THE RULES OF MANAGEMENT

The Rules of Work was about those Rules that work for you from your very first day, fresh from school, college, training, and go on working for you whatever your role. I’d observed plenty of those in action over my career, so that’s what I’d written about. However, there were plenty more Rules that you only really needed to learn once you reached the point where you were leading a team of your own. However if you’re following The Rules of Work that’s likely to be pretty soon, and I could see that I’d need to assemble and write down The Rules of Management too.

These Rules seemed to me to fall into two broad categories. Firstly there were the Rules about managing other people. That’s the essence of being a manager: you’re responsible for other people. Responsible for their work, yes, but also responsible for their motivation, their welfare, their rights and their ability to work with the rest of the team.

You may not have appointed these people. You may not even particularly like them. But it’s your job to get the best out of them – as a team, not just as individuals. And there are lots of unspoken Rules for doing just that. Some of them seem obvious as soon as they’re pointed out, but if they were that obvious every manager would be following them, and that’s certainly not the case. So the first part of The Rules of Management sets out these Rules for managing your team.

The second category, and the second section of the book, is about Rules for managing yourself. When you become a manager, suddenly you’re supposed to be doing your job and worrying about the rest of your team as well. That’s a juggling act in itself and, while all the Rules of work still apply, there are suddenly lots of new skills you’ll need. But no one is going to tell you what they are. Your bosses might send you on management training workshops and leadership weekends, but there will still be plenty of Rules they don’t tell you that the successful managers are all following. So you’d better follow them too.

You’re now the filling in a sandwich. You’re the buffer between your team, and the higher-ups. You have to explain your team’s performance to the bosses, stick up for your department’s rights and represent their interests further up the organisation. At the same time, you have to defend to your team the bosses’ decision to change working practices or slash budgets or restructure. You have to do this without bad-mouthing either side to the other – you need to keep the respect of both groups, and that is an art you need all the help with that you can get. In other words, you need The Rules of Management.

I was interested to see what a wide range of Rules were voted for from this particular book, spread between both sections – Rules for your team and Rules for yourself. Two Rules garnered the most votes: ‘Get them emotionally involved’ and ‘Go home’. It’s a rare manager who has ever had either of these Rules spelt out to them in any form of training, and yet every manager needs to know and follow them in order to do their job well.