I have had a lot of managers over the years and recently I have been reflecting on how to manage a small department.

There are a lot of ideas (books!) about management. If you put aside performance reviews, HR policies and the mechanical aspects of "management", there are two basic philosophies for first-line management.

Company culture usually determines which model is used and that starts with the CEO and moves downhill. The CEO picks a model and sets the tone. People who use their model are promoted; others are frustrated.

• The first model is a miliary one. You (the manager) are given a task and a set of resources (your team). Your job is accomplish your task with those resources and no excuses. The manager is in charge and the team are just a means to an end.
• The second model is the team model, as in team-sports. In this case, the manager and the team take the task as a given. The manager's job is to develop their team so that they grow and get promoted into better jobs. The manager's job is to be sure the team gets the task done while people enjoy themselves and feel like they are going somewhere. The same is true for the manager who is being developed by their own manager.

If you ask most managers, I would imagine they would describe theselves as the second type of manager. But in practice, two common situations get in the way.

One, fire-fighting. When its all-hands-on-deck emergency time, there is no bandwidth left for people development. The problem is that many companies are always in fire-fighting mode. Some company cultures cannot distinguish between executing on a plan and reacting. These cultures find that they are always reacting to the latest crisis (whether it is a real crisis or not) and they never get to other things that are important but not an emergency.

Two, weak or insecure managers. A manager cannot develop their team if they themselves are feeling insecure or threatened. For these managers, the last thing they want is to lose people especially the good ones. These teams find more fear than fun at work.

If these two problems are chronic, odds are that people are unhappy and turnover is high.

The military model works best in the military where the team has made a commitment (they enlisted), they experience intense social bonding and there is a clear hierachical structure. It works less well in a workplace because the workplace is less constrained and more open. When the going gets tough, people literally get going; they quit.

The team model deals more openly with change and more honestly with individual motivations and our desire to better ourselves. With the team model, one can have a conversation about pay and personal goals as well as about responsiblity. That kind of discussion wont come up in the military model.

The team model can be thought of like team sports where the manager is a coach and the employees are the players. This analogy makes mentoring easier. It is also easy to acknowledge that players leave (they quit or get fired) but the game goes on. If you are down a man the game doesnt end -- everyone just has to chip in.

The team model also deals better with fun. It is surprising how few place are fun to work at. (A few episodes of The Office ought to remind folks of the worst jobs they have had.) Fun has less to do with the company or the task than it has to do with attitudes and intangibles like camaraderie, teamwork, and humor. It is a lot easier to have fun if people feel people like they are in it together and working towards a common goal.