Exceptions are when the new manager has had actual management training before moving up, or has benefited from the gift
of competent mentorship. If the mentoring continues after the promotion, the
value is multiplied.
The great majority of entrants into
management aren’t so lucky. They arrive unprepared in this strange new place,
and some of them never really recover. Look around you. How many of the
managers you encounter actually perform the work well?
In case your ability to evaluate managers
has been dulled by years of exposure to the general run of the practice, let’s
step back and freshen our perspective.
To clarify: in most situations, the
manager is NOT supposed to be the most accomplished worker bee in the place.
Your widget-making days are over now.
The responsibilities of managers vary
limitlessly, so we’ll start with the universal basics: What is a manager
supposed to do?
First
of all, the manager is responsible. The buck stops right at the manager’s
door. Actually, right inside the door.
If whatever needs attention doesn’t appear
in your job description, then you’re responsible for communicating to someone about whatever
part of it is on your turf.
The mechanics of your job operate somewhat
against each other: It’s up to you to design and tend processes to enable good
people to do good work; and to guide and discipline those good people to use
the processes in doing the good work.
If the people aren’t good enough, it’s up
to you to ensure that they come up to speed or are replaced.
Process constricts people’s freedom, and
many of them don’t like that. Processes often turn out to be, or become,
ineffective in achieving the desired outcomes. You’re the one who is to fix
that.
This people factor turns out to be the most challenging
aspect of the job to the newbie, and the part most likely to be permanized at
an inadequate level of development.
Bluntly put, many managers never become
competent at managing people.
They busy themselves with meetings, memos,
managerial trivia and/or – most damagingly – with the task details of the
operation.
It is common that managers, and not just
new ones, avoid the higher and more uncomfortable issues in their role by spending
their time on what is familiar. They’re either out there on the job with everyone
else, or they’re critiquing those who are.
Most of our organizations are no longer in
the old industrial model, the one where the boss enforced the one way everybody
was to perform repetitive tasks.
This is not to dismiss the importance of
the boss’s input to the organization of the work and the way it should be
performed. And it certainly is important that he/she monitor the various quality
measures of the operation.
Few things stay the same in today’s world,
and work requirements now tend to be briefer, more complex and more tuned to
demanding market requirements. Sure, the manager must know what’s going on out
in the workplace – but the manager mainly is the architect of group outcomes
that meet current, changing standards.
In
this role, you don’t have time for the lesser duties. You train people for
them, and that educator role is your prime duty when you’re the manager.
And there’s the rub. The main object of
your attention, the top priority in your role, is that changeable,
elusive, sometimes baffling and often frustrating invaluable asset . . . the
human being.
Your job is to get people to consistently
do the right things the right way, to learn and perfect work activities they’ve
never done before and may not be too eager to learn and do now.
You can’t do it all yourself, so you have
to delegate training and supervision as well as the work itself. You must learn
all kinds of skills in communication, psychology, perception, persuasion. And
broader, deeper and tougher stuff they never told you about back there at
promotion time:
Patience and tolerance.
CONTRIBUTE: How were you introduced to
management? How does that experience influence the way you manage people today?
SEE ALSO: The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do
http://jimmillikenproject.blogspot.com/2010/02/hardest-thing-youll-ever-do.html
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