Manager-X: The Chess Manager
A manager role remains as one of the most sophisticated jobs at any organization, mainly because of the ambiguous needs such job necessitates, to the wide varieties of skills a manager should have.
But, what makes the job more and more complicated is the unclear job description and unclear goals demanded from that manager.
Some organizations would associate the manager’s success with a mere increase in profits, but profits might get increased due to other factors where the manager performance wasn’t a direct cause of it, rather he/she had an obvious awful performance that lead to less profits.
In another cases the success of a human resource manager would be associated with lower rates of staff turnover, but with deep investigation, they may find out that the sudden depression that affected an entire industry was the real reason the staff stick more to their jobs as less offers they get and more instability emerges.
Finally, the performance of a sales manager would be measured by a certain target of annual sales, and this might happen at the short timeframe, and after though it’s revealed that such increase in sales was due to some illegal transactions and unethical agreements, that finally will lead to a significant drop in sales at the long timeframe.
Hence, what qualities a manager should have so he/she would grant sustainable results for his/her department and for the organization as a whole? And what are those crucial skills that qualified that particular person to be titled as a manager?
When observing the main traits of the two managers, the brilliant and the mediocre one, it won’t be quite easy to snatch a certain repetitive pattern that distinguishes both of them. The brilliant manager would attribute his peak performance due to using some sort of complex algorithms while making important decisions. But the mediocre manager might know and use the same algorithms but still not achieving good results. The inability of controlling emotions is one prominent trait of a mediocre manager, rather the brilliant manager sometimes fail to control his/her emotions. The brilliant manager is someone who got a piercing insight of the possible future changes, while many mediocre managers may have the same unique insight, but they couldn’t adapt to changes, and finally scored poor results.
Therefore, attributing success or failure in management based one or two elements wouldn’t be a very accurate thing to do. That’s why the best analogy that differentiates between the brilliant and the mediocre manager that I’ve ever encountered was the analogy made by Marcus Buckingham, in his book, “First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently” and that was also mentioned in his article that was published in Harvard Business Review titled “What Great Managers Do”, where he gave an example of the mediocre manager as a checkers player, where he sees all his pieces (team) as a one thing, having the same capabilities and with no difference in qualities or traits, he moves all of them the same way, he got very few strategic options to implement as many of them are already known and practiced and have never been altered or developed.
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While the brilliant manager is a chess player, he deals with each piece he has as a very unique piece. He knows that each of them has both, a point of strength and weakness. He knows well that the most vulnerable piece can cause a marvelous advancement because of its good positioning, while he also believes that defeat can be a cause of one of the strongest pieces he has, but is located at the worst possible position. He knows that checkmate is neither a coincidence nor a fate, but a series of smart moves and accumulated small winnings that the opponent couldn’t expect or deal with. The various scenarios of the next move of pieces would exceed a probability of fifty thousand different moves. A professional chess player thinks attentively in successive moves and sets up a separate scenario for the consequences of each, all simultaneously inside his mind, and finally, he alters his main strategy according to the current situation maybe more than once during the same game.
The traits of a chess player is a very close analogy to the traits of a brilliant manager that his subordinates would feel his influence during the shortest time frame, but so few would grasp the source of his faculties that made him that brilliant manager. This type of a manager uses multidisciplinary approaches to tackle the problems he faces. He masters various skills that all combined work in synchronize to create an awesome management style that leads to awesome results. That kind of managers acts like the symbol x, in mathematics, where as many of variables and equations mingle together till finally finding out the true value of x, that solves the dilemma. The brilliant manager is the one who can master all those variables, equations and rules so to turn all the complex problems into a great and optimal solution. Only thus, such a person deserves to be titled, Manager-X.
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