Small management digest...

This one lesson might help someone who is managing people. I dont know if it holds true generally. So feel free to take it if u think it might help.

Mostly for a person who gets a new manager, The manager is someone very distant from him, who sits at a corner, always judging him. Some kind of judge who is supposed to make a decision on his behavior, promotions, salary, bonuses etc. So how to break the ice? This one suggestion might help. Other than the professional stuff, pick a subject that interests your employee the most. Try to see if you know anything about it. If not thats the best thing to do. Tell him during the next one on one that you are really interested in knowing about it. Choose some basic questions and get the answers from him. The employee gets a feeling that he has supremacy over you in that topic, and he will definitely answer your question even more than that, give you suggestions and there develops the relation.

If you know something about the subject, then you would definitely have more advanced question and even that helps.

This notion is from my experience for the past 3 and half years. I understand that with those managers whom I had a good relation, it was always bcoz apart from work there was something that we could talk about.