I love hearing managers complain about unions.

“You can’t get those guys to take responsibility,” they complain. “They’re just not motivated. Don’t blame me — they belong to a union!”

Union members who won’t take responsibility? Didn’t I just hear the manager refuse to take responsibility for motivating employees? It would be one thing if motivating union members were impossible, but it isn’t. I’ve seen it done, and in small ways I’ve done it myself once or twice.

Employee motivation is one of your most critical responsibilities as a manager. Last week we talked about the five great motivators, learned from my personal marketing guru (aka Dad): fear, greed, guilt, need for approval, and exclusivity. We explored fear and its limitations. A last thought: Don’t confuse fear and intimidation. There’s never an excuse for bullying an employee. Bullying is simple self-indulgence.

How about greed? Managers misunderstand and abuse greed more than any other motivational technique. Managers who don’t understand how to motivate union members share a mentality with those who rely excessively on the compensation system as a motivator — they think employees do it for the money.

Outside of sales, greed has big problems as a general-purpose motivational tool. You can apply it in four ways: salary, spot bonuses, annual incentives, and stock ownership. Salary is the worst. Let’s take an employee who earns $50,000 annually and try to use his salary increase as a performance incentive. Let’s imagine your company has established 4 percent as its standard raise for average employees. You squeak out a 7 percent raise for a great performer — way above the average. Wow! After taxes, your great performer will take home less than $20 a week more than an average one. If you think that will motivate someone to excel next year, you’re living in a fantasy world.

How about spot bonuses? They’re very nice to receive. You see an employee who does killer work, so you give her a spot bonus of a few thousand dollars, for which she’s thrilled. “That ought to motivate everyone,” you think to yourself.

How so? Every other employee is thinking, “When is it my turn?” And the employee who received the bonus? She’ll continue to work hard, but if she doesn’t get another spot bonus she’ll become grumpy too. Add it all up and you lose more than you win.

Annual incentive programs and employee stock ownership programs, or ESOPs? When structured properly, these are pretty good ideas. They work well because they deliver enough money to be meaningful. They work well because they give employees a stake in the company’s success. And they work well because they mitigate the enervating sense that bonuses are a management perk. (Management perks deliver a simple message: “Managers are better than you are.”)

Most of all, though, annual incentives and ESOPs work because they’re great communication tools. The money isn’t as important as the message, and the message says, “We really mean it when we tell you about the kind of behavior and results we value. You know we mean it because we’re putting our money where our mouths are.”

If you think of money as a communications vehicle you’ll stay on track with spot bonuses and salary increases, too. Present the salary increase as your understanding of the employee’s quality. Deliver a spot bonus privately, and say, “We don’t give out a lot of these. You’ve done a lot to earn it, and your work on the new payroll system is just the most recent example. This is just our small way of saying we appreciate the great work. Thanks.”

Delivering money unfairly demotivates employees as much as anything you can do. Using it to motivate is risky.

But used properly, it’s a great communication tool. After all, money talks.

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.