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One fringe benefit of public speaking is meeting friends I never knew I had.

So it happened when I gave a luncheon speech recently at LawNet, an association for CIOs and IS managers who work for law firms.

You think you have a tough gig? Imagine having no status and no hope of promotion (only lawyers become partners). Imagine having no real company strategy to use in setting priorities, only 20 bosses, each with a priority du jour. Imagine technology being a key competitive differentiator, specifically asked for in requests for proposals but effectively ignored by your firm’s fragmented executive leadership.

After I’d spent an hour babbling about electric fish, prairie chickens, evolution, and IS management, I talked with dozens of LawNet members, many of whom regaled me with anecdotes about bad managers. Bad managers don’t, of course, outnumber good ones, but they sure stick more in people’s minds and craws.

My e-mail reinforces this conclusion. When I write about bad managers I get megabytes of “me too” letters; writing in defense of managers and executives yields the kind and volume of messages usually reserved for commentaries on operating systems or Bill Gates.

Memories of bad managers last longer than memories of good ones and create expectations that the next manager will be just as bad or worse. That, I guess, is how evolution wired us: Failure to anticipate an adverse situation can keep our genes out of the next generation, whereas failure to anticipate a positive event simply leads to a pleasant surprise.

IS Survival Guide is about managing staff well. It’s also about being effective in your job and about how to have a successful career. Managing staff well means building teams and nurturing employees so they can succeed. Managing effectively means getting the resources and decisions needed to accomplish your goals and get the job done. You measure success through career advancement.

These three dimensions of management aren’t intrinsically linked — aligning them takes deliberate effort on the part of company leadership. Sadly, managers can be successful without managing staff well or being effective, because many, and perhaps most, companies are structured so managers have plenty of power to filter information as it rises in the executive hierarchy.

You manage in four directions: down to your staff; sideways to recipients of the services you provide; sideways again to your peers and rivals in the company; and up to the executives above you. In my experience some managers are good at managing staff and service recipients; others excel at managing peers and organizational superiors. Very few are good at all four.

If you want to manage your staff well, be effective, and have a successful career, you have to master all four directions.

You also have to reconcile the three dimensions of management in your day-to-day job. I don’t care how much of a political rat’s nest you work in — good managers insulate the people who work for them from the politics in the rest of the company. Running interference for your employees is, in fact, a key part of your job.

That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be so naive that you ignore your political environment. Your staff can’t succeed without the resources it needs to do its job. If you’re ineffective, everyone who works for you will be frustrated and ineffective as well, no matter how good a manager you are.

Your success, of course, depends on your ambition, your ability to “manage up”, and dumb luck.

If you want to succeed, or, for that matter, just be an effective manager, you’ll have to play some stupid political games. That’s OK: There’s one thing worse than playing stupid political games, and that’s losing them.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

When I lived in Washington a decade or so ago, one of the local banks started calling itself The Most Important Bank in the Most Important City in the World.

Needless to say, I took my business elsewhere – I didn’t feel important enough to do business with them and was pretty sure I wasn’t important enough for them to give me the kind of service I wanted.

Self-importance is a geographic hazard in Washington. It’s also an occupational hazard for executives, many of whom exhibit thinly disguised contempt for staff-level employees. Managers in companies afflicted by the executives-are-royalty culture learn that self-important arrogance gets them ahead. Sad to say, in some companies it does.

You have alternatives, though.

For example, shortly after I departed the electric fish of my graduate school days in pursuit of an actual income, I found myself having to present a system design to the senior vice president of manufacturing. I’d only interacted with corporate executives a couple of times at that point in my career. From my perspective, this was a big deal.

Nervous, I arrived a bit early, expecting to sit outside his office until the rest of the attendees showed up.

“Go on in,” his secretary said, and there I was, alone with the No. 2 guy in the company.

After we introduced ourselves, he held up a black book and said, “I found the most remarkable thing in the library the other day.” I asked what it was.

“It’s a PhD thesis from an anthropologist who lived with the Sioux Indians a hundred years ago. It’s just amazing!” And with that he proceeded to put me completely at ease as he told me about what this long-dead anthropologist had learned.

After the meeting (which went well, in part because this gentleman extended himself on my behalf) I learned some other things about him.

That he’d literally started at the bottom of the company, working his way up. That he was responsible for negotiating with a dozen bargaining units as a regular part of his job, and routinely had to make very difficult decisions. That he was respected throughout the industry.

I learned two other things. Here’s the first: Not a single employee had a single bad thing to say about this executive.

Not one.

Can you make that claim?

Here’s the other thing I learned: Abusive, ill-tempered, bad-mannered, politically driven managers didn’t succeed in his organization. With no disrespect to any other group I’ve known in my career, this team, with no written mission statement, vision, or other chartering document, was the most focused, mission-driven, aligned collection of managers I’ve ever worked with.

It’s common for groups with charismatic leaders to lose their way when their leader retires or moves on. Through at least two successors, though (both promoted from within), and at least two complete turnovers in managerial staff, this group continued to have the same chemistry. For all I know it still does.

I’ve since worked for and with screamers, schemers, liars, and back-stabbers. The first time it happened I had no idea how to deal with the situation, in fact.

But I’d learned the key facts: that lots of managers and executives are excellent leaders. That it’s possible to create an organization in which everyone focuses on the job instead of on personal agendas. That you can, as a leader, create an environment in which helping the company succeed is the best route to personal success.

I’ve heard colleagues say things like, “You don’t become a manager to make friends.” Maybe not.

But I know from experience that it’s possible for you, like the subject of this week’s column, to be a highly effective leader and still be a mensch.

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