Digiday recently served up some horror stories from the ad agency trenches, as senior managers reported on the trials of managing self-assured Millennials.
When the practice of managing up gets confused with promotion of self-interest, brown-nosing, manipulation, the gymnastics of corporate climbing, or other mind games, a good theory rapidly becomes twisted resulting in a false and dangerous reality.
Those managingthe work had to shift from being controllers of individuals to enablers of self-organizing teams, with responsibility for establishing priorities in a timely fashion and removing impediments as they are identified, rather than controlling each worker.
Jean Claude Rodriguez Ferrera of the Association for Self-Financed Communities (CAFs) initially kept his methodology for managing a self-financed community in a hefty, three-inch thick binder.