The managers

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People don’t usually leave companies or jobs, they leave people. Time and time again, when we ask our candidates why they want to move they will cite their manager. 

‘They never listen’, ‘I don’t know what he/she wants’, ‘There is no room to progress, and no-one to promote me’, ‘He/she just doesn’t like me’.

This doesn’t mean that these people, ‘The Managers’, are horrible people – they provide value to their employers, it’s just that they are in the wrong job.

There is a strange status thing with managing people. People with three or more years’ experience start to collect them like badges. ‘I manage three people’, ‘I manage seven people’. To be honest in the early part of my career, my dad could only equate my success with the size of my team.

In today’s complex world, not everyone can manage people – it is a skill that requires a particular set of attributes, some of which ...