“There is no trap so deadly, as the trap you set for yourself.”
Raymond Chandler
What is it that makes some managers so good? Is it their exceptional talents and skills, a good nose for business, a secret recipe or a gut feeling that never fails? Or maybe it’s just the right touch, or the right connections?
Like many others, as I began my climb up the ladder, I also thought (with no small amount of vanity) that top managers had to be something very special. And ergo that they must be able to do something very special. Since then I’ve had many opportunities to observe them up close. As a board member of international banks, setting up and winding down financial institutions in Eastern Europe, and now, today, in my own company which advises, coaches and trains managers in all industries and at all levels, I’ve come into contact with many top executives in many countries—contact with my American colleagues, though infrequent, is often rather comical. It usually starts with the introduction:
“Hey guy, where are you from?”
“Austria”
“Ah! I know. Kangaroos and crocodiles, right?”
“No, that’s Australia. I’m from Austria!”
“Yeah man, I know. Sydney and Bondi beach. Fantastic!”
“Noooo! Niki Lauda, Mozart and Arnold Schwarzenegger!”
“Huh? …”
In spite of these little cross-cultural misunderstandings, I still held on to my belief that top managers really were “top”—I wonder, now, how I could have been so naïve, because what makes top managers so outstanding is not their outstanding qualities.
Even colleagues who have had less success usually have at least one remarkable talent, otherwise they wouldn’t have kept their positions for so long. Average managers can have excellent talents. But why aren’t these talents helping them more? A good example came recently from the stock market: A lot of traders were making millions—for years—and then one fine day in autumn, a mortgage crisis erupted and the less clever traders suffered one loss after the other. They lost their jobs, dragged their bosses down, and sometimes even ruined their companies in the process. Which just goes to show:
The secret of top-notch managers: they make fewer, and less serious, mistakes.
This reminds me of a board member who, although he was smart enough and had a proven track record to go with it, still wasn’t considered a top manager by his peers. He made one fatal mistake: He didn’t do enough to improve business. He waited patiently each day for the phenomenal, ground-breaking success to come knocking on his door, thus ensuring his place of glory in the annals of the company for all time. The other board members called him the “tick-tock manager”.
We all make mistakes now and then—don’t worry. Weak managers, however, don’t just make a few mistakes, they commit sins: systematic, chronic, colossal management sins.
That’s why they don’t manage to achieve phenomenal success, or the long wished for breakthrough. They miss out on that decisive career step or the admiration and respect of their line managers and colleagues. They also lack the esteem of their clients, unshakeable self-confidence and the adoration of their partners and children. They fail because they commit critical management sins. Looking back, I’m almost sure that the aforementioned board member knew, or at least suspected, what fatal mistake he was making, how mad colleagues were with him and that he was, in effect, digging his own management grave.
But what could he have done about it? General management training is often exactly that: general. It doesn’t always offer a quick and effective remedy for this type of tick-tock management or the other management sins. In practice, most training measures for managers don’t help when they are based on the misconception of ideal management virtues (that have nothing to do with reality and won’t help managers keep their white collars clean).
For a long time I brooded over this (seemingly) built in tendency towards self-destruction. Then I remembered my almost twenty years of experience in management jobs and executive board rooms, my own youthful cardinal and deadly sins and I realized: when you consider that general management trainers, bosses, management gurus, editorial journalists, and coaches have been preaching to top managers for decades about the “right” way of doing things, and then aren’t even able to do it “right” themselves, then it’s probably not in spite of, but because of, this overly-positive didactical style.
This well-meaning advice comes across as too saccharine for most managers tastes. It hasn’t been able to prevent me from committing the classic management sins at the executive board room level (and it hasn’t made the managers who I’ve been advising and coaching for years become more virtuous). When this realization hit me, I decided to turn the tables.
From then on I began telling managers what they should not be doing. I told them—without naming names, of course—about manager colleagues who were suffering the most because of their sins. And, oh, what joy: It worked! And to those who are reading just to gloat over another manager’s mistakes, to them I say: go on and gloat—the happier you are, the better you learn. Everyone knows: we learn from our mistakes. But the managers learning the most are the ones learning from the mistakes of others.
In consulting sessions since then, I have definitely seen the metaphorical light going on. International trade journals promptly asked me to publish my findings and I began to enjoy great popularity among German-speaking managers across Europe—at least those who regularly read my columns or invited me to speak. The others kept asking me for “Management Sins—The Book” for so long and so adamantly that I finally sat down and wrote it. It was a bestseller immediately—not just in the land of Mozart and kangaroos, but in Germany and all across Europe. This made a lot of people angry. Every month I got emails from English-speaking managers: “Do you expect us to learn German, or what?” No, that would be a sin! And that’s what you want to avoid in the future.
I’m sure you, as a manager, have got your stuff together and are completely competent in your field and have already achieved a lot (otherwise you wouldn’t be where you are today). When something goes wrong from time to time, you probably ask yourself “Why does this always happen to me?” We usually notice, with great pain, when we commit one of these little management sins. We recognize how damaging it is for our success, reputation, career, satisfaction and also the effect it has on our personal relationships.
These, in effect, not so little sins, are absolutely avoidable. And in the following pages you can find out how.