The pavement crunched beneath my feet as I walked down my road. Pavement doesn’t usually crunch, but parts of my road are more gravel than asphalt, and potholes are part of the fauna. As I was walking, I noticed some of the larger holes outlined in white spray-paint.
And you know what my first thought was?
“A manager did that.”
I guess I’ve been reading too many business books of late, but my interests ebb and flow and right now they lap upon a beach called Business.
I didn’t really understand the need for managers when I first started working. Mostly I thought they got in the way. They created more work for me. And sometimes it seemed like they didn’t do anything — I remember thinking, “if they’d spend their time actually doing what I did, twice as much would get done!”
Eventually I accepted managers as a mysterious necessity. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I understood how essential managers are. And, strangely, it was white spray-painted potholes that solidified my recent thinking about managers.
The road patchers have been through a few times and each time they get a few of the holes. And by that I mean they miss most of them, but patch some of the more egregious ones. I appreciate their work, but I often wonder why they don’t patch them all the first time. It doesn’t make sense why one hole would be patched but another five feet away remains gaping.
I don’t know the details of how the spray-paint got there, but I’m sure it had something to do with a manager. Perhaps a neighbor called one to complain. Or maybe the manager was doing his job and realized his employee’s work was an embarrassment.
But I guarantee you a manager was involved in some way, otherwise it would have been pothole patching (or not) as usual.
Someone had taken the time to outline all their mistakes. Perhaps it was the manager himself, or an employee the manager delegated the task to. Regardless, it was a manager because someone was creating more work. Workers — unless the are new or exceptional — rarely want to create more work than necessary for themselves. I know, I’ve been there. And my guess is you have too.
While workers do create work for themselves, they only want to do so to a comfortable degree. I’ve found myself in this position many times, but never more so than in my web design business. I got to the point where I was often suggesting making projects smaller — not because it was better for business but because it was better for me (as the technician, not the owner).
The manager in me should see that as opportunity for more business, but the technician sees it as work I don’t have time for. And the technician was right, in a way. Alone, I could not do more. I was already working 13 hour days.
Ah, but if I became a manager! Then I could dream again, because it wasn’t all dependent on me to do the work.
So I realized that being a manager was actually pretty awesome, as well as being essential if you want a business to grow. Management can be just as hard of work (and harder), but an exponential amount of work could now get done compared to before.
I’m not a very good manager, but I’m slowly figuring things out. I believe the key to success for most average people is delegation. We can delegate activities to those who are better than ourselves, and therefore succeed in ways we could never do alone.
Through delegation — which is management — we can create the most precious commodity there is: time.
And that’s why I want to be a manager. To be able to create time. To do far more projects done than I could ever do alone.
And ultimately, to build businesses that can work without me, instead of businesses that wear me out.