Serenity

In Chinese idioms, people said “Replace a new brain when replacing one’s position.” Usually, we use this sentence to give managers backhanded compliments. Staffs always think their managers are stupid and hard to buy their advices. They don’t like their managers’ rule and think their organization directs a wrong way, but few people provide their opinions. This phenomenon seems abnormal but happens everywhere. The weirdest point is that every manager was a staff before, so what happens after they were promoted?

One of the columns in the Advanced magazine, “Facing Criticism at the Top”, discusses a similar problem in a different view. It’s said that we think good managers should face criticism against them; however, after collecting some questionnaires, the counterintuitive result is that the higher position managers are, the lower ratio of them can receive criticisms. One possible reason is that after promoting to higher positions, people think that they’ve done good jobs or they are much better than other coworkers, and therefore the criticisms may be wrong.

Reading this column, I’m thinking whether I have done the same mistakes or not. Sometimes, I think people who give me advices are weaker than me, so I don’t take their advices. Moreover, even when they are stronger than me, I think they don’t face the same situation as mine, so their advices may not be suitable in my case. In fact, I cannot receive all advices every time; I need to distinguish the useful and useless parts in each advice. However, if I could eliminate my personal emotional view, I would have more valuable advices to consider. On top of that, respecting others’ opinions would gain more respects from others.

By the way, after being a small manger last year, I found that it was really hard to keep what I think right as a staff when being a manager. The difficulties are caused by many factors such as performance of a team, time to market, etc. What I can do now is to keep the views of being a staff and rethink these no matter how high my position is. As Peter Drucker said, even a high-level manager should go to meet the first line of staffs, and talk to them.