The affectless manager is just interested in the things of his concern but doesn’t look any further.
He doesn’t really care about things.
But he’s not a poor manager. Actually, he’s usually pretty good, technically speaking. In fact, he became a manager because he did his job particularly well, and so the company gave him confidence.
He does his job well, but this doesn’t mean he cares.
He does it well because his mental mechanism involves this.
The affectless manager has only one goal: the execution of the task.
If he has to perform a task, he’ll perform his task.
If the task is made up of so many subtasks, it does the subtasks well too. He links tasks efficiently.
And maybe even effectively.
But all this without feelings.
And yet, no athlete becomes the No. 1 in the world if he doesn’t love what he does. No actor wins an Oscar if he doesn’t love his job. No entrepreneur treats his company with distance: every company is like a son.
No manager exercises some form of leadership if he’s technically good but aseptic, affectless.
The affectless manager doesn’t conceive that an important metric of his work is the satisfaction of those around him: I did my job as it should have been done … but why isn’t my colleague happy? Why isn’t my employee happy? Why isn’t my boss happy? Why isn’t my customer happy?
There’s a beautiful expression in the world of sales that perfectly sums up the distance between the affectless manager and his customer (internal or external):
People will never care how much you know until they know how much you care
To excel in doing a certain thing means not only doing it WELL, but also with passion.
