Don't find execuses for yourself
On the way to management role, you will soon find that it is quite different from technical role. When there is disaster, people are not going to take responsible and analyze their problem. The first resort is to find execuse from others. They may look into history logs to find your mistakes and put blame on you.
It really happens even though they used to be very nice apparently. The root cause for someone to pass the buck is the fear of failure. They are afraid of being blamed and dealing with the overwhelmed situation.
In this case study, we can look from two point of view, and conclude some learning points.
1 Stop passing the buck
For whatever reasons, when people are not taking responsibility, he will fail in his work, lose respects from others, and fail to grow.
Firstly, you should start from the reality and analyze the cause of the problem, while not find cues to blame other.
Then, based on the result of the analyzing, you should find any actions you can do to create workaround, if the case is quite urgent.
After that, you shall list all the actions strategically, list item by item, group to small project, prioritize them, and schedule them.
Finally, when you complete all the actions needed to solve the problem, you should retrospect the problem, and find process improvement to avoid the same problem in the future. At this point, you could frankly and nicely provide suggestions to others if their mistake leads to the problem. I think they will trust you and appreciate your help.
2 Avoid being the scapegoat
Well, as I mentioned in the beginning, there are always the guys who will pass the buck to you. You should prepare for this in your work.
Here are some tips:
- The first thing you should always do is to be professional. Do not leave the chance for others to blame you. That means you should make high quality product. You should always improve your quality.
- Whatever risks you take, you should prepare for taking the responsible. If others want you to rush for the deadline, you should protect yourself. Otherwise, you can let others to write down their responsible for the potential risk.
- Avoid being meek and submissive. If the criticism is unfair, you should stand up. It is not the time to be nice. But you should have the sufficient evidence that you are correct.
- Don't rush for fight, be cool, wait for enough supportive evidence to fight.
Management role is always a dagerous role. It a long way for me to be a professional manager.