如何成为更好的老板 | 经济学人社论

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2023-11-01 08:11

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Angela， “如果这纷乱的世界让我沮丧，我就去看看她们眼中的光芒。”

02 第十八期翻译打卡营

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方法，类型，背景知识到细致的语言点，

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精读|翻译|词组

Leaders | Just about managing

社论｜无非就是管理

英文部分选自经济学人202301021社论板块

Leaders | Just about managing

社论｜无非就是管理

How to be a better boss

如何成为更好的老板

Tips from “Boss Class”, our new podcast

我们的新播客“老板课堂”开课啦

Workplaces havechanged 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.

“在哪里办公”这件事，在过去四年间发生了巨变。如果把时间维度拉长至40年，变化则更为明显。远程办公让工作团队更分散，也更多元。技术进步当然有诸多好处，但烦恼也紧随而至，Zoom的线上会议不舍昼夜，Slack的工作消息永无停歇。借全球化之势，客户和供应商遍布世界各地，但在紧张的地缘政治背景下，远距离合作似乎成了一种新的风险。

注：Slack是由Slack Technologies开发的一款基于云端运算的即时通讯软件，目前已成为国外企业内部交流最常用的软件之一，与国内的钉钉和飞书类似。

With each of these shifts, thejob 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.

种种变化也让管理者的工作更难做了。管理者工作的本质是协调利益不同的员工实现共同目标。曾几何时，管理者只要是个称职的技术专家就能轻松胜任，而现在他们往往要三头六臂，同时协调更多活动。许多管理者因此感到筋疲力尽、严重过载、困惑不已。

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.

老板们很少能成为让人同情的对象。在小说中，他们总被刻画得冷酷无情（如艾比尼泽·斯克鲁奇, Ebenezer Scroog）或阴险狡诈（《办公室》中大卫·布伦特说：“倘若未能一击即中，那就抹掉所有你尝试过的证据。”) 但在现实中，糟糕的管理让人人受累，反之则人人受益。要改善管理，需要付出更多努力。

注：

艾比尼泽·斯克鲁奇是查尔斯·狄更斯小说《圣诞欢歌》的主角；《办公室》是一部改编英国电视剧的同名情景喜剧及伪纪录片《办公室风云》。

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.

首先，要认识到管理者对员工的影响。美国约五分之一的公司员工处于管理者的位置，几乎每个打工人头上都有一位管理者。在一项对十个富裕国家进行的调查中，69%的员工表示他们的老板对其心理健康产生的影响与他们的配偶相当。在美国有一半员工离职是因为管理者问题，在英国这一比例达到近三分之一。

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.

优化管理不仅能提升员工幸福度，还会提高公司业绩。一项长期涉及多国管理水平的调查表明，管理水平良好的公司往往生产效率更高，出口规模更大，研发支出也更多。这当中不仅有关联关系，也存在因果关系。一项在印度进行的随机对照试验发现，管理质量的提升带来生产效率的提高。斯坦福大学的尼古拉斯·布鲁姆（Nicholas Bloom）等人研究得出结论：美国和世界其他地区之间在经济总体生产效率方面的差距，有三分之一是由管理实践差异导致的。

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.

因此，优化管理能够带来可观的回报。但要如何实现呢？饱读管理“圣经”之后，你可能会得出这般结论：管理者需要重塑自己的人格，要么成为马基亚维利笔下合格的“君主”，要么成为漫威宇宙的超级英雄。如果去研究成功的管理者，你会发现他们的经验平平无奇，但却更为实用，这也是我们的新播客节目“老板课堂”（"Boss Class"）所发现的。播客本周开播，共有七期，将以犀利而接地气的视角对现代经理人面临的问题做一次全面审视，从会议礼节到招聘策略无所不谈，并奉上业内专家和大咖们的独到建议。

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 atgsk, 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.

这样的分析方法给出了几条启示。一是明确公司的流程。管理者应该清晰阐述团队的任务、会议的目标以及决策制定权的归属。英国制药公司葛兰素史克（GSK）要求在议程中注明本次会议的目标：是为提高对某一问题的认识，或是征集参会者的意见，又或是为了做出一项决定。另一家药企莫德纳（Moderna）列举了契合该公司企业文化的12种标志性“思维模式”，并据此寻找匹配的求职者。这样的明确性意味着每个人都知道自己在做什么，也知道为什么要这样做。

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.

然而，企业管理并不仅仅是工作任务、会议和流程的堆砌。另一条启示是，管理者可以通过“做减法”来使企业增值：不开无意义的会、不发无意义的邮件、不做无意义的项目，让员工能更专注于那些可以为公司带来效益的工作。举例来说，今年初，电商公司Shopify大刀阔斧地从员工日程表中删除了12000个定期会议（当然有用的会议最后还是保留了）。该公司表示，经过此次大规模削减，会议数量减少了14%，而生产效率也上升了14%左右。

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.

出色的企业管理是一门技术。很多人被提拔成管理者纯粹是因为他们在原本的岗位上表现出色，而并非因为他们是管理人才。据英国一项调查显示，高达82%的管理者表示自己并不具备正儿八经的管理技能，也没有接受过正规培训。因此，企业可以通过提供此类培训来弥补这一不足。

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.

另一种完善方式是建立双轨晋升制度，让员工能在不担任管理职务的前提下获得晋升。谷歌和Shopify都有类似的机制，目的是为那些不具备能力或不愿意从事管理工作的员工提供晋升路径。不能仅因员工资历老，就让他们承担企业管理工作，这样风险委实太大。

翻译组：

zy，没啥新鲜的，想做一个好译员
Alfredo，小小少年，很多烦恼
Jessie，女，翻译界林黛玉，想被人叫大佬

校对组：

Hannah，女，做个废柴，保持愉快

Rex. The one who widens your English~

风筝，热爱生活热爱翻译热爱搞钱热爱猫咪

观点|评论|思考

本周感想

Neil，男，外贸民工，经济学人铁粉

最近几年小小的感悟是一个人做业务有难度，但是比起带领团队做业务要简单得多。也渐渐地明白为什么大公司晋升有专业和管理两条线路。好的运动员不一定能当教练。在带队上，并不是只是简单地激励自己。按照自己以往的业务方式不一定能适合团队的每一个人。管理者如果不能成功转变思维模式，会拖累整个团队来。

以我肤浅地经验，管理者的主要工作是制定目标、组织计划、领导激励。核心技能要求是动员员工解决问题。初级的水平让员工解决技术性问题，比如整体业务流程顺利进行；高阶的水平是能成为一名领导者，解决挑战性难题，带领团队更有创造力地完成任务。那如何成为一名优秀的管理者？除具备一定的专业素养，还得懂得人性。

大多数人工作是为了生活，能拿更高的工资，但是工资并不是所有工作价值的体现。现在的员工90、00后居多，他们不像我们80后能隐忍，威权领导对他们不一定管用。管理者很多需要需要照顾这帮小屁孩的情绪。刚刚结束的刘润年度演讲提到情绪价值，除了物质上的激励，情绪上所能创造的价值往往无形却极具力量。这也提醒管理者需要理解年轻员工的心内需求，找到更好激励他们的方式。

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