The people I call Cubicle Warriors, people who not only survive, but thrive, working in cubicles, need to know how to evaluate a position and manager for any prospective work. How can we tell the manager will be right for us? How can we tell if the group’s culture will support us? It isn’t as if we can ask forty questions about the culture during an interview, can we? But Patrick Lencioni has come close with his book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. In it, he describes each of these signs and why they make the job miserable. We can use these signs as knowledge workers to discover if a position is right for us.

But we can also use it to show how managers can engage knowledge workers in their cubicles. Let’s look at the first sign: Anonymity, where “people who see themselves as invisible, generic, or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing.”

Before you discount this in the workplace, consider how little managing of people we do. Or, how we constantly reorg people with the latest change in management. Anonymity is rampant in corporations. We forget that people produce the work. Here’s what you can do remove anonymity in your team:

• Management by walking around. Yes, it’s old, but the premise behind this approach was that you would walk around and see the work in progress. Talk to the people you work with. In doing so, you would learn about them, their work, families, and hobbies. Knowing your people beyond the task is critical to managing Cubicle Warriors.
• Find the unique talent a person brings to the team. We are not interchangeable parts. People have different strengths and talents for the job. Find that talent in your team and let the person know that you recognize that talent. They may not and, if they do, will recognize that you know it.
• Don’t fake it. Cubicle Warriors have that “corporate speak” detector set to the most sensitive setting. Without genuinely wanting to know your employees, you will fail if you fake it.
• Manage people, not workers. Too many managers look at Cubicle Warriors as the best workers they have. And they are. But they are people, too, and forgetting they are people will reduce their work for you.
• Help your team know each other. This will strengthen the bond between them and help them understand cultural differences.

Treating people as adults goes a long way to getting to know your people. People don’t get out of bed in the morning to program code; they get out interacting with people while completing satisfying tasks. Interacting with you as their manager can make them want to come to work. Or not.

Next up: Irrelevance

About the author: Scot Herrick is the owner of CubeRules.com, a site dedicated to on-line career training of knowledge workers who mostly work in cubes. Scot has a long history of management and individual contribution in multiple Fortune 100 corporations.

Photo credit to http://www.myspacelayouts.org/generators/Name-Tag/

Post from: EveryJoe

Cubicle Warriors Are Not Anonymous