A new manager who fails usually lacks information about the job, and his character has little to do with it. According to the source, a gap in organizational know-how explains most failures, and a gap in knowledge can be closed.
When the role runs you
The source opens with a condition. Anyone in an executive position must hold information about his post, and about how the unit or organization he heads functions. Without it, he “becomes the effect of post and organization” and starts creating unreal orders and situations.
That is an exact picture of an owner whose day is decided by whatever just landed on him. The business runs him.
According to the booklet, the first symptom shows before the tiredness: orders that cannot be carried out, because whoever gave them does not know how long the work takes.
Suppose an owner promises a customer a delivery date without checking how loaded his team is. They hit it once. The second time, they no longer believed his dates.
Or a manager who demanded a weekly report to save himself twenty minutes, when producing it takes his team three hours.
And a shop owner who decided stock would be counted every evening. A fortnight later the count existed on paper only, which left things worse than before.
Before an order goes out
For someone who became a manager yesterday, the source has an explicit instruction that runs against instinct. If you lack the knowledge, be careful to take advice from the people below you before you issue an order. That way you make sure it can be carried out, that it is necessary, and that it fits the way the work is already done successfully.
The source goes further. Someone who is learning an executive post while already acting in it should spend most of his time studying. He issues no orders and approves none until he has taken the matter up with the people it will affect.
An order that fails any of those tests creates work instead of saving it.
This gives up nothing of your authority. Taking advice is different from letting people decide. The decision stays with you, and the people doing the work supply the information that is missing.
Suppose an owner buys new software without asking the person who will enter data into it. Three months later everyone is back on a spreadsheet.
Or a manager who set a packing procedure after half an hour of watching how the packing actually got done. It matched what the packer was already doing, so she simply carried on. The next time, he set a procedure without asking first. Within two weeks that procedure was dropped, and he alone was caught off guard.
Four ways managers fail
The source states outright why managers fail, and the list is short. They do not go about a new job or a promotion the way described above. They fail to hold together and control the activities they find themselves in charge of. They use their position to buy popularity. Or they form a clique to protect themselves against the crowd.
Look at the phrase “solely because.” The source presents the four as the factors, with no others beside them.
In a business of up to ten people the third one is the common one. An owner drops a demand to avoid anger, and a year later finds he is neither respected nor liked.
Suppose an owner who wanted to be on good terms with everyone and approved every vacation request without checking for overlap. That summer, two people were left covering for four.
Or a manager who routed every uncomfortable decision through the line that management decided, in a business where she is the management. When she began saying that the decision was hers and giving the reason, two decisions went through in the first month without an argument.
Why the cause is missing knowledge
A different volume of the source lifts the self-blame, and this may be the most important line in the chapter. According to it, the terrible dismay of a young leader who plans a great new era and finds himself facing old, weak faults comes from a lack of organizational know-how. The source rules out foolish ambition and lack of realism as the cause.
Many owners know the feeling: I planned something big, and I spend my day putting out small fires. The booklet reads that feeling as a sign of missing knowledge, the knowledge of how to hold an activity together. It does not show that the plan was too ambitious.
The difference is practical. Someone convinced he is too ambitious shrinks the plan. Someone who knows he lacks knowledge goes and learns it.
Suppose an owner cuts the annual target by a third after a hard three months. The hard stretch came from a lack of tracking, and the target was fine.
Or an owner who blamed herself for being unrealistic. Once she tallied them up, four of her six setbacks came from one and the same cause.
And two partners who decided against expanding because they felt they were not built for it. They were built for it, and they had nobody coordinating it.
What the booklet has on this
The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: The three tests, and The four ways. It also has a self-check, and it sits inside a full booklet about what the manager's job requires of someone who hired a first employee.
If you planned something big and find yourself putting out fires all day, look first for the knowledge you are missing, before you shrink the plan.
The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice on employment law.