Mark and Eddie, 2 Ideas...

What makes a good leader?

A Manager is a classification of a staff member. Typically, a manager is a person who performs management tasks.

What are management tasks? Setting a clear mission, training staff, motivating staff, delegating and empowering, setting a strategic direction, handling political issues, and selecting and placing the right people.

A good manager learns to manage each employee in a different way depending on their needs. Ken Blanchard coined the term "Situational Leadership", saying how one leads depends on the situation.

Unfortunately you lack intelligence to comprehend the above statements. You talk about having a management style that not everyone agrees with. Micromanaging is not a style of management it is a compulsive, behavioral disorder similar to other addictive patterns. People who micromanage generally do so because they feel unsure and self-doubting. You are insecure in your abilities; as well you should be as you really have none, you are paranoid, untrusting, a hypocrite, and condescending.

FastChannel was all too willing to sweep all your flaws under the rug. You were promoted to Director and then VP based purely on the fact that you were with the company early on in it’s inception and not because you possess any of the skills which are outlined below. People who are in leadership roles should be leaders’ and mentors, you are neither.

Leaders have vision, a clear sense of where they want to go and how they intend to get there. They see the big picture, and then create a strategic plan for achieving their goals. This includes not only an individual vision, but also vision for your department.

Leaders aren’t afraid to make difficult or unpopular decisions because they have confidence in themselves and their abilities. They know the indecisions wastes resources and opportunities.

Leaders have the courage to act in situations where results aren’t assured. They’re willing to risk failure. Leaders know not to expect perfection. No one wins all the time. Leaders grow by making mistakes and allowing others to make mistakes. Leaders don’t revel in the fact that they can point out every t you forgot to cross or i you didn’t dot.

Leaders motivate others. They can articulate their vision and ideals to others convincing them of the value of their ideas. They can inspire people to work toward common goals and to achieve things they never though they could do.

Leaders build teams. They create productive teams that draw the best from people. They effectively coach teams in collaboration, consensus building, and conflict resolution.

Leaders possess self knowledge. They know their own strengths and weaknesses and are able to view their behavior objectively. They recognize their shortcomings, open themselves up to feedback, and are willing to make changes when necessary.

Leaders display integrity. They must be trustworthy before others will follow them. Qualities that establish trust are competence, constancy, caring, candor, and congruity, which are defined as authenticity, reliability, and feeling comfortable with oneself.

Leaders pursue lifelong learning. They have a desire to continually learn and grow and are open to new ideas.

Lifelong learning won’t fix all your mental issues. Prozac on the other hand might. Stop reading self help books. If you could help yourself then what do you need the book for?

Leaders communicate effectively. They can convey their ideas to diverse individuals and adjust their styles to meet the needs of the people they lead.

Leader’s help others succeed. They empower others and go out their way to help them achieve their full potential, thereby benefiting the organization.

Micromanagers hurt productivity and morale--and often drive others away. In fact, one out of three people has changed jobs because of a micromanager. How many engineers did you lose because you’re a micromanager?

Some specific behaviors that define micromanagers:

• They exercise raw power.
Micromanagers love to flex their muscles--asserting their power and authority just because they can. While unable to subordinate themselves, they control others with an uncompromising sense of entitlement and self-interest.
• They dictate time.
Micromanagers like to control and manipulate others' time. They don't trust people to assess their own workload, so they routinely dictate priorities and distort deadlines. And while they guard their own time with an iron fist, they're notorious for interrupting others, misusing and mismanaging meetings, and perpetuating crises.
• They control how work gets done.
Micromanagers want everything to be done their way. After all, the boss knows best--or so they think. They dismiss others' knowledge, experience, and ideas--no matter how good--then hover over them to make sure they're doing things "right."
• They require undue approvals.
Micromanagers share responsibility, but not authority. As the bottlenecks of the workplace, they allow no one to move forward without their approval--even on routine or time-sensitive matters.
• They demand frequent and unnecessary reports.
Micromanagers are driven to know what's going on. They monitor others to death--requiring a stream of needless reports that focus on activity over outcomes.

Just a few things we’ve all wanted to say to you:

1. Crying or getting choked up in front of any one of your staff members is a sign of mental instability and weakness. Same goes for crying on the phone to your wife that you’ve screwed up some implementation and you think you’re going to be fired.
2. Burping in front of your staff members does not make you one of the guys especially since we know where your loyalties lie.
3. Giving someone a cap and telling them you got it from a vendor when in fact it was given to you by an ex employee who left the company because they couldn’t stand you anymore is a lie. You are not as honest as you want everyone to believe you are. Particularly when you tell a prospective engineer that he will have a lot of meaningful work with the company in a pathetic effort to save your own job.
4. Installing anti spyware and anti virus/firewall on a computer does not make you a Security Officer. People who earn that title have spent years learning about security.
5. Telling members of your staff to get a nice breakfast on the company after they’ve spent countless hours trying to get a new office online is insulting. Same goes for staff that are working a night project and you buy sandwiches for dinner.
6. Everyone in Memphis hates you.
7. When you say things like “I expect a senior engineer to be able to prioritize their own projects” it translates to “If you succeed then I look good, if you fail I’ll blame you for making the wrong decisions”. This is the expected behavior of someone who is incapable of managing, prioritizing or making decisions that might not be favorable for them.
8. During a FW outage when all your engineers are in the server room trying to fix the issue it is not ok to start demanding one of your engineers who is working on fixing the issue to label a cable because you are panicking.
9. When a new engineer comes on board you want to spend every waking minute with them like a school girl in love. When they realize what you are all about you have a bitter and emotional break up and that person is no longer trusted and never did anything right.
10. Remember the day we had a team meeting on the bridge and you kept hearing noise and couldn’t figure out who it was so you had to do one of your investigations and stupid “roll calls” to determine the source and never could. We all laughed behind your back at the amount of time wasted on that considering the fact it was all of us doing it.
11. You are incapable of building any sort of relationship with anyone including your immediate supervisors, your direct reports and vendors.
12. When you say “I know a lot of engineers are angry with me right now and I don’t care if I’m the last one standing” we know what that means. It means you hope everyone quits so that your job can be prolonged by and extra week or two. You are transparent and pathetic. Maybe you’re just trying to prove that you are more committed to the company than your employees who have worked very hard for you and put up with your crap. This is an other example of how insulting you are
13. You are the slowest talker in the world. It is painful to sit in any meeting or attempt to have any meaningful conversation with someone who mentally cannot keep up.
14. Two words: Lumberg, Quagmire.
15. You were always trying to “hang someone” with your idiotic investigations. You accused John Mahoney of putting server labels in the bathroom stalls, Aaron of talking to Shah over IM after you frivolously fired Shah and Greg of taking down the network 3 times.
16. You were always riding on Stan’s tip. Before FastChannel Stan was a DBA and you were a janitor.
17. Any vendor who ever met with you thought you were a jackass and laughed at you behind your back. We guess they didn’t want to have a “marriage” with you.
18. Did you give yourself a written warning when you took down the exchange server? If an engineer did that you would have been all over their ass for it. Just goes to show you how little technical skill you really have. Stick to what you do best, running SpyWare on people’s machines.
19. Repeating your agenda, ideology, and methods, while not listening to your staff’s input, will garner you nothing but growing uneasiness from your staff members – do not believe for a minute that you have to repeat yourself because “we” aren’t listening, it is you who is not listening.
20. You did not get to where you are by your own skill, but from the sweat and effort of the members of your staff. That you forget this, and believe that you have achieved your status of your own accord, is your own undoing.
21. You should stop and consider the many altercations and miscommunications that you have experienced and start to examine what common factor(s) exist. If you keep having problems with your employees – and you are the only constant – what does that say about you?
22. A wise man is one who realizes what he does and does not know.
23. Do not expect to receive respect from your employees if deep down you resent that they know something you do not.
24. A good team is comprised of multiple skills dispersed among multiple people working toward the same goals – not multiple people with multiple skills serving one shortsighted and insipient boss.
25. If you continually seek to look good based upon the efforts and work of your staff, expect your staff to see through your ploys, insecurities, and inabilities.
26. Controlling everyone and everything does not guarantee you the ending that you desire.
27. Lying or embellishing to your staff members about anything, no matter what you believe, is never “cool.”
28. You may be able to fool people outside of your organization for a long time, but don’t think for a minute that you can ever fool your own staff.
29. The more you try to hide your insecurities and inabilities, when in a position of leadership, the more transparent these weaknesses will become to those you rely on to make you look good.
30. You would do yourself more good by admitting what you do not know, rather then pointing out to outsiders what your staff members do not know – in the long term, you are only undermining what little respect and loyalty you may have with your employees.
31. If you find that most people you approach become defensive, you should think carefully about your own approach, you are likely being quite offensive.
32. Just because you cannot keep up with your own tasks and manage your own time, does not mean that your staff members suffer from the same affliction.
33. Just because the methodology used by your staff members does not resemble your own, it does not mean that it is ineffective – as long as things are done timely and within the bounds of legitimacy and fairness, you should focus on results.
34. If you are going to be a leader of any sort, you must first defend your staff members, not sell them out for a mistake – even if it means that as a whole, the team will have a temporary negative light shined down upon it – everyone makes mistakes.
35. Treating your employees like kids does not send a message that you trust your staff.
36. Working out and lifting weights while having a meeting shows how much you lack respect for your staff.
37. While some people have offices, when your staff work in cubicles and they hardly have any privacy, it is very rude to climb over the cubical to have a chat with others. Learn some tact.
38. Speaking to your own staff about someone who works for you behind their back gives you very little respect from everyone especially when you tell the staff member that “this is a secret and I should have never told you that”.
39. As a person in charge, you should always hear both sides of the story.
40. Making sure your staff is logged into IM and MSN is not a way to find out if your staff is idle or busy.
41. Did you know “Employees working over 40 hours in any work week must be paid at least 1 ½ times their regular rate of pay.” It is unlawful to tell your staff that they are expected to works more then 40 hours a week.
42. Being on production rotation does not improve the skills of an IT Engineer or make you more senior as an engineer. Training, going to classes, and actually learning new technology and not free technology helps improve the skills.
43. You can not learn everything by reading and writing knowledge base and FAQs. Sometimes you have to do it.
44. Writing down bullet points with people’s names next to them in an email does not constitute a project plan. It just goes to show how unorganized and uneducated you really are.
45. Getting certified on FastChannel technology is insulting considering there is real technology out there that most engineers would rather be certified on. You’ve probably never heard of Cisco, Microsoft, Checkpoint, or Redhat.
46. You have said on multiple occasions that IT is required to work 55 to 60 hours per week. Not only is it illegal to make statement like that but it goes to show how stupid you really are. It is much more productive and beneficial to the business to have its employees work smarter not harder.
47. Just because your warped reality warrants you to put FastChannel above your family life, don’t expect everyone else around you to be as fucked up as you. We all have families and life outside of work.
48. Most people take pride in the solutions and technology they implement. You take pride in implementing the cheapest crap you can find. Just because you know how to plug in a Linksys router into the network does not mean you are a networking professional.
49. Giving the team regurgitated stories you heard from someone else is insulting. No one gives a crap about your positive outlook on a shitty situation. When you told us the story of the bricklayers, secretly we hoped a whole pile of bricks fell on your head just so you would shut up.
50. Grow a pair of nuts or take the pair back that’s sitting on the nightstand by your wife’s side of the bed. The business world is not the military and your boss is not always right. Telling everyone that your boss is a great leader after he lost his entire engineering department to a marketing guy just shows everyone what a tool bag you really are!

If you have a “Mo” and would like to discuss any part of this document, please let us know. If you believe that this is not constructive criticism, well then you would be correct, but when did you ever give any of us constructive criticism?

Although you might be able to find another job in October after your contract with DG runs out, any company you go to will shortly realize that you are not an asset to their organization but an ass in all other respects. They will deal with you in a swift and just manner.

Seek help from a trained professional.

The identities of the authors have been concealed to protect the innocent. Even if the gerbil in your head (or ass) eeks out enough electrical impulses for you to figure it out, we could give a rat’s ass. If you believe you have received this email in error and are not the intended recipient ……………Nah, this is not in error, you are the intended recipient.

You sound like you've been doing this for years. Solid idea, great delivery.

Rich Meitin
www.righmeitin.com
http://www.publicradioquest.com/node/1038
please drop by sometime!

I think the radio voice of Mark and Eddie is on air worthy. The subject matter will fill a need for fun tech information for the tech challenged. I need some tech help!!!!! Save me Mark and Eddie.