Part I. Managing Your Team

We all have to work with people. These may be loosely known as a team or a department or a squad or a crew—even a posse. It doesn’t matter. The mistake a lot of managers make is to think they are managing people. They think that people are their tools, their stock-in-trade. Make the people successful and you have the successful manager—or so the theory goes.

But unfortunately this is a myth, and we need to see that the real role of the manager is to manage processes rather than people. People can manage themselves if you let them. What you need to be concentrating on is the real job of management—the strategy. The team is merely a means to fulfilling that end. If all your people could be replaced by machines—and how many of us haven’t prayed that this might happen?—we would still need a strategy, still need to manage the process.