Now You Are a Manager

You may have been working towards a promotion for ages, and finally won that coveted team supervisor role, or perhaps your job has just kind of expanded almost without you realising it and now you are coaching a volunteer or graduate trainee.  Whatever the route, one day you realise you are a manager now.  This can be a scarey thought!  Many people have had a manager who was less than ideal - they may have been a micromanager, bossy, unappreciative or just too busy to have any time for you.  Most people are determined that they will never be as bad.

I remember when I was first offered a management role, at Manpower back in the mid-1990s.  Although it was for a very small branch, with one full time consultant and one part time administrator, suddenly I had gone from just having to worry about my own performance to being responsible for delivering half a million turnover, managing two staff, and being the person clients meant when they said *let me talk to your manager*.  Although I had a regional manager and head office full of senior specialists to call upon, it felt like a very exposed and scarey position!

Making sure you are a better manager than those aweful managers you remember from the past means learning a whole new skill set.  Many people are entrusted with supervisory roles because they were a great performer in their previous job.  However being good at doing a particular job doesnt necessarily make you good at managing others doing that job.  Doing and managing are very different activities.  Knowing how to do the job is useful, when knowing what to delegate, being able to coach others to do a better job, and knowing when part of the job isnt being done very well.  In other words, it is necessary to the job of managing, but it isnt sufficient.

So, what other skills do you need to be a good manager? 

• Able to set an example - act as a role model
• Value individual contributions - treat colleagues with resect, solicit alternative opinions
• Cultivate collaboration & continuous improvement
• Set stretch targets - challenging but achievable with the resources available
• Inspire and motivate others - create a vision, set goals, offer praise
• Adept at critical and analytical thinking - ask open questions, ask why and so what, question the status quo
• Influence others - either persuade with strong arguments and facts or bring people round to see the benefits to themselves of your ideas
• Building relationships - with your direct reports, with your own manager, with their manager and the rest of the senior team, and externally with suppliers and other partners 
• Able to translate organisation and team goals down to individual level - including understanding budgets and desired outcomes

Some of the tasks you will be doing as a manager are also different from those you do as a team member.  These include things like setting objectives, delegating tasks, monitoring progress, giving feedback and reviewing performance.

Some of the best tips Ive seen for new managers can be found at Work Awesome. They advocate making sure you allow team members to be pround of their work - this means taking account of their ideas, allowing them to implement those ideas where they fit into the overall team goals, and giving credit to them for the idea and the outcomes.  It means not micro-managing them while they are doing the work.  There is a difference between having one-to-one meetings at agreed intervals, where progress on current tasks is reported, and you checking several times a day to see how things are going and to tell them how to do each step along the way!

The other key advice they offer is to "catch me doing something right".  It is very easy to spot when someone has missed something, or isnt using the best technique to get something done.  However, if the majority of your conversations with your direct report are criticisms of what they are doing or how they are doing it, you will quickly demotivate them and they will end up thinking "why bother, nothing I do is right, there is no point trying any more".

Although this seems obvious, it is surprisingly difficult to make sure the balance stays in favour of praising more than offering criticism.  Issues tend to jump out and catch your attention. You could end up being very busy attending to all those issues. Someone doing good work - ie, "just doing their job" - tends to be taken for granted.  Try and take time to notice the little things - a simple "thank you" or "well done" or "thats great" works wonders, especially when delivered in public.

Another useful site, which has a list of common mistakes new managers tend to make, is the management site at About.com.  One of the key points they make is that a major change once you become the manager, is that everything that happens in your team is now your responsibility.  This holds true whether it is something you did or knew about, or not.  You are accountable for the performance and behaviour of your team members.  This means it is up to you to have developed those relationships, delegated and motivated effectively, and communicated often and well, so as to minimise those "oh ......!" moments.

  




 
   
   

Some thoughts on leadership and management

There has been something of a focus on leadership and management (or should that be leadership vs management?) over the last couple of weeks. Jo Alcock posted Seven Lessons About Effective Leadership on her blog, where she listed some lessons she’s learnt about leadership as part of the CILIP Chartership process.

This was followed by #uklibchat on Tuesday 29^th May, which was on the topic of leadership (thank you to @Annie_Bob for the storify of the conversation) and Emma Cragg posted Leadership and Management on her blog in the middle of last week.

This got me thinking about my experience of leadership over the years, both practical examples I have witnessed or experienced and also the learnings about leadership from my MBA studies.  The first thing that struck me was the lack of any really positive examples I could give; perhaps this is because leadership is very hard or maybe I have been very unlucky in the leaders I have seen?

Some examples:  

1. A company whose leader had the vision that it should be the largest and best in its field – probably a common and possibly a laudable goal in business.  However, this was translated into annual regional goals which were somewhat unrealistic.  It was clear that when managers were asked for growth projections anything not in double figures was simply unacceptable – did this mean that the leader had little understanding of conditions ‘on the ground’, or really thought that anyone suggesting less than 10% growth year-on-year just didn’t have what it takes to ‘make it happen’? Perhaps the leader had a great vision but lacked the communication skills to carry the staff with them?
2. A company whose leader was charismatic, had a loyal team of staff, led the firm to growth over several years, and had a clear vision of where they wanted the company to be and which new areas to go into.  Unfortunately the key one of those ventures turned out not to be the massive growth area the leader had expected, and it never made sufficient revenues to break even.  This shows that even with a ‘good’ leader the clear and compelling vision they create, which people are prepared to follow, isn’t always the ‘right’ vision.  A leader can draw the wrong conclusions from the information they have or can filter the information they receive to fit their dream, and so make the wrong decisions.
3. A company with a well loved leader who looked after their staff, led the firm to growth over several years and managed the working process and company finances really well.  However the leader didn’t tell anyone in the company what the strategy was, what their vision for the firm was, or where the company was heading.  Despite having a strong brand and great reputation, the firm just jogged along making small profits.  Perhaps this leader was more of a manager at heart?

There seems to be general agreement on the attributes of a leader – vision, charisma, provide inspiration, confidence, communication skills - I think that some of these can be learned but others you either have or not.  One example could be confidence and self-belief – you may be able to adopt a veneer of confidence sometimes, in some situations, but to put yourself forward as a leader, with a view of ‘how things could/should be’, and to take difficult decisions which may not always be popular, I think takes real self confidence.

 

While self confidence may be innate, having it means there are other skills (which perhaps don’t come so naturally) that a wise leader would make sure they learned – enabling opposing voices and setting up mechanisms to ensure information contrary to what the leader wants to hear gets heard for example.  In one case I can remember, a leader was so fixed on their vision of growing the firm that they refused to listen to their managers who were telling them about a forthcoming downturn in the market, to the extent they borrowed heavily to fund the expected growth and nearly bankrupted the company when the downturn they refused to believe in duly came to pass.

One of the points raised in the #uklibchat that caught my eye was that communication skills, universally agreed to be a vital skill for a leader, were very hard to teach / learn.  Leaders need to communicate to inspire people with their vision, to motivate and encourage their followers, to negotiate with partners and to promote their vision to external parties.  They need to make everyone believe in their dream; believe that the different state of affairs that they envisage is not only desirable but achievable. 

The vast majority of CVs I’ve seen over the years include the phrase ‘good communication skills’.  Beyond the obvious (written or verbal), what does it mean?  For a leader it means being able to inspire by talking about their vision (whether in a speech to hundreds, or one to one in a conversation), to persuade and negotiate, to give and accept criticism, to use effective body language and tone of voice, to give a great presentation, to gather information by asking questions, to give instructions and to praise and encourage followers….phew, no wonder ‘communication skills’ are hard to learn!

Although it helps to have read about the basics of what makes up good communication (University of Kent has a good summary on their careers site, it is only by putting these ideas into practice (probably repeatedly) that effective communication becomes second nature.  Outside of work, where trying to act like a leader in non-leadership positions might cause unwanted waves, I believe that probably the best environment to get this practice is within one of the various information groups, especially through volunteering to be on a managing committees.  Although this may sound daunting, many of the groups are crying out for people with the interest and energy to step forward and give some time and effort to help organise things, so it's well worth asking informally if there are any ways you can get involved.

Some other ideas on ‘what makes a leader’ can be found in the literature.   Psychology Today has an article that claims there is little difference between leadership and management, beyond semantics, but several sites have lists of differences between the two – including those of Practical Management and Performance Coaching International.

ChangingMinds argues that the main difference is that leaders have followers, while managers have subordinates. Finally, Harvard Business Review has a whole series of classicarticles on the subject, 10 of which have been collected together into one piece (subscription required).

Another librarian-written piece, by Andrew Burlington, Emerging Technologies Librarian in Burlington, USA, has some tips to get started on leadership straight away.