by Jim Brady

Created on: October 11, 2008

Do you like your dentist?

You might, and it's certainly helpful to you at the moment his plastic-covered hands enter your mouth, but you're probably thinking about trust and confidence while you're sitting back under that glaring spotlight with your mouth so vulnerably wide open. Is this man or woman competent to maintain my dental health and guide me in my dental future?

In the workplace, it's also a great situation when the person you report to and take direction from every day is a pal, or at least someone with whom you can exchange small talk. But it's not the most important thing.

As a manager, your job is to oversee employees in a multi-faceted way. You must monitor their work performance, their punctuality, their interactions among themselves, their potential to grow and contribute more to the company. A lot of this is simply administrative, keeping everyone within regulations and promoting fairness. But some of it, and the most important part, involves dealing with the uniqueness of the human individual.

The most unsuccessful managers miss that last part. They get wrapped up in the structure of a workplace, the rules and regulations, the charts and memos, and forget that the names printed so neatly at the top of all those emails and papers did not get born to conform to the company that employs them. And so they will never fit perfectly into the slots a corporate bureaucracy creates for them.

They will ask for days off on a moment's notice, and they will get sick at noon. They will show up late twice a week, and work till midnight on a project without being asked. They will offer the merest of greetings every day, or they will light up the office with personality.

In short, the successful manager is one who respects the people he is called upon to manage. In most cases, that will be understood by those people, and the working relationship will be a smooth one and the years will pass effortlessly and productively. In some cases, the best efforts of a manager trying to balance the demands of the workplace and his staff will fail in the face of a worker whose approach to work and life is contrary to the circumstances he or she is in.

And then, the successful manager recognizes that he or she has not failed in being disliked or even defied, but has simply come up against the imperfections that define that crazy little thing called life, within which we all live and work.

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