My lecturer understood, of course – his blood pressure must have shot up really fast – but he had no time to open his window and give the rude Hungarian a for a piece of his mind. He had never kept his opinion to himself – and this time he had absolutely no way to vent his frustration. 

***

In the third chapter we will deal with becoming a manager in the first place. This might be a step up the career ladder at your company, or a new position at a new company. The two situations are very different, which means you need to consider different approaches.

Your new position will pose a lot of challenges and you will inevitably feel puzzled: it all seemed like a piece of cake from the outside; how come you cannot deal with it so easily? That will be the topic of the chapter "Why the heck is management so complicated?. In the chapter A manager’s know-how portfolio and the vicious to-do list we will talk terminology and take a quick look at the building blocks of theory. This is important to those who are unfamiliar with the subject of management methods. Then we will discuss employees, and hopefully find some surprising, new information to delight my dear readers. In the chapter Personality issues" we will talk about the personality and roles of leaders, and introduce the main weapons of the managers’ arsenal. At last, before honestly considering the issue of giving up, we will briefly mention communication, and handling emergencies.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family for their support; I am grateful to George Mohai for encouraging me to write this book and helping me to find the best anecdotes. I am also indebted to all my dear friends and acquaintances who gave me valuable advice and offered their stories to enrich my book. I am particularly grateful to:

Bulcsú Balássy, owner and CEO of Fornax Ltd.

Balázs Kovács, CEO of Danubius Hotels

Tamás Lengré, owner and CEO of ASC Hungary

András Simor , former president of the National Bank of Hungary and vice president of EBRD

Antal Strbik, owner and CEO of ponte.hu

And also all my friends who told me lots of fascinating stories throughout the years and may recognise some of those in this book .

2. Now I am a manager

***

There is only one of me, so I really have to look after myself. Others are replaceable, and on top of that there are lots of them…

***

If you don’t start your career as an entrepreneur, chances are, you will work at a company where you have several bosses. As Bill Gates once said: If you think your teachers are unfair, wait till you meet your first boss…

We look at managers with mixed feelings as they remind us of quite a few issues: they have their own offices, fancier cars, our bonuses depend on them and they decide our holidays. Bosses are the royals of the little kingdom that is our workplace. They evaluate and help our work, give feedback (or not), or they simply don’t give a damn.

Do you look up to your bosses? Do you respect them? That depends on so many factors, sometimes contradictory ones. There are of course the extremes:

"Well, I could earn more in a different job, but my boss is the best I ever had and I will stay with this company because of him. It is a pleasure to work with such a manager.

or

I can’t stand that idiot, frankly, I could murder him!

There are countless other views too: I respect my boss because he is a good person, but he is professionally useless; or: professionally he is really on top, but he is a horrible person.

So the years go by and suddenly you find yourself in a managerial position. Okay, perhaps not a manager straightaway, just a team leader. Or you are sneakily being tasked with smaller projects. Would you honestly believe that this is already the trial run for a possible future promotion? Yet you will find that you are being observed and it is at this point that the decision is made whether or not you will become a manager. Perhaps you are still very young, which is actually an advantage because you are still enthusiastic about challenges and don’t give a damn about obstacles.

Actually, age is a much less important factor than many would believe. The key is your personality. If your personality is right, all you need is some experience, but there will be more about that later.

Some are born managers: in kindergarten they delegate their playground fights. They deal their below-the-belt karate kicks swiftly, just as they have seen in films. Of course the mini-manager will not take part personally but stays back and stands there with a smug smile

***

Punish the rebel!

One of our neighbours’ children was 5 or 6 when he got a time out. We asked why, and his mom told us that little Robert and his friends were playing kings and soldiers at kindergarten, and one of the kids must have done something wrong because the king ordered the soldiers to punish the rebel. The other kids kicked the poor little rebel just like they had seen  in action films…

***

So here you are, you got your promotion. As a team leader everything was easy, your team accepted you. But as soon as you are promoted, you are expected to be an expert in everything. Not just a field expert but a management expert too. Haven’t you learnt all about it? Well, too late, you have to deal with it. Even jokes become double-edged swords. They used to be funny while you were just one of the guys, but now the same words hurt your subordinates’ feelings and humiliate them. You are suddenly expected to know all about HR¹, planning, organizing, and project management. You should train your colleagues who are now a lot less tolerant and offer a lot less feedback. Because of course they, as subordinates, cannot afford the same familiarity as before your promotion. It’s like driving faster and faster on a highway while the rain is getting heavier, the sides of the road are blurred, and your windows steam up.

New managers mostly notice an increased level of freedom first: what you do is your own decision, you are not watched all the time. Some enjoy it immensely as they have always dreamt about this. Some find it slightly puzzling. But remember, the higher you climb the career ladder, the more often you will find that

there is nobody to lean on.

If you are a top manager, you can’t ask your boss what to do, because you don’t have a boss. Especially not when it comes to management decisions. You are expected to make your own faultless decisions and be a wonderful leader. After all, wasn’t that why you got promoted? So you have to make decisions about your tasks, your priorities, your schedule. This used to be very different; as an employee you were given tasks and deadlines, but now it is your job to manage this, and not just for yourself but for the others too.

Of course you can decide to leave it up to the employees to do as they please. Unfortunately this will lead to them doing everything but work; believe me, they will not volunteer if they don’t have to. So you have to take responsibility: good decisions, bad decisions, and giving suitable tasks to the employees. There will be more about this in later chapters, as it is not a great idea to drown them in work, but it is also inadvisable to let them browse Facebook all day.

So it is up to you to make decisions for yourself as well as for others.

That’s new, isn’t it? These two issues will cause the most trouble in the future. You will often feel guilty and wonder whether you are managing your time effectively and concentrating on the important tasks. Do your colleagues have enough work, are they bored? Are the tasks distributed fairly?

Priorities take on a new meaning. Until now it didn’t really bother you to see a few colleagues spend a bit too much time on Twitter or generating a sea of emojis in a chat window, but now you find yourself outraged and try to find the best way to kick their asses, which raises the question:

When and how should I tell off my subordinates?

I promise I will offer you some reasonable solutions soon instead of just listing dilemmas .

New and exciting dangers make your life more interesting on a daily basis; you would never have thought that a manager may be lacking consciousness to the extent that he will ignore tasks he doesn’t enjoy. There was someone I knew who didn’t like tasks related to software operation, because he did not find them creative enough. Of course his colleagues only found out later. When he was given the task to arrange this project, well, let’s just say it was not the smartest idea. He had plenty of other things to do, so he just neglected it. He must have thought it would work anyway, without him babysitting. The result was a failed project and several good employees left as well. Life has a way of providing plenty of things that are far more interesting than an unwelcome project. But if that project is important, if neglecting it will get in the way of efficiency, it is a grave mistake to ignore it simply because you don’t feel like bothering. I will return to this in How to keep focus and how does a manager end up pole-dancing.

Speaking of feelings, I must mention the other worry new managers often come across, which is:

There is something wrong, things don’t work as they should, but I don’t know what the problem is.

Was it like this while your predecessor was boss? The worst is when you are told outright that the previous manager was an expert in certain fields, and that you better watch out. So you can worry and try to compete with this great predecessor; or you can stand up for yourself and open a new chapter. Believe me, that boss before you was not perfect, he must have had a fair share of faults. But nobody will talk about that in the beginning, because people want a boss who is at least as good as the previous one. So the new one must know at least as much as the one before him. This is always taken for granted, isn’t it? The new boss must be a better boss.

What is this all about? Well, people tend to forget their problems and remember the strong points for comparison: he was a great lecturer, a competent professional, he would not have botched that decision, and so on. You will have a particularly hard time if your colleagues are not used to new bosses and they consider you a big, nasty fly in their soup. They have only that one predecessor to compare you to, since they only had one previous boss.

You may not be the same, but you also have your strengths. Rely on them and relax, some honest talking will reveal what faults your predecessor had. So just remember to keep them in mind and mention them whenever and wherever it might be useful. It is not very nice to take advantage of the weaknesses of others, but I suggest you get used to it.

If your working environment is one where things were not going too well, most employees are used to this. Some want to see changes of course, but it is shocking to realize how much people are willing to compromise and how they are willing to accept negative things if these issues follow each other slowly instead of coming all at once. After all, the dosage is important when dispensing bitter medicine, isn’t it?

So the next feeling is frustration. And you believe that it shows, everyone knows how you feel. Anyway, speaking of frustration, was your predecessor a frustrated person or not? Was he perhaps only feigning an easy-going attitude? If you didn’t know him, it’s worth asking your colleagues.

It is possible that employees are used to things going badly and the boss being frustrated. So don’t worry about that, but don’t forget that your mood and opinion will be mirrored and multiplied. If you say perhaps or not so good, then your subordinates will think really not good at all. If you say there might not be bonuses this year, they will understand we are getting absolutely nothing this year. If you are in a bad mood when you communicate a certain issue, you can bet they will interpret it much more gravely than you intended. This is the managerial multiplication effect. Good mood is contagious too, but unfortunately not as much as negative attitudes. I would say

The managerial effect has a very asymmetric aspect towards negative emotions.

I thought raising children was easy until I actually had kids. A bit of shouting, the occasional smack, and the rest of the time you can be a loving parent . Before I built a house, I was never bothered with this subject and I didn’t consider it particularly difficult, even though I knew some people who had a hard time with it.

These were issues that didn’t concern me. When a colleague told me at lunch that he was going to do some gardening when he got home I smiled and thought that it was really irrelevant.

Why do you view leadership differently if you haven’t done it before? Is it really such a big deal? Just do it. You are not alone in this. You have enough worries already, why should you make such a big deal out of it?

Needless to say, I had a lot to learn when my child was born, when I built a house, and when I started tending my garden. So now I have a completely different attitude when it comes to things I haven’t tried before. I am a lot more cautious. You see your bosses every way and you rarely stop to think how hard they have it. Most people think that’s not a big deal, he doesn’t really do anything, just gives orders and talks a lot and earns a lot. I could do that!

Now that I have been leading big and small teams for years I am convinced that management is a profession in its own right and it requires more than just aptitude; you need to learn the theory and gain the experience. In fact, by the time you learn all the theory it’s time to retire .

***

How does communication change meaning?

The factory director to the technical director:

The technical director to the head of department:

The head of department to the supervisor:

The supervisor to the team leader:

The team leader to the workers:

***

Different nations have different criteria when selecting managers. There are several books and studies that analyse the way different nationality groups choose leaders. The Japanese allegedly choose the oldest candidate, Germans choose the one with the highest qualifications. With Americans, even after some thorough research, the study could not determine the precise idea behind the choice. The group members talk and talk and eventually a leader is appointed quite spontaneously.

The researchers emphasized that Americans are socialized to work together as a team from early childhood. This is how they are raised. They can give up individual preferences to support the team; therefore they are very effective team players. If the boss is also familiar with these principles, his person doesn’t matter much as long as he is good at organizational tasks and doesn’t do stupid things. According to another study, Americans prefer a boss with a large belly, because they believe that skinny bosses are irritatingly neurotic; American employees consider managers with large bellies much more relaxed .

I have been promoted

If we had to choose between promoted and coming from the outside, then the majority would supposedly pick the former one. This usually happens when it’s a minor step-up in the hierarchy. Your predecessor is gone, you are relocated to another department, in rare cases things are restructured, and you are promoted this way. Practically it means one or two steps up the ladder. It is not typical that they place so much confidence in somebody that he is promoted to the highest level all at once. Even more, it is unfortunately typical that insiders are trusted less, and a newcomer is appointed, because there is a need for someone different.

But let’s get back to the situation: you have been promoted, and the following day you go to work knowing that you will have to sit in a new place. The others are also aware of that. Either they had been asked their opinions, or they had simply been told. In the worst case they weren’t informed at all. The situation clearly determines which option is best to choose, however the first one is the most democratic, while the second one seems to resemble a rather autocratic type of leadership. Unfortunately I have seen examples when some members of the company did not feel like accepting the promotion of an executive. They had previously been on quite good terms with him – their relationship could even have been defined as friendly – while they were at the same level. Right at the moment when their former colleague was promoted, they started feeling tension, and took to intriguing at full speed with the other colleagues against the new leader… A very complicated situation evolved.

The only piece of advice is that it must be nipped in the bud at the very beginning. Matters