Editor’s Note: As I wind down my stint as Editor of TLNT — yes, I’m leaving next month — I wanted to share some of my favorite posts over the years. Here’s one from our first month back in June 2010.
Here’s a lesson worth remembering: No matter how long you have managed people, or worked in HR, one thing is for certain – you never, ever stop learning how to be better at leading and managing those in your charge.
And, I frequently get that message reinforced when reading the “Corner Office” column in the Sunday Business Section of The New York Times, because as I wrote earlier this year, “it seems to have a wide range of management thinking from the very good (Yahoo’s Carol Bartz making a great case for ditching performance reviews), to the very bad (Carol Smith of the Elle Group claiming that women are inherently better managers than men), to the very simple and sophomoric (a CEO with a Winnie the Pooh fetish who actually says that you should only hire Tiggers instead of Eeyores).
Autonomy leads to great work
Reading it is like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates – you never know what you are going to get.
The “Corner Office” column is basically a Q&A with a CEO, but as I’ve pointed out before, the advice ranges from incredibly insightful to the woefully idiotic. And, even though you sometimes learn just as much from bad advice as you do from really smart thinking, I find the best management wisdom is the kind that is both present-day practical AND profoundly philosophic.