I’ve spent quite some time reading different books about management and leadership, to the point that I sometimes feel that the arsenal of guidelines and rules they assert mostly cancel each other out, leaving me puzzled and with tired eyes.
Although over the years I’ve become a fan of for example Patrick Lencioni and Albert J. Bernstein, there is one highly important area of this field that I’m missing in the mainstream, namely Peer Management.
Especially in the Nordics, I see an urgent need to train not only managers but everybody in an organization in order to utilize the opportunities of globalization and vastly improved means of communication between people. Far too often this task is bestowed upon managers only, who are magically supposed to understand and manage a workforce in which any individual has access to more information and knowledge that was ever part of the manager’s training.
Being part of a modern organization like BaseN requires management skills regardless of position. You need to manage your peers, bosses and subordinates alike, make them accountable and utilize their resources in order to succeed in your own tasks and projects. Yes, sounds tough, but if you want to achieve anything larger than what you can do with your own 24 hours/day, this is the way to go.
Starting to manage your own boss may seem difficult and even inappropriate, but once the ‘accountability relationship’ is reciprocal, you’ll quickly realize how critical of a resource you had just ignored in the past. Bosses and peers can be highly useful in many things. Organizations which embrace this and do not cling to the management models of the previous century will be the successful ones.
