74 - Being Easy To Manage - The "Yes" Man/Woman

What being easy to manage doesn't mean

I’m writing about being easy to manage. How it has a critical impact on the performance of a team, as well as a huge impact as a virtuous circle superpower for a person’s career learning and growth. This is the advice I would have benefitted from early in my career.

But first a short post to dispel something. Being easy to manage absolutely does not mean being a “yes” man or woman. I’ll use the term “yes” person and acronym YP for this post.

A YP can feel easy to manage in the short term. They assent to everything that’s requested of them. They never clarify any of their manager’s instructions. They never challenge any of their manager (or the organisation a whole’s) decisions or priorities. The YP is extremely low maintenance. 

Too low maintenance. No manager can perfectly judge their report’s workload. No matter how hard they try, they will never achieve perfect clarity of commuincation. Nor will they, or the organisation, have perfect knowledge to make perfect decisions.

So one of two, non-mutually exclusive, things happens when it comes to the YP. One is that things painfully unravel at some point. The YP burns out. They drop a costly ball. They waste time working on the wrong thing because of unclear instructions. A misguided decision, that the YP could have surfaced information to prevent, has a damaging impact. The other is that the manager is reduced to the role of mind reader. Having to guess and constantly check whether the YP is saying “yes” when the answer is “no”, which takes up a lot of time and reduces managerial leverage.

A YP is somewhere on the spectrum of extremely difficult to impossible to manage.