HRGuru

Who do you feel make better managers - Men or Women ????

It is pretty much a draw among the sexes. I have seen the best and worse of both worlds!

I don't think gender has anything to do with it.  It depends on the person, their experience, their motivation, etc. as well as their level of committment to the job, the organization and their team.  Some people just want the title not the responsiblities and others want the responsibilites rather than the tile. 

Honestly, both males and females can make good managers.  I agree with everyone who states it depends on experience and education and personal ability.

I have seen a lot of good and great managers from both genders.

My personal experience is that below the "great" managers there are a lot more female managers who are not as successfull as they could be because they worry too much about feelings, being liked, and being "sensitive."   I am not knocking those issues at all.  But as a consultant I get called in to help coach these types of people into being successful.  The big "Oops!" in this is that they generally are not paying enough attention to the business metrics.  They get so wrapped up in the softer issues they don't manage well and are therefore targeted for termination and everyone thinks it's because they are a woman.  Wrong, it's a skill issue.

On the other hand, I get called in to help men who are great at their business metrics, but they'll steamroll over anyone and generally don't give a *&^%$ about employees.  These are equally as failing as what I described with women.  They are not concentrating on the softer aspects necessary for a successful job as manager.  Troglodytes went out a long time ago, (sorry Geico).

The truth of the matter is, a successful, great manager has to be good at all things, hard and soft.  But the primary goal of a business is to a) produce a product or service people want to buy, b) sell that product or service at a reasonable profit, and c) stay in business.     These generally translate into hard business and market related skills.   The softer skills of people management generally don't have immediate impacts.  The impact horizon of soft skills is often overlooked because it is so far down the road.  The effect of poor people skills of most managers is often felt so far down the road the separation of time and the ambiguity of assessing the impact back to the manager is lost in a myriad of excuses and scapegoating.   That's where a good HR professional can shine, by coming into organizations assessing both the hard business metrics and the softer, people managment metrics and tying true performance lapses and successes back to their root causes.  Hard to do, time consuming, and many managers aren't willing to invest the time.  Only the great ones do!

Almost all I have come in contact with have been women and of those woman and the few men they run the guantlet of personality types. Being detail oriented to varing degrees seems to be a common trait but I couldn't say which gender is better for any one reason. I think in general men find it less desirable because its percieved as a touchy feely job.