Managing Your Team, Managing Your Self, Visualize your blue plaque!

When you write your bestseller and then die you will get a blue plaque on the building where you were born, or lived, or Wrote the damn thing just so long as it was in London. I'm fairly certain you have to be dead, but you don't have to have written anything. Being a musician is good enough even Jimi Hendrix got one.

When I say 'you' I don't mean you, I mean whomever it is that lives thereafter you've snuffed it. This blue plaque is there to commemorate the fact that you did a good thing while you were alive. If you didn't do your good thing i.e. write your bestseller, add to the sum of human literacy, manage to afford to live in London you don't get a blue plaque.

Now imagine that there is a blue plaque for management style and it's not limited to London. What would you get yours for? Would you get one? Basically, how would you like to be remembered?

I worked for a boss once whose style of management was quaint, to say the least. As he came in each day he would blast the first person he saw, give them a complete rollicking over whatever they happened to be doing. Then he would go to his office and have a coffee for half an hour. Then he would walk through the plant and compliment the first person he saw, telling them what a great job they were doing no matter what it was they were doing. I asked him about this and he said, 'Keeps them on their toes. They never know where they are with me.

I get more out of them if they are frightened.' No blue plaque for you, Billy boy.

I've told this before because it still, after over 20 years, fascinates me as the worst incompetent, bullying stupidity I have ever come across. And he is still in a job, still employed by the same firm. Yes, he has hardly risen the ranks, because he is still doing pretty much what he was then, back when I knew him but he is still employed. I don't buy shares in that particular company never have, never will.

I want a blue plaque. I want it for being the best damn manager there ever was. I want it for being good for my team, getting results, setting standards; be a huge success, and be somebody they liked working for.