situation fits with your overall aims. If you don’t have a clear sense of what your purpose is (why you’re doing what you do), and how it fits with your life, you cannot hope to make consistently good decisions for yourself and others. You’ll just be condemned to react to your circumstances.”


2 Choose, deliberately and environment you want to


actively, the type Are You a of


Self-Determined Manager?


10 Changes You Might Need to Make Now


Am I a great manager? This is an incredibly tough question to answer. A manager’s job is to get things done by marshalling the efforts of others — and most of us have blind spots that keep us from seeing how we impact others.


But in all honesty, the answer is probably no, says David Deacon, author of “Te Self-Determined Manager: A Manifesto for Exceptional People Managers.” Great managers are self-determined managers, and self-determined managers are extremely rare.


“Being a great manager — the kind


who creates a high-performing company — is exceptionally difficult,” says Deacon. “You can never rest. You can never let things slide. You can never waste an opportunity. You are responsible for creating an environment in which people can achieve and grow in ways they did not even imagine — and that’s a job that’s never finished.”


Sounds exhausting, yes? But if you


don’t do the hard work of becoming a self-determined manager, a lot of major things can go off the rails. Bad managers create environments where there’s little openness or honesty … or where everyone curries favor rather than focusing on performance ... or where people deflect blame onto others.


10 SUMMER 2 019 “Employees do these things to try


to cope with the environment you, the manager, have created,” says Deacon. “But the flip side is that when you become a better manager — a self-determined one — you’ll see dramatic changes in their behavior and performance.”


Being a self-determined manager is


not so much about mastering a vast array of technical skills. It’s less about task and more about attitude. It’s about creating environments of overachievement where people thrive and great work gets done.


Deacon says the ideas in his manifesto


are for managers at every level, from the CEO to the first-time leader. Regardless of your level or the scale of your impact, you will get better outcomes when you strive to be a self-determined manager. If you want to be among their number, here are 10 changes you may need to make right now:


1 Set aside time to reflect on your lose sight of how (and if) your current


own agenda. “Tis is a biggie,” says Deacon. “It’s really easy to


create. As manager, it’s your job to decide the kind of environment that the team will experience —for better or worse. Tink of the best teams you’ve worked on. What was the prevailing atmosphere? How did the team members work together and how were problems solved? At the heart of all that will have been a manager who set the tone and created the atmosphere.


“Tis environment isn’t something you can just will into being,” says Deacon. “It’s a process. But every process begins with a decision, and making that decision now is the step that all other improvements this year will flow from.”


3 Be more restless. Each week ask


yourself and your team: What can we do better? The best


managers have impatience (if something is worth doing, why wait?), an instinct for continuous improvement (good enough is never good enough). Tey set themselves and others very high standards of performance and conduct.


“Tis demanding impatience for ever- greater impact and ever-higher standards can make self-determined managers very difficult to work for,” admits Deacon. “Just be sure to always balance the high expectations with encouragement and a positive approach.”


4 Start treating employees like


adults. Work is not school. Adults do their best work when they are


treated as adults. Terefore, great managers don’t bully, shout, patronize, belittle, play favorites, name-call, behave aggressively or condescend. To generate trust and respect, you must create an environment where adults can do great things.


“Life is a little short for bad relationships and miserable interactions,” says Deacon. “Make sure you are helping create harmonious environments around you.”


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42