工作场所在过去几年发生了重大变化，更不用说过去的40年。团队变得更加分散，这要归功于远程工作，也更加多元化。科技带来了巨大的好处，但也带来了不断的干扰，从无休止的Zoom会议到Slack上又一则消息的提示音。全球化将客户和供应商分散到世界各地，地缘政治紧张关系使遥远的关系似乎成为一种新的风险来源。
Workplaces have changed dramatically over the past four years, let alone the past 40. Teams have become more dispersed, thanks to remote work, as well as more diverse. Technology has brought with it great benefits but also constant interruptions, from endless Zoom calls to the ping of another message on Slack. After globalisation spread customers and suppliers around the world, geopolitical tension has made distant relationships seem like a new source of risk.
随着这些变化，管理者的工作变得更加艰难。曾经有一段时间，管理者只需成为技术专家就能够应对。如今，他们表示自己需要应付更多任务，需要协调更多活动。许多人报告称感到筋疲力尽、超负荷和困惑。
With each of these shifts, the job of the manager—the person tasked with getting workers with disparate interests to achieve a common goal—has become harder still. There was a time when managers could cope simply by being technical experts. Now they say they are juggling more tasks and have more activities to co-ordinate. Many report feeling burnt-out, overloaded and confused.
老板们很少会成为他人同情的对象。在小说中，他们常被描绘成冷酷无情的人（想想Ebenezer Scrooge），或者狡猾狡诈的人（“如果一开始不成功，就要消除你曾经尝试过的一切证据”，如《办公室》中的David Brent建议）。然而，在现实生活中，当管理不善时每个人都会受到影响，而管理得当则使每个人都受益。要使管理变得更好，需要付出更多努力。
Bosses are rarely the objects of sympathy. In fiction, they are portrayed as cold-hearted (think Ebenezer Scrooge) or weaselly (“If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried,” advises David Brent in “The Office”). Yet in real life everyone suffers when management is bad and benefits when it is good. Far more effort is needed to make it better.
以管理者对员工的影响为起点。在美国，大约五分之一的企业员工是管理者，几乎每个人都有一位上级。在对十个富裕国家的一项调查中，69%的员工表示他们的老板对他们的心理健康的影响不亚于他们的配偶。半数美国人辞职的人表示离职是因为管理不善，英国辞职者中也有近三分之一是因为糟糕的管理者。
Start with how managers affect workers. Roughly a fifth of corporate employees in America are managers, and almost everyone has one. In a survey in ten rich countries, 69% of workers said their boss influenced their mental health as much as their spouse did. Half of Americans who have left a job said they did so because of a bad manager, as did nearly a third of British job-leavers.
更好的管理不仅意味着员工更快乐，还意味着公司绩效更出色。基于对各国管理技巧的长期调查的研究发现，良好管理的公司往往更具生产力。它们还出口更多产品，并在研发方面花费更多。这些发现不仅仅是相关性：例如，印度的一项随机对照试验发现，管理质量的提高导致生产率上升。而且这种影响很大。斯坦福大学的尼古拉斯·布鲁姆（Nicholas Bloom）等人的研究得出结论，管理实践的差异占据了美国和其他国家之间的整体经济生产率差距的三分之一。
Better management does not just mean happier staff. It means better-performing companies, too. Research based on a long-running survey of management techniques across countries has found that well-managed firms tend to be more productive. They also export more and spend more on research and development. Such findings are not mere correlation: a randomised controlled trial in India, for instance, found that increases in management quality caused productivity to rise. And the effect is large. Research by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and others concluded that differences in management practices account for a third of the gap in economy-wide productivity between America and the rest of the world.
因此，更好的管理的奖励是巨大的。但如何实现它呢？阅读足够多的管理书籍，你可能会得出结论，管理者需要进行全面的个性移植，要么成为马基雅维利的君主，要么成为漫威的超级英雄。然而，研究成功的管理者，学到的教训更加平凡。它们也更加实用——正如我们的新播客“Boss Class”所发现的。从本周开始，这个播客将以一种机智但实际的方式探讨现代管理者面临的问题，从会议礼仪到招聘策略，同时汇集专家和从业者的建议。
The prize for better management, then, is big. But how to obtain it? Read enough management books and you might conclude that managers need full-on personality transplants, becoming either Machiavelli’s prince or a Marvel superhero. Study successful managers, though, and the lessons are more prosaic. They are also far more useful—as “Boss Class”, our new podcast, discovers. Over seven episodes starting this week it will take a wry but practical look at problems facing the modern manager, from meeting etiquette to hiring strategy, while bringing together tips from experts and practitioners alike.
这种方法带来了几个教训。其中之一是要明确公司的流程。管理者应明确团队的目的、会议应该实现的目标以及谁将做出决策。英国制药公司gsk的会议议程清楚地说明了每一项议程是用于意识、收集参与者的意见还是旨在产生决策。另一家制药公司Moderna列出了定义其企业文化的12种“心态”，并寻求至少具备其中一些心态的求职者。这种明晰意味着每个人都知道他们在做什么，以及为什么这么做。
This approach yields several lessons. One is to be explicit about a firm’s processes. Managers should make clear the purpose of a team, what a meeting should achieve and who will take a decision. Meeting agendas at gsk, a British drugs firm, clearly say whether an item is for awareness, to gather participants’ input or intended to yield a decision. Moderna, another drugmaker, lists 12 “mindsets” that define its corporate culture and seeks job applicants with at least some of them. Such clarity means that everyone knows what they are doing, and why.
然而，管理并不仅仅是积累任务、会议或流程。第二个教训是管理者可以通过减少来增加价值。减少无意义的会议、电子邮件和项目，使员工能够集中精力做增加底线的工作。在年初，电商公司Shopify从员工日历中删除了12,000个定期会议。最终，有用的会议被重新添加。但该公司表示，自从大规模删除以来，会议减少了14%。生产力也提高了大致相同的幅度。
Yet management isn’t all about accumulating tasks, meetings or processes. A second lesson is that managers can add value by subtracting. Sparing workers from pointless meetings, emails and projects frees them to concentrate on the work that fattens the bottom line. At the start of the year Shopify, an e-commerce firm, deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from its employees’ calendars. The useful ones were eventually added back. But the firm says that meetings are down by 14% since the mass deletion. Productivity has gone up by a similar amount.
良好的管理是一门技能。有太多的偶然管理者，他们之所以晋升，是因为他们在自己的领域表现出色，而不是因为他们适合未来的工作。在英国的一项调查中，82%的管理者表示他们没有适当的管理技能或培训。提供这种培训是公司填补这一空白的途径之一。
Good management is a skill. There are too many accidental managers, promoted because they were good at what they did, rather than because they were suited to what lay ahead. Fully 82% of managers told a survey in Britain that they had no proper management skills or training. Providing that training is one way for companies to fill the gap.
另一种方法是建立两轨晋升系统，提供一种可以在不进入管理职位的情况下晋升的途径，就像谷歌和Shopify已经做的那样。这给那些不能或不想管理的人提供了一种进步的方式。管理不应该成为人们仅仅凭借资历晋升的职位。风险太高。 ■
Another is to establish two-track promotion systems that offer a way to rise through the ranks without going into management, as Google and Shopify do already. That gives people who either can’t or don’t want to manage a way to progress. Management should not be something people fall into simply by dint of seniority. The stakes are too high. （The Economist)