Welcome to Career Mondays. What I would like to talk about is worker, visionary, and manager. It’s important. The first thing I’d like to do is to set the stage for this, there is absolutely no right or wrong. If you are a worker, if you’re good at what you do, or if you’re not and you’re working on it what is important is that it’s who you are at a core level. Yes, you can work on changing it and that’s wonderful, but there is no right or wrong, and better or worse. It’s simply what works for you. Maybe I’m a worker, and somebody else is a visionary and a manager, or just a manager, we think they’re better than we are because maybe they make more money, let that go. That’s all self-imposed stuff. There’s my little rant for the moment.
Here we go on the worker thing. A worker is basically a person that plugs into it, and I’m thinking of person that worked at a very large automotive company. Great person, wonderful woman — she was basically a robot. Loved her job, it fulfilled her, she plugged in, she did her nine-to-five, she’s got her pension, she’s happy, she’s vibrant. She was a worker. She did the same thing day in and day out, different task. But she was told what to do, she was managed, and she didn’t have a vision for the company itself. She was employed and it was a good place to be. But to recognize that is really important.
The next level is a manager. Some people are born managers, other people can learn to be managers. Either way, if that’s what you feel good doing, because if you take a worker, that is a worker at the core, and that’s what they like to do, and you put them into a management position – an old study a long time ago, it is called the Peter Principle, where you take a person and you promote them past their efficiency level, and then they become miserable, and they quit, or they start to fail. I believe that’s what that test was about. As a manager, you’re good at organizing, you’re good at seeing the bigger picture, you’re good at putting pieces in the place, and running things.
The third level is a visionary. Visionaries see the image of what this is to be in a year from now, in five years from now, in 30 years from now. They get the picture, they get the image, it can feel almost like a dream, and that’s a whole lot of other videos that are run off later on. But there’s three different areas: Worker, manager, and visionary.
If you started a business and you’re a visionary, you’re probably not a good worker. You’re probably not a good manager. You can learn how to do it, but the key if you’re a visionary, and a lot of self-employed, entrepreneurial types can be visionaries, you should very quickly hire people that are good workers. Hire people that are good managers that can take your vision and implement it. If you’re a manager but you don’t vision well, then connect with somebody that is a good visionary if you’re in your own business. Or take the company’s vision and learn how to interpret it at your level.
There are a few tips today and thanks for listening.
