5 new rules for managers who are ready to buck conventional wisdom
Do new challenges on traditional ways of managing offend your sensibilities? If so, consider why—and whether it’s time to cast off what you were trained to believe and embrace them. …
A few years ago, a management professor I had met in Los Angeles was visiting New York and dropped by the office for coffee. “How are you?” he asked. “Not great,” I confided. “I think I’m a terrible manager.”
Just that morning, in our newsroom’s main Slack channel, I had sketched out a plan for covering a big breaking news story. A young reporter involved in the plan pushed back on a key piece of it, in a reply that everyone in the Slack channel could see. I considered her reasoning but found it faulty, and messaged her and her direct supervisor explaining why. We pressed on with my plan, which turned out to be the right call.
I had won the argument and proved my point, but I still felt lousy, and not because I had overruled someone (I was confident enough to feel no guilt about that). What was bothering me was that I couldn’t imagine ever openly questioning a ranking editor’s request like that when I was a young reporter. And so I deduced that if I was being questioned in that way, then I must have been doing an awful job of carrying myself with any authority.