Chapter 10. The Line Manager Manifesto
This chapter covers
- Principles of leadership from a line manager’s perspective
- Working with teams suffering from a lack of good leadership
- Working with individuals suffering from indifferent leadership
If you’re a line manager, maybe some of the things in the Team Leader Manifesto in chapter 1 didn’t make sense to you. You don’t exactly have a “team.” Your team might be spread out, providing services to multiple unrelated projects (particularly in a matrix organization, where your direct lead isn’t your hiring manager) or even multiple customers (if your employees are consultants).
Does that mean that now all you get to do is “push paper” and sign budgets? When I became a director I hoped not, but in the beginning that’s exactly what happened.
In a large organization, you may feel torn away from doing “real” things that matter to people. Instead, you’re thrown into a mountain of paperwork, SAP software, and other hazardous materials that’ll make you twitch in disgust for hours as they suck your life away.
You feel compelled away from doing what’s best for your team and toward doing what’s best for the company’s procedure police (to your dismay, you see how money is wasted on meaningless labor that brings nothing to the bottom line but lower numbers).
No, that’s not what line managers were meant to do.