RULE 81

Don’t bad-mouth your team

So you can’t bad-mouth the company and you can’t slag off your boss. ‘Surely’, I hear you ask, ‘I can criticize my team?’ Not in public you can’t. Behind closed doors when there is no one there but you and you alone, then and only then are you allowed one small silent scream when things really hit the fan, but apart from that, nothing.

It’s a poor work person who blames their tools. Your team is your tool to getting your management job done. If your team is useless it is you who hasn’t sharpened the tool, oiled it, cleaned the rust off, repaired the handle, replaced worn-out bits, checked for damage, that sort of thing.

Your team will make mistakes, that’s a given. Things will go wrong, that too is a given. You’re dealing with people; they screw up from time to time, get emotional, let you down, fail to work as a team, goof off and generally behave completely normally. You’d be a fool not to expect this, to plan for it, to build it into your plans. Look, things go wrong and slagging off your team doesn’t help. Learn from it and move on.

You have to ‘publicly celebrate those who move the organization closer to the attainment of its vision and strategic goal’ – that’s your team, that is. If you slag your team off you are focusing on the negative, which will spiral them downwards. If you praise them it’s an uplifting experience.

If you slag your team off you are slagging yourself off and admitting publicly you are a crap manager. Don’t do it – you’re not.