Good Management, Bad Management

Management, in general, can be oversimplified as follows:

When things are operating as they should, nobody notices. However, when things are poorly managed, everyone can tell. Why is this? Things go wrong, that's a fact. A door handle breaks. A good building manager notices and gets it fixed quickly. A bad manager will either not notice, not fix it quickly, or fix it poorly and it breaks again. With bad management, it's just more likely that people will spot the flaws, because they'll be visible for longer. More people are exposed to them or repeatedly exposed to them, so it becomes harder to forget that the door handle was broken a week ago.

I figure that managing employees is no different. If one complains about something and nothing is done, this person won't forget and will just get more frustrated. It's also likely that someone else notices and so on.

Of course, this is just one aspect of managing. We're all managers, at least of our own lives. If we don't fix what's broken and fix it right (and right away), it will remain broken and whatever it is we're managing will degrade, very likely getting worse in time.

For people who like lists, here's one:

1. If it's broken, FIX IT. No excuses.