The Effective Manager: Management skills for high performance

FOREWORD

IT is often seen as a ‘hard-skill’ profession where there is no place for soft skills. Yet the importance of soft skills for the IT professional should not be underrated; they underlie all behaviours and interactions. Both IT and non-IT professionals need to work together and learn from each other for effective business performance. All professionals, be they in IT or elsewhere, need to understand how their actions and reactions impact on their behaviour and working relationships.

This series of books aims to provide practical guidance on a range of soft-skills areas for those in IT and also for those not in IT who deal with IT professionals in order to facilitate more effective and co-operative working practices.

Each book is written by an experienced consultant and trainer. Their approach throughout is essentially practical and direct, offering a wealth of tried and tested professional guidance. Each chapter contains a diagnostic and focused questions to help the manager plan and steer their course. The language used is jargon-free, and a bibliography and a helpful glossary of terms are included at the end of the book.

Angela Wilde, February 2009

PREFACE

This book is intended to provide IT managers with practical advice and tips on how to become an effective manager.

Whether you are new to management or have been a manager for some time, management is a skill that can be learned and developed in order to gain the trust and respect of your team members and to achieve team and organisational goals.

This book will help you to develop your management skills. It is designed to assist you in understanding what the characteristics are of a high-performing manager, to help you assess where your strengths and development areas lie as a manager and to create a plan of action for realising your management potential.

I hope that you will find this book informative and practical and that it provides you with details on how you can become an even more effective manager.

Sarah Cook

The Stairway Consultancy Ltd

www.thestairway.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has 15 years’ consulting experience specialising in team building, leadership and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy.

As well as having practical experience of helping individuals improve their management skills, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on management development, leadership, coaching and team building. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics.

Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and team diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via [email protected] .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge:

John Adair, Action Centred Leadership, Gower Publishing, 1979.

Dean R. Spitzer, SuperMotivation: A Blueprint for Energizing Your Organization from Top to Bottom, AMACOM, a division of the American Management Association, 1995.

Steve Macaulay of Cranfield University for his thoughts on conflict management.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Tom worked as an IT manager for a large multinational. Recently promoted, Tom sometimes wished that he had given up the opportunity to become a manager and had continued to work on his own. He had taken the job on with such good intentions: he would be an effective manager, he would manage the performance of individuals on his team, he would recruit and create a high-performing team, he would deal effectively with difficult situations and help others manage change.

It had all seemed so perfect in the ideal world, but six months into the role, Tom’s confidence in his own abilities was waning. Being a manager was not as easy as Tom had expected. After speaking to a friend who had been an IT manager for five years in another organisation, Tom realised that managing others was not easy, even for people with more years of service than his own.

This book is dedicated to people like Tom and his colleague who have made the transition from a technical role to managing others. It provides practical advice and proven techniques to help you enhance your management skills. You will find exercises and assessment tools, as well as theory on how to manage others effectively. Each chapter provides examples and ideas that you can readily put into practice.

CHAPTER 1:

WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE MANAGER?

This chapter outlines for you:

• The characteristics of an effective manager.

• A model of where you should be focusing your attention.

• A diagnostic to help you assess your own management skills.

We join organisations and leave managers

Think back to when you joined the organisation where you currently work or an organisation that you have worked for in the past. I expect that when you joined either of these organisations, you were hopeful about what the future would bring. You probably had a good impression of the business that you were joining and felt that you were making a good choice of employer. Hopefully you still feel like this about the organisation you are currently working for. If you don’t feel like this, or if you decided to leave another organisation in the past, research shows that the biggest influence on a decision to ‘disengage’ from the organisation is your direct line manager.

When we work for a good manager we are more likely to feel motivated and committed to the organisation. We are prepared to go the extra mile for the customer, for the organisation and for our boss.

So what makes an effective manager? What does a good manager do?