| Actually ... It's equally hard to do good or bad management, since most of the time you have no idea if you're achieving either outcome - and neither does anyone else. The problem with all forms of management is that it's completely unscientific. The main resource you're working with is a "human" which has emotions and who will respond to inputs in very different ways depending on all sorts of factors you as a manager don't know about. And, when you put a group of "humans" together you might expect a direct increase in productivity - 6 humans should be 6x more productive right - you'd be wrong. Also, for whatever reasons the dynamics of the individual humans change in groups! They are differently productive depending on what other humans they work with! And, since there's no scientifically proven way of categorising them - you can't even tell which ones will work well with other ones. Oh and the big joke, even if you get that working, sometimes they *change* and then some part of the group is broken for some unknown reason. Then there's the problem of measurement, and I don't mean the team members. As a manager trying to measure the outcome of your own efforts is difficult, bordering on impossible - maybe something you did changed something, on the other hand it might be some other factor you know nothing about. Finally, you might expect that the individual "humans" might know what makes them individually more productive. But, nope - most humans have no idea what makes them individually more productive, and then throw in a team setting and you're in a whole world of pain. Some of them think they're "analytical" and can't tell that they're dragged around by their emotions, love life, caffeine, commute or sunshine quota. There's a variety of 'received wisdom' stories they tell themselves, but it's often just a random walk. So actually ALL management is hard, and you often have a equal chance of doing it "well" or "badly" on pretty much a daily basis. It's as hard to do it badly, as it is to do it well since most of time you're not sure if either is happening. |