Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's show, Pier One-on- Ones. Part one, here we go. We often say at conferences that the farther you go up in an organization the more you

realize that you're actually less and less able to get things done all by yourself, which is opposite of what most managers think, right?

They think, well, if I become the CEO or I get a promotion, all of a sudden now everybody will do what I say.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

When you get that first promotion and you first have power,

you assume more promotion, more power.

And while technically that's true, you have more power,

more role power, and that allows you to skip levels go down and

make something happen all of a sudden. It doesn't mean that everybody underneath you

two three five hundred a thousand people are all in lockstep waiting for you and you can you can

order them around like a single entity just doesn't work that way.

You know by the way there's another statement I heard I remember when I was in Hawaii I heard it when I was

room for the general which is the higher up you are on the flagpole the more

your butts exposed and I think the combination of being exposed and for a mid or maybe a little bit higher level manager

thinking that they have a lot more role power and then realizing that they

don't can induce some panic sometimes right? Yeah we hear from CEOs all the time that they they

feel like they're running an oatmeal and they just can't make things happen as

quickly as they like to or quickly as they used to frankly yeah I remember the first time I heard that and I kind of

chuckled and I just thought it was a great analogy for that sense of working real

hard and not being able to have as much influence all the way down.

And then I heard a couple more times, like, oh, God, it just,

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