Management Skills
- Effective
management requires a different set of skills from leadership.
- Managers
need to promote efficiency, to deliver on today's goals, to execute
existing directions - leaders generate new directions.
- Getting
the best performance out of people means achieving today's targets
and is therefore a management task.
- Anything
to do with making decisions to allocate resources, motivating
or developing people to improve their performance a matter for
management.
- Leadership,
by contrast, is about influencing people to change.
- This section
focuses on managerial skills.
- There
are managerial task skills and people skills. The focus here is
on people skills.
- The following
pages will help you improve your skills in empowering employees,
delegating, team building, coaching and much more. Read on and
enjoy!
The Meaning
of Management
We need to
understand the meaning of management in order to know what management
skills to develop. Think of what is means to be an investor - someone
with money to invest and wanting the best return. Such a person
shifts his or her money around regularly to improve return.
Similarly,
managers have resources at their disposal to invest - people, material
and a budget, in addition to their own time and energy. Smart managers
think carefully on a regular basis about how to get the best return
on these resources. In the case of human resources, it is not just
a matter of having the right employee in the right place at the
right time, it is also about developing and improving that resource.
Managers
are catalysts, brokers, facilitators, coaches and people developers.
Because thinking is the most important work we do today, managers
need to ask stimulating questions to draw new solutions out of people,
to get mental work done through them. This makes managers faciltators
more than decision makers as they were thought of in the old days.
Certainly they still make decisions, but ineffective managers do
too much of their own thinking, hence not reaping the fullest possible
return of all resources at their disposal. They are poor investors
as a result.
Effective
managers know that delegation is not enough in today's knowledge
driven world to get work done through people. This is because most
of the critical work we do today is to make decisions, solve problems
and think creatively. This is mental work. Smart managers get this
kind of work done through people by asking them the sorts of questions
that stimulate people to think, to draw solutions out of people.
Ineffective managers may delegate a lot but this is so they can
be free to do most of their own thinking and problem solving. They
fail to work with and through people when it comes to this mental
work. The skilled manager knows how to get the best out of people
by asking them the right questions - those that make them think
differently, not simply fact-gathering questions.
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Are
you ready for a complete shake up of leadership theory? Then,
you should buy this book!
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